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Born Oct. 14, 1890, in Denison, Texas, where his father, David Eisenhower, was a railroad-yard mechanic, Dwight was brought to Abilene at the age of two. The family was never well off—David Eisenhower rarely earned more than $100 a month—and the six boys worked hard to help out. Dwight sold vegetables grown on his family's three acres and stoked furnaces at the Belle Springs Creamery, where, at 19, he became night foreman.
There was much of Abilene in Eisenhower, and he described it unforgettably one June afternoon in 1952, when he had returned to open his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Standing near the little white clapboard house where he was reared (now open to the public), he spoke of his boyhood and his parents, who were members of the River Brethren, a Mennonite sect: "Their Bibles were a live and lusty influence in their lives. There was nothing sad about their religion." Of his own faith, he once said: "I am the most intensely religious man I know. Nobody goes through six years of war without faith." Of the citizens whom he knew as a youth: "To those people I am proud to belong."
Along with their piety, the Eisenhowers gave their sons the frontier creed of self-starting individualism. "Opportunity is all about you," they told them. "Reach out and take it. Do you want to go to school? Well, go!" Too old at 20 for Annapolis, his first choice, Ike qualified for West Point, where he reported in June 1911. Never an intellectual, he distinguished himself more as an athlete than as a scholar, graduating 61st in a class of 164. At his first post, Texas' Fort Sam Houston, Second Lieut. Eisenhower met Mamie Doud, a vivacious belle from Denver. They were married in 1916.
They soon experienced a tragedy that was to stay with them always. Four years later, at Camp Meade in Maryland, their first son, Doud Dwight ("Icky"), 3, died of scarlet fever. "This was the greatest disappointment and disaster in my life," Eisenhower wrote in 1967, "the one I have never been able to forget completely. Today when I think of it, even now as I write of it, the keenness of our loss comes back to me as fresh and as terrible as it was in that long dark day soon after Christmas, 1920." At Abilene, the bodies of father and son will lie inches apart.
After his son's death, Eisenhower returned to duty, burying his grief in work. The rewards were scarcely commensurate with the efforts. Ike's rise up the promotion ladder was painfully slow. In 1922, he was transferred to the Canal Zone—an inhospitable place in those days—where he became executive officer to Brigadier General Fox Conner, commander of the 20th Infantry Battalion. Next to Eisenhower's parents, Conner was probably the strongest influence in his life, introducing him for the first time to the serious study of military history and strategy. At West Point, Eisenhower remembered with distaste, this had been "an out-and-out memory course." Ike later wrote: "It took years before I fully realized the value of what [Conner] had led me through. In a lifetime of association with great and good men, he is the one more or less invisible figure to whom I owe an incalculable debt."