Before the White House, Reagan narrated baseball games he could not see
As a young radio announcer in Des Moines, Ronald Reagan called Chicago Cubs games from brief wire reports, inventing the vivid play-by-play as the bare facts arrived. That talent for storytelling carried him through 53 films, two terms leading the actors' union, California's governorship and finally the presidency.
Reagan was born on 6 February 1911 in an apartment in Tampico, Illinois, and grew up largely in Dixon, where his first job was lifeguarding on the Rock River. His mother was a devout member of the Disciples of Christ; his father struggled with alcoholism. At Eureka College he was an unremarkable student but active in football, drama and campus politics, and when two Black teammates were turned away from a segregated hotel he took them to his parents' home, where they were welcomed.
A screen test during a Cubs trip to California in 1936 won him a Warner Bros. contract. He made mostly B films, though playing George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American earned him a lasting nickname, the Gipper, and critics rated his role in Kings Row as his best. During the Second World War his severe short-sightedness kept him stateside, where he helped produce more than 400 training films. As president of the Screen Actors Guild he named suspected communist sympathizers to the FBI in 1947, and in his second stint won actors payments when their films were shown on television.
His 1964 speech A Time for Choosing made him a conservative star. As governor of California from 1967 he raised taxes and turned a deficit into a surplus. He beat Jimmy Carter in a landslide in 1980 and pursued Reaganomics, cutting taxes, spending and regulation, while sharply raising military budgets. He survived an assassination attempt and won re-election over Walter Mondale in 1984, but his second term was shaken by the illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contra rebels.
Negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev produced the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Reagan left office in 1989 with inflation and unemployment down but the national debt nearly tripled. Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, he died in 2004.
Source: Ronald Reagan
