Presidential boyhood homes: Eisenhower home oozes charm

ABILENE, Kan. (SHNS) — The 1909 edition of the Abilene High School yearbook included a tradition of the age — a class "prophecy," in which a member travels in time and writes of his classmates in years to come.

One classmate, in this prophecy, has made it to the very top.

"If Eisenhower is elected president this year, it will make his third term," the time traveler relates.

Yep, someone in the Abilene class had a premonition, yet, possibly to everyone's surprise, Edgar Eisenhower failed to fulfill it. His younger brother and classmate, Dwight, however, did, even though the class seer had pegged him as a professor of history at Yale.

The town that shaped Dwight David Eisenhower has retained the just-folks charm — a charm that survived picaresque beginnings.

The end stop on the Chisholm Trail, this town was once brimming with cowboys and such a rough spot the town fathers hired Wild Bill Hickok as sheriff.

Today, it is the epitome of middle America: a small town with a strait-laced Main Street, a turn-of-the-century train station proclaiming its name and a presidential boyhood home straight out of the Disney props department.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum is one of 13 presidential libraries under the National Archives, most of them adjacent to some larger destination city, from Los Angeles to Atlanta.

"We're not a suburb of any place," says Dennis Medina, the museum curator who left Denver 40 years ago to spend a few years working here.

That Medina is still here testifies to the hold the town has on its sons.

Eisenhower's parents grew up here and his ancestors hailed from old German stock in Pennsylvania. Dubbed "Ike," Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, where his father took the family for a few years after his Abilene store failed.

Ike was brought back as a child. As a man, he left little doubt that he considered Abilene his real birthplace. Its centrality to his vision of himself as a man from the heart of America is unmistakable, both in his words and in his efforts to ensure a foundation preserved the house along southeast Fourth Street where he lived, played and dreamed. On his return from World War II, Ike declared that the thing of which he was most proud was being a son of Abilene.

"I always tell visitors you can't separate Abilene from the Eisenhower library and museum," says the center's director, Karl Weissenbach. "He would come back periodically — family visit and so forth."

Many Americans, though, and surely most Pennsylvanians, associate Eisenhower with the rambling farm in Gettysburg that was one of dozens of stops in life for the young man who left here for West Point in 1909.