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Ronald Reagan was the second child of John Edward (“Jack”) Reagan, a struggling shoe salesman, and Nelle Wilson Reagan. Reagan’s nickname, “Dutch,” derived from his father’s habit of referring to his infant son as his “fat little Dutchman.” After several years of moving from town to town—made necessary in part because of Jack Reagan’s alcoholism, which made it difficult for him to hold a job—the family settled in Dixon, Illinois, in 1920. Despite their near poverty and his father’s drinking problem, Reagan later recalled his childhood in Dixon as the happiest period of his life. At Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, Reagan played football and was active in the drama society but earned only passing grades. A popular student, he was elected class president in his senior year. Graduating in 1932 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and sociology, he decided to enter radio broadcasting. He landed a job as a sportscaster at station WOC in Davenport, Iowa, by delivering entirely from memory an exciting play-by-play description of a Eureka College football game. Later he moved to station WHO in Des Moines, where, as sportscaster “Dutch Reagan,” he became popular throughout the state for his broadcasts of Chicago Cubs baseball games. Because the station could not afford to send him to Wrigley Field in Chicago, Reagan was forced to improvise a running account of the games based on sketchy details delivered over a teletype machine.

In 1937 Reagan followed the Cubs to their spring training camp in southern California, a trip he undertook partly in order to try his hand at movie acting. After a successful screen test at Warner Brothers, he was soon typecast in a series of mostly B movies as a sincere, wholesome, easygoing “good guy.” (As many observers have noted, the characters that Reagan portrayed in the movies were remarkably like Reagan himself.) During the next 27 years, he appeared in more than 50 films, notably including Knute Rockne—All American (1940), Kings Row (1942), and The Hasty Heart (1950). In 1938, while filming Brother Rat, Reagan became engaged to his costar Jane Wyman, and the couple married in Hollywood two years later. They had a daughter, Maureen, in 1941 and adopted a son, Michael, a few days after his birth in 1945. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1948. Reagan was the first president to have been divorced.

Commissioned a cavalry officer at the outbreak of World War II, Reagan was assigned to an army film unit based in Los Angeles, where he spent the rest of the war making training films. Although he never left the country and never saw combat, he and Wyman cooperated with the efforts of Warner Brothers to portray him as a real soldier to the public, and in newsreels and magazine photos he acted out scenes of “going off to war” and “coming home on leave.” After leaving Hollywood, Reagan became known for occasionally telling stories about his past—including stories about his happiness at “coming back from the war”—that were actually based on fictional episodes in movies. Some of Reagan’s detractors pointed to such lapses to suggest that he lacked a basic interest in the truth and that he had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy.

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Reagan had absorbed the liberal Democratic opinions of his father and became a great admirer of Franklin Roosevelt after his election in 1932. Reagan’s father eventually found work as an administrator in a New Deal office established in the Dixon area, a fact that Reagan continued to appreciate even after his political opinion of Roosevelt had dramatically changed.