08/13/2026
I never heard this part of the story!
In the summer of 1926, a shy, thick-glasses-wearing 15-year-old walked into Lowell Park in Dixon, Illinois, and asked for a job.
His name was Ronald Reagan. Everyone in town called him "Dutch."
He'd just finished a lifesaving course at the YMCA, and the Dixon Park Board needed a lifeguard for the swimming section of the Rock River.
They hired him on the spot.
What came next wasn't glamorous. Memorial Day to Labor Day, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, watching a stretch of river that locals knew could turn dangerous fast.
For that, he earned a small seasonal wage — and one unexpected bonus.
The first time he pulled a man from the current, the grateful swimmer handed him $10 on the spot. Reagan later said it was the first time in his life he'd ever been paid for doing anything.
He kept that memory for the rest of his life.
To track his rescues, Reagan started cutting a notch into a wooden log positioned near the water's edge. One notch, one life.
By the end of that first summer, there were already several marks on the wood.
He returned every summer for seven years straight, through 1932. Some days were quiet. Other days, the current pulled someone under fast, and Reagan had seconds to react.
Not everyone was actually in danger. Dixon locals later admitted that more than a few notches came from young women who "pretended" to struggle, hoping the athletic young lifeguard would swim out to rescue them.
Reagan knew. He didn't seem to mind.
By his final summer, the log held 77 notches. Seventy-seven people pulled from the Rock River over seven years — and during his entire tenure as a lifeguard, Lowell Park recorded not a single drowning.
That statistic mattered more to him than almost anything that came after.
Because after Lowell Park, life moved fast. Reagan left Dixon for Hollywood, then politics. He became Governor of California in 1967, and in 1981, the 40th President of the United States.
Decades passed. The speeches got bigger. The stakes got higher.
But he never stopped counting.
While serving as Governor of California, Reagan reportedly pulled a struggling swimmer from the water one more time — an unofficial 78th save, decades after he thought his lifeguarding days were behind him.
Old instincts don't retire easily.
In 1990, after leaving the presidency, Reagan came back to Dixon one last time. He walked down to Lowell Park, stood at the river's edge, and skipped stones across the water — the same motion he'd made as a teenager 60 years earlier.
He later called that lifeguard job "one of the best jobs I ever had."
Not the presidency. Not Hollywood. A summer job on a 200-acre stretch of Illinois woodland, watching over a town of roughly 15,000 people.
The original log with all 77 notches has since been lost. But a rescue board tied to Reagan's years at Lowell Park survived, passed down through a local family for nearly a century, and returned to a museum in Dixon in 2026 — a hundred years after he first sat in that lifeguard chair.
Reagan summed up what those seven summers meant to him in one line: "One of the proudest statistics of my life is 77 — the number of people I saved during those seven summers."
Before the White House. Before Hollywood. Before anyone knew his name.
He was just a teenager who showed up to the river every single day, ready to jump in.
