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of his behavior. Coming from a very religious, strict family, she was quite upset. . . . I tried to tell her what Nelle had told us about Jack’s problem, that it was a sickness, but she’d never heard anything like that before and didn’t buy it. My heart was just about broken. I thought I was going to lose her. When I went home, I told my mother about it and said that if I did lose Margaret because of Jack, I didn’t know what I’d do, but I’d probably disown him and never speak to him again. Nelle felt terrible for me but asked me again to be patient with Jack. In the end, Margaret decided that she was willing to accept Jack’s drinking rather than break up our romance.”62

From their freshman year, both Ronald and Margaret were in the Dramatic Club, which was run by the school’s English teacher, B. J. Frazer, who was quick to recognize Reagan’s talent. Under Frazer’s direction they co-starred in productions of contemporary Broadway plays. In his senior year, Ronald was elected president of the club. He was also president of the student body (Margaret was president of the senior class), art director of the yearbook, and—what he considered the greatest accomplishment of his high school career—tackle on the varsity football team. In addition he found time to serve as vice president in charge of entertainment for the YMCA’s Hi-Y Club, which was dedicated to “Clean Speech, Clean Sports, Clean Living, and Clean Scholarship.” His job was to invite local businessmen to give inspirational talks to the group. Only his grades suffered: he graduated in June 1928 with a B average.63

That month the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover to succeed Calvin Coolidge, who had presided over the greatest economic boom the country had ever known, and the Democrats nominated New York governor Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic to run for the presidency. Smith, who had been born on the Lower East Side, spoke with a heavy New York accent, played up his Irish background, and opposed Prohibition. The Re-Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

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publicans portrayed him as a lush and spread rumors that the Pope was going to move to Washington if Smith won. Jack hung Smith banners on his car, and was deeply disappointed when his candidate lost by a landslide in November.64

One wonders what Nelle, who apparently was also a Democrat, thought about the wet Al Smith. According to Garry Wills in Reagan’s America, one of the men in her church used to kid her by saying, “I could really take a liking to you if you weren’t such a Democrat.”65 Jack’s sons shared his enthusiasm for the party of the people. Neil became part of the blue-collar working class when he took a job at the Medusa Cement Company after graduating from high school in 1926. Ronald’s summer jobs, on the other hand—first as a caddie at Plum Hollow Country Club, then as a lifeguard at Lowell Park—brought him into direct contact with the opposition: wealthy Republicans.

He started caddieing in junior high school and continued on and off all through high school. One of the men he caddied for regularly was Charles Walgreen, America’s first drugstore tycoon. Walgreen, who had started with one store on Chicago’s South Side in 1901 and built a national chain of 110 stores by 1927, had grown up in Dixon and often returned to his hometown. In the late 1920s he bought a six-hundred-acre estate overlooking the Rock River. In her memoir, his wife, Myrtle Walgreen, remembered that the young Reagan “came to one of the picnics which we gave for the caddies each year and I brought him his plate of food while he lay in the hammock. That was his idea of being king.”66

In 1926, when he was fifteen, Ronald spent the summer as a construction worker, which he liked because it helped him build up his skinny body.

“I was hired at 35 cents an hour—10 hours a day, six days a week,” he wrote in a 1984 article for UPI. “First tools handed me were pick and shovel. . . .

Before the summer was over I’d graduated to laying hardwood floor, shingling roof and painting the exterior.”67 The following summer, between his junior and senior