A Man I Needed to Meet at Camp Randall, by David J. Marcou
by When I worked as a student-manager for the UW-Madison Football Team ca. 1969-70, I met a man after practice one day who has continued to play a role in my informal education. Though his name was Eisenhower, I did not immediately associate him with the President by that name, but maybe I should have. He’s continued to assist me with my work, though he died in 1985.
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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