The Complete Vacationer

At 8 o'clock one morning last week, Dwight Eisenhower strode out of his mother-in-law's Denver home and headed for his Cadillac. As they do almost every morning, a group of neighborhood children swarmed around him, whooping and jumping. Ike stopped to exchange good mornings with them, but his eyes kept straying toward the car. "Goodbye," he said finally. "I gotta go fishing."

Trailed by a carload of Secret Service men, the black Cadillac turned westward, picked up Route 40 outside Denver and headed into the Rockies. Twisting and climbing to a top of 11,314 ft. in Berthoud Pass on the Continental Divide, Route 40 west of Denver is a spectacular highway. It was a ride Ike thoroughly enjoyed, and he was making it in pleasant company. With him were his mother-in-law, Mrs. John Doud, and a pair of old friends, General Lucius Clay and Washington Contractor Charles Tompkins. Mamie, who has been feeling under the weather and has appeared in public only twice since her arrival in Denver, stayed home.

The Western Touch. From Berthoud Pass, the Cadillac rolled down the western slope of the Rockies into a long, grassy valley (alt.: 8,561 ft.), at one end of which lies the town of Fraser (pop. 350). Fraser, whose dusty streets and log buildings look like sets for a horse opera, was a little subdued. There had been a fatal shooting in Bud's Bar a few days before, and most everyone was getting ready to go to the funeral.

The presidential party turned off Route 40 into a side road a mile outside town, and pushed on down the lane to the 1,900-acre ranch of Danish-born Aksel Nielsen, an Eisenhower family friend and financial adviser since the early '30s. Making an immediate break for his cabin, Ike shucked his tweed jacket and flannel trousers for old slacks and a fishing jacket. His Secret Service guards underwent an even more dramatic sartorial transformation. Stocking up on blue jeans and flannel shirts in local stores, they also bought wide, tooled-leather belts and, as a final Western touch, hung their Chicago-type shoulder holsters on their hips cowboy-style.

Those Distant Hills. Despite his hopeful announcement to the neighborhood kids in Denver, Ike was not up to much trout fishing. At a highly informal press conference, he gave nine-year-old Philip

Warden, son of a Chicago Tribune reporter, a painstaking lesson in the proper use of a spinning rod, and late in the week he fished St. Louis Creek for an hour and a half, catching a twelve-inch rainbow on his first cast. But fly-casting was not what the doctor ordered for the President's aching right elbow, which he had bone-bruised in Washington and aggravated by his daily golf games in Denver.

Short-changed on his fishing, Ike consoled himself with another favorite pastime--cooking. He took full responsibility for the party's meals, noisily clanged the big outdoor dinner bell whenever chow was on. (One day's menu: breakfast--flapjacks and sausage; lunch--potato salad and Ike's special vegetable soup, which takes two days to make; dinner--trout and roasting ears.) In between meals, he loafed around, sometimes worked on a new oil painting--a mountain landscape.

A reporter asked Ike when he planned to leave Denver for Washington. Like any other victim of vacation euphoria, Ike was reluctant to face up to his approaching return to the workaday world. "Well," said he, "I have to be in Massachusetts [for a speech in Springfield] on Sept. 21 . . . I'm not going back until I have to."

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