A Man I Needed to Meet at Camp Randall, by David J. Marcou.

While I was working as a student-manager for the UW-Madison Football Team, ca. 1969-70, the team and staff came off the field at Camp Randall Stadium one afternoon from practice. (Camp Randall was originally a training camp for Union Soldiers during the Civil War.) Of course, the stands were empty, because it was a weekday, and it may have even been a spring practice, not a summer or fall one.

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    I entered the locker-room, and one of my fellow managers said to me, ‘Hey Dave, there’s a man in the stands you should meet. He’s sitting alone right by our entryway.’

   It didn’t take me long to head up to meet him, though I had no idea who he was.

   The man I shook hands with said his name was Milton. He was a somewhat large man physically (at least larger than 5’9”, 160 lb. me, at the time). Now, his was a good literary name, but as we talked, it became clearer, if not crystalline, to me, that this was more than an average Joe.

   Milton had lived in Kansas, and various other places, and had been president of three very good American universities, though that came out only gradually, not all at once: Kansas State, Penn State, and Johns Hopkins.

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He’d been married and had family. He said family was very important to him, and I agreed that it was important to me, as well. He asked a bit about my family, and we talked a bit more. Although his wife had died, their son and daughter were still living, apparently.

    It was not an era when the internet reigned supreme, so when he finally said his family name was Eisenhower, I simply said, ‘That’s not a common name. Are you related to the famous Eisenhowers?’ I believe he said he was Dwight’s brother, but it didn’t strike me big-time, if he did, that this was President Eisenhower’s brother. I just know that by the close of day that day, I knew his name was Milton Eisenhower, he might be related to the former President, he had two children, and he’d been president of three leading universities. If we talked about his government service during WWII, I can’t recall, though we may have broached that topic briefly, too.

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    I thought him a nice man, but didn’t think much more of meeting him for the next 30 years or so. Around 2000, I thought more about this Milton, and wrote a story about my meeting him (we’d actually spoken that day for at least half-and-hour), sending it to ‘American Heritage’, because that magazine had a guest column space then, that had to do with bumping up against history. That column-article by me was apparently not published there.

    However, Milton Eisenhower’s WWII government service came into play recently (in summer 2009), when I was working on a long article about the great photographer Dorothea Lange, which has since been published, titled: ‘Photographic Equality: Dorothea Lange, Her Migrant Mother, and the Nisei Internees’. Apparently, Mr. Eisenhower was her boss for a short time during the spring of 1942, when he directed the War Relocation Authority, and Ms. Lange photographed Nisei internees.

    Milton Eisenhower was reluctant to head that office, because he was in charge of putting Japanese-Americans into concentration camps, when he’d been led to believe earlier that they would be sent to more freely settle homestead farms in the interior. But interior-states’ governors objected to the latter plan, and Milton directed the penning up of the Nisei instead. Although he tried to make the internments as liberal as possible, he felt frustrated, and resigned after only a few months’ in charge, stating his regrets (really, apologies to the Nisei), in a letter to a former boss, before he resigned.

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    To make a long story short, during the Red purge of the 1950s, Milton Eisenhower was accused of being a communist, which might have embarrassed most other presidents he might have been the brother to, but not Ike; President Eisenhower knew his brother well. Milton continued his work, and today a large center at each of the universities he was president of, is named in his honor.

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    In fact, in retrospect, it was an honor for me to have met Milton Eisenhower, who died in 1985. His grand-niece, Mary J. Eisenhower, Dwight’s granddaughter, would write the Introduction to an anthology I directed/edited in 2006, ‘Spirit of the World.’ I am grateful to all the Eisenhowers for what they’ve done for this nation and world, and for me and my family, too. I’m also grateful for the formal and informal educations my son and I have been receiving over the years, because life educates us all, in many ways.

David J. Marcou is a father, writer, photographer, and editor in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He’s graduated from three Midwestern universities, UW-Madison, UI-Iowa City, and UM-Columbia. His son, Matthew, attended UM-Minneapolis for three years, and is now serving in the US Army. Their works are in leading libraries and museums around the world, including the Smithsonian’s.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_S._Eisenhower