Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [14]
The Reagans rented an old two-story frame house with a barn on South Hennepin Avenue, a few blocks from Jack’s store. The boys shared a bedroom and a bed, and Nelle used the third bedroom for the sewing she took in when ends didn’t meet. Years later, Neil recalled: The downstairs part of the barn had just been made into a garage for a car, but there were still a couple of stalls there. Upstairs was just an empty hayloft. To this day, I can’t remember what brought it about, but in some way I got interested in pigeons. I said something to my dad about it, and my dad brought home a pair of fancy pigeons, pouters, and said, “Now, build a little nest in a couple of boxes and put them into the haymow, keep the haymow door closed for three or four days. Feed them and keep them watered, but don’t let them out for three or four days. That way, when you do open the mow door, they’ll go out in the morning and they might stay all day, but they’ll come back at night, because now this is their nest.”
Well, over a short period of time, why, he bought two or three other pairs of different kinds of fancy pigeons; and, of course, as pigeons do, before long, when they came back at night, a thousand others would come back with them. The first thing you know I had practically the whole mow up there covered with boxes nailed to the walls and had pigeons up to our neck.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dutch got interested in birds’ eggs, collecting birds’ eggs, and my dad got him an old glass display case from a store. . . . Then they put cotton batting on the floor of it, and that’s where Ronald kept his bird egg collection. He’d punch a hole in both ends and blow the eggs, and he was climbing trees to get them out. This kind of stuff didn’t interest me.
Then I got to raising rabbits and built quite a hutch out back of the barn. . . . Come Friday night, after the pigeons came in, if there were squabs up there, I’d get the squabs and a bucket of boiling water, and I’d snap their heads off and clean them. I’d kill four or five young rabbits, skin them and clean them. Then I’d take a market basket and go out the next day beating on doors, and I never failed to sell all the squabs and rabbits I had in the basket. I built up a little business.40
In March 1923 the Reagans moved to a smaller house on the North Side, where the brothers had to sleep on an enclosed porch but could attend the academically superior North Dixon High School.41 The Rock River divided Dixon socially as well as geographically. Downtown was on the South Side, as were the factories and the working-class Irish Catholic neighborhoods. The North Side was a little leafier, a little wealthier, more Protestant—“the sissies’ part of town,” as Neil put it. He refused to switch from South Dixon High School, at which he had started the previous fall, preferring to trek across the bridge every morning and afternoon.42 From then on, the Rock River also came to symbolize the division in the Reagan family.
On one side were Jack and Neil, on the other Nelle and Ronald. In talking about his father with a Saturday Evening Post writer in 1974, Ronald Reagan said, “There was never any buddy-buddy relationship, because of either fear or self-consciousness.”43 While Neil frequented Red Vail’s pool hall on the South Side with his friends, the sons of firemen and factory workers, Ronald was home taking elocution lessons from Nelle.
“We just sort of went our separate ways,” explained Neil.44 On March 25, 1924, the Dixon Telegraph reported, “Neil Reagan was taken into Justice A. H. Hanneken’s court yesterday afternoon on a warrant charging him with disturbing the peace, he being taken as the second party in Saturday night’s fistic encounter staged near the corner of North Galena avenue and Boyd street, when police responded to a riot call.”45
As a Dixon schoolmate put it, “Neil was all boy, Ronald was a momma’s boy.”46 Perhaps young Ronald was aware of this perception of him, for he Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
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began to insist