There's No Place Like It

By Hugh Sidey

When Ronald Reagan's 73rd birthday hubbub subsided last week in Dixon, Ill., the old neighborhood at the top of the hill on Hennepin Avenue tidied up to welcome the rest of the world. People will come from across oceans and states, in campers and Cadillacs, peering in the dark corners of Reagan's restored boyhood home for insight into what makes a President.

Even before the peaked and porched Queen Anne-style house was refurbished, 18,000 tourists visited the new mecca. It is one of 13 such presidential boyhood homes open to the public. Nearly 200,000 people visit Dwight Eisenhower's home each year in Abilene, Kans., and some 30,000 find Theodore Roosevelt's house on New York City's East 20th Street.

Presidents sometimes seem to resemble their houses. The great head and strong jaw of Franklin Roosevelt fitted in with his stately Hudson River mansion at Hyde Park. Lyndon Johnson, weathered and slit-eyed, sometimes looked as if he came with the clapboards of his boyhood home in Johnson City, Texas. Reagan's home seems tall and open like the man.

Presidential homes are quiet stops, far away from the clang of power. They speak volumes with their family artifacts and life patterns etched in furniture, stairways and backyards. New paint sometimes glamorizes the houses too much. The home had not been "quite so shiny" when he lived in it, Reagan confessed. In the end, the memories, evoked by a fragment of wallpaper or a warm corner in the kitchen, are the stuff of such museums.

"It looks so much smaller," Reagan said as he wandered through the rooms. When he studied the side yard where he, his brother Neil, and the O'Malley boys, Edward and George, used to play, he said to Neil: "They even shrank our football field." The President took a handful of popcorn from a bowl on the sitting-room table, just where his mother Nelle always had it popped and waiting. "No salt," he muttered. "Good," said Nancy, who tends the diet.

Reagan peered down the cramped basement stairs and remembered that his father Jack, a hefty fellow, had to back down to tend the coal furnace. What might OSHA think, the President wondered. In the bedroom with its pennants and simple oak dresser, Reagan drifted back 60 years. "I read a book about Indians and started to build a tepee in here," he said. "Nelle vetoed that." Reagan rubbed a hand over a huge brass ball on the bedstead in his parents' room and recalled that he had taken one from the original bed frame, put it on a broomstick and used the contraption as a baton to lead the Y.M.C.A. band.

The three Reagans lunched in the dining room, the prairie sun making bright squares on the floor through the white scrim curtains, memories tumbling forth about raising rabbits, collecting birds' eggs and filling the icebox and the wood stove.

Then the noisy presidential caravan swept on to Dixon High School for a birthday party and flew off to Eureka College for the speech on his old campus. Hennepin Avenue quieted and for the moment appeared to be the same tranquil corner of the Middle West it had been for more than a century. But that was deceptive. The avenue now is in the history books.

The O'Malley brothers, together again for the Reagan festivities, understood all that as they pondered the particular human concoction that was their boyhood companion, "Dutch" Reagan.

The O'Malleys and the Reagans had run and hidden and scuffled and laughed behind the barns and in the bushes when the world was not watching. They had slept in summer on the O'Malleys' big screened porch, and in winter piled four deep on the Flexible Flyer and coasted a mile down Peoria Avenue to the Rock River. Could it be that Presidents are made of such things? Could be.