Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [36]
Ronald Reagan’s decision to go into radio came after a talk with Sid Altschuler, the Kansas City businessman who had become a mentor to him at Lowell Park during the summer of 1932. After graduating from Eureka College, Dutch, as everyone called him by then, was back on his lifeguard stand with no clear idea about his future—the only certainty seemed to be 6 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House that he would marry Margaret Cleaver. “This depression isn’t going to last forever,” the farsighted Altschuler told him, “and smart businessmen are willing to take on young men who can learn their business in order to have trained manpower on hand when things start to roll.” Dutch, whose father was unemployed and spending most of his time campaigning for FDR, later wrote that it was “literally the first note of optimism I’d heard about the state of the nation.” Altschuler then asked him the question he had been avoiding since graduating from Eureka that June: “What do you think you’d like to do?” Dutch said he didn’t know. “When you determine what line of work you want to get in, let me know,” Altschuler told him,
“and if it’s one of those areas where I can help, I’ll get you a job.”7
Dutch spent several sleepless nights mulling over his future before going back to Altschuler with an answer. “Out of the things that Sid had talked about came a new approach. No longer did I speculate about a paycheck and security. I really wrestled with the problem of what I would be happy doing for the next few decades.” Thinking back on the thrill of winning a prize for his acting in Aria da Capo the year before, he admitted to himself that he had a “secret dream to be an actor” but was afraid to declare it “in the middle of Illinois in 1932” for fear he would be institutionalized, as he half-jokingly put it. He also reasoned, “Broadway and Hollywood were as inaccessible as outer space,” but there was a form of show business
“closer to home” that attracted him—radio, which was then largely centered in Chicago. He went back to Altschuler and told him, “Way down deep inside, what I’d really like to be is a radio sports announcer.”8
“Radio had created a new profession,” he later wrote. “Broadcasting play-by-play reports of football games, people like Graham McNamee and Ted Husing had become as famous as some Hollywood stars and often they were more famous than the athletes they reported on.” Parentheti-cally, he made an even more telling remark: “I’d seen several movies in which sports announcers played themselves and thought there was a remote possibility the job might lead me into the movies.”9 Reagan’s recounting of the thought process involved in his decision reveals a clever willingness to move stealthily and incrementally toward a seemingly unat-tainable goal, as well as an ability to make compromises along the way.
The goal, it is clear, was stardom.
Altschuler had no connections in radio, but he approved of Dutch’s choice, because radio was one of the few growing industries during the Depression, and he urged him to “take any kind of job, even sweeping Iowa: 1933–1937
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floors, just to get in.”10 In early September, Dutch went to Chicago. He didn’t make it past the receptionists at the big networks, though he did have a stroke of luck. On his second attempt to see the program director at NBC, a secretary came out and sat with him. “This is the big time,” he recalled her telling him. “No one in the city wants to take a chance on in-experience. Go out in what we call the sticks—we shouldn’t but we do—
and try some of the smaller stations. They can’t afford to compete with us for experienced talent, so they are often willing to give a newcomer a chance. I think you will make it—come back and