An American Life Read online

  Nowadays, I bet doctors would say it was healthy for us, too.

  Dixon straddles the Rock River, a stretch of blue-green water flanked by wooded hills and limestone cliffs that meanders through the farmland of northwestern Illinois on its way to the Mississippi.

  The river, which was often called the “Hudson of the West,” was my playground during some of the happiest moments of my life. During the winter, it froze and became a skating rink as wide as two football fields and as long as I wanted to make it. In the summer, I swam and fished in the river and ventured as far as I dared on overnight canoe trips through the Rock River Valley, pretending with playmates to be a nineteenth-century explorer.

  In my hand-me-down overalls, I hiked the hills and cliffs above the river, tried (unsuccessfully) to trap muskrats at the river’s edge, and played “Cowboys and Indians” on hillsides above the river.

  When we first moved to Dixon, we lived on the south side of the river. When we could afford it, we moved across the river to a larger house on the north side. As I look back on those days in Dixon, I think my life was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  On the eve of the Fourth of July when I was eleven, I managed somehow to obtain some prohibited fireworks, including a particularly powerful variety of firecracker known as a torpedo. As I approached the town bridge that spanned the Rock River one afternoon, I let a torpedo fly against a brick wall next to the bridge. The ensuing blast was appropriately loud, but as I savored it, a car pulled up and the driver ordered me to get inside.

  I’d been taught not to get into automobiles with strangers, and refused. When he flashed a police badge, I got in the car. Then I made a second mistake: As we started to drive away, I said, “Twinkle, twinkle little star, who in the hell do you think you are?”

  At the police station, I was taken in to see the police chief, who I knew spent a lot of time playing pinochle with my father. Of course, I expected leniency, but he promptly called Jack and told him of my infraction and, friendship or not, Jack had to pay a $14.50 fine, which was big money in those days. The police chief took the ban on fireworks seriously and I guess my smart aleck attitude in the car hadn’t helped. It took me a lot of odd jobs to pay off my debt to Jack.

  My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED.

  When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived.

  At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.”

  Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.”

  My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.”

  Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.

  I had my share of fistfights, including some that started only because I was from an Irish Catholic family. In reality, we were a religiously divided family, but some of my classmates seized on the fact that Jack was a Catholic, and in Dixon that made him—and me—something of an outcast. The other boys claimed the basement of his church was filled with rifles for the day when the Pope was going to try to take over the country, and when I told them Jack said this story was baloney, they called him a liar and that led me to engage some of them in hand-to-hand combat on the playground.

  Still the Great Naturalist in Dixon, I read everything I could about birds and wildlife of the Rock River Valley. My mother gave me a book, Northern Lights, that was based on the lives of the great white wolves of the north and I read it like a textbook, over and over, imagining myself with the wolves in the wild. She had a book containing Robert W. Service’s ballad, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” I reread it so many times that years later, on the occasional nights when I had trouble falling asleep, I’d remember every word and recite it silently to myself until I bore myself into slumber. If I still couldn’t sleep, I’d switch to “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and that usually did it.

  I’m sure that the fact our family moved so often left a mark on me.

  Although I always had lots of playmates, during those first years in Dixon I was a little introverted and probably a little slow in making really close friends. In some ways I think this reluctance to get close to people never left me completely. I’ve never had trouble making friends, but I’ve been inclined to hold back a little of myself, reserving it for myself. As I’d done in the attic in Galesburg, I found a lot of enjoyment during those first years in Dixon in solitary ways—reading, studying wildlife, and exploring the local wilderness. I liked to draw cartoons and caricatures, and for a while fancied myself earning a living as an artist. I was a voracious reader and once I found a fictional hero I liked, I would consume everything I could about him. After reading one Rover Boys book, for example, I wouldn’t stop until I’d finished all of them. It was the same thing with Tarzan and Frank Merriwell at Yale. (I also read Brown of Harvard but didn’t like the hero as well as Merriwell, and for years that made me a little biased against Harvard.)

  The books about college life, with exciting stories about Ivy League life and gridiron rivalries, planted in me the first of my dreams (unless you count a four-year-old’s aspirations to become a fireman).

  My dad had negotiated a deal with Mr. Pitney under which he became part owner of the Fashion Boot Shop in exchange for his management of it. For a long time while we were growing up, it was assumed by everyone in the family that as soon as we got out of high school, Neil and I would go to work at the store and when Jack was ready to retire, we’d take it over.

  From time to time, I helped out at the store, but found it boring; besides, those books I’d read about college life had given me my own ideas about the future.

  With their casts of characters drawn from rich old Eastern families, the glamorous Ivy League life depicted in the stories was admittedly pretty remote from the reality of my life as a towheaded kid in overalls from a poor family in rural Illinois.

  But I read and reread the stories and I began to dream of myself on a college campus, wearing a college jersey, even as a star on the football team. My childhood dream was to become like those guys in the books.

  All my heroes weren’t college football stars. A wonderful book about a devout itinerant Christian—That Printer of Udell’s—made such an impact on me I decided to join my mother’s church, the Disciples of Christ. Although Jack and Nelle were married by a Catholic priest, Nelle assumed responsibility for the spiritual preparation of my brother and me. She first took us to Sunday school, then, when we were older, to the main services, but always said she’d leave it up to us to decide whether we wanted to actually join the church. At twelve, I made my decision and was baptized as a member of the Disciples of Christ.

  When Nelle thought Neil and I were old enough to know, she sat us down and explained why my father sometimes disappear
ed and told us the reason for those sudden unexpected trips from home.

  She said Jack had a sickness that he couldn’t control—an addiction to alcohol. She said he fought it but sometimes lost control and we shouldn’t love him any less because of it because it was something he couldn’t control. If he ever embarrassed us, she said we should remember how kind and loving he was when he wasn’t affected by drink.

  When I was eleven, I came home from the YMCA one cold, blustery, winter’s night. My mother was gone on one of her sewing jobs and I expected the house to be empty. As I walked up the stairs, I nearly stumbled over a lump near the front door; it was Jack lying in the snow, his arms outstretched, flat on his back.

  I leaned over to see what was wrong and smelled whiskey. He had found his way home from a speakeasy and had just passed out right there. For a moment or two, I looked down at him and thought about continuing on into the house and going to bed, as if he weren’t there. But I couldn’t do it. When I tried to wake him he just snored—loud enough, I suspected, for the whole neighborhood to hear him. So I grabbed a piece of his overcoat, pulled it, and dragged him into the house, then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother.

  Jack wasn’t one of those alcoholics who went on a bender after he’d had a run of bad luck or who drowned his sorrows in drink. No, it was prosperity that Jack couldn’t stand. When everything was going perfectly, that’s when he let go, especially if during a holiday or family get-together that gave him a reason to do it.

  At Christmas, there was always a threat hanging over our family. We knew holidays were the most likely time for Jack to jump off the wagon. So I was always torn between looking forward to Christmas and being afraid of its arrival.

  Prohibition was in force in those days, and somebody would usually tempt him to go to a speakeasy to celebrate, and when he left we knew he’d come staggering home at dawn—or maybe several days later.

  Sometimes he went for a couple of years without a drop, but we never knew when he would suddenly decide to go off the wagon again and we knew that as soon as he touched one drink, the problem would start all over again.

  Like my mother, I came to dread those days when he’d take the first drink. Although he wasn’t the kind of alcoholic who was abusive to his wife or children, he could be pretty surly, and my brother and I heard a lot of cursing from my parents’ bedroom when my mother went after him for his drinking.

  Still, I always loved and always managed to maintain my respect for Jack, mostly I think because Nelle tried so hard to make it clear he had a sickness that he couldn’t help and she constantly reminded us of how good he was to us when he wasn’t drinking. As I’ve said, Nelle always looked for and found the goodness in people.

  Every summer, a store in Dixon decorated one of its windows with mannequins outfitted with the uniforms of our high school football team and, as I grew up, filling one of those purple and white jerseys became the noblest and most glamorous goal in my life.

  Our house overlooked the high school playing field and I spent countless afternoons sitting on an earthen ledge watching and hearing the clash of padded bodies butting up against one another and dreaming of the day when I could put on a uniform and join the combat.

  In grade school I wasn’t especially good at sports and worried about it. I could run pretty fast, but I was small and spent a lot of time at the bottom of pile-ons in sandlot football games. In baseball, I was forever striking out or suffering the indignity of missing an easy fly ball. I was so lousy at baseball that when our group was choosing up sides for a game, I was always the last kid chosen.

  I remember one time when I was in the eighth grade. I was playing second base and a ball was hit straight toward me but I didn’t realize it. Everybody was looking at me, expecting me to catch it. I just stood there. The ball landed behind me and everybody said, “Oh, no!”

  I hadn’t seen it. I didn’t know about the ball coming toward me until I heard it drop on the ground. You don’t forget things like that.

  I didn’t know then that there was a reason for my problems. As a result, I had a lot of trouble convincing myself I was good enough to play with the other kids, a deficiency of confidence that’s not a small matter when you’re growing up in a youthful world dominated by sports and games. I was always the first to think: I can’t make the team. I’m not as good as Jack or Jim or Bill.

  My troubles in sports, along with always having been the new kid in school, left me with some insecurities. I suppose it isn’t unusual for schoolchildren to suffer feelings of inferiority and lack of self-confidence—I’d be surprised if it wasn’t one of the most common afflictions of childhood—but when it’s happening to you, it can seem the biggest thing in the world, and for a while it caused me a lot of heartache.

  In a town like Dixon during the early 1920s, the silent movie was still a novelty, “talkies” hadn’t been invented yet, visits by vaudeville troupes were still rare, and television was something you read about in science fiction stories. People had to rely on themselves for entertainment, and at this, my mother excelled.

  She was the star performer of a group in Dixon that staged what we called “readings”: Dixonites would memorize dramatic or humorous passages from famous poems, plays, speeches, or books and deliver them in a dramatic fashion before an audience at church or elsewhere.

  Whether it was low comedy or high drama, Nelle really threw herself into a part. She loved it. Performing, I think, was her first love.

  One day she helped me memorize a short speech and tried to persuade me to present it that evening at a reading, but I resisted. My brother had already given several and had been a hit; in fact, he could sing or dance with the best of ’em and a lot of people in Dixon thought he’d end up in show business. But I was more shy and told my mother I didn’t want to do it. Yet I guess there was something competitive enough in me that made me want to try to do as well as my brother and I finally agreed.

  Summoning up my courage, I walked up to the stage that night, cleared my throat, and made my theatrical debut. I don’t remember what I said, but I’ll never forget the response: People laughed and applauded.

  That was a new experience for me and I liked it. I liked that approval. For a kid suffering childhood pangs of insecurity, the applause was music. I didn’t know it then, but, in a way, when I walked off the stage that night, my life had changed.

  3

  WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN OR FOURTEEN, my father took the family for a Sunday drive through the green countryside bordering Dixon. As usual, my parents sat in the front seat and my brother and I sat in the back.

  Nelle had left her eyeglasses in the back seat, and as we approached the gently rolling prairie outside town, I picked up her glasses and put them on.

  The next instant, I let out a yelp that almost caused Jack to run off the road. Nobody knew what I was yelling about, but I’d discovered a world I didn’t know existed before.

  Until then, a tree beside the road looked like a green blob and a billboard was a fuzzy haze. Suddenly I was able to see branches on trees and leaves on the branches. There were words as well as pictures on billboards. “Look!” I shouted, pointing to a herd of grazing dairy cows I hadn’t seen before.

  I was astounded.

  By picking up my mother’s glasses, I had discovered that I was extremely nearsighted. A new world suddenly opened up to me. The reason I’d been such a lousy baseball player was that I couldn’t see a pitch until it was about three feet from me. Now I knew why I’d always been the last kid chosen for the baseball team. And I also knew why I’d always jockeyed to get a desk in the front row at school. I hadn’t realized before that the other kids could see the blackboard from the back of the room.

  The next day, my eyes were tested by a doctor and I found out how blind I really was and was fitted with my own pair of glasses—thick, black-rimmed monstrosities I despised that soon had my friends calling me “Four Eyes.” But I could see and that outweighed the effects o
f whatever ridicule I had to endure.

  In school, I was always among the first in line when it came to participating in sports and other activities, and when someone in town decided that Dixon ought to have a boys’ band, I wanted to be a part of it. I didn’t play a musical instrument, but I wound up out in front of the band as drum major and felt very special about it.

  My most memorable experience with the Dixon boys’ band was a strange one.

  We were invited to a nearby small town to play in the Decoration Day parade and were assigned to lead the parade just behind the parade marshal and his horse. Down the middle of the street we marched in our fancy white duck pants, bright tunics, and high, beaked hats. At one point, the marshal turned his horse around and rode back down the line of marchers to assure that everybody was in line; well, I kept marching down the street, pumping my baton up and down, in the direction I thought we were supposed to go. But after a few minutes I noticed the music behind me was growing fainter and fainter.

  I turned around and discovered I was all alone: The band was gone.

  The marshal had ridden back, gotten in front of the band, and had then led the parade down a cross street, but I didn’t know it; the band just followed him and turned the corner; I’d kept going straight down the street. When I saw what had happened I started running, crossed several vacant lots and backyards, got in front of the band, and fell into step again.

  It wasn’t the last time, incidentally, that people have said I sometimes march to a different drummer.

  As teenagers, Neil and I began calling our parents by their first names. It started one day when Neil, after enlisting my backing, told the folks that since we were such a close family, wasn’t it appropriate for the two of us to address them as Jack and Nelle? They were probably a little shocked at first, but they consented to it, and after a while I think they liked the special familiarity it gave the four of us.