Small-town boyhood shaped Reagan's view of America

Unconventional family: Ronald, second from right, and older brother Neil called their parents by their first names, Jack and Nelle.

DIXON, Ill. - The river is where Ronald Reagan began trying to save the world.

He was a lifeguard on the Rock River, every summer day from 1927 to 1932. The teen-ager known as "Dutch" watched over 600 or so of his friends and neighbors who braved the quarter-mile-wide stream.

The local hero saved 77 of them and notched each rescue on a log. The hardwood testament long ago floated west toward the Mississippi River. But the number 77 is catechism in Dixon, where people still talk about Reagan saving parents and grandparents.

"Everyone has a place to go back to," Reagan wrote in an autobiography. "For me, that place is Dixon." As an actor, he had a line of dialogue changed in the 1949 movie "The Hasty Heart" so he could say, "I want to go back to Dixon on the Rock River."

Imagine River City of the Broadway musical "The Music Man" is a real place - only the people are sociable and, as much as they can be, generous.

This is Dixon. The Petunia City. The county seat. The public-park capital of Illinois. Shucks, Ronald Reagan was even drum major of the YMCA band.

This heartland town that played against type by being much more hilly and progressive than other villages dusting the northern Illinois prairie was an ideal setting for an opening act of life of a future president. Then a town of 10,000, Dixon was home to the Reagans during the late president's formative years, from age 9 until he graduated from nearby Eureka College at 21.

Some would say the Lord above had blessed Dixon. Reagan's devout, do-gooding mother, Nelle, would be one of them.

When the Reagans lived here, it boasted the nation's second largest assembly hall for the Chautauqua movement. Started in New York as training for Sunday school teachers, the Chautauqua attracted podium-pounding speakers on government, history and the arts.

Here young Ronald heard the scorching oratory of evangelical politician William Jennings Bryan - known as the Great Commoner.

The Commoner and the Chautauqua are gone, but the bronze waters of the Rock River still cut through Dixon. The river and the succession of factories that located on its banks kept Dixon going and offered its people honest work.

It was a city of modest frame houses with one exception. On the north edge of town, the estate owned by drugstore mogul and one-time Dixon pharmacist Charles Walgreen offered a keyhole through which young Ronald could glimpse great wealth.

A year before the Reagans moved here, Dixon declared its place in the world with a simple steel arch that to this day spans the main street like a vanilla rainbow. It reads "Dixon" - just Dixon.

River watch: Dutch saves 77.

The Rock River has a system of feeder canals, and the Henepin Canal slices the black loam of northern Illinois to Tampico - 20 miles south of Dixon. Ronald Reagan was born there, on Main Street in a flat above a bakery.

At dawn on snowy Feb. 6, 1911, Doc Gholson climbed the 20 narrow steps to the Reagans' five-room apartment to deliver the second of Jack and Nelle Reagan's two sons.

Although Illinois calls itself the Land of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator was born in Kentucky. The Great Communicator was the only man to live in the White House who was an Illinois native.

In Tampico, young Ronald learned to swim in the canal and to ride a horse on a nearby farm. While still in diapers, he had his first acting role in Tampico's opera house. He was typecast - as a baby.

But the town of less than 1,000 with the world's shortest commercial railroad held too little promise for the Reagans.

Civic pride: Dixon makes no secret of its bond to Ronald Reagan.

In 1920, after a nomadic life forced by Jack Reagan's trouble holding a job, the family moved to Dixon. They rented a narrow white house on Henepin Avenue and lived there four years - the longest they would stay at any address.

A genial shoe salesman, Jack Reagan had bouts with the bottle. In the driest days of Prohibition, 11-year-old Ronald came home to find his father passed out on the porch - the aftermath of a visit to Bootlegger's Knob.

Jack was half owner of the Fashion Boot, the town's only shoe store. He lost it during the Depression, and Nelle Reagan mended clothes and clerked in a dress shop to keep food on the table.

Nelle threw herself into good works. At the noon hour, she could be found at the jail, supplying prisoners with crackers and Bible lessons.

A stalwart of the First Christian Church, she taught Sunday school. She used her flair for drama and public speaking to perform inspirational skits for the congregation. A topic revisited often was temperance.

Ron and brother Neil, older by three years, were baptized in the church, which parishioners revived after a fire reduced the sanctuary to rubble. Ronald fell in love with the pastor's daughter, Margaret Cleaver, and they dated throughout high school. While he was enrolled at Eureka College, she met a man in Europe and married him.

The Reagans were unconventional by the standards of small-town America, but they were never ostracized. The boys called their parents by their first names. Jack was a Catholic but never insisted his sons be raised in the faith.

Both parents felt a need to address the intolerance of the day. Jack once slept in his car rather than stay in a hotel that did not accept Jews. With their mother's encouragement, the Reagan boys played with a black child, Winston McReynolds, who went on to be elected to the Lee County Board.

But there was another campaign to build young Ronald's character. This one was fought on the football field. In the cold mud of November and on the fields frozen hard in December, he labored as a tackle. He never made first string.

Ronald Reagan left Dixon to seek work. He lost out on a job at the local Montgomery Ward and happened into a spot as a sports announcer in Iowa before making his way west to Hollywood.

Shortly after he was elected president, a reporter interviewed him in a grand room of the White House. She asked how his new digs compared to his modest childhood circumstances. "It was a good life. I have never asked for anything more, then or now," he told her.

Brush with fame: Don Kirst paints a mural on the side of a tavern in Tampico, Ill., in the late summer of 1998. Reagan was born in an apartment across the street.

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