AP

RADIO SPOT: Sportscaster Reagan in a 1932-33 promotion from when he worked for WHO radio in Des Moines, Iowa. The pipe is a prop— Reagan didn't smoke, but the ad was for Kentucky Club pipe tobacco

Radio Days and Reagan
	Growing up and growing old with the Gipper
	By HUGH SIDEY

Posted Sunday, June 6, 2004
So the voice is still. For most of the century, from heartland to the White House, it was a folk song of hope — on the air, the screen and in politics. The echoes still cheer the nation. Ronald Reagan was first only a voice over the old Philco radio on the table beside the furnace register where I used to huddle in a Depression-ridden Iowa, which was either freezing or scorching. Husky, warm — like a neighbor — coming out of Des Moines' who down the road but exuberant and happy, oddly, for a land gripped by despair over every kind of affliction: bankruptcies, drought, a grasshopper plague.

Even then, in the 1930s as a sportscaster, he was off on some kind of American adventure, finding joy in faking play-by-play Chicago Cubs baseball games from the wires, describing the Big Ten football matchups as the country's ultimate contest of brawn and speed. He even brought suspense to the shot put. You felt a little better after a Reagan radio fix, and that was just what he claimed he was trying to do, inspired by his hero Franklin Roosevelt, who scorned fear.

Years later, in the White House, Reagan told how he had laid elaborate plans for live radio coverage at trackside of the Drake Relays quarter-mile run only to be cut off by a commercial. When the studio patched him back online, the race was history. Reagan said he never blinked and, from notes and the sharp whack of his pencil for the starting gun, he re-created the whole race, cinders crunching, muscles etched by strain, colored jerseys blurring, winner hailed in an exultant shout. "Just then it occurred to me there would be no crowd cheers in the background," Reagan related. "So without a pause, I said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, the crowd has been stunned into silence.'" True or not, it doesn't much matter since the story is so good, and by the time he was spinning the yarn, he believed it. There's no other documentation.

In the late 1930s, he went to Hollywood and got a face. Few of us knew what he looked like until he marched across the screen in the Grand Theater in the hometown. He was a lot of other characters in a lot of forgettable films, but he was ours, and we never missed one. War and its aftermath pushed him to the fringes, but then one day I was standing in the Governor's mansion in California, and there was the voice, the face, the hair, the body, the Windsor knot, the three-dimensional Reagan flawlessly draped in creamy desert-tan gabardine. It sort of took my breath away. All the rest of him was there. He was on his way to the White House, and I could hear it, feel it.

He was still telling old Iowa stories, but by then he had added Hollywood chapters. He never forgot anything, or at least he made up good endings to what he might have forgotten. On Air Force One with him in his presidency, I told him a friend of mine was still miffed that Reagan in his radio days had gone to referee some Little League ball in Lincoln, Neb., and had called my friend out at third. Bum call, my pal insisted. Reagan sat up like a bolt. "Not so," he protested in genial shock. "I remember that game and that play exactly. There was some disagreement, but I had that one right." I can't recall the particulars, but my friend Fred is out there somewhere still proud he was subdued — rightly or wrongly — by the Gipper.

The day finally came in 1981 when I saw the full Reagan standing, smiling in the Oval Office among the expected portraits and busts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, plus one of budget-balancing, tax-cutting Calvin Coolidge, a wry Reagan touch. I made a quick calculation that it was a half-century before when I had first heard that voice. Reagan talked on that day about all the things he had ever talked about: his conversion to conservative, his opposition to wasteful, oppressive government. But always, still, the good ole days in Dixon, Ill. Then, oops, he remembered and grabbed his jar of jellybeans like some kind of avuncular country-store proprietor and passed them around. Nothing was ever discarded in this man's life; he just piled experience on top of experience, filed them and then fished them out when needed.

When he was explaining that nothing was better for him than being on the backside of a horse, he suddenly smiled and told us of the time he was in a National Guard cavalry company at Fort Des Moines and pounded up for review. His mount suddenly balked; he somersaulted over the horse's head and landed upright on his feet ready to salute his commanding officer. Surely another enhanced memory out of the file.

Reagan would telephone quite a bit during his presidency, the voice usually soft and disarming though sometimes wondering, sometimes perplexed. When he liked something that had been written or broadcast, he would say, "You are the only one to get it right." He never called to complain or criticize directly. It was always, "Now just let me explain what I had in mind."

Reagan loved being President. He liked the power, the prominence, the house, the airplane and the legends. He never claimed he saw or heard the storied White House ghost. But the old showman couldn't let the myth die like that, so he insisted he had friends staying in the Lincoln Bedroom, and both the man and his wife awoke to see a misty Lincoln at the foot of the bed. He would not tell the names of his guests.

Reagan even relished the White House food. This is a man who rose to power telling stories about the creative preparation of macaroni and cheese during the Depression days by his sainted mother Nelle, and how it had remained one of his favorite dishes. At a small dinner in his private dining room, he ladled out a generous helping of caviar, then a second, and he caught me kibitzing. The smile came out, and he crinkled up and whispered, "We didn't get any of this in Dixon."

Looking back now, I wonder if Alzheimer's had not begun to erode his mind in the last years of his presidency. Reagan was in Moscow on his one and only visit to the "evil empire." He had been in meetings in the Kremlin, been strolling in Moscow neighborhoods and Red Square. I thought this was the stuff of legend, to go with Dixon, Des Moines and Hollywood. I had to ask him about it. After conniving and waiting hours in a dreary Moscow hotel room, I managed to get a phone call patched through to Reagan, who was staying in the American embassy. But at that moment, at least over the phone, the voice was flat, seemingly uncomprehending of the greatest scene he had ever played. He mumbled banalities about his journey. I was still puzzled by the lack of the old zest. But then he went out and delivered — reading off the TelePrompTer — some of the finest speeches he had ever given.

To the end, Reagan reveled in everything about America: its tragedies, which he insisted built character and fostered humility and good humor; its wars, in which he never directly participated but could communicate the bravery of "the boys of Pointe du Hoc" on D-day; its small triumphs, like an uninterrupted sled ride a full mile down the Rock River from his hill in Dixon; its grand achievements, like the endless suburbs of tidy ranch houses, which he proudly pointed out to a visiting Mikhail Gorbachev.

Ronald Reagan always saw "the shining city on the hill." You can still hear the voice, even in the letter to the country saying he was entering the dark world of Alzheimer's. "I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life," he wrote. "I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead."

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