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Ronald Wilson Reagan's conservatism reflects his Main Street origins. Son of a shoe salesman, he was reared in a succession of small Illinois towns: Tampico, where he was born on Feb. 6,1911, Galesburg, Monmouth and Dixon. As a freshman at 250-student Eureka College, a Disciples of Christ school, he was one of the leaders of a week-long student strike that forced college officials to rescind cuts in the educational program and loosen puritanical rules that forbade smoking, drinking and dancing. An indifferent student, he concentrated on debating, dramatics and football.
Says a teammate: "He got his face shoved in the mud and got pushed around, but he seemed to like it."
After graduating in 1932, he took a series of jobs, eventually becoming a sportscaster at radio station WHO in Des Moines. He was a superb announcer of major league baseball games. Guided by only the sketchy summaries from ballparks, Reagan would fashion a gripping and imaginative narrative for his listeners. But his goal was always Hollywood. In 1937, while accompanying the Chicago Cubs to spring training in California, he wangled a screen test at Warner Bros, and landed a $200-a-week contract. His good looks and fine physique also led University of Southern California art students to select him as a "20th Century Adonis," and he posed for the school's sculpture class in 1940.
He made 50 movies and his salary reached $3,500 a week, but Reagan never achieved first rank as an actor or star. "I became the Errol Flynn of the B's," he says. He also appeared in several A-quality productions, though never in a lead part. Some typical roles: admirer of a dying Bette Davis in Dark Victory (1939), suitor to Shirley Temple in That Hagan Girl (1947) and a scientist who played second banana to a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). Two roles won him acclaim: George Gipp, the doomed halfback of Knute Rockne, All American (1940), and Drake McHugh, the playboy whose legs are amputated needlessly by a sadistic doctor in King's Row (1941). As McHugh wakes from anesthesia, he speaks the line that became the title of Reagan's 1965 autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?
Reagan always had a casual interest in politics, but he did not become actively involved until his film career began declining after World War II. He regards himself as a reformed "hemophiliac liberal." Indeed as late as 1950 he campaigned for Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas against Richard Nixon in their bitter Senate race. It seems likely, however, that in Reagan's early years, his political opinions were less his own than a reflection of those held by the people around him: his father, who was a New Deal Democrat, and the liberal men and women of Hollywood.