• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2777 0

later it was raised to $300. He was now making enough money to marry Margaret Cleaver, but it was not to be. After graduating from Eureka, Margaret had taught high school for a year in a nearby town, then, to Dutch’s dismay, decided to spend a year in Paris, where her sister was living.31 In the summer of 1934 she wrote to say that she had fallen in love with an American diplomat named James Waddell Gordon Jr., and she enclosed Dutch’s fraternity pin and engagement ring in her letter.32 Reagan later reflected stoically, “As our lives traveled into diverging paths, we would find that it was true that before and after age twenty-one, people are often different. At any rate, our lovely and wholesome relationship did not survive growing up.”33 However hurt he may have been at the time, his feelings didn’t stop from him buying his first car, a brand-new metallic-beige Nash Lafayette two-seater convertible, from Margaret’s brother-in-law, who had a dealership in Illinois.34

Dutch asked Neil to drive the car to Des Moines. His brother was out of work again, so he introduced him to MacArthur, who guaranteed Neil $30 a week for announcing football scores and reading laxative commercials.35 Neil moved into Dutch’s apartment in a subdivided mansion in an old neighborhood near the radio station for a few months, before being sent to WOC in Davenport as a full-time sports announcer. In 1936, he was promoted to program director at WOC.

That same year he married Bess Hoffman, a Drake College graduate from Des Moines, two weeks after meeting her. Dutch urged him to wait, but Neil ignored his advice.36 Meanwhile Jack, still chain-smoking, had suffered the first of his heart attacks and could no longer work.

Dutch started sending his parents $100 a month. “I had the satisfac-tion,” Reagan later wrote, “of being able to send a monthly check that removed all his economic problems for the first time in his life . . . it never entered his mind that he could apply for public assistance.”37 Nelle Iowa: 1933–1937

6 5

gave up her job at the dress shop in Dixon and frequently visited her son in Des Moines.

Dutch’s official title at WHO was sports director. He announced football games, swimming meets, track meets, and car races. By 1934 he had his own show, The Teaberry Sports Review, which aired twice a day. He also interviewed visiting sports stars, most notably the world heavyweight champion Max Baer (in Reagan’s words, “as beautiful a piece of physical machinery as ever stepped into the fight ring”).38 Occasionally he was asked to interview celebrities from other fields, including the movie star Leslie Howard (“I was so stage-struck that I forgot his name as I stepped up to the microphone”) and the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, whose flam-boyant style and dramatic voice so mesmerized him that he let her run away with the interview.39

He became best known for “covering” baseball games from Chicago’s Wrigley Field without ever stepping out of WHO’s studio in Des Moines.

“To millions of sports fans in at least seven or eight middlewestern states,”

the Des Moines Dispatch reported on August 3, 1934, “the voice of Dutch Reagan is a daily source of baseball dope. Every afternoon at 2:00 o’clock,

‘Dutch’ goes on the air with his rapid-fire, play-by-play visualization of the home games of Chicago’s major league baseball teams, the Cubs and the Sox.”40 Reagan called this technique “the magic of radio.” A telegraph operator sitting in the stadium press box tapped out the game’s plays in Morse code to an operator sitting in the radio studio opposite Dutch at his microphone. From these brief flashes he constructed the entire scene in the baseball park—the pitcher’s form, the batter’s gestures, the fans’ reactions, even changes in the weather—out of his imagination. (He had visited Wrigley Field only once, when it was empty, to get a sense of what it looked like.)

“You just couldn’t believe that you were not actually there,” remembered a WHO colleague of Reagan’s decades later. In his four years at the station, Dutch made some six hundred baseball