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There are few people in America, Im sure, that have never dreamt of becoming Americas next president or one of Hollywood's many stars and living The American dream. Our 40 th president Ronald Reagan, however, did both. Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6 th 1911 in Tampico, Illinois two years after his brother John Neil Reagan. His fathers name was John Edward (Jack) Regan. He was the son of John Michael and Jennie Cusick-Reagan. In the 1860 s during the great potato famine Ronald's paternal great grandfather Michael Reagan immigrated to the United States from Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, Ireland.
Before his immigration the family name had been spelled Regan, but after settling in America the spelling was changed to Reagan. Ronald's mother was Nelle Clyde Wilson-Reagan. She was one of seven children of Thomas and Mary Ann Elsey-Wilson. His maternal great grandfather immigrated to the United States in the early 1800 s from Paisley, Scotland. Ronald states in his autobiography that his father Jack was endowed with the gift of blarney and the charm of a leprechaun[and] was destined by Got be a salesman. constantly searching for a better life moved to wherever my fathers ambition took him He also says in his autobiography that his nickname, Dutch, was given to him by his father soon after he was born when he remarked that Ronald looked like a fat little Dutchman, and later the Dutch Boy haircut that his mother gave him as a toddler only strengthened the nickname.
When Ronald was younger his family was always moving as his father went from job to job. But In 1920 after years of moving from town to town the family settled down for good in Dixon, Illinois. In 1924, when he entered high school, Reagan's greatest aspiration in life was to make the high school football team and earn his right to his own purple and white jersey. At tryouts he scrapped as best he could but at only 53 and 108 lbs he didnt measure up to the other boys and he didnt make the team. The following summer at age 14 Reagan got his first job. For thirty-five cents an hour he worked ten hours a day, six days a week, with a pick and shovel helping to build and remodel homes in Dixon.
He had taken the job solely to build up his muscles in hopes that it would help him make the team his sophomore year. In September Reagan caught a break and the High School formed a new team for smaller players up to 135 pounds for which Reagan was elected team captain. That summer Reagan quit his old job building and remodeling homes and began working as a lifeguard in Lowell Park on the Rock River. He worked seven days a week for ten to twelve hours a day for $ 20 a week. He would work there every summer for the next seven years and save a total of 77 people from drowning.
By his junior year Reagan had grown to 510 and over 160 lbs and had earned his place on the varsity, even though that place happened to be the bench. At the end of the season though, he earned himself a place on the field as right guard and by his senior year he had earned his place as a permanent starter. It was Reagan's English teacher in High School, B. J. Frazer, that began to spark Ronald's interest in acting, convincing him to write essays for class laughs and try out for student plays. Another of his teachers in college, Miss Johnson, would only encourage him further into his acting career.
Back then less that seven percent of high school graduates in America went to college, but Reagan was determined to be a part of that percentage. In 1928 he attended Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois. He majored in economics and sociology but his true love was for acting. His college English professor, Miss Johnson, formed a drama society which, of course, Reagan joined. His junior year she entered the drama team in a play contest at Northwestern University. Their team placed second and Reagan was one of three performers to win an individual acting award.
When he graduated from Eureka College in 1932 he returned to another summer of life guarding at Lowell Park to pay off his college tuition debts. His sights were still set on Hollywood but he soon realized, as he remarked in his autobiography, that Hollywood and Broadway were a long way from Dixon, but not Chicago, the nations hub of radio broadcasting. At the end of the summer he hitchhiked to Chicago to tackle his new goal, to be a radio sports announcer. He was rejected everywhere he went until after being turned down at a radio station called WOC in Davenport Iowa as he was leaving he said to himself How the hell can you get to be a sports announcer if you cant even get a job at a radio station.
He hadnt mentioned in the interview that he wanted to be anything but an ordinary radio announcer but when the owner heard him mention sports announcing it caught his attention. He asked Reagan to describe an imaginary football game to him over the microphone in the studio and by the time he finished hed earned himself a job. Reagan broadcasted Iowas last three games of the season for $ 10 apiece and a $ 5 bus fare. But after the final game he was out of work, like many other people during the Depression.
In February, however, Reagan got a call from WOC offering him a job as a radio announcer starting at $ 100 a month. I was a disc jockey before they invented the term he claimed in his autobiography. Nobody had bothered to train him on how to be a radio announcer and after he decided not to play a commercial for the local morgue the radio station decided that it was time for him to find another job. They hired a teacher to fill his position and asked Reagan to stay and help break him in. But, after hearing what had happened to Reagan, the teacher asked for a contract.
WOC refused so he quit and Reagan was told that he could keep his job until they could find a replacement. Reagan said that he would stay, on one condition; they had to assign someone to help him improve his on-the-air delivery. Whatever he did during that training worked and after a few weeks the station stopped looking for someone to fill his place. A few weeks WOC closed and they all moved into their sister station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa and Reagan was offered the position of sports announcer. He spent four years at WHO and at 22 years old he had achieved his dream of being a sports announcer and was earning $ 75 a week during the depths of the Depression. At WHO Reagan broadcasted Cubs games and eventually formed a plan to accompany the team to their annual spring training camp in California.
In Los Angeles he checked into a hotel to look up a former coworker from WHO, Joy Hodges, who had come to Los Angeles several years before to get into show-business. Reagan confessed to Joy about his dreams of acting and Joy told him that he knew an agent who might help get him into Hollywood if he thought he had a chance. The next day Reagan met with agent Bill Meiklejohn who, after hearing Reagan's pitch, called Max Arnow from Warner Brothers. Arnow had Reagan do a screen test, which he did so well on, that Arnow showed the test to Jack Warner, the man who ran Warner Brothers Motion Pictures. At 27 Reagan was a very handsome man.
He stood 61 tall and weighed about 180 pounds. He had brown hair and blue eyes and a ruddy complexion that made it unnecessary for him to wear makeup in his movies. Although, it wasnt just his looks that got him into those movies in the first place, it was Reagan's great sense of humor that won the hearts of so many of his fans. He was always telling jokes and stories and was easy to entertain. People also loved that he was always cheerful, optimistic and thoughtful of others.
Many people have said was like an uncle, one not responsible for discipline but who can give well-meaning guidance. Everything about Reagan, from his looks to his personality, would contribute a great deal to his successes in Hollywood and later in politics as well. Reagan's first acting role was in a traditional B movie that was originally called Inside Story then renamed Love is on the Air in which he played a radio announcer. The Hollywood Reporter said that Reagan gave one of the best first picture performances Hollywood has offered in many a day. Once he had his foot in the door of the motion picture business Reagan had been forced to join the union and was drafted to the Screen Actors Guilds board of directors to represent the less famous actors in the movie industry. He played in several B movies that he said were movies the studio didnt want good, they wanted em Thursday, but after expressing an interest in making a movie about Kate Rockne, (a coach at Notre Dame who died in a plane crash in 1931 after revolutionizing the game of football, as Reagan fondly put it) the studio picked up on the idea and Reagan was given a leading role.
At first the producer wouldnt give Reagan the part of George Give (the Gipper) in the movie because he didnt think that he looked like the greatest football player of all time, but after seeing a yearbook picture of Reagan in a college football uniform he let him have a screen test and gave him the part. After that Reagan was cast regularly in the leading roles of A movies. (He has a star on the Hollywood walk of fame at 6374 Hollywood Blvd. ) Negotiations for Reagan's new contract were under way while bombs flew as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was only a reserve officer and had been designated as limited service because of his poor eyesight but, three months after the attack he was ordered to report to Fort Mason, the port of embankment in San Francisco. Because of his experience in motion pictures he was sent to the Air Forces first intelligence unit in which he helped make over 400 Air Force training films and documentaries. He served three years in the US Army and was discharged with the rank of captain. After the war Reagan became very active in the Screen Actors Guild.
In the absence of so many people in Hollywood during the war problems had begun brewing in the film industry. Some of the unions had gotten together to form what they called the Conference of Studio Unions, or CSU. The CSU went on strike, but it was obvious to the other unions that they werent doing it to improve the wages or working conditions of its members, they were doing it to take something from another union that wasnt theirs. In the midst of all this on January 26 th, 1940 Reagan married actress Sarah Jane Mayfield (Screen name Jane Wyman) and a year later on January 4 th 1941 they had their first daughter, Maureen Elizabeth.
They adopted their son, Michael Edward, (birth name John Flaugher) on April 1 st 1945. In 1947 they had another daughter, Christine, but she was born four months premature and she didnt live past her first day. In 1947 the CSU strike finally collapsed and later several members of the CSU admitted to being communists and revealed the Soviet Unions plan to gain control of Hollywood and the content of its films. Afterwards Reagan was nominated as the president of the Screen Actors Guild.
On June 28, 1948 Reagan and Wyman divorced and the children remained with their mother. In 1951 Reagan met another actress, Nancy Davis, (Named Anne Francis Robbins at birth, she took the name Nancy Davis when she was adopted by Dr. Loyal Davis in 1935) when she arranged to meet him to discuss her concerns of having been wrongly accused of being a communist. They had dinner at the Sunset Strip and watched a show at Ciros theatre and from then on they dated only each other until they were married. Reagan proposed to her over dinner saying simply lets get married to which she replied with an equally simple lets. They were married on March 4 th, 1952 in the little brown church in the valley near Los Angeles, California when Nancy may have already become pregnant.
Their daughter Patricia (Patti) Ann was born on October 21 st of the same year and on May 20 th 1958 they had their son Ronald (Skip) Prescott Reagan. Reagan made his last big screen appearance in his movie The Killers in 1964 after making over fifty other films, although his film...
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