Presidential junkie

I adore past presidents, well, most of them, and especially ones like Ike.  My first presidential memory is I Like Ike buttons.  Does anyone else from Yoakum remember that they were pasted on the sidewalks?  I was six, so I could be wrong.

And Mamie.  Everyone loved Mamie.

It was worth a fifty mile detour to visit Abilene Kansas to find out more about Ike at his birthplace and resting place.  Above is the house he grew up in with six brothers.  His father worked at the creamery and then the gas company.  Ike too worked at the creamery for two years to help his older brother finish college.  They were working class folks from the poor side of the tracks.

When it was his turn for college, he got an appointment to West Point, giving up the dream of Annapolis because by then he was too old.

Ike came back from WWII a reluctant hero.  He never considered running for President, but he was sought out by so many grass roots campaign groups from both parties that he finally accepted the Republican party nomination. The museum has a movie on Ike that says several times that he never sought his careers, that the job always found the man.

As president, he was concerned with the large military industry that was growing at the expense of other needs of the American people, and he advocated for peaceful solutions.

Once again I left a Presidential Library impressed with the common man who rises to greatness and lives a life of duty.