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"Hemophilic Liberal." Reagan is quite willing to discourse about the sharp-angled turns in his political life. Indeed, he has written about it at length in what, to his critics, seems a singularly well-titled autobiography, 'Where's the Rest of Me?"—the line he shouted in King's Row when he awoke to find both legs cut off at the hips. Unhappily recalling his days as a "hemophilic liberal," he writes: "I have come to realize that a great many so-called liberals aren't liberal—they will defend to the death your right to agree with them."
In conversation with a TIME correspondent last week, Reagan attempted to trace the events that caused the abrupt shift in his political creed: "You have to start with the small-town beginnings. You're a part of everything that goes on. In high school, I was on the football team and I was in class plays and I was president of the student body, and the same thing happened in college. In a small town, you can't stand on the sidelines and let somebody else do what needs doing; you can't coast along on someone else's opinions. That, really, is how I became an activist. I felt I had to take a stand on all the controversial issues of the day; there was a sense of urgency about getting involved."
The drive for personal involvement may well have sprung from the fact that Reagan's family seldom grazed any place very long. He was born in Tampico, 111., one of many Midwest towns that attracted Ronald's Irish father, John Reagan, a Willy Loman type who may not have been the world's best shoe salesman but held all records at the bar. Reagan's mother, Nelle, of Scots-English blood, was a churchly woman who taught Ronnie and his brother Neil, now 58, to read before they entered the first grade.
"Stupefying Bureaucracy." By hoarding his summer earnings as a lifeguard, Reagan managed to enter tiny (enrollment then: 250) Eureka College in Illinois—another small, activist-breeding environment. He made the football team (as a 175-lb. guard), led a student strike against the board of trustees when they tried to change the curriculum, graduated in 1932 with a degree in economics and sociology, and—"because I was a child of the Depression, a Democrat by upbringing and very emotionally involved"—he cast his first vote for Franklin Roosevelt. "Remember his platform?" asks Reagan. "It was all for states' rights, and it also promised to reduce the size of the Federal Government and cut the budget by 25%. Well, I'm still in favor of that."
During the early '30s, Reagan got a job as a sports announcer for a couple of Iowa radio stations. He had a crack ling delivery—so intense that he could keep his listeners enthralled with his account of a distant baseball game that Reagan would follow from the studio with the help of cryptic messages from a ballpark telegrapher and a fertile imagination.
Eventually he wangled trips to California to cover the Chicago Cubs' spring-training camp. On one such junket, in 1937, at the urging of a Hollywood starlet he had known in the Mid west, he took a screen test before heading home with the Cubs. The first day back, he got a wire: WARNER'S OFFER
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