An American Life Read online

  In high school, my brother had a teammate on the football team, Winston McReynolds, who was his closest buddy and they were so inseparable the other players began referring to Neil as “Moon” and Winston as “Mushmouth”—the names of the two lead characters in the “Moon Mullins” comic strip.

  Neil’s nickname stuck and, from then on, about the only person who ever called him Neil was my mother.

  When I entered Dixon High School in 1924, I was thirteen and worshiped football more than anything else in the world. I wanted desperately to play for the school team. The fact that my brother was already a star on the team only intensified my resolve.

  Although it fielded only a single football team, Dixon High had recently been divided into two campuses on opposite sides of town, the Northside and the Southside campuses.

  Our family had just moved to the north side of Dixon. As a freshman, I was assigned to the Northside campus, but Moon decided to remain with his classmates at the Southside school. It was probably fortunate for me that he did. Although he and I were close, he was still my older—and bigger—brother, and we had our share of brotherly fistfights and rivalries. He had always had an outspoken, self-confident personality that was a little like Jack’s, which made him a natural leader, and until then I think I probably felt a little under his shadow. On my own at Northside, I knew I wouldn’t have to be compared with him.

  As the trees in the Rock River Valley began turning gold that fall, I joined a large group of other boys on the grassy field where for years I’d watched my heroes play football, ready to compete for the right to wear a purple and white jersey.

  Slowly surveying the crowd of boys who’d come out for football that season, the coach walked down the line, came to me, and looked down: I weighed 108 pounds and stood only five feet, three inches tall.

  After a long moment, he said he would see if he had a uniform to fit me.

  The next day, the coach said he’d found shoulder pads and a helmet for me, but the school didn’t have a regulation pair of pants that were small enough. However—God bless him—somewhere in his attic or some other musty preserve, he’d found an antique pair of football pants with thigh pads made out of bamboo. I’d never seen anything like those pants before, but they fit.

  For the next several days I battled as best I could against the bigger boys, but when the day arrived for the coach to announce the team roster, my name wasn’t on it. I went home terribly disappointed but determined to make the team during my sophomore year.

  When the following summer came, I hadn’t grown much larger than I’d been the year before and decided I had to do something fast to build up my muscles for the next season as well as make some money, because I’d decided to start a bank account for my future. With the dual motivation, I got my first job—at thirty-five cents an hour—working with a pick and shovel to help build and remodel houses in and around Dixon.

  I learned a lot that summer—how to use my hands, how to lay floors and shingle roofs and work with concrete. I would like to be able to look back on that summer when I was fourteen years old and say I had an unblemished record as a tireless worker, but one incident tarnished the image: At noon one day, as I raised my pick into the air to take another bite out of a stubborn vein of clay, I saw my father approaching our construction site to pick me up for lunch, and at exactly the same moment, the noon whistle blew.

  Without moving the pick another inch, I relaxed my wrists, opened my hands, walked out from under the pick, and headed toward Jack.

  The pick plunged to earth and stuck in the ground an inch or two from one of my bosses’ toes. As Jack and I walked away together, he said: “That was the damnedest exhibition of laziness I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  When September arrived, our high school football conference established a new division for smaller players weighing up to 135 pounds and I was elected captain of the team, playing tackle and then guard.

  I loved playing on the line: For me, it was probably a marriage made in heaven. It’s as fundamental as anything in life—a collision between two bodies, one determined to advance, the other determined to resist; one man against another man, blocking, tackling, breaking through the line.

  By my junior year, I had shot up to five feet, ten-and-a-half inches and weighed over 160 pounds. But although I made the varsity, by mid-season I was still warming the bench. Then one Saturday morning, the coach, who had decided he was unhappy with the playing of one of our first-string guards, convened our regular pre-game meeting in the locker room and, reading off the starting team, said—I’ll never forget it—”Right Guard, Reagan.”

  Once I got in, I never let the other guy get his position back. The first string job was mine for the rest of the season and during my senior year, when I’d grown even bigger, I was a starter from the beginning.

  About my second year in high school, I got one of the best jobs I ever had: I began the first of seven summers working as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, a three-hundred-acre forested sanctuary on the Rock River named for the poet James Russell Lowell, whose family had given the property to the city. I’d taken a course on lifesaving at the YMCA and when an opening for a lifeguard came up, I went to my old employer in the construction business and told him I was going to have to quit.

  I worked seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day, for $15—later $20—a week and one of the proudest statistics of my life is seventy-seven—the number of people I saved during those seven summers.

  Besides swimming and football, I found two other loves while I was at Dixon High. The first was named Margaret, the other was named acting.

  About the same time I was entering high school, the elders of our church hired a new minister. On the Sunday that he preached his first sermon, I looked around and spotted three attractive new members of the congregation; they were his daughters.

  Perhaps it was love at first sight, I’m not sure. But I was immediately drawn to one of them. Her name was Margaret Cleaver and, like my mother, she was short, pretty, auburn haired, and intelligent. For almost six years of my life I was sure she was going to be my wife. I was very much in love.

  One day when I was out with Margaret she brought up Jack’s drinking; it was during one of the times when he’d gone off the wagon, and somebody had given her a vivid account of his behavior.

  Coming from a very religious, strict family, she was quite upset. Of course, I’d never said anything to her about Jack’s problem with alcohol and had tried to keep it a secret.

  I tried to tell her what Nelle had told us about Jack’s problem, that it was a sickness, but she’d never heard anything like that before and didn’t buy it.

  My heart was just about broken. I thought I was going to lose her.

  When I went home, I told my mother about it and said that if I did lose Margaret because of Jack, I didn’t know what I’d do, but I’d probably disown him and never speak to him again. Nelle felt terrible for me but asked me again to be patient with Jack.

  In the end, Margaret decided that she was willing to accept Jack’s drinking rather than break up our romance.

  Another newcomer in Dixon that year was a new English teacher, B. J. Frazer, a small man with spectacles almost as thick as mine who taught me things about acting that stayed with me for the rest of my life.

  Our English teachers until then had graded student essays solely for spelling and grammar, without any consideration for their content. B. J. Frazer announced he was going to base his grades in part on the originality of our essays. That prodded me to be imaginative with my essays; before long he was asking me to read some of my essays to the class, and when I started getting a few laughs, I began writing them with the intention of entertaining the class. I got more laughs and realized I enjoyed it as much as I had those readings at church. For a teenager still carrying around some old feelings of insecurity, the reaction of my classmates was more music to my ears.

  Probably because of this experience and memories of the fun th
at I’d had giving readings to my mother’s group, I tried out for a student play directed by Frazer—and then another. By the time I was a senior, I was so addicted to student theatrical productions that you couldn’t keep me out of them.

  Prior to Frazer’s arrival in Dixon, our high school’s dramatic productions had been a little like my mother’s readings: Students acted out portions of classic plays or out-of-date melodramas. B. J. Frazer staged complete plays using scripts from recent Broadway hits and he took it all quite seriously. In fact, for a high school English teacher in the middle of rural Illinois, he was amazingly astute about the theater and gave a lot of thought to what acting was all about. He wouldn’t order you to memorize your lines and say: “Read it this way. . . .” Instead, he’d teach us that it was important to analyze our characters and think like them in ways that helped us be that person while we were on stage.

  During a rehearsal, he’d sometimes interrupt gently and say: “What do you think your character means with that line? Why do you think he would say that?” Often, his questioning made you realize that you hadn’t tried hard enough to get under the skin of your character so you could understand his motivations. After a while, whenever I read a new script, I’d automatically try first to understand what made that particular human being tick by trying to put myself in his place. The process, called empathy, is not bad training for someone who goes into politics (or any other calling). By developing a knack for putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, it helps you relate better to others and perhaps understand why they think as they do, even though they come from a background much different from yours.

  As I’ve grown older, perhaps there’s always been a little of that small boy inside me who found some reassurance in the applause and approval he first heard at nine or ten. But in high school, I began to lose my old feelings of insecurity; success in the school plays, in football and swimming, being the only guy on the beach with LIFE GUARD on my chest and saving seventy-seven people, being elected student body president, even the fact I could now see, did a lot to give me self-confidence. Still, I think there’s something about the entertainment world that attracts people who may have had youthful feelings of shyness or insecurity. After I went to Hollywood, some of the most successful people I met—a lot of actors and great comedians like Jack Benny, for example—would just sit quietly, even shyly, at a party while some of the funniest people were writers who took center stage and became the real show-offs. It made me wonder if some entertainers hadn’t gravitated to their calling because they’d been a little insecure and the job gave them a chance to be someone they’re not, at least for a while.

  4

  IN THE 1920S, fewer than seven percent of the high school graduates in America went to college, but I was determined to be among them. Jack wasn’t offended when I told him I’d set my sights higher than on working at the store, or if he was, he never showed it. I suspect he was proud that one or both of his sons might go to college. But he always told us that, short of a miracle, he wouldn’t be able to help us financially. If we wanted a college education, he said we’d have to earn the money to pay for it ourselves.

  Moon didn’t think it could be done and when he graduated from high school, he got a job at the local cement plant and was soon making almost as much as Jack did. Going to college, he told me, was a waste of time.

  But my dream of attending college was firmly planted and I wasn’t going to be discouraged easily.

  I was drawn to one college in particular. Ever since I could remember, one of Dixon’s biggest heroes had been the husky son of one of the ministers who preceded Margaret’s father at our church. After starring as a fullback on our high school team, he’d gone to Eureka College and become an even bigger football celebrity there.

  My hero worship of Garland Waggoner was boundless and it made me want to follow him to Eureka, a liberal arts college owned by the Disciples of Christ that was located about 110 miles southeast of Dixon.

  Although I’d never seen it, Eureka College began to take on an almost mystical allure as my high school years passed. Even repeating its name silently to myself was exciting after a while.

  I’d like to be able to recall that my burning desire to go to college was planted first and foremost in a drive to get an education. But at seventeen, I think I was probably more motivated by love for a pretty girl and a love for football.

  Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years. And my choice of Eureka was fixed in concrete when Margaret told me that she’d decided to follow her two sisters there.

  If I was going to do the same thing, though, I had to overcome a big obstacle: I still didn’t have enough money for college. Ever since I’d begun working with a pick and shovel, I’d banked just about everything I earned except for the church tithe my mother called “The Lord’s Share.” I’d saved $400. But it wasn’t enough to finance four years at Eureka, where the tuition bill alone was $180 a year and the cost of room and board was almost as much.

  When I drove Margaret to Eureka that September to register for her freshman year, I saw the campus for the first time and I was bowled over. It was even lovelier than I’d imagined it would be.

  There were five Georgian-style brick buildings arranged around a semicircle with windows framed in white. The buildings were covered with ivy and surrounded by acres of rolling green lawn studded with trees still lush with their summer foliage.

  I knew I had to stay. I also knew my only chance of doing that was to get a scholarship. While Margaret registered, I presented myself to Eureka’s new president, Bert Wilson, and Ralph McKinzie, the football coach, and tried to impress them with my credentials as a football player and as someone who could win some trophies for Eureka’s swim team.

  Like many small church-affiliated colleges, Eureka was perpetually insolvent. It didn’t have the luxury of giving students a free ride. But, fortunately for me, I was convincing enough to talk them into giving me a Needy Student Scholarship, which covered half my tuition, and they promised me a job that would pay the cost of my meals.

  The balance of my tuition and the $2.50 a week it cost for my room, plus books and other expenses, had to come from my savings account.

  • • •

  The boyfriend of one of Margaret’s sisters introduced me to his fraternity brothers in Tau Kappa Epsilon. I was accepted as a pledge, and moved into the TKE house, where the fraternity gave me a job washing dishes and serving tables in exchange for my meals.

  I entered Eureka when I was seventeen. I stood almost six feet one and weighed almost 175 pounds. My hair was in a crew-cut style and parted down the middle like the hero of the comic strip “Harold Teen,” and I wore those thick eyeglasses I despised. I had a trunk filled with almost everything I owned and a head full of dreams.

  Eureka, of course, is a Greek word that means I have found it and it described perfectly the sense of discovery I felt the day I arrived there in the fall of 1928. Eureka was everything I had dreamed it would be and more.

  In later life, I visited some of the most famous universities in the world. As governor of California, I presided over a university system regarded as one of the best. But if I had to do it over again, I’d go back to Eureka or another small college like it in a second.

  At big universities, relatively few students get involved in extracurricular activities: They go to class, go to their living quarters, go to the library, then go back to their classes. There may be a lot to be said for those large institutions, but I think too many young people overlook the value of a small college and the tremendous influence that participation in student activities can have during the years from adolescence to adulthood.

  If I had gone to one of those larger schools, I think I would have fallen back in the crowd and never discovered things about myself that I did at Eureka. My life would have been different.

  There were fewer than 250 students when I was at Eureka, roughly divided between men and women, and ever
yone knew one another by their first name.

  As in a small town, you couldn’t remain anonymous at a small college. Everybody was needed. Whether it’s the glee club or helping to edit the school yearbook, there’s a job for everyone, and everybody gets a chance to shine at something and build their sense of self-confidence. You get to discover things about yourself that you might never learn if you were lost in the crowd of a larger school.

  I’ve been accused of majoring in extracurricular activities at Eureka. Technically, that wasn’t true. My major was economics. But it is true I thrived on school activities—although my expectation of sweeping onto the campus and becoming an overnight football sensation was, to say the least, not fulfilled.

  Our coach, Mac McKinzie, was a legend at Eureka who as a student had won twelve letters and been the captain of his team in three sports. During one football game, he single-handedly scored all the points and beat our archrival, Bradley Tech, 52—0, and while he was still a student, he was elected assistant coach of the football team and, shortly thereafter, head coach.

  Legend or not, I soon reached the conclusion that Mac McKinzie didn’t like me. He was not only unimpressed by my high school exploits, he kept me on the bench most of the season and I spent much of my freshman year sulking about it.

  While I didn’t play much football that fall, I did taste another type of combat—my first taste of politics.

  In the autumn of 1928, the stock market crash and the Great Depression were still a year away. But in the Midwest, farmers were already feeling an economic pinch, and Eureka, which drew much of its support from the region, was feeling the impact in the form of smaller donations to its endowment.

  To make ends meet, Bert Wilson, the new president, decided to lay off part of the faculty and impose other cuts. His plan was to be implemented during the week that students went home for the Thanksgiving vacation.

  When the students and faculty got wind of the plan, resentment spread over the campus like a prairie fire because the cutbacks meant many juniors and seniors wouldn’t be able to take classes they needed to graduate.