In her senior year, Nancy was also selected to be student judge, a position that involved meting out punishments to girls who had committed infractions such as coming back from lunch wearing a smidge of lipstick, or failing to pass the daily noon inspection of their desks for neatness. She did not cut any slack. “Nancy had a very effective approach to a culprit, looking straight at her and asking, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” one retired teacher wrote.
Her grades were mediocre, which teachers attributed not to lack of effort or intelligence but anxiety. “She works very faithfully and does well from day to day. In spite of much experience, she is nervous about examinations and never does herself justice on them,” read one note in her record. “Fine cooperation and attention. Accurate, does not guess. Extremely good visual memory and observation which might be used pedagogically,” another noted. “Her daily work is better than her tests.”
The Latin School files also hint at an early disquietude that accompanied the “fairy-tale” turn Nancy’s life had taken. “When she entered the school, her mother had just remarried, and Nancy had an adjustment to make to her stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis, a brain specialist of whom she stood in awe,” one teacher wrote.
It is not surprising that she might have been intimidated by her new stepfather at first. Loyal (“a terrible name, and quite a handicap,” he said) was the proud, stern son of a locomotive engineer. Growing up in Galesburg, he lived with his parents on a street known as Scab Alley, in a set of row houses that had been built by the railroad during an 1888 strike. His father never made it as far as high school, having been forced to go to work at the age of seven. But Al Davis was determined that his only child would earn a living with his head, not his back. On nights when Al was not away on runs to Chicago for the Burlington Railroad, he monitored his son’s schoolwork at the kitchen table. “My father knew nothing about my studies and couldn’t aid me, but he sat next to me as though his presence would help,” Loyal wrote later.
Fueled by those expectations and his own inner drive, Loyal was an unbending perfectionist, obdurate and disciplined from an early age. One year when he was in grade school, Loyal compiled a perfect Sunday school attendance record at Galesburg’s Grace Episcopal Church, his sights set on a prayer book that was to be awarded to a boy and a girl. Loyal donned a black cassock and white surplice to lend his quavery voice to the choir and carried the cross at the head of the procession into services. He even pumped the organ.
But at the end of the year, the prize went to a boy whose father owned the town’s largest department store. “I was the only boy to have such a record, and I knew that,” Loyal wrote in his 1973 memoir, still burning at the injustice of it. “I was angered and crushed in spirit. When I got home, I announced I would never go back to the church again.”
From then on, Loyal proclaimed himself a nonbeliever: “I have never been able to subscribe to the divinity of Jesus Christ nor to his virgin birth. I don’t believe in his resurrection, or a heaven or hell as places. If we are remembered and discussed with pleasure and happiness after death, this is our heavenly reward and mortality for having led a good life.”
He graduated from high school at sixteen as his class valedictorian, attended nearby Knox College for two years on scholarship, and then headed to Chicago and Northwestern University Medical School, from which he received his degree in 1918 at the age of twenty-two. After an internship at Cook County Hospital, he joined a general-medicine practice back in Galesburg.
This was right around the time he married nurse Pearl McElroy. “She was beautifully impressive in her black velvet dress with her black hair and brown eyes, the first time we met as the result of a date arranged by telephone by a mutual friend,” Loyal recalled. “Our courtship was short, and there was no chance to learn about each other’s idiosyncrasies.”
Those became apparent soon enough. “I was unable to accept her dislike and ineptitude for housekeeping. She had left a small town for the attractions in Chicago; she was not prepared to settle down to life in Galesburg,” Loyal said. There were also financial problems, as his practice was not earning much, and Loyal had to borrow to furnish their apartment and pay for a Velie coupe automobile.
So, in search of “security as against an uncertain future,” he headed back to Northwestern to train as a neurosurgeon. In 1923 and 1924, Loyal did a stint in Boston working under Dr. Harvey Cushing, considered among the most renowned surgeons in history. (As first lady, Nancy would get the postal service to issue a stamp in Cushing’s honor in 1988.) Afterward, Loyal returned to Northwestern and joined the faculty as an associate professor.
Loyal inspired more fear than affection in those he taught. He could call the roll in class by memory and demanded silence in the operating room. On Saturday mornings he held clinics where he drilled first-year medical students on how to take a patient’s history and make a diagnosis. For those aspiring physicians, these sessions felt “like sitting on a powder keg waiting for someone to light a match,” recalled Harold L. Method, a one-time All-America football player who went on to be a prominent surgeon himself. “Woe to the student who was not properly attired—clean shaven, clean shirt, tie, and jacket.” Indeed, Loyal, who sported a stylish
