Free Ronnie and Nancy by Bob Colacello

Bethesda, then as now, was one of Washington’s more affluent suburbs, with many large estates and several country clubs, the Galbraiths lived in “a tiny, tiny house”—Nancy Reagan’s words—in the modest Battery Park section, which was popular with military families. “It was right up the street from the Army-Navy clubhouse,” their daughter, Charlotte Galbraith Ramage, who was three years older than Nancy, said of the two-bedroom Dutch-colonial-style house at 123 Glenbrook Road. “I had my own bedroom before Nancy came, and then Mother and Dad fixed up the little sun porch, and that was her bedroom. We had a good time in Battery Park.”
    Was Nancy a happy child? “As far as I knew.” Didn’t she miss her mother?
    “I’m sure she did. But Aunt DeeDee would come down anytime she could.
    And we’d go up to New York to see the plays she was in, when she was with Walter Huston and Kay Francis and Louis Calhern and Spencer Tracy and the rest of them.”35
    Talking about her mother’s visits, Nancy Reagan told me, “Mother taught Charlotte and me the Charleston, and I was dying to have long hair, so Mother went out and bought me a Mary Pickford wig.” She and her cousin, she recalled, played hopscotch in front of their house, using coal to draw the lines, and went to a neighbor’s for taffy pulls. “We both fell down in the cinder driveway, I remember, and I had to wear knee patches. I had a boyfriend who would come by while we were eating breakfast, and he would pull me around the block in his red wagon.”36
    C. Audley Galbraith was an assistant auditor of freight accounts for the Southern Railroad; Virginia Galbraith was a housewife. But somehow they managed to send Charlotte to Sidwell Friends School, the private Quaker institution where the children of high government officials and well-to-do Washingtonians had long been, and still are, educated. In the fall of 1925, four-year-old Nancy started kindergarten at Sidwell Friends, taking the bus with Charlotte four miles down Wisconsin Avenue through Northwest Washington. The Galbraiths covered the tuition for Nancy’s first year, which must have been a burden on a railroad clerk’s salary, and Edith paid after that.37 School records show that Nancy was enrolled in kindergarten for only part of the 1925–26 school year, and then again for only part of 1926–27. Was her pneumonia the reason she missed so much Early Nancy: 1921–1932
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    school, or was her mother having trouble making the six-times-a-year tuition bills? Nancy Reagan vaguely recalled leaving school to spend stretches of time with her mother in New York. In any case, she started first grade in the fall of 1927, at age six, and completed it the following spring.
    It might be said of Nancy’s early years in Bethesda and at Sidwell Friends that she grew up with the wealthy, but was not of the wealthy.
    Charlotte Ramage recalled, for example, a Christmas party given by “the Hope Diamond gal,” referring to Evalyn Walsh McLean, the silver-mining heiress whose husband, Edward B. McLean, owned The Washington Post in those days. The McLeans’ estate, Friendship, with its own nine-hole golf course, was located directly across Wisconsin Avenue from the Sidwell Friends School. “Their son was in my class, or the class ahead of me, or behind me, I’ve forgotten which,” Charlotte Ramage told me.
    “That’s why I was included in that. And Nancy went. We saw the big tree, and they gave all the girls baby carriages, and the boys got little cars.”38
    The world of politics and power also seemed far away from the Dutch colonial in Battery Park, even though it was so near. Once, Nancy Reagan told me, Aunt Virginia and Uncle Audley took Charlotte and her to the White House Easter Egg Roll. She didn’t remember how old she had been, but given the years she lived in Bethesda, Calvin Coolidge must have been President. I asked Charlotte Ramage if her parents were involved in politics. “No.” Were