It is simplistic to say only that football and girls lured Dutch to attend Eureka Disciples College. As a young boy, he had read books about college life, among them "Frank Merriwell at Yale" and "Brown of Harvard." These books gave the young Dutch a sense of college life and gridiron rivalries, and these changed his ideas about the future. Rather than go to work at his father's boot shop after high school, he wanted to go to college and play football.

By his own admission in An American Life he attributed his college education to a hometown football hero and romantic ideas of following his high-school sweetheart Margaret Cleaver. Garland Waggoner, the football hero, had inspired Dutch playing fullback on the Dixon High School team. He continued to star on the Eureka College football team.

Margaret Cleaver had been Dutch's high school sweatheart. He often remarked that he "was as close to being a 'minister's kid'" as one could be without actually moving into rectory. This remembrance was about the Cleaver family, whose father Ben was a minister in town and whose daughter Margaret was Dutch's sweetheart. Dutch spent a good deal of time with the Cleavers, so much so that Ben was primarily responsible for Dutch learning how to drive. Eventuallly, Margaret and Dutch became engaged.[anecdote]

So when Margaret Cleaver went to enroll at Eureka College, Dutch drove her. He finally saw the campus he had previously only imagined. What he saw, along with the urgings of Margaret, made him seek an audience with the new president Bert Wilson and the football coach Ralph Mackenzie. Reagan emerged from those conversations on the way to a Needy Student Scholarship to cover half his tuition and a job to pay for his meals. He then had to make up the difference in the tuition with money from his own pocket. So Dutch bought a new, shiny, black steamer trunk and enrolled in the fall of 1928, at the age of 17.

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Margaret and Dutch continued to see each other throughout most of their time at Eureka. Dutch never expected that she would not eventually be married to him. Eventually, though, he was surprised and hurt when she left to spend her last year at the University of Illinois and there began to see other men. She eventually married a man she met on the boat to Europe on a trip with her sister.








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