Letter to the Editor

Gen. Eisenhower to the rescue

Friday, October 2, 2020

Dear Editor,

Elivera Doud lived in the neighborhood where I grew up. She was the mother-in-law of Dwight D. Eisenhower, our 34th U.S. president.

He was the third son of the seven sons of David Jacob Eisenhower and his wife Ida Elizabeth Stover.

The Eisenhowers were German Swiss immigrants who came to America in the 1730s.

I sold Girl Scout cookies to Elivera Doud. Mrs. Doud was married to John Sheldon Doud, who was a wealthy head of a meat packing company.

Due to financial reverses, the Eisenhowers moved to Denison, Texas, from Dickinson County, Kans.

When Dwight was almost 2 years old, the family moved back to Kansas and lived in Abilene. Dwight’s birth place in Denison was a white-framed house.

In a business area at 9th and Corona Street in Denver, we saw Ike and Mamie shopping when they visited her mother, Mrs. Doud. They frequently bought dairy products at the Purity Creamery.

They attended church at the Corona Presbyterian Church. Mamie and Ike were married by a Presbyterian minister from Britain. Their honeymoon was spent at a mountain resort outside of Denver known as Eldorado Springs. (My parents used to take me swimming there.)

One time, the lady who lived upstairs in the duplex where parents and I lived sent me to buy some milk and bread.

She paid me to run the errand. Unfortunately, the double-decker strawberry ice cream cone that I bought with the money she paid me toppled down to the sidewalk.

Ike and Mamie saw it happen. He bought me another one.

During the Normandy invasion known as “Operation Overlord,” our family worried about my uncle, Bill Blakely, who was there in the infantry. I was very thankful that General Eisenhower was in charge of what became known as D-Day on June 6, 1944. My Uncle Bill was in the “Battle of the Bulge.” He was one of the survivors of a division of the infantry sent tot he Black Forest of Germany. Under the leaves and pine needles, the Nazis had mined it with explosive3s. Many of them were killed.

Helen Ruth Arnold,

Trenton, Neb.

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