Read Reagan: The Life for Free Online

anxieties at bay. He had followed the careers ofTom Mix andMary Pickford, and he imagined himself on the screen beside them. “By my senior year at Eureka, my secret dream to be an actor was firmly planted,” he remembered. But he kept it secret lest his friends and acquaintances consider him egotistically odd. “To say I wanted to be a movie star would have been as eccentric as saying I wanted to go to the moon,” he explained. “If I
had
told anyone I was setting out to be a movie star, they’d have carted me off to an institution.”
    To disguise his dream, he charted a path he considered more conventional.Radio was a newer medium than movies, with the first regular broadcasts postdating the war. But it caught on quickly, and soon radio sets—typically large consoles, often in handsome wood cabinets—had become a standard feature in middle-class households. Sports broadcasts were an early staple of programming; for many Americans the age of radio began when the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA, aired the 1921 heavyweight boxing championship fight betweenJack Dempsey andGeorges Carpentier. Soon the voices of sports announcers were almost as familiar as the faces of Hollywood movie stars.
    Reagan spent his teens listening to radio stations broadcasting from Chicago; their signals covered Dixon and much of the rest of northern Illinois. He supposed that sports radio could be a step on his road tothe movies; at least it was in the field of public entertainment. And its announcers enjoyed the fame he sought. So he decided that after his last season as a lifeguard ended, he would try to find a job in radio. He bade farewell toMargaret Cleaver, who herself was departing to take a teaching job in a distant Illinois town, and headed to Chicago.
    He arrived with high hopes. Chicago had lots of stations and, presumably, room for at least one more announcer. Yet several fruitless visits to stations produced nothing. A kindly woman in one of the offices told him why. “This is the big time,” she said. “No one in the city wants to take a chance on inexperience.” He should go out to smaller cities and towns and interview with stations there. “They can’t afford to compete with us for experienced talent, so they are often willing to give a newcomer a chance.”
    Reagan returned to Dixon and talked his father into lending him the family car, a worn Oldsmobile, for a small-town tour. Davenport, Iowa, was just across the Mississippi River from Illinois, seventy-five miles west of Dixon. A series of futile visits to radio stations there made him think the Chicago woman had simply wanted to get rid of him. Eventually, he found himself at stationWOC. The program director told him he had arrived too late; the station had had an opening but had filled it just the day before. Reagan’s frustration overcame his usual politeness. He stalked out of the office saying, in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “How the hell can you get to be a sports announcer if you can’t even get a job at a radio station?”
    Something about Reagan appealed to the program director, who followed him out into the hall.Peter MacArthur was a blunt-spoken Scotsman with arthritic knees; his two canes clacked on the wooden floor while his brogue demanded, “Hold on, you big bastard!” Reagan stopped. “What was that you said about
sports
announcing?” MacArthur inquired. Reagan replied that he wanted to be a sports announcer someday. “Do you know anything about football?” MacArthur asked. Reagan said he had played in high school and college. MacArthur offered him an audition. He took Reagan to an empty sound studio and put him in front of a microphone. “I’ll be in another room listening. Describe an imaginary football game to me and make me
see
it.”
    Reagan hadn’t been expecting this, but he wasn’t going to miss the first opportunity his job search had yielded. He recalled a game Eureka had won in the last seconds. He knew the