Chapter One

If I'd gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward, I suppose I would never have left Illinois.

I've often wondered at how lives are shaped by what seem like small and inconsequential events, how an apparently random turn in the road can lead you a long way from where you intended to go -- and a long way from wherever you expected to go. For me, the first of these turns occurred in the summer of 1932, in the abyss of the Depression.

They were cheerless, desperate days. I don't think anyone who did not live through the Depression can ever understand how difficult it was. In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, "the country was dying by inches." There were millions of people out of work. The unemployment rate across the country was over twenty-six percent. Every day the radio crackled with announcements warning people not to leave home in search of work because, the announcer said, there were no jobs to be found anywhere. There were no jobs, and for many, it seemed as if there was no hope.

In Dixon, the town in northwestern Illinois where I lived, many families had lost their land to crushing debt; the cement plant that provided many of the jobs had closed; on downtown streets there were perpetual clusters of men huddled outside boarded-up shops.

I'd been lucky. In the summer of 1932, I'd been able to work a seventh summer as a lifeguard at nearby Lowell Park and had saved enough money to finance a job-hunting trip. I had a new college diploma that summer and a lot of dreams.

Keeping it secret from my father -- I knew he believed those daily announcements and would have said it was a waste of time for me to leave Dixon in search of a job -- I hitchhiked to Chicago after the swimming season ended with visions of getting a job as a radio announcer. But all I got was rejection: No one wanted an inexperienced kid, especially during the Depression. And so I had hitchhiked back to Dixon in a storm, my dreams all but smothered by this introduction to reality.

If there was ever a time in my life when my spirits hit bottom, it was probably the day I thumbed my way back to Dixon in the rain, tired, defeated, and broke.

But when I got home, my dad told me he had some good news: The Montgomery Ward Company had just decided to open a store in Dixon and was looking for someone who had been prominent in local high school sports to manage the sporting goods department. The job paid $12.50 a week.

Suddenly, I had a new dream -- not one as seductive as my real dream, but one that seemed to be more grounded in reality, and for a time late that summer, nothing in the world was as important to me as managing the sporting goods department of the new Montgomery Ward store. I loved sports; I'd lettered in football in high school and college and loved just about every other sport there was. The job offered me the chance not only to help out my family financially at a time it really needed it, but to get started on a life career. Even during the Depression, Montgomery Ward had a reputation as a steady employer and I knew that if I did well in the sporting goods department, promotions would follow.

I told my father I'd run the best sporting goods department Montgomery Ward had ever seen, and when I applied for the job with the manager of the store, I told him the same thing, and then waited for his decision.

His decision several days later was a heartbreaker. He gave the job to a former superstar on our high school basketball team.

I was raised to believe that God has a plan for everyone and that seemingly random twists of fate are all a part of His plan. My mother -- a small woman with auburn hair and a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos -- told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God's Plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. If something went wrong, she said, you didn't let it get you down: You stepped away from it, stepped over it, and moved on. Later on, she added, something good will happen and you'll find yourself thinking -- "If I hadn't had that problem back then, then this better thing that did happen wouldn't have happened to me."

After I lost the job at Montgomery Ward, I left home again in search of work. Although I didn't know it then, I was beginning a journey that would take me a long way from Dixon and fulfill all my dreams and then some.

My mother, as usual, was right.

I was born February 6, 1911, in a flat above the local bank in Tampico, Illinois. According to family legend, when my father ran up the stairs and looked at his newborn son, he quipped: "He looks like a fat little Dutchman. But who knows, he might grow up to be president some day."

During my mother's pregnancy, my parents had decided to call me Donald. But after one of her sisters beat her to it and named her son Donald, I became Ronald.

I never thought "Ronald" was rugged enough for a young red-blooded American boy and as soon as I could, I asked people to call me "Dutch." That was a nickname that grew out of my father's calling me "the Dutchman" whenever he referred to me.

My delivery, I was told, was a difficult one and my mother was informed that she shouldn't have any more children. So that left four of us -- Jack, Nelle, and my brother, Neil, who had been born two years earlier.

My dad -- his name was John Edward Reagan but everyone called him Jack -- was destined by God, I think, to be a salesman.

His forebears had come to America from County Tipperary by way of England during Ireland's potato famine and he was endowed with the gift of blarney and the charm of a leprechaun. No one I ever met could tell a story better than he could.

He was twenty-nine when I came into his life. Like my mother's, his education had ended after a few years in grade school. He had lost both of his parents to a respiratory illness that people in those days called "consumption" before he was six years old and was brought up by an elderly aunt who raised him a proper Irish Catholic.

Despite the brevity of his formal schooling, Jack had a lot of what people now call "street smarts." Like a lot of Americans whose roots were on the nineteenth-century frontier, he was restless, always ready to pull up stakes and move on in search of a better life for himself and his family.

My dad believed passionately in the rights of the individual and the working man, and he was suspicious of established authority, especially the Republican politicians who ran the Illinois state government, which he considered as corrupt as Tammany Hall.

Among the things he passed on to me were the belief that all men and women, regardless of their color or religion, are created equal and that individuals determine their own destiny; that is, it's largely their own ambition and hard work that determine their fate in life.

Although I think Jack could have sold anything, his specialty was shoes. A large part of his life Jack pursued a singular dream: He wanted to own a shoe store...not an ordinary shoe shop, but the best, with the largest inventory in Illinois, outside Chicago.

Nelle Wilson Reagan, my mother, was of Scots-English ancestry.

She met and fell in love with my father shortly after the turn of the century in one of the tiny farm towns that were planted on the Illinois prairie by pioneers as they moved westward across the continent during the nineteenth century. They were married in Fulton, Illinois, about forty miles from Dixon, in 1904.

While my father was a cynic and tended to suspect the worst of people, my mother was the opposite.

She always expected to find the best in people and often did, even among the prisoners at our local jail to whom she frequently brought hot meals.

I learned from my father the value of hard work and ambition,