Woman remembers Reagan saving her

DIXON – Gertrude Childers was 15 when Ronald Reagan saved her life.

During the summers, she and a friend would borrow a canoe and go to Lowell Park.

Lots of young people would gather at Lowell Park to go swimming. For 10 cents, they could use the bathhouse, shower and get a towel. There were sandwiches, drinks and candies for sale.

“There would be a lower diving board and an upper diving board and also a slide,” Childers said. “The older people would go down that slide and they’d hold onto their knees like a cannonball, and the younger people like me would be under the dock and we would push out toward the lifeline.”

She didn’t see the man who went down the slide as she pushed out.

“I remember going under, but that’s about all I remember because it knocked me out,” she said.

The next thing she can remember is waking up with a very bad nose bleed.

It was Ronald Ronald, who saved her, during his time as a lifeguard at Lowell Park.

“I always knew him as Dutch,” she said. “I never think of him as Ronald.”

Childers’ father came to pick her up, but she didn’t need a trip to the doctor. The next Saturday she was back at the park.

Reagan was a lifeguard for many years. Childers’ 1932 rescue came after he was in college.

Every time he had to go into the water, he’d make a notch on his lifeguard chair. He is credited with saving 77 people over seven summers.

“I think a lot of of it is just, you know, playing around and people get too anxious,” Childers said. “I think maybe a lot of people just called for help.”

People joke that some girls pretended to drown so they could be rescued by Reagan.

“I was too young to think that way, but maybe in another year I would have,” Childers said.

About 80 years later, Childers, now 94, and her family wants to know who else Reagan saved.

“We were the ones who decided to look into that because when mom moved here (to Heritage Square), we found this,” her daughter Susan Zickuhr said, referring to a letter from Reagan to Childers’ husband, Virgil.

“I appreciate your words very much and am certainly very thankful that I could be in the right place at the right time in your wife’s behalf,” the typed letter said. “I know I would feel just as you do if it had been Nancy.”

Keith Zickuhr, Susan’s husband, has been doing research at the Lee County Historical Society, the Lee County Genealogical Society, the Telegraph and the Dixon Park District.

“Nobody seems to have an archive of when Reagan was a lifeguard,” he said. “Nobody knew he was going to be a president.”

Have a Reagan story?

Contact Emily Coleman at the Dixon Telegraph, 113 S. Peoria Ave., or by calling 815-284-2224, ext. 225.