Even when he was hobnobbing with the glitterati in Hollywood, negotiating with Soviet leaders in the Kremlin or traversing the corridors of power in Washington, there always was something about Ronald Wilson Reagan that never strayed too far from Dixon, Ill.

It was but one of the trademarks of Mr. Reagan's long life that even though he could not wait to leave that small-town existence, its old-fashioned way of life and values never really left the man who back home was known as "Dutch," but who died best known to the world as "Mr. President."

"There was the life that shaped my body and mind for all the years to come," he said in his 1965 autobiography. "It was a good life. I never asked for anything more, then or now."

In a 1968 interview with his biographer, Lou Cannon, Mr. Reagan put it more succinctly, declaring simply: "Dixon is part of me."

The son of a small-town shoe clerk whose earnings too often went to liquor, Mr. Reagan cherished the small-town American belief in hard work. In his relentlessly upbeat 1965 book, he recalled "a rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idyll."

It is a recollection at odds with the more somber assessment of those years by his older brother Neil Reagan, who died in December 1996.

Neil Reagan's memories were more of poverty, which resulted in weekly chores such as a Saturday trip to the meat market to buy a 10-cent soup bone for a week's meals.

"I was also told to ask the butcher for liver for the cat," he said once. "We didn't have a cat. Our big meal on Sunday was always fried liver."

Ronald Reagan was born Feb. 6, 1911, in a flat above the Pitney General Store where his father worked in Tampico, Ill.

He immediately gained a nickname from his father, who said, "For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn't he?"

"Dutch" moved several times before he was 9 years old, with his father's efforts to make money selling shoes taking the family to Chicago, Galesburg, Monmouth and then back to Tampico before finally settling in Dixon, about 100 miles west of Chicago, in 1920.

Then a tiny farming community with 8,191 residents, Dixon was Mr. Reagan's home for a dozen years before he moved to Davenport, Iowa, to take a radio announcing job at age 22. But in those years, the family moved five times, again reflecting the economic uncertainties of the Depression and Jack Reagan's efforts to make a living for his family.

DEPRESSION-ERA DOUBTS

The period of Mr. Reagan's later youth was one of national self-doubt. Years later, the future president, like many Americans of that troubled era, never hesitated when asked to name the most important influence on his life. "The Depression," he always answered.

Mr. Reagan later tried to be upbeat about those years, regaling listeners with tales of his high school football exploits and the 77 people he claimed to have rescued from drowning while a lifeguard for seven summers at Lowell Park on the Rock River.

But there was a dark side to those memories as well.

Mr. Reagan turned serious when he was forced to recount his father's drinking, particularly the time at age 11 when he found Jack "drunk, dead to the world," and was forced to laboriously drag him into the house.

There also was sadness when he recalled Christmas Eve 1931, when his father went to the mail anticipating notice of a promotion only to find an ominous blue slip.

"It was a note saying he didn't have a job," the president often stated grimly.

Mr. Reagan was forever shaped by his environment.

His interest in the theater was instilled by his mother. His belief in patriotism, God and hard work came out of a small-town upbringing in which he gleefully recalled celebrating in 1918 the armistice that ended
World War I.

His strong belief in New Deal liberalism came from his father and his personal experience helping people during the Depression.

Decades before Mr. Reagan ever railed against Washington and aid programs, his own father was a beneficiary of those programs. The business devastated by the Depression, Mr. Reagan's father landed a New Deal job handing out relief checks to those in need in Dixon.

It also was at this time that Mr. Reagan found that he could use words to move others to action. He made that discovery when, as a freshman, he helped lead a student strike at tiny Eureka College, delivering a speech that mobilized the student body.

"I discovered that night that an audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together," he said in his book. "It was heady wine. Hell, with two more lines I could have had them riding through 'every Middlesex village and farm' - without horses yet."

A POPULAR, BRIGHT STUDENT

A popular student, Mr. Reagan had little difficulties with his studies at the college, blessed as he was with a retentive mind.

More important to the ambitious young man, the college experience confirmed for him that a larger world awaited him outside small-town Illinois. And even then, for this good-looking young man, the dreams reached to Hollywood.

In the short term, that meant a job as a sportscaster, a goal he achieved soon after college when he worked his way up to a good position with WHO radio in Des Moines, broadcasting Big Ten football and, though sitting in his Iowa studio, Chicago Cubs baseball.

Often giving listeners a better play-by-play description than that offered by announcers at the ballpark, Mr. Reagan read the action from the Western Union ticker, adding sound effects and, when the ticker broke down, an occasional extra ad-libbed foul ball to fill the dead air.

With his $90-a-week announcer's salary, Dutch bought a Nash convertible in 1936. The next year, he drove that Nash to Hollywood, taking advantage of a spring training trip with the Cubs to get a screen test with Warner Bros.

A quick name change later - from Dutch back to Ronald - and Mr. Reagan had signed a $200-a-week contract, launching a film career that was much better than his political critics ever conceded but less memorable than he himself recalled.

While many of his films were eminently forgettable, Mr. Reagan himself built a solid reputation as a steady, dependable quick study, drawing good reviews even when trapped in bad movies.

Almost always he was cast as a nice guy, later fervently wishing that the public would quickly forget the one time he played the villain who slapped Angie Dickinson around. And, later critics notwithstanding, he often did get the girl.

"The villainous stuff just isn't for me," he said in a 1965 interview. "Oh, I've played one or two bad guys, but I don't seem to pull it off. ... I figure the only kind of heavy I can play is the Clark Gable type of villain, bad at the start but then the old heart of gold emerges at the end."

The films Mr. Reagan was proudest of and which drew the best reviews came after he graduated from the low-budget pictures. They included "Brother Rat" with Eddie Albert and a future wife, Jane Wyman; "Dark Victory" with Humphrey Bogart; "Knute Rockne - All American" with Pat O'Brien; and, perhaps his best, "King's Row" with Claude Rains and Robert Cummings.

FORGOTTEN REVIEWS

Unfortunately for Mr. Reagan, the good reviews for his role as playboy Drake McHugh in "King's Row" were all but forgotten - and the movie-going public was looking for new stars - when World War II ended in 1945.

Mr. Reagan had spent most of the war with the Army Air Corps in Hollywood, narrating training films. And when he returned to acting, he learned that he was not one of the new faces so sought by the public and the studios.

In financial trouble and with his marriage to Wyman collapsing in divorce, Mr. Reagan threw himself into his work as the six-time president of the Screen Actors Guild, which was then heavily involved in fighting the communists who Mr. Reagan said were then "crawling out of the rocks" in Hollywood.

Even three decades after his last movie, Mr. Reagan proved far more sensitive to criticism of his acting than of his politics or governance.

He was able to cite reviews that proved he was more than the "B movie" player that many dismissed him as.

But even Mr. Reagan was critical of many of the vehicles he was offered, feeling particularly after World War II that the old studio system had not served him well.

"A star doesn't slip. He's ruined by bad stories and worse casting," Mr. Reagan groused in 1950 in an interview with Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.

Mr. Reagan firmly believed that television was ruining the movies and that the studio heads were responding to the threat by lowering the level of the films they produced.

Ironically, it was this newfangled invention that rescued Mr. Reagan's faltering career while setting him on a new, politically conservative path that would lead to the White House.

Entranced by the idea that somebody would be paying him to make the speeches he then was giving for free, and seduced by the prospect of a steady income of $125,000 a year, Mr. Reagan in 1954 became host of a new half-hour television series to be called "General Electric Theater."

In addition, Mr. Reagan agreed to visit GE's "company towns" to serve as a spokesman for GE.

It was during this eight-year tour of duty that transformed Mr. Reagan from an actor to a politician - both physically and philosophically. Numerous times a day he was required to give pro-business, anti-government, anti-communist speeches that reflected GE's conservative point of view.

Mr. Reagan at the time complained of the grueling schedule and difficult conditions, but it molded him and hardened him for the life that was to come.

"Eight years of accidental campaigning, of being ceaselessly pushed to give more, turned Reagan into a clockwork politician," said Edward Langley, who was often Mr. Reagan's traveling companion in those days.

DRAWN TO POLITICS

But GE was not solely responsible for Mr. Reagan's political metamorphosis. Two others events coincided to push him rightward - his marriage in 1952 to actress Nancy Davis, the adopted daughter of archconservative Chicago neurosurgeon Loyal Davis, and his shock at the taxes he was paying now that he was making decent money.

Increasingly, Mr. Reagan was being pulled into the world of politics, a realm he had shunned as recently as 1946 when Democrats tried to get him to run for Congress.

But now, though still nominally a Democrat, he found himself voting for Dwight Eisenhower and, in 1960, heading up Democrats for Nixon.

Finally, in 1962, he changed his party registration to Republican.

He was still regarded as but a political bauble until he rose from the rubble that was the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964.

He delivered a speech at the '64 GOP convention that, in its clarity and call to arms, was unlike anything the American electorate was hearing at that time.

More than anything else, that speech established Mr. Reagan as a political force and potential candidate. Washington Post political columnist David Broder called it "the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his 'Cross of Gold' speech."

Within two months of Goldwater's defeat, the pressure was building on Mr. Reagan to make a 1966 challenge to second-term Democratic California Gov. Pat Brown. By 1965, "Friends of Ronald Reagan" was formed and the campaign was on.

With his mastery of television and his easy style on the stump, Mr. Reagan overwhelmed the less-charismatic George Christopher of San Francisco in the Republican primary and stunned the ill-prepared Brown by almost 1 million votes in November.

It was the kind of margin and the kind of political debut guaranteed to draw national attention.

For once, the glare of the spotlight was not entirely kind to Mr. Reagan, who was well-prepared for the campaign but, as top aides later acknowledged, ill-prepared for governing.

He was plagued by first-year mistakes in Sacramento but was still being pressured by members of his own staff to immediately test the waters for a presidential run in 1968.

As author Theodore H. White later wrote, Mr. Reagan was not opposed to the idea.

"Within 10 days of his election, Reagan had gathered his inner circle together on Thursday, Nov. 17th, 1966, at his home in Pacific Palisades for a first discussion of the presidency," White wrote.

NIXON'S TIME

The pressure grew, but the planning was flawed as Mr. Reagan underestimated the strength of Richard Nixon, who had been plotting his political comeback carefully for six years.

Mr. Reagan soon found himself in an undeclared state of noncandidacy that would lead to a convention announcement, a frantic scramble for Southern delegates long since locked up by Nixon, and his first national defeat.

It would be eight years before he could again address his hankering for the White House. That chance came in 1976, two years after he had completed his second and last term as governor.

Again, though, hesitation and poor planning did him in as he took on Gerald Ford, who had been thrust into the presidency and thwarted Mr. Reagan's path to the GOP nomination.

Ford clearly was vulnerable entering the New Hampshire primary, but at that moment White House aides tripped up Mr. Reagan with an old speech in which the Californian had advocated shifting the burden for $90 billion in federal programs to the states.

Ford used the proposal effectively to raise doubts about Mr. Reagan, and the former governor's strategy, which had been based heavily on a win in New Hampshire, was dealt a severe blow.

Mr. Reagan lost the state and with it the momentum he needed so badly.

Even with later wins in the South and the West, Mr. Reagan was never to recover from that opening-round loss.

Despite coming to the Kansas City convention ever so close to Ford, Mr. Reagan suffered a bitter second defeat and returned to California amid the conventional wisdom that he would be too old to try again in 1980.

WILL WORK FOR PRESIDENCY

But as was often the case, he confounded the conventional wisdom.

For as he approached 1980, Mr. Reagan had learned from his political mistakes in 1968 and 1976. Unlike 1968, Mr. Reagan seemed not only to badly want to win, but he also was willing to plan and work for it.

He came out of 1976 having smoothed out the rough spots in his operation and with his issues firmly in place. His themes were set. And his experience enabled him to weather an early stumble in the Iowa caucuses and march to an easy nomination victory in Detroit.

The general election was shaping up as far more difficult, with an incumbent president branding Mr. Reagan as extremist and voters telling pollsters of their doubts almost up to the eve of the election.

But in those final days, Mr. Reagan and President Carter held their lone debate and, with a single good-natured, "There you go again," Mr. Reagan eased the doubts and coasted to an electoral landslide.

For Carter, who like Pat Brown 14 years earlier had eagerly prayed for Mr. Reagan's nomination in the belief that the Californian would be the easiest foe to top, it was a bitter lesson that Mr. Reagan was not to be underestimated.

Others were still to learn that lesson - House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill when Mr. Reagan rammed his "supply-side" economic package through the Democratic Congress; skittish allies when Mr. Reagan held strong for missile deployment in Western Europe; and a wary Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr. Reagan's partner in more U.S.-Soviet summits than ever before seen in a single presidency during the Cold War.

For much of the nation, lingering doubts about Mr. Reagan's capacity to lead were eased by two events very early in 1981 - his unyielding firing of the striking air traffic controllers and his good humor after being struck by a bullet in an assassination attempt.

In the end, despite a deep recession in his first term and the Iran-Contra affair in his second, Mr. Reagan left office higher in the public opinion surveys than any modern predecessor, and his 49-state sweep to re-election was the most crushing victory in history.

ACTING AND POLITICS

One secret to his success, Mr. Reagan maintained throughout his presidency, was something he had learned in acting.

"What does acting have to do with politics and statecraft? Whatever possessed the American people to entrust this high office to me?" Mr. Reagan asked rhetorically in a 1988 speech in Moscow. "In looking back, I believe that acting did help prepare me for the work I do now."

In both acting and politics, he said, you need a clear vision. "To grasp and hold a vision, to fix it in your senses - that is the very essence, I believe, of successful leadership - not only on the movie set, where I learned about it, but everywhere."

Along with a vision that rarely wavered, Mr. Reagan exhibited an optimism that marked everything he did and, to some, was perhaps his most important contemporary contribution to his country.

Put simply, he took a country trapped in a malaise of hostage-taking and economic woe and still shaken to its roots by Vietnam and Watergate, and made it feel good again about itself.

As his 1984 re-election campaign commercials trumpeted, he made many of his fellow citizens feel that it truly was "morning again in America."

And it was that optimism, unseen in such abundance in presidential rhetoric since Franklin D. Roosevelt, that was at the heart of the "Great Communicator" title bestowed on Mr. Reagan.

Mr. Reagan's speeches, said Steven Hayward, an expert on rhetoric, conveyed "a message of native optimism and hope for the future which is deeply rooted in the American character and in American history."

This innate optimism was never more in evidence and never more endearing than when it surfaced during perhaps the bleakest moment of his life - the day he told the country that he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, the incurable neurological disorder that steadily destroys memory.

"I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead," he wrote in a moving open letter to "my fellow Americans" in November 1994.

Eight months later, amid reports that his condition was worsening, Nancy Reagan, in a speech in New York during one of her rare trips away from her husband, called Alzheimer's a "really very cruel disease" and appealed for understanding for the families of victims.

Her eyes reddening and her voice breaking as she delivered a fitting comment on the final chapter of the former president's life, she said, "For the caregiver, it's a long goodbye."

Saturday, that long goodbye ended, triggering anew the memories of a long life that began in small-town Illinois but played on stages across the world.

As Mr. Reagan himself once said about life in show business, he had "a hell of a close."