DIXON, ILL.

With nearly ten thousand people, Dixon was more than ten times larger than Tampico. We arrived there in 1920 when I was nine years old, and to me it was heaven.

I think growing up in a small town is a good foundation for anyone who decides to enter politics. You get to know people as individuals, not as blocs or members of special interest groups. You discover that, despite their differences, most people have a lot in common: Every individual is unique, but we all want freedom and liberty, peace, love and security, a good home, and a chance to worship God in our own way; we all want the chance to get ahead and make our children's lives better than our own. We all want the chance to work at a job of our own choosing and to be fairly rewarded for it and the opportunity to control our own destiny.

The dreams of people may differ, but everyone wants their dreams to come true. Not everybody aspires to be a bank president or a nuclear scientist, but everybody wants to do something with one's life that will give him or her pride and a sense of accomplishment. And America, above all places, gives us the freedom to do that, the freedom to reach out and make our dreams come true.

Later in life I learned that, compared with some of the folks who lived in Dixon, our family was "poor." But I didn't know that when I was growing up. And I never thought of our family as disadvantaged. Only later did the government decide that it had to tell people they were poor. When we first moved to Dixon, we lived on the south side of the river. When we could afford it, we moved across the river to a larger house on the north side. As I look back on those days in Dixon, I think my life was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

On the eve of the Fourth of July when I was eleven, I managed somehow to obtain some prohibited fireworks, including a particularly powerful variety of firecracker known as a torpedo. As I approached the Town Bridge that spanned the Rock River one afternoon, I let a torpedo fly against a brick wall next to the bridge. The ensuing blast was appropriately loud, but as I savored it, a car pulled up and the driver ordered me to get inside. I'd been taught not to get into automobiles with strangers, and refused. When he flashed a police badge, I got in the car. Then I made a second mistake: As we started to drive away, I said, "Twinkle, twinkle little star, who in the hell do you think you are?"

At the police station, I was taken in to see the police chief, who I knew spent a lot of time playing pinochle with my father. Of course, I expected leniency, but he promptly called Jack and told him of my infraction and, friendship or not, Jack had to pay a $14.50 fine, which was big money in those days. The police chief took the ban on fireworks seriously and I guess my smart aleck attitude in the car hadn't helped. It took me a lot of odd jobs to pay off my debt to Jack.

I'm sure that the fact our family moved so often left a mark on me.

Although I always had lots of playmates, during those first years in Dixon I was a little introverted and probably a little slow in making really close friends. In some ways I think this reluctance to get close to people never left me completely. I've never had trouble making friends, but I've been inclined to hold back a little of myself, reserving it for myself.

Every summer, a store in Dixon decorated one of its windows with mannequins outfitted with the uniforms of our high school football team and, as I grew up, filling one of those purple and white jerseys became the noblest and most glamorous goal in my life. Our house overlooked the high school playing field and I spent countless afternoons sitting on an earthen ledge watching and hearing the clash of padded bodies butting up against one another and dreaming of the day when I could put on a uniform and join the combat.

In a town like Dixon during the early 1920s, the silent movie was still a novelty, "talkies" hadn't been invented yet, visits by vaudeville troupes were still rare, and television was something you read about in science fiction stories. People had to rely on themselves for entertainment, and at this, my mother excelled. She was a star performer of a group in Dixon that staged what we called "readings": Dixonites would memorize dramatic or humorous passages from famous poems, plays, speeches, or books and deliver them in a dramatic fashion before an audience at church or elsewhere. Whether it was low comedy or high drama, Nelle really threw herself into a part. She loved it. Performing, I think, was her first love.

One day she helped me memorize a short speech and tried to persuade me to present it that evening at a reading, but I resisted. My brother had already given several and had been a hit; in fact, he could sing or dance with the best of them and a lot of people in Dixon thought he'd end up in show business. But I was more shy and told my mother I didn't want to do it. Yet I guess there was something competitive enough in me that made me want to try to do as well as my brother and I finally agreed. Summoning up my courage, I walked up to the stage that night, cleared my throat, and made my theatrical debut. I don't remember what I said, but I'll never forget the response: People laughed and applauded. That was a new experience for me and I liked it. I liked that approval. For a kid suffering childhood pangs of insecurity, the applause was music.

I didn't know it then, but, in a way, when I walked off the stage that night, my life had changed.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster