#71 When Howard met Ron

My father grew up on a tenant farm in an unincorporated area called Pine Creek, Illinois, just a few miles from Dixon. When he was at Mt. Morris College, he played football against the future president, Ronald Reagan, and enjoyed saying, “and we beat ‘em too!” I’ve just looked at the college yearbook and see that on November 15, 1930 MMC beat Eureka 21 to zip. The next year on November 14, neither team scored.

MMC had a disastrous fire on Easter of 1931, struggled to stay open for the 1931-32 school year, and then closed. Technically and legally it merged with Manchester College in North Manchester, Indiana, which retains MMC‘s archives and student records. Dad was very smart, but not a very good student. However, he was also very poor and he could play football--thus he was on scholarship. My mother was an excellent student from a formerly wealthy family devastated by the Depression, so she didn’t have a scholarship and worked in 1932 as a domestic in Chicago.

The small college gridiron wasn’t the first place Howard and Ron met. When Dad was in high school a neighbor took an interest in his future--Dad had worked on his farm. Dad had a loan from the Polo Women’s Club (for the worthy poor, he told me, and he paid it all back) to go to college but hadn’t decided where he wanted to go. I doubt that he had ever been out of the county. He was only seventeen years old and that year (1930) had seen a bathroom for the first time in a private home while visiting a town friend. The neighbor took him to Dixon to meet nineteen year old Ronald Reagan, who was at Eureka. Apparently there was no spark, and besides later in the summer he met my mother on a blind date and she was planning to go MMC.

I don’t recall that my father, a life long Republican, was ever enthusiastic about Reagan. To him I suppose it was a “can anything good come from Nazareth” bias. Or it could have been the Hollywood stigma. Or remembering that Reagan had once been a Democrat. Or that he wasn’t a very good football player. No, I never heard Dad say anything about Reagan except “and we beat ‘em too.”