"We arrived there in 1920 when I was 9 years old, and to me it was heaven." This is Ronald Reagan, describing Dixon, Ill., where he spent most of his boyhood. "Heaven" is typical Reagan—sunny, and a bit of an exaggeration. Jack and Nelle Reagan spent the first nine years of the future president's life skittering across northern Illinois, settling in one town after another, seeking economic success but never quite finding it. Jack Reagan was a shoe salesman with a good sense of humor and a ready supply of bawdy jokes, who dressed stylishly and seemed to have a little Chicago in him. His goal was to own a shoe store, but, Catholic and Irish and a Democrat, he never quite fit in in heavily Protestant and Republican northern Illinois; and he drank. Nelle Reagan was a member of the Disciples of Christ, active in church affairs and a faithful attendee of Rock River chautauqua programs; she went to the local prison regularly to counsel prisoners and welcomed parolees to her home; she insisted that her husband's alcoholism was a sickness. It was in Dixon that Ronald Reagan forged the personality—friendly yet somehow distant—that enabled him to move up seemingly effortlessly to movie star and president.

Dixon was certainly a more spacious arena for the Reagans' ambitions than Tampico, where Ronald was born above a store on Main Street in 1911. Tampico is a village of just a few blocks, with perhaps 1,000 people, smack on the flat, treeless farmlands that stretch west from Chicago across the prairie. Dixon in 1920 was a small city of 8,000, only 100 miles straight west of Chicago, on rolling hills sloping down to the wide Rock River. From the Reagans' first home you can look downward and see the copper cupola of the Lee County Courthouse, the Nachusa Hotel where Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant once slept, the then new War Memorial Arch over Galena Avenue. Tampico depended for its livelihood on the farms all around; Dixon, in the midst of rich cornfields (the courthouse has glassed-in cases showing the depth of the topsoil in various parts of the county), was also on major rail lines and had big Brown Shoe and Medusa Cement factories. History was not distant: Lincoln's visit to Dixon was closer in time to the young Ronald Reagan than he is to us today. Tampico, isolated on the prairie, suggested only the possibility of working hard on the land; Dixon, in touch with major currents of American history and the industrial economy, raised many possibilities, and Reagan remarked years later that his neighbors would have looked askance had he confessed the full extent of his youthful fantasies.

Creating himself

The Reagan who arrived in Dixon at age 9 was a quiet boy who liked to play with tin soldiers and loved to read; at 5 he had surprised his father by reading a newspaper headline and story out loud. His older brother, Neil, liked to play with other boys; Ronald was a loner, teased often by the others. This was no way to win esteem in Dixon. He sought to make himself an athlete. Badly nearsighted—an affliction not discovered until he was a teenager—he could not see a baseball well enough to hit or field. At football, which he claimed as his passion, he could not see well enough to play the flashier positions and only made the team as a guard when another player was cut. "He was a regular boy. I played football with him and was on the track team with him," remembers neighbor Ed O'Malley, but "I would have to say that he was very slow of foot."

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