The Key West Citizen

Hal Boyle Says
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — If part-time farmer Dwight D. Eisenhower holds onto that city job in Washington for another five years or so, he may have to move out of his farmhouse.

The way people keep giving him things for the 189-acre farm, the time could come when there wouldn't be enough room left for the President, his wife and his golf clubs.

Cows, farm equipment, furniture—almost everywhere the President goes somebody gives him something. And Ike Eisenhower goes a lot of places.

Nobody has troubled to keep books but it's known that he has received at least eight head of livestock, mostly Black Angus, since word got around he was interested in building a herd.

This is in addition to, among other things:

Two pigs, one of them named Pansy.
A flock of chickens.
A chain saw.
A spice box for Mrs. Eisenhower.
An antique sofa and an equally antique fireplace mantel, both presented by the White House staff.
A 30-foot flagpole and a hand carved top in the form of an eagle.
A silver Paul Revere bowl.
And, most recently, from the American Legion Boys Nation, a 2½-horsepower cultivator.

Probably the most elaborate gift has been a complete flower garden, set up at a Washington flower show last year and later moved in toto to the Eisenhower farm on the edge of Gettysburg battlefield. Right pretty one, too. Serpentine brick wall and everything.

All sorts of people bestow gifts on the President livestock breeders, Republican clubs—even Democrats. The latest Black Angus heifer, Blue Bonnet, was presented at a Women's National Press Club affair by Democratic congressional leaders Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson of Texas.

Usually the people who make these gifts have nothing to gain from the White House—except, sometimes, a little incidental publicity. The makers of one piece of farm equipment, for instance, were overjoyed that their trade name showed up in news photographs.

Giving things to presidents is an old American custom—and one that the presidents sometimes regard wryly. "That's the way it always is," Harry S. Truman once remarked, "people wait until you have everything in the world and then they give you something."

Eisenhower likewise tossed off a good-humoredly ironical remark when he wound up a New England trip laden down with everything from two calves to a little evergreen tree—now planted on the farm—from Skowhegan, Me.

"I have accumulated so many gifts," he said, "that I am moved to remind the chairman there is one very important thing he forgot. He should have provided a truck to carry them in."

Only a fraction of the gifts made to Eisenhower are for his farm. "Official" gifts, such as art works from eminent foreign visitors, stay in the White House or go to such public places as the Smithsonian Institute. Others go to the Eisenhower museum in Abilene, Kan.

In an average year the President will receive such oddly assorted items as a 100-pound cake in the form of a Christmas tree, a made-on-a-sewing-machine tapestry portrait of himself and Mrs. Eisenhower, a gold nugget set into a tie pin, a Hopalong Cassidy good luck charm from a small girl admirer, a solid gold desk set valued at $5,000.

He may be—and, in fact, has been—sent Bibles in 78 languages, a gold-plated horseshoe, a guaranteed original shillelagh, a section of the original rail used in completing the first cross-country railroad, and the collected speeches of a man he heard a lot about in 1952, Adlai E. Stevenson.