As a kid, Ronald Reagan couldn’t see straight. When he was little, his parents made him get his hair cut so that his bangs grew down over his eyes. The style was called a “Dutch boy.” Whenever his bangs grew too long, the barber chopped a tiny hole in the hair helmet so that he could peep out.

To make matters worse, now everyone called him “the little Dutchman,” or “Dutch” for short.

Like most kids, Dutch got into his share of misadventures. Once, when fooling around with some fireworks, he launched a rocket into the side of a bridge. He was hauled down to the local police station and forced to pay a fine. Another time, he was goofing off by railroad tracks when a steam train started to roll out of the station and nearly ran right over him.

But mostly he kept to himself, playing quietly in his room with his army of tin soldiers or reading books about natural history. His favorite one was about wolves, which he read so many times that, years later, he could still recite it word for word from memory. And then there was his prized butterfly and birds’ egg collection.

Dutch had stumbled upon the collection by accident. When he was about six years old, his family moved to a new house in Galesburg, Illinois. One day he crept up into the dusty attic. There, enclosed in a glass case, was a magnificent array of birds’ eggs and preserved butterflies. It had been left behind by the home’s previous owner—and now it was all his. Dutch spent hours alone in the attic, marveling at the spectacular colors of the eggs and the intricate patterns on the butterfly wings. Many years later, when he was governor of California, he signed a bill making the dog-face butterfly the state’s official state insect. He never lost his sense of wonder about the natural world.

But there was another reason Dutch liked hobbies involving the close-up study of small things: he was severely near-sighted.

When it came to seeing anything more than a few feet away, Dutch’s eyesight was horrible. To him, a tree on the side of the road looked like a green blob. A billboard was nothing but a gigantic fuzzy rectangle. In school, Dutch would have to take a seat in the front of the class to see the blackboard. Most of the time, he had no idea what was written on it. When his schoolmates chose sides for baseball, he was always the last one picked.

He couldn’t see a pitch until it was almost on him. He was conked on the head more times than he could count. It was maddening, frightening, and embarrassing.

That all ended one Sunday afternoon when Dutch was about thirteen years old. That day, he went for a drive in the country with his parents. His mother accidentally left her eyeglasses on the backseat. On a lark, Dutch picked them up and put them on. In that instant, everything changed. He let out a yell so loud that his father nearly drove off the road.

The trees! They suddenly had branches—and leaves! The billboards had words on them! The world had a beautiful and astonishing clarity he’d never seen before.

The fields beyond the roadside were filled with heavy, brown, lazily chewing creatures that had to be dairy cows. “Look!” Dutch exclaimed, pointing out the window to a spot where a herd was grazing. It was as if a whole new world had magically opened before his blinking eyes.

The next day, Dutch went to an eye doctor. He was told he had 20/200 vision, meaning that he was legally blind.

He was immediately fitted for a pair of huge, thick, black horn-rimmed eyeglasses. They were ugly and he hated wearing them. But they gave him something he never had before: confidence.

Now that he could see clearly, Dutch threw himself into sports and physical fitness. He had always been a good swimmer, but now he felt comfortable enough to try out for a job as a lifeguard. He took a lifesaving course at the YMCA and was hired as a volunteer lifeguard on an especially treacherous section of the Rock River, which ran through his hometown.

For the next seven summers, Dutch worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. He kept his glasses in his lifeguard chair at all times. When swimmers strayed out too far, or stayed too long in the water, he would throw pebbles at them and shout out, “River rat!”

That usually got their attention. Sometimes it didn’t, however, and Dutch would have to dive in and pull them to safety.

Every time Dutch rescued someone, he carved a notch in a wooden log on the river’s edge. After seven summers, there were seventy-seven notches on the log—one for each of the lives he had saved.

And it wasn’t just people he rescued. One time, an old man offered Dutch ten dollars to dive into the river and retrieve his false teeth, which had fallen out while he was swimming. It took Dutch several tries, but he finally found them. That was his first paying job.

Years later, one of Ronald Reagan’s biographers wrote that working as a lifeguard left him with a lifelong desire to save people. That idea was proven true on an especially memorable occasion. On July 4, 1967, Reagan was in his first term as governor of California. During a Fourth of July pool party at his home, the young daughter of one of his guests was having trouble swimming. Noticing her distress, Reagan excused himself from the party and leapt into the pool—clothes and all—to rescue her from drowning.

So the final tally of lives saved by the man who would one day become America’s fortieth president is seventy-eight. Not bad for a near-sighted butterfly collector from Dixon, Illinois.