Dixon Public Schools to showcase century mark of Reagan beginning his high school years

DIXON – In celebration of the 100-year mark since President Ronald Reagan began his freshman year at Dixon High School, the school hopes to show its students that “every one of them has the potential to achieve their goals and dreams,” Dixon Public Schools Technology Director Jim Manley said.

At a school board meeting Aug. 21, Manley gave a presentation in which he went through the DHS yearbooks from the years Reagan was a student there. He said he was looking through them over the summer and realized that the 2024-25 school year is exactly 100 years since Reagan began his freshman year at DHS.

“I thought what a great opportunity for us to look at that history and that heritage that sort of belongs to us here in Dixon,” Manley said.

In fall 1924, Reagan started classes at Dixon’s north side high school, a building that was torn down due to crumbling architecture in the 1960s and located in the 600 block of north Ottawa Avenue. Until 1929, when DHS’ current building opened, Dixon had two high school buildings that were known as the north side and south side schools, according to newspaper records from the Dixon Evening Telegraph.

Manley began his presentation by acknowledging the building change. He showed the board a picture of the front page of the DHS yearbook from 1928, Reagan’s senior year, that features an architect’s drawing of the current high school on Lincoln Statue Drive.

“The community was planning ahead,” Manley said. “Their future is our past.”

He also pointed out some notable staff who were featured in the yearbooks, including athletic director Arthur Cleveland Bowers and Principal Allen Lancaster.

Lancaster, who had been South Dixon High School principal since 1921, was the first principal of DHS, from 1929 to 1932. He then served as district superintendent from 1932 to 1955. After he died in 1959, the school board named the just-completed Lancaster Gymnasium in his honor.

A.C. Bowers was hired in 1921 as Dixon’s athletic director, science teacher and coach for track, football and basketball. Bowers was the first coach to utilize the school’s new athletic field. A year after he retired in 1963, the school board renamed the athletic field A.C. Bowers Field, as it’s known today.

“They were staff members in our school district that interacted with and helped influence Reagan and many generations of students,” Manley said.

Reagan interacted with Bowers a lot as he was determined to make the football team his freshman year, but at 5 feet, 3 inches tall and 108 pounds he was simply too small to make the team. That summer, Reagan took a job in construction where he helped build and remodel homes around Dixon. By the beginning of school in the fall of 1925, he’d grown to 5 feet, 10 inches and weighed 160 pounds. He’d tried out for the football team again and was elected captain in a newly created division, according to reaganfoundation.org.

During Reagan’s junior year, he made the varsity team and was described as “the lightest but fastest guard on the team” who “won his letter through sheer grit,” according to the 1927 yearbook.

He continued to play football throughout his senior year and served as vice president of the boys “Hi-Y” Club that year, as well, according to the 1928 yearbook.

The “Hi-Y” Club is “something that ties very much to things that are happening today in our school. Our fellowship of Christian athletes is very much in line with this organization from that time,” Manley said.

In the 1928 yearbook, the club is described as “an organization of leading high school fellows from the junior and senior classes who have as their purpose, ‘To create, maintain and extend throughout the school and community, the highest standards of Christian character’ and as their aim to promote ‘Clean Speech, Clean Sports, Clean Living, and Clean Scholarship.’”

Manley noted how Reagan was called out as a leader of his class in the 1928 yearbook. He was elected north side student body president during his sophomore year and served on the student council.

Reagan also held leadership positions in the dramatics club and performed in two school productions, the yearbooks show.

“Of course we know that [Reagan] went on to quite a film career and we see how that started right here in Dixon,” Manley said.

Manley noted how cool it would be “if some of our kids got to do some of the same productions in the coming years that Reagan was in” and said he was going to encourage the theater staff to look into the possibility of that.

In 1927, Reagan was cast as the male lead in a play called “You and I.” The production followed Reagan’s character and a love interest through what is described as a coming-of-age story. He also was cast as a supporting role in a play called “Captain Applejack” in which the characters uncover clues of a crime that occurred, according to the 1928 yearbook.

“[The plays] might need to be updated a little bit for the modern day,” Manley said. “I believe they’re still licensable and still performable.”

Relating to his more artistic side, Reagan was credited with completing some of the artwork in the 1928 yearbook and had three of his literary works featured: “Gethsemane,” “Life” and “Meditations of a Lifeguard,” which detailed some of his experiences working as a lifeguard at Lowell Park’s swimming section of the Rock River.

Reagan’s lifeguard experience was something he spoke about often during his later years, and he proudly spoke about the 77 lives he saved, a number that he kept track of by cutting a notch in a log on the river’s edge each time he pulled someone in need out of the water, according to reaganfoundation.org.

Manley said that each of Reagan’s literary works contained “some very interesting things that could apply to our current classrooms.” He suggested that teachers “could take a critical look at his works and use those to help influence what we do today as we remember the past.”

Some other ideas that Manley mentioned include offering historical talks about Reagan and Dixon’s history, and raising money to donate to the programs Reagan was a part of during high school by selling school shirts and other gear.

For the shirts, “we are planning to do a web store and sell them,” Manley said.

The idea is any revenue the school makes from the shirts can be put toward the activities that Reagan was involved in, such as theater or athletics, he said.

Reagan was a student in Dixon, he walked the city’s streets, was in many of the city’s buildings, and was in sports and on local stages. He wasn’t from a particularly wealthy family and he didn’t have a lot of advantages but he participated and he went on to be the leader of the free world, Manley said.

The next four years are a great opportunity to “sprinkle this message in,” Manley said.