Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [37]
He was only too happy to flee the big city: “I couldn’t afford cabs and I was afraid of the damn buses—as a matter of fact, the city itself scared the bejesus out of me. Everybody seemed to know where they were going and what they were doing, and I could get lost just looking for a men’s room.”12 He hitchhiked back to Dixon in the rain, borrowed his father’s
“third-hand Oldsmobile,”13 and headed for Iowa.
His first stop was sixty-five miles west: WOC in Davenport, a small city sitting on a hill just across the Mississippi from Rock Island, Illinois. The station’s call letters stood for World of Chiropractic; it was owned and operated by the Palmer School of Chiropractic and located on the school’s campus. He auditioned for the program director, a tough old Scotsman named Peter MacArthur, who was impressed enough by his delivery—Dutch recreated the fourth quarter of a football game in which he had played for Eureka the previous fall—to offer him $5 and bus fare to announce a University of Iowa game the following week. Three more trial games followed that fall, but as the holidays approached Dutch still did not have a full-time job.14 In November he voted for the first time—for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who carried forty-two of forty-eight states, including Illinois. (Herbert Hoover was so despised by 1932 that in Detroit his campaign train was greeted by chants of “Hang Hoover! Hang Hoover!,” and in many other cities his limousine was pelted with eggs and tomatoes.)15
Finally, just after the New Year, MacArthur called from Davenport to say that a position as staff announcer had opened up at WOC. The starting salary was $100 a month, which Dutch would apportion as follows: $32 for a room in a boardinghouse, $16.60 for meals at the Palmer School cafeteria, $20 for Nelle and Jack back in Dixon. After receiving approval from a Disciples of Christ minister, he also decided to send $10 a month to Neil, who was in his last year at Eureka, in lieu of his tithes to the church.16
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House The remainder—$21.40—was his to spend or save as he liked. (“You could get a made-to-measure suit with two pairs of pants for $18.50,” he wrote in his autobiography.)17
Ronald Reagan officially became a radio announcer on February 10, 1933.
A month later, on March 12, President Roosevelt gave the first of his Fireside Chats, reassuring Americans that it was “safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress”—thus launching the first radio presidency. Like Adolf Hitler (who also took office in 1933), FDR was quick to recognize the power of radio to sway a mass audience, to connect a country’s leader with its citizens in their living rooms, a possibility that had never existed before. One of the new President’s most avid listeners was young Dutch. “I soon idolized FDR,” he would later write. “During his Fireside Chats, his strong, gentle, confident voice resonated across the nation with an eloquence that brought comfort and resilience to a nation caught up in a storm and reassured us that we could lick any problem.”18
Reagan would later criticize Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup of federal agencies” as the first step toward “a form of veiled socialism [in] America.”19 In June 1933, however, he was grateful that his father’s efforts on behalf of the Democrats were rewarded with a job in the Dixon office of the newly created Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). That November, five months after graduating from Eureka, Neil Reagan was appointed district representative of the Federal Reemployment Bureau (FRB).20 Neither Neil nor Ronald mentioned this government job in their later accounts of this period, and Ronald would often cite his father’s supposedly frustrating experience with the federal bureaucracy as his first insight into why big government doesn’t work. Neil often said that he had registered as a Republican “six months after Roosevelt’s first inauguration”—perhaps he was frustrated by his New Deal experience. According to some