The President Visits Home
Featured in the KANSAS! Magazine January/February issue of 1955
It was dusk in Abilene. A large crowd of several hundred people, complete with a brass band, had gathered in front of the Hotel Sunflower. They were talking quietly and waiting patiently in the mild November evening. Military police formed a great semi-circle around the entrance to the hotel, keeping it clear. In the lobby, state highway patrolmen and members of the U. S. Secret Service checked signals and took their stations. Photographers collected in a cluster at the head of the hotel's short stairway. P
A shout went up along Third Street. And, as a convoy of police cars and sleek convertibles pulled up in front of the hotel, the shout, was taken up by the crowd there. "HI, IKE!" they yelled as the band burst into the strains of Hail to the Chief. With this greeting, the President of the United States was welcomed back to his old hometown.
In the two years since his election as the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower has visited his boyhood home at Abilene just twice. His first visit, a year ago last October, was a quick business trip to check on the progress of the new Eisenhower Museum being built near his boyhood home in Abilene by the contributions of his fellow Kansans and non-Kansans throughout the nation.