Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home, Dixon

Dixon, Illinois likes to call itself the hometown of Ronald Reagan, the fortieth president of the United States. That claim is mostly fair. Reagan was born in the small town of Tampico about thirty miles to the northwest, but he spent the years that actually shaped him right here, from age nine to twenty-two. His family moved to Dixon in nineteen twenty, renting a modest two-story house at eight sixteen South Hennepin Avenue that still stands today.

The Dixon years were years of becoming. Reagan's father Jack was a charming but unreliable shoe salesman whose alcoholism brought the family to the edge of poverty more than once. Ronald Reagan later credited those early lessons in financial uncertainty with teaching him the discipline that carried him through his careers. He attended Dixon High, played football, joined the drama club, and began developing the performer's instincts that would serve him across four decades of public life.

But the experience that Reagan himself returned to again and again when explaining who he was began in nineteen twenty-seven. At sixteen he took a job as a lifeguard at Lowell Park on the Rock River, a stretch of water known for its treacherous currents. He worked that job for seven consecutive summers. Each time he pulled someone from the river, he cut a notch in a log on the bank. By the end of his seventh summer, the log had seventy-seven notches. Reagan kept a photograph of the Rock River on the wall of the Oval Office and told visitors it was his favorite job he had ever held.

The house on Hennepin Avenue was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-two, while Reagan was still in office. It has been restored to its nineteen twenties appearance and is open to visitors today, run by Young America's Foundation. It is a small house by any measure, which is part of the point. This is where the man who would spend eight years in the most powerful office on earth learned to swim, learned to save people, and began figuring out who he wanted to be.