THE first time that Ronald Reagan appeared on a newspaper front page was as a teenage lifeguard, hailed for saving a drowning man from a fast-flowing river. The future president was not yet “Ronnie”, America’s reassuring, twinkling, optimist-in-chief. He was still “Dutch”, to use his childhood nickname: a slim, bespectacled youth, serious to the point of priggishness. A biographer, Garry Wills, unearthed a high school yearbook in which Reagan scolded swimmers he pulled from the cool, treacherous Rock River, near his boyhood home of Dixon, Illinois. “A big hippopotamus with a sandwich in each hand, and some firewater tanked away,” Reagan wrote of one. Each summer from 1927 to 1932 the teenager would rise early to collect a 300lb block of ice and hamburger supplies before driving in his employer’s van to the river, working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The post offered responsibility, money for college and stability in a childhood blighted by frequent moves, brushes with...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2tlzgQi
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