Up and Away in a Down Year

By Frank Trippett

Every politician, of course, is shaped by the distinctive nature of a personal past, but few acknowledge the debt so readily as Ronald Reagan. TIME invited the President-elect to pinpoint the year that was most important in forming his views, and after some mulling, he settled on 1932. That was the year he turned 21 and went home to Dixon, III., a graduate of tiny Eureka College near Peoria. Then, after a summer of lifeguarding at Lowell Park near Dixon, he found, at radio station WOC in Davenport, Iowa, 60 miles away, a chance to get into sports announcing. What was the year like for the nation and the young man who would one day lead it?

The year 1932 was anything but consistent and even-tempered. The one overshadowing constant was the Great Depression: 12 million workers were jobless, and as the months went by, more and more banks, businesses and factories folded up. The year slapped a brusque eviction notice on President Herbert Hoover and handed New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt a ticket to what turned into the longest White House tenure in history. It awarded triumph to Amelia Earhart as the first woman to match Charles A. Lindbergh's feat of a solo flight across the Atlantic. 1932 also brought cruel tragedy to Lindbergh and his wife: their infant child was kidnaped and murdered --the first of the century's repetitious proofs that even heroes are not immune to lethal violence.

In Dixon (pop. 10,000) and Davenport (60,000), Americans anguished with the Lindberghs, exulted with Earhart and fervently argued national politics. The Dixon Evening Telegraph came out for Hoover, who took the county, 7,813 to 7,187, on Nov. 8.

People testily debated the treatment accorded the so-called Bonus Marchers --a plucky contingent of some 20,000 veterans who, invading Washington to demand bonus money, got instead an official bum's rush from Congress, backed up by troops commanded by Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur. Was that any way to treat men who fought in the war? The World War, that is. It did not yet own a Roman numeral.

Like Americans everywhere, the local residents of Dixon and Davenport fumed and spatted about Prohibition, which brought violence even to Davenport: the mysterious shooting and murder of Bootleg Kingpin Nick Coin on the street after raids on sub rosa saloons.

But most of all, people were talking about the Depression. In a poignant cartoon, the Dixon Evening Telegraph memorialized dejected workers leaving a steel and wire company carrying their lunch buckets home after being laid off. In Davenport the Union Bank failed, a year after the American Savings Bank and Trust Co., and the John Deere Co. shut down six plants, throwing 716 men out of work. In surrounding Scott County a monthly average of 7,000 persons --10% of the population--were on relief, getting beans, flour and potatoes. People were understandably riled that Iowa farmers, angered by the low prices they were getting at the markets, were dumping milk on the roads. That year 38 persons committed suicide in the county, reflecting the 42% rise in Iowa's suicides since 1928, the year before the crash of the stock market. The most popular song on station WOC was Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

"A job, any job, seemed like the ultimate success," Reagan recalls thinking, and the attitude was commonplace. Boys worked as store clerks for ten hours a day to earn a dollar. Before Reagan got the tryout at WOC that took him by bus weekly from Illinois to Iowa through the football season, he considered seeking a $12.50 a week post at Montgomery Ward, where his father Jack sold shoes. In those days, $12.50 was a good wage: at the big new A & P in Dixon, four cans of evaporated milk cost 19-c-; the price of 3 Ibs. of coffee was 49-c-, and 10 Ibs. of new potatoes went for 23-c-. For 75-c-, the Dixon dentists would pull a tooth by the "painless method," or so said their ads.

Hard times, the wet-dry fuss, national politics--these things obsessed Americans all year, but not to the exclusion of all else. In Dixon, Davenport and all over, people avidly followed sports. Baseball was the game, Babe Ruth the hero--and one who alone would have made the year memorable: flamboyantly gesturing toward the centerfield bleachers where he intended to hit the home run that would, and did, help the Yankees sweep the Cubs in the World Series.

Everybody followed the action on radio--which everybody was talking about more and more. The infant NBC-Red Radio Network delivered Amos n' Andy into Dixon living rooms at 6 every weekday night. Radio was such a captivating novelty that even Reagan's maiden effort as sportscaster rated a review in the Davenport Democrat and Leader. He narrated--for $5--Iowa's loss to Minnesota, 21-6, before some 10,000 spectators who had paid $2 to $3 and got rained on. Gushed the critic of Reagan's play-by-play: "His crisp account of the muddy struggle sounded like a carefully written story of the gridiron goings-on, and his quick tongue seemed to be as fast as the plays." As usual, Reagan had prepared thoroughly by practicing mock commentary at Dixon High scrimmages.

So, despite the many problems, existence was not all grim. The luckless lined up for bread and coffee at Newman's garage in Dixon, and yet the truth of many a young man's mood was as remembered by Lawrence Grove, who hustled popcorn at the park where Reagan was a lifeguard. Recalls Grove: "We really had little sense of the Depression. We always had a good time." Such a time, in Dixon, usually meant a day at the park, socializing at Fluf's Confectionary, an 8-c- ice cream cone at the Prince Ice Cream Castle, roller skating for 15-c- at Moose Hall, a dance at the Masonic temple or a dinner of jumbo frog legs for 750-c-at George Papodakis' Manhattan Cafe. Or maybe the movies.

No. Above all, the moving pictures. Ronald Reagan was not the only one with a secret yen to get onto the silver screen. The nation's crush on Hollywood was flowering wildly in 1932; while a few would read Ernest Hemingway's new hymn to bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, throngs would dig up the pennies necessary to get them in the picture show to see Gary Cooper in A Farewell to Arms. As things got worse, film fantasy became more and more a handy escape; Red Headed Woman with Jean Harlow, Winner Take All with James Cagney and Horse Feathers with the Marx brothers. Once, the Dixon theater, which had a three-keyboard Barton organ, imported a popular radio entertainer, Gene Autry, for a stage appearance. But the town's 1932 movie year climaxed with the showing (at the shocking premium evening rates of 50-c- to $1.50) of Grand Hotel. The stars: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore. Now those were names to conjure with, but others were around. Winston Churchill, bad boy of British politics, had just put out a book titled Amid These Storms about the unhappy drift of the democracies. Adolf Hitler was in the vestibules of German power and would pre-empt the inner sanctum come January of the next year. Joseph Stalin had the Soviet state in the palm of his hand. In sum, all the leaders who would contrive the shape of the midcentury world were now on stage --but little noticed. But the agonized present was enough for the American mind. The country's main concern was to stay afloat, if possible, and to get ahead, granted the right break. The year handed such a break to Ronald Reagan -- a regular announcing job early in 1933 for $100 a month. He was on his way.

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke Lincoln

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