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B I VA
O PODE
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1:12
It is striking how often self-made Americans have stories to tell about boring summer jobs.
ing Different Type...
of the American ...
priggishness: being extremely proper
e Author's Use of ...
President Ronald Reagan had a summer job as
a lifeguard when he was a teenager. What did
Reagan gain from his summer job?
the Author's Craft
1 The first time that Ronald Reagan appeared on a newspaper front page
was as a teenage lifeguard, hailed for saving a drowning man from a fast
flowing river. The future president was not yet "Ronnle", America's
reassuring, twinkling, optimist-in-chief. He was still "Dutch", to use his
childhood nickname: a slim, bespectacled youth, serious to the point of
priggishness. A biographer, Garry Wills, unearthed a high school
yearbook in which Reagan scolded swimmers he pulled from the cool,
treacherous Rock River, near his boyhood home of Dixon, Illinois. "A big
hippopotamus with a sandwich in each hand, and some firewater tanked
away," Reagan wrote of one. Each summer from 1927 to 1932 the
teenager would rise early to collect a 300lb block of ice and hamburger
supplies before driving in his employer's van to the river, working 12
hours a day, seven days a week. The post offered responsibility, money
for college and stability in a childhood blighted by frequent moves,
brushes with financial ruin and his father's drinking. There was glory, too:
in all he saved 77 lives. A picture of the Rock River hung in Reagan's Oval
Office.