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In Abilene, Ike made his first money selling homegrown vegetables (tomatoes were 5¢ a pound). And when he got his first job pulling ice, loading wagons and firing furnaces in the Belle Springs Creamery (working his way up to night foreman), his friends made their headquarters there, drawn to Ike by qualities they still describe as "horse sense" and "keen sense of humor." In 1910, suddenly conscious of his own aimlessness, Ike heeded a friend's advice and took an examination for Annapolis and West Point. (The Navy lost a future admiral because he was eight months too old for the Naval Academy.) In June 1911 he reported for duty, "Eisenhower from Kansas, sir," thus consigning his frontier exuberance to the stern mold of discipline of the Point.
There, so said one of his instructors, Ike was "a not uncommon type." He moved through four years from 57th out of 212 to 61st out of 164, accumulating demerits for such offenses as "using profanity at supper" and "violation of orders with reference to dancing," e.g., doing the turkey trot. On the football field, Ike became a star halfback who once downed Jim Thorpe ("We really stopped him-hard") and might have made All-America had he not wrenched his knee.
On Graduation Day, June 12, 1915, Ike was no less inspired than any of his comrades as he sang the West Point hymn:
The Corps! Bareheaded salute it, With eyes up, thanking our God . . .
When Ike moved on to his first infantry posts and training schools during World War I he began to pick up a reputation as a disciplinarian. Around the age when he courted and married Mamie Geneva Doud, a slender girl with violet eyes (the Douds' maid was provoked one day when "Mr. I-Something" kept calling every 15 minutes), he was finding a new confidence that led him on to command, at 27, the tank training center at Camp Colt, Pa. But soon after Christmas 1920 their first child, Doud Dwight ("Icky"), died of scarlet fever when he was only three. Ike stumbled out of the hospital room blind with grief, and Mamie, close to a breakdown, lost something of her vitality which she did not recover for years.
Tne Siege or Fort Leavenwortn
With a new zeal that bordered on perfectionism, Ike threw himself anew into soldiering. Serving nearly three years (1922-24) in Panama with a little-known man of fire, Brigadier General Fox Conner, Ike did such a stringent job as executive officer that many of his juniors have neither forgotten nor forgiven. In his spare hours he buried himself in extracurricular study of maps, charts and treatises of the great historical campaigns prescribed by his mentor Fox Conner. Night after night (Mamie went home to Denver to have another child-son John) the intense young major and the spark-eyed general debated and deliberated about command in wartime. "When we go into [the next] war," said Conner to Ike, "it will be in company with allies. Leaders will have to learn how to overcome nationalistic considerations. Systems of single command will have to be worked out."