Doud Dwight "Icky" Eisenhower was the first son of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Mamie Eisenhower.
Background
He was named "Doud" in honor of his mother (her maiden name was Doud) and "Dwight" in honor of his father. Icky was the first son of future-president Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife Mamie Eisenhower. He was born on September 24, 1917 in San Antonio, Texas.
He and his mother moved to Denver, Colorado while his father was stationed at Camp Meade in Maryland.
Career
He was commonly called "Icky" amongst his family members. He called Mamie several times a week, beginning each call with requests for news about Icky. How was he growing? What new mischief had he gotten into? Once Mamie interrupted with, "Listen here.
Mamie gave up.
After he and his family relocated to Fort Meade in Severn, Maryland, his mother hired a sixteen-year-old local girl as a maid. The girl had been recovering from scarlet fever. In December 1920, shortly before Christmas, Icky caught scarlet fever from the girl.
Though his mother tried desperately to save him, even calling a specialist from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Icky died on January 2, 1921.
In his biography of, Stephen East. Ambrose wrote: These feelings had to be suppressed if the marriage was to survive the disaster, but suppression did not eliminate the unwanted thoughts, only made them harder to live with. So did the equally inevitable sense of loss, the grief that could not be comforted, the feeling that all the joy had gone out of life.
"Foreign a long time, it was as if a shining light had gone out in Ike"s life," Mamie said later. "Throughout all the years that followed, the memory of those bleak days was a deep inner pain that never seemed to diminish much." On January 7, 1921, less than a week after his death, Icky was buried in Fairmont Cemetery in Denver, Colorado.
Lester and Irene David said: Forty-five years later, by then a national hero, flew to Abilene in an unpublicized trip.
Dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, his deeply lined face pale and taut, Ike stood bareheaded as the body of little Icky, taken from Fairmont Cemetery, was reburied beneath the marble floor of the little thin-spired chapel of buff-colored stone on the grounds of the Center. After this, he was moved to the Presidential Center. In 1967, would look to Icky"s death as "the greatest disappointment and disaster of my life, the one I have never been able to forget completely".
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Quotations:
"Foreign a long time, it was as if a shining light had gone out in Ike"s life,".