Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [169]
Reagan’s first tour for General Electric began at a turbine plant in Schenectady, New York, where the company had its headquarters. He spent four hours walking through the thirty-one-acre factory, stopping to chat with almost every worker, signing autographs, and “generally having a hell of a good time getting acquainted,” Dunckel recalled. It happened that several thousand high school teachers were holding a convention in Schenectady that weekend, and when their scheduled speaker fell ill, they asked Dunckel if he could get Reagan to give a speech on education.
Dunckel turned them down, fearing that he would have to write the speech, but Reagan volunteered to write it himself. “He got up there and gave a speech . . . that just dropped them in the aisles,” according to Dunckel. “He got a good ten minute standing applause afterward. This is when I finally began to realize the breadth and depth of his knowledge-ability . . . everything that went into that mind stayed there. He could quote it out like a computer any time you wanted.”55
Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
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This first tour, in the fall of 1954, lasted eight weeks. “At the beginning, I took Patti and went to see my family in Chicago,” Nancy recalled.
“The time apart seemed to drag on and on. Ronnie and I were both so unhappy that . . . we never allowed ourselves to be separated for that long again.”56 In the following years, G.E. reduced Reagan’s time on the road to twelve weeks a year, broken into three or four trips, and Nancy sometimes joined him in New York or Chicago. Of the eight years Reagan worked for the company, he estimated, he spent two on the road. He always traveled by train, and Nancy always drove him to the station. He preferred to do his own packing, but Nancy “would slip little notes and jellybeans” into his suitcase; it was part of their “ritual,” she said.57
By 1958, according to TV Guide, he had visited more than 130 G.E.
factories in twenty-five states and met nearly 200,000 G.E. workers. “He delivers as many as 15 talks per day in an 18-hour day of corporate good will,” the magazine reported in its November 22 issue. “Reagan speaks not only to employee groups in company auditoriums and cafeterias, but also
. . . is available wherever he goes, free, to local groups. Lions, Kiwanians, Ro-tarians, high school principals, Great Book-worms, chambers of commerce or clergymen have only to phone their requests to the local G.E. plant manager . . . and lo, a live TV star from Hollywood . . . appears as if at the press of an electric button. . . . The community and employee relations aspect of his job is the part of which Reagan is apparently most proud.”58
For Reagan, traveling through Middle America was an enlightening experience: “When I went on those tours and shook hands with all of those people, I began to see that they were very different people than the people Hollywood was talking about. I was seeing the same people that I grew up with in Dixon, Illinois. I realized I was living in a tinsel factory. And this exposure brought me back.”59
As much as he related to his audiences and loved the glad-handing and applause, Ronnie never stopped missing Nancy and never ran out of new ways to tell her so. “My darling,” he wrote from the Atlanta Biltmore on Sunday, March 20, 1955:
Here it is—our day and if we were home we’d have a fire and
“funnies” and we’d hate anyone who called or dropped in.
As it is I’m sitting here on the 6th floor beside a phoney fireplace looking out at a grey wet sky and listening to a radio play music not intended for one person alone.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nevertheless I wouldn’t trade the way I feel for the loneliness of those days when one place