Ronald Reagan Biography Research Paper
The life story of Ronald Wilson Reagan begins in 1911 in the quiet country town of Tampico, Illinois. His father, John Reagan, was an Irish American, a Democrat who believed that all people have to be treated equally. For most of his life Jack Reagan was working on selling shoes. His mother, Nelle Reagan, worked as a community volunteer. Ronald was not the only child in his family; he had an older brother called Neil.
His mother usually helped people with tuberculosis by visiting clinic and offering them help. She was a volunteer for a number of communities and was visiting prisoners in the jails of her town. At the same time Reagan’s father was a great example of a person with a strong sense of justice and kindness. So, it is possible to make a conclusion that from the very beginning of his life Ronald
Reagan was surrounded by people who truly believed in necessity of helping others. These people were his family.
Situations that perfectly demonstrate the personality of Ronald’s father are mentioned in the text of Ronald Reagan’s biography written by Michael Benson. The authors says that Ronald’s father liked to put his believes from ideas into practice and describes the situation when a local theater was promoting a movie called ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and Jack totally forbid any member of his family to see this movie, because its main idea was concerning the support of violence against African Americans.
One more illustration is a situation that happened when Jack Reagan refused to stay at the only one hotel in town, because its owner said he did not welcome Jewish visitors. On this issue Jack said, that he was a Catholics and it meant that the owner could not welcome him as well. These situations describe that the father of Ronald Reagan was a person with strong believes, while his mother was a woman with a big hearth, and it is logical that his parents made an influence on the personality of Ronald.
Just like any child he was causing some troubles to his mother, but most of time he was making her proud. He learned to read in the age of five and once his father caught his son sitting on the floor with a newspaper and when Jack Reagan asked his son what he was doing, the boy answered with one word. This word was ‘reading’.
In the age of nine Ronald’s family moved to Dixon, and this town became the one where the future President finished High School. During the times of High School the boy was taking part in school’s theater plays, he was also an athlete in a school sport team. It was the time when he began his football career. During the times of studying in Dixon High School he also made the first steps for his future career as a politician, because there he became a Student body President.
High School times for Ronald Reagan had also become the times when he discovered his natural talent for writing. It happened due to a new English teacher that was hired by the School he was studying at. She announced that every piece of writing made by pupils would be evaluated not on the basis of grammar and spelling correctness, but on the basis of contest also. It made Ronald try to make his writing more creative and it made him understood that writing is an area he is strong at. Who knew that in further life this particular skill would lead Ronald Reagan to the highest position in the structure of American Government? There was also another English teacher’s requirement for her pupils. She usually asked them to read their essays out loud, so in this way Ronald realized that he had necessary skills for entertaining people and understood that he liked it. That understanding can be considered the first little step to his successful career as an actor.