Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [35]
Where did she get her stories? From the policeman who directed traffic at Lake Shore and Michigan, from the Drake hotel doorman, from a cab driver—she knew them all and they all knew her. It was not uncommon to be walking down Michigan Avenue with Edie and have a cabbie shout, “Hi, Miz Davis!”102
C H A P T E R T H R E E
IOWA
1933–1937
“Everything comes to him that waits”—But here is one that’s slicker: The man who goes after what he wants, Gets it a darn sight quicker.
An optimist is the one who sees a light where there is none. A pessimist is one who blows it out.
A “specialist” is one who knows more and more about less and less.
Keep your head cool—feet warm—mind busy. Plan work ahead and stick to it—rain or shine. If you are a gem, someone will find you.
From As a Man Thinketh by B. J. Palmer, founder of WOC Radio, Davenport, Iowa1
The memories of friendships dear
Give strength that we endure
And the Great Purpose of it all
Hold steadfast, and more sure.
From “My New Year Poem 1935–36”
by Nelle Reagan2
EDITH DAVIS WASN’T THE ONLY ONE PURSUING A CAREER IN RADIO IN THE
fall of 1932. After his lifeguard job in Dixon ended on that Labor Day, Ronald Reagan hitchhiked to Chicago in hopes of getting an interview at the National Broadcasting Company or the Columbia Broadcasting System, the booming new radio networks that had been established in the late 1920s by David Sarnoff and William S. Paley, respectively. Although the twenty-one-year-old Ronald didn’t even get to see the program directors at NBC and CBS, by 1934 he was becoming well known across the Midwest as Dutch Reagan, sports announcer for WHO in Des Moines, Iowa.
It is hard to imagine how omnipresent, powerful, and glamorous radio was in the 1930s and 1940s. The biggest stars at NBC and CBS—George 5 8
Iowa: 1933–1937
5 9
Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy—were as famous as, and made as much money as, the top movie stars at MGM and Paramount Pictures.
Amos ’n’ Andy, which starred Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll and went on the air in 1928 (it stayed on until 1960), was so popular that some movie theaters installed radios and interrupted their evening screenings so that audiences wouldn’t have to miss a single fifteen-minute episode.
In Where’s the Rest of Me?, Reagan makes much of the first time he heard a crystal set, as early radios were called, at Nelle’s sister’s farm near Morrison, Illinois: “I remember sitting with a dozen others in a little room with breath-less attention, a pair of earphones attached tightly to my head, scratching a crystal with a wire. I was listening to raspy recorded music and faint voices saying, ‘This is KDKA, Pittsburgh, KDKA, Pittsburgh.’”3 According to Anne Edwards, “when the sound faded,” the nine-year-old Ronald stood up
“and imitated the announcer. Everyone laughed and he repeated the performance.”4 Edwards places this scene at Christmastime 1920, not long after KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the nation, had begun regular broadcasts that November 2 with the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election.5
However, Edmund Morris quotes a 1984 speech in which Reagan said this momentous event took place “one Sunday afternoon” in Dixon. In this version, the Reagan boys had borrowed a crystal set from a neighbor:
“My brother and I and a couple of other kids walked all over town trying to find if we could hear something. And finally we went down by the river and something was coming! We passed the headphones around and heard this orchestra playing, coming out of the air! Let me tell you, that was a