Ronnie and Nancy Read Online Free PDF

in Early Reagan , “Shoes became [his] specialty. He liked children, and particularly admired the graceful turn of a lady’s ankle. He talked about someday traveling west to pioneer. . . . But he remained at Broadhead’s for eight years, gaining a reputation as a young man a bit too fond of alcohol, a fact that made the parents of most eligible Fulton women (who were entranced by his beguiling manner and dark good looks) wary.”13 And then he met Nelle, who was earning her living as a milliner in Fulton.
    Nelle Wilson, who was born on July 18, 1882,14 also spent her early years on a farm. Her mother, Mary Anne Elsey, had been born in England and immigrated to Illinois to work as a domestic servant. When Nelle was seven, her father left the family and moved to Chicago for reasons unknown. Like Jack, Nelle left school after the sixth grade. Her mother died when she was seventeen. Although Nelle had been brought up as a Presbyterian,15 and her father disapproved of Jack, probably because he was a Catholic, they were married in Fulton’s Catholic church on November 8, 1904.16
    It was said that Nelle didn’t mind Jack’s weekend benders at first, but when his older brother, William, was jailed for six months for drunk and disorderly conduct, she apparently had had enough. In February 1906, eighteen months after they married, the Reagans moved to Tampico, a country town with a population of about eight hundred, where the local Law and Order League prevailed and liquor licensing was banned twelve years before national Prohibition.17 They were in their early twenties, full of hope, good-looking, and smart, even sophisticated by Tampico standards. Nelle was blue-eyed with auburn hair, petite and full-bosomed.
    Jack was almost six feet tall, well built and handsome, with wavy black hair rakishly parted in the middle, and always impeccably turned out for work in a freshly starched white shirt, a tie, and highly polished shoes.18
    Jack and Nelle spent the next eight years in Tampico, the first five in the apartment on Main Street where Neil and Ronald were born. Three months after Ronald’s birth, they moved up to a two-story frame house with modern plumbing that faced a small park with a Civil War monument and, just beyond that, the railroad tracks and a pair of tall grain elevators. Jack did well Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
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    at H. C. Pitney’s General Store. He was in charge of the shoes and clothing department and made occasional buying trips to Chicago. Energetic and outgoing, he was a natural leader, serving during the years in Tampico as a councilman, an assistant fire chief, a baseball manager, and, though not much of a churchgoer, finance chairman of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church.19
    Neil was baptized at Saint Mary’s, although Nelle had to be prodded by the priest to keep her marital promise to raise their children as Catholics.
    Neil’s godfather, A. C. Burden, owned Burden’s Opera House, located above the bank on Main Street. Nelle and Jack were soon appearing in plays put on there by the town’s amateur dramatic group, for audiences of a hundred or so, seated on folding chairs. Neil recalled rehearsals at his parents’ house. “When the rehearsal wound up at the end of the evening, they’d all sit down and have a bowl of oyster stew and crackers,” he said.
    “Ronald and I’d sneak down the stairs partway and look . . . at all the goings-on down there.”20
    The most significant event of the Reagan family’s years in Tampico was Nelle’s conversion to the Disciples of Christ, a breakaway sect of Presbyterianism. On Easter Sunday, March 27, 1910, she was baptized by total immersion in the Hennepin Canal outside town. When Ronald was born the following year, she refused to have him baptized as a Catholic, and from then on she raised both sons as Disciples of Christ, taking them with her to prayer meetings on Sunday and Wednesday nights and to Sunday school, which she taught. She became a “visiting