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Mamie was a belle and a leading spirit even as a little girl. "When the rest of us were still getting kicked in the shins by boys," recalls Mrs. Eileen Archibold, a girlhood friend, "one of them gave Mamie a snakeskin. It was a real honor." Mamie made regular Saturday streetcar pilgrimages to the Orpheum Theater to drink in vaudeville performances by Blossom Seeley, De Wolf Hopper, Eva Tanguay, Harry Lauder and other such glamorous figures. She "dressed up" in adult finery at every opportunity. Boys swarmed around the Doud house, and Mamie fed 'them cookies and Welch's grape juice, and allowed them to play at a pool table in a basement game room; as she grew older, they took her dancing . . . and dancing . . . and dancing.
Army Wife. Mamie was bright, but she was no student. She sighed with relief when she was through at Miss Wolcott's, a Denver finishing school, and could turn to the real and fascinating business of her young life: ruling her string of beaux. Then, on a family winter vacation in San Antonio, she met 2nd Lieut. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nine months later, at 19, she was married. She went for a honeymoon visit with Eisenhower's parents in Abilene, Kans., had her marriage's first bitter quarrel — after Dwight refused, in flat tones, to come home until he had broken even in an all-night poker game. Soon after, she found herself keeping house in a two-room flat at Fort Sam Houston.
It was the beginning of Mamie's real education — and of a rambling, catch-as-catch-can existence which only an Army wife who remembers the appropriations drought between the two world wars could really appreciate. The cubbyhole at Fort Sam was only the first of some 20 different quarters which Mamie has occupied in the decades since; she learned to clean, decorate, move out; to clean and decorate again; to pay bills and dress on Army pay ; and to catch yet another train.
Sometimes it was wonderful. There was Paris after World War I, when "everyone" came to the Eisenhowers' apartment on the Rue d'Auteuil to have a drink, sing old songs, laugh, and refight the war, and when the nearby Seine bridge was known as "Pont Mamie." But there was also Panama in 1922. Mamie had just lost her three-year-old son, "Little Icky," and was expecting her second. She found herself living amid the damp, stifling tropical heat in an ancient and stilt-supported house. There were bats in the rafters, and tarantulas crept out of cracks in the floor. She learned to know a lot of worlds: Washington, the Army schools, the rainy Northwest. In 1936, when Ike served as assistant to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, Mamie found herself living amid rococo splendor in Manila. The next hop took her to an apartment in San Francisco.
Marnes-la-Coquette. During World War II, she just sat tight, played mah-jongg, and kept out of the newspapers. As wife of the president of Columbia University, she did the sensible thing, and acted since she was a stranger to the academic world — as if she were on some unfamiliar Army post. But at Marnes-la-Coquette, the 14-room French mansion which the Eisen howers occupied when Ike commanded SHAPE, Mamie served a unique appren ticeship for life in the White House.