Authors:
Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
Winter 2011 | Volume 60, Issue 4
A Boy From Tampico: Ronald Reagan
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Back in 1965, Ronald Reagan published his first memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me?, borrowing the title from a line in the 1942 Warner Brothers film Kings Row. In the movie—Reagan’s favorite of all he starred in—he played Drake McHugh, a playboy whose legs have been removed by a sadistic surgeon. “Where’s the rest of me?” Reagan famously cried out when he came to, with thespian relish worthy of an Academy Award nomination.
Up until now, Reagan—like McHugh—hasn’t been whole. His legacy has been too rooted in Hollywood, Culver City, Pacific Palisades, Sacramento, Beverly Hills, Simi Valley, and the Santa Ynez Mountains. On the centennial of his birth in the tiny northwestern Illinois town of Tampico, the Midwest is determined to make Reagan whole again. The Tampico prodigal has become the Land of Lincoln’s new favorite son.
Grim economic times have not spared Tampico’s Main Street Historic District today: home foreclosures and the decline of the family farm have shuttered many buildings and infected its residents with an omnipresent, shroudlike fear that the American dream is in permanent recession. Yet each year over the last decade, tourism has picked up as the legend of Ronald Reagan grows as wide as the Mississippi River only 50 miles away.
On February 6, 1911, our 40th president was born in a second-floor apartment above a brown-floorboard saloon in a hard, cold sleet that blanketed the prairie town in gray. That’s right, Reagan was born above a bar. The Tampico Historical Society erroneously claims on its website that Reagan was born above a bakery, likely because it sounds more wholesome than a tavern. The first floor of the Graham Building—at 111 South Main Street—didn’t become a bakery until 1915, four years after Reagan’s birth and long after his family had moved to their next house on Glassburn Street.
The Reagan birthplace—a red-brick building with three second-story windows and a cornice—is a modest First National Bank museum today. What it lacks in Reagan artifacts it makes up for in modest homespunness. In his 1990 autobiography An American Life, Reagan repeated his one and only 111 South Main Street birth story, which he regularly recycled over the years. “He looks like a fat little Dutchman,” Reagan claimed that his father, Jack, an Irish Catholic alcoholic, had said when he first saw his cute butterball son. “But who knows, he might grow up to be president someday.” Historians over the years have inferred that this story is apocryphal. Yet the anecdote is pure Ronald Reagan, somehow seeming appropriate even if Jack never said it. And the nickname “Dutch” clearly stuck. At least that’s the way they’ll tell it at Tampico’s Dutch Diner, where they dip fried food in a special “Ronnie sauce.”
What historians do know about February 6, 1911 is that William Howard Taft was president (but struggling), crew members were prepping the RMS Titanic for its inaugural Atlantic voyage, and Mexico stirred with talk of revolution. The future president’s mother Nelle, an ardent Disciples of Christ churchgoer, had