Ronnie and Nancy by Bob Colacello

Eureka College, a small Disciples of Christ institution located a hundred miles south of Dixon. Only 8 percent of their graduating class went on to college, and Ronald was not actually sure he could afford it—tuition, room, and board at Eureka came to more than $300 a year. “While Margaret registered,” he later wrote, “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.” Ronald was given a scholarship to cover half his tuition and a job washing dishes to cover his board at the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house.70
    A teachers college that had evolved into a liberal arts institution, Eureka had a faculty of twenty and fewer than two hundred students in 1928, but its handful of ivy-covered red-brick buildings set on a spacious campus of rolling lawns crisscrossed by gravel paths and shaded by elms looked like Princeton to the small-town shoe salesman’s son. “I fell head over heels in love with Eureka,” he later wrote,71 and he was immediately caught up in campus life.
    In his freshman year he took an active part in a student strike that led to the resignation of Bert Wilson, who had infuriated students and faculty with his plan for severe cutbacks in the academic curriculum. During the strike Ronald first became aware of his effectiveness as a public speaker, when a fiery speech he gave in the campus chapel, denouncing the “morally evil” president, brought the student body to its feet.72 “I discovered that night that an audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together,” he said.73 One of the strike’s organizers, Howard Short, would later explain, “We put Reagan on because he was the biggest mouth of the freshman class; he was a cocky s.o.b., a loud talker.
    Dutch was the guy you wanted to put up there.”74
    In October 1929 the stock market crashed, but on the surface the Depression did not seem to have much effect on Ronald’s college life.
    That September, Neil had entered Eureka on a scholarship arranged by Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
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    his brother. Ronald’s days and nights were a whirl of extracurricular activities, occasionally interrupted by a bout of cramming. He made the varsity football and track teams, captained the swimming team, and was the lead cheerleader for the basketball team. He was a sports reporter on the school newspaper for a year, features editor of the yearbook for two years, and president of the Eureka Booster Club, which was responsible for the college’s public relations, for three years. As a senior, after two years in the student senate, he was elected student body president. Along the way he co-starred with Margaret Cleaver in several plays, including Edna St. Vincent Millay’s avant-garde verse drama Aria da Capo , which won a prize for the Eureka Dramatic Society in the Eva Le Gallienne tournament at Northwestern University’s School of Speech. Ronald played Thyrsis, a shepherd boy, in the one-acter, which was set in ancient Greece and had a strong pacifist theme; he was cited as one of the six best actors in the competition. Almost as an afterthought, it appears, he majored in social science and economics, and maintained an average that hovered between B and C. “He would take a book the night before the test,” Neil recalled, “and in about a quick hour he would thumb through it and photograph those pages and write a good test.”75
    Things were not so carefree at home in Dixon. The Dixon Telegraph noted on April 3, 1928, that Jack Reagan had “severed his connection with the partnership operating The Fashion Boot Shop.”76 Jack took a temporary job at Dixon State Hospital, a mental institution, which he found “humiliating,” before going to work at another shoe store in town in August 1929.77 The Reagans had already given