Nation: The Leader: Everett Dirkson

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Beantown. His parents were German immigrants who, shortly after the U.S. Civil War, settled in the town of Pekin, on the Illinois River. The place had been known as Townsite. When the citizens could not agree on a new name, they asked the wife of a local army major to make the choice. She took a map, traced her finger along between the 40th and 41st parallels till she came to a likely name. It was Peking, China. Translated to Pekin, it calls itself "the Celestial City," sports a Chinese dragon in its parades. The high school football team is dubbed, naturally, "the Chinks."

Dirksen's father, like most folks in those parts, was a Republican through and through. He proved it by naming his first-born son Benjamin Harrison; when his wife gave him twins, he seconded the motion by naming them Everett McKinley and Thomas Reed (after the then Speaker of the House). Father Dirksen died when Everett was nine. He had made a good living painting fancywork on carriages and buggies. But he left little. The family lived in the section called "Beantown," where thrifty immigrants grew beans instead of flowers. Dirksen's mother, a hardy woman who had helped build the wood-frame Second Reformed (Calvinist) Church with her own hands, set her boys to work. On their 1½ acres, they grew berries, lettuce, radishes, turnips and onions. They had cows, hogs, chickens and 15 stands of bees. Ev delivered milk to customers, sold eggs and vegetables. "There was a certain ruggedness about life," he recalls. "And a certain ruggedness in living that life." There was church on Sundays, followed by Sunday school, followed by a meeting of the young people's Christian Endeavor (a Bible group that elected Ev president year after year), and in the evening another church service. At home, says Dirksen, "there was the Big Book on the parlor table. And you opened the Big Book in those days."

In the Barn. Pekin, the home of Bird Farm Sausage, Bourbon Supreme and Olt's Duck Calls, was a pleasant place for boys. They played "stink base," "run, sheep, run," football and marbles, fished for crappies and perch in the river. The block on which the Dirksen house stood was rimmed with bushy maple trees, and Tom Dirksen recalls that "you could climb up in one tree and go all the way around the block without touching the ground, climbing from tree to tree." But Everett didn't go in too much for that sort of amusement. Says Tom, a retired employee of the local power plant: "His idea of fun came when it rained. Then he could go back out to the barn, nail a sort of platform out of some old boards, usually using nails twice too big. Then he would get up and start speaking. Preaching to himself, that's what he did." When the kids on the corner had an argument, Everett "would use words that had the other boys shaking their heads. They'd tell him, 'You don't even know what those big words mean.' But he did. He had ambitions from a youngster on. Play and pleasure, that was secondary to him."