Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [19]
Things were not so carefree at home in Dixon. The Dixon Telegraph noted on April 3, 1928, that Jack Reagan had “severed his connection with the partnership operating The Fashion Boot Shop.”76 Jack took a temporary job at Dixon State Hospital, a mental institution, which he found “humiliating,” before going to work at another shoe store in town in August 1929.77 The Reagans had already given up their house on the North Side, and had moved from one small apartment to another. They were soon reduced to subletting all but one room and cooking on a hotplate. Jack spent most of 1930 and 1931 based two hundred miles away in Springfield, working as a traveling shoe salesman for the Red Wing Company, while Nelle remained in Dixon, working as a salesclerk and seamstress at the Marilyn Dress Shop. There was talk of a girlfriend in Springfield—and of divorce—but by late 1931 Jack and Nelle were reunited in an apartment on Monroe Avenue on Dixon’s South Side. On Christmas Eve 1931, Ronald and Neil were home for the holidays when Jack received a special delivery letter firing him. Like millions of other Americans, Jack was unemployed throughout 1932.78 Ronald, then in his last semester at Eureka and working part-time as the school’s swimming instructor, would later recall sending his mother $50 to buy food. He was able to complete his final 3 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House year at Eureka with a $115 loan from the Disciples of Christ–affiliated Henry Strong Educational Foundation,79 but could not afford to buy his $30 class ring.80
On June 30, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated for president at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and Jack went to work as a volunteer at the Dixon Democratic Party headquarters for the patrician who promised a New Deal. Ronald was back on the lifeguard stand at Lowell Park, where he would get into arguments over politics with his Republican boss. He was a twenty-one-year-old college graduate with no clear idea of what he was going to do with the rest of his life, except to spend it with Margaret Cleaver. “Soon after our graduation, I’d given her an engagement ring,” he later wrote, “and we’d agreed to marry as soon as we could afford it.”81
C H A P T E R T W O
EARLY NANCY
1921–1932
After Mother and my father were separated, Mother had to go back to work.
She didn’t take any alimony and she didn’t think that hauling me around from town to town and theater to theater was the best thing in the world. So I lived with my aunt and uncle and cousin in Bethesda, and it was very nice. I had a wonderful time. I’ve read that I was abandoned. I wasn’t abandoned. I adored my mother. She could have, I suppose, sent me to I don’t know where, but letting me live with my aunt and uncle and cousin—this is family. I was with my family.
Nancy Reagan to author,
June 4, 2000
When I had lunch with Peggy [Noonan, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan], she said, “Well, you obviously had a couple of unhappy years.” I said, “Well, no, I didn’t.” I didn’t have a miserable, unhappy childhood. I was living with my aunt and uncle and cousin. And Mother would come to Bethesda.
Oh, that was a big thing when Mother came to Bethesda.
Nancy Reagan to author,
April 30, 2001
AMONG THOSE ATTENDING THE OPENING OF THE WEEK-LONG DEMOCRATIC
convention that nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Chicago at the beginning of that summer of 1932 was a chubby, well-dressed eleven-year-old girl named Nancy Robbins. She and her mother, Mrs. Loyal Davis, the wife of Chicago’s first full-time neurosurgeon, were guests of Edward Joseph Kelly, the powerful Democratic machine politician who would become