Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [15]
In the winter of 1922, coming home from playing basketball at the YMCA after school, Ronald found his father passed out drunk in the snow outside the South Hennepin Avenue house. He didn’t tell his mother, but that spring he asked to be baptized into her church. On June 21, 1922, Ronald became a member of the First Christian Church of Dixon. At eleven, he was somewhat young to enter the Disciples of Christ, who rejected pe-dobaptism and believed that choosing the faith should be a rational adult decision. But Ronald’s fervor was such that he even persuaded Neil to be baptized with him. There is some evidence that this happened behind their Catholic father’s back.49 In any case, Neil would return to his father’s side of the religious divide and reconvert to Catholicism when he turned eighteen, in 1926.
Nelle’s whole life had come to revolve around her church. She believed in tithing but could seldom afford to part with 10 percent of their income, so she made up for it in good works. She taught the True Blue Class in Bible study to a women’s group every Sunday. She was song director of the choir and president of the Women’s Missionary Society, and she raised funds to build a parsonage for the new minister, Reverend Ben Hill Cleaver. According to Neil, she regularly visited prisoners in the county jail, where she would “get all the inmates singing and drive the sheriff nuts.” It wasn’t unusual for her to have inmates released into her custody; she would put them up in her sewing room until they found a place to live. “Blacks, whites, we never thought about color,” Neil said. “She would hear of a case and just know that person wasn’t guilty and go to work on the state authorities who, I suspect, finally just gave up and paroled the person because it was too much trouble otherwise.”50
In a compilation made by local historian Ron Marlow of references to the First Christian Church congregation published in the Dixon Telegraph between 1920 and 1928, Nelle’s name appears 136 times, Ronald’s name sixty-six, and Neil’s sixty. On November 24, 1923, for example, the Telegraph described a piano recital at the church in nearby Prairieville, at which
“Mrs. J. E. Reagan . . . gave a number of delightful readings. . . . [She] captivated her audience, reading ‘The Italian’s Story of the Rose,’ an exception-2 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House ally beautiful selection, and ‘On the Other Train,’ another pleasing number.
. . . Mrs. Reagan is most versatile, and is equally happy in tragic, comic or descriptive readings. Every number on the program was heartily applauded.
After the program the ladies of the Prairieville Social Circle served refresh-ments, clearing $19.45. Those taking part in the program were served free of charge, a compliment from the Circle and much appreciated.”51
Once a month, Nelle and Ronald entertained the patients at Dixon State Hospital with banjo playing and recitations. She also wrote poems, essays, and plays with moralistic messages and, to quote her younger son, became “the dean of dramatic recitals for the countryside.”52 A typical Nelle verse, titled “On the Sunnyside”:
As you journey on the road of life
Observe as you push your way
Some faces moodish, sullen, sad.
Others with smile so gay.
These last ones are on the sunnyside
They see the best in life
Think lovely thoughts, ennobling the soul
Keeping them from strife. . . .
The sunnyside’s the only side
Full of graces divine
Sometimes too bright for us to scan
I’d seek to make them mine.53
A temperance play Nelle wrote for the Dixon church contained the telling line “I love you, Daddy, except when you have that old bottle.”54
Nelle’s attitude toward Jack’s drinking was complicated. On one hand she was a fervent temperance advocate; on the other, she told her boys that alcoholism was a sickness their