For the adolescent Dutch, football became a consuming passion.To him, the game was "a matter of life and death. Every year at the beginning of the football season you were kind of ready for summer to end. You'd begin to think about the smell of burning leaves. The new high school uniforms would be put on display in a store downtown. Your heroes were the high school stars. They seemed like grown men." To make the high school team was "your goal and aim in life. Everything is a game except football," he said. "It is the last thing in our civilized life where a man can physically throw himself, his full body, into combat with another man."
In playing football, Dutch has two challenges, though. First, his acute near-sightedness meant that he couldn't see the ball well enough to catch it. That meant, in turn, that he needed to play in the line but there he found himself too small to play. When Dutch began his high school football career, Dixon High School did not even own a pair of pants small enough for him to wear during tryouts. Fortunately, the coach managed to find an old pair in his attic. In fact, in his freshman year Dutch's mere 108 pounds did not quite make the last cut for the team. The picture above, captures Dutch with the Dixon team in his freshman year, just prior to the final cut. Dutch is on the first row, seated fourth from the left. His brother Neil is standing third from the right.
At the beginning of his sophomore year, the conference created a division for players with a weight maximum of 135 pounds. Dutch served as captain for that team, playing both tackle and guard, still limited by his eyesight.
The varsity team finally chose Dutch in his junior year, but he held down the bench until mid-season when he quickly gained 25 pounds. Then, the coach called on him to play right guard and he kept the position for the remainder of the season. The next year he retained his starting position.
Photo credit: White House
Ronald Reagan and his boyhood friends only talked about playing football, until one of his friends found a lopsided ball. Ronald Reagan's legendary love of football began with an uneven ball, no goalposts and informal rules which the boys conceived of themselves.
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A resident of Dixon recalls seeing Dutch take to the High School football field one morning, alone. Against an imaginary foe, Dutch took the ball and began running the length of the field, looking like he caught a 30-yard pass. He dodged an invisible defender, and then danced into the endzone, a touchdown, with jubilation in his face. A lineman's dream come true.
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