The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [65]
I was about to depart, feeling guilty that I had come so far without getting anything much out of the experience, when I saw a sign at the visitors’ centre for tours to the Eisenhower home. I had forgotten that Ike and Mamie Eisenhower lived on a farm just outside Gettysburg. Their old home was now a national historical monument and could be toured for $2.50. Impulsively I bought a ticket and went outside where a bus was just about to depart to take half a dozen of us to the farm four or five miles away down a country lane.
Well, it was great. I can’t remember the last time I had such a good time in a Republican household. You are greeted at the door by a fragrant woman with a chrysanthemum on her bosom, who tells you a little about the house, about how much Ike and Mamie loved to sit around and watch TV and play canasta, and then gives you a leaflet describing each room and lets you wander off on your own so that you can linger or stride on as it pleases you. Each doorway was blocked off with a sheet of perspex, but you could lean against it and gaze into the interior. The house has been preserved precisely as it was when the Eisenhowers lived there. It was as if they had simply wandered off and never come back (something that either of them was quite capable of doing towards the end). The décor was quintessentially early 1960s Republican. When I was growing up we had some neighbours who were rich Republicans and this was practically a duplicate of their house. There was a big TV console in a mahogany cabinet, table-lamps made out of pieces of driftwood, a padded leather cocktail bar, French-style telephones in every room, bookshelves containing about twelve books (usually in matching sets of three) and otherwise filled with large pieces of flowery gilt-edged porcelain of the sort favoured by homosexual French aristocrats.
When the Eisenhowers bought the place in 1950, a 200-year-old farmhouse stood on the site, but it was draughty and creaked on stormy nights, so they had it torn down and replaced with the present building, which looks like a 200-year-old farmhouse. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that just so Republican? I was enchanted. Every room contained things I hadn’t seen for years – 1960s kitchen appliances, old copies of Life Magazine, boxy black and white portable TVs, metal alarm clocks. Upstairs the bedrooms were just as Ike and Mamie had left them. Mamie’s personal effects were on her bedside table – her diary, reading glasses, sleeping-pills – and I dare say that if you knelt down and looked under the bed you would find all her old gin bottles.
In Ike’s room his bathrobe and slippers were laid out and the book he had been reading on the day he died was left open on the chair beside the bed. The book was – and I ask you to remember for a moment that this was one of the most important men of this century, a man who held the world’s destiny in his hands throughout much of World War II and the Cold War, a man chosen by Columbia University to be its president, a man venerated by Republicans for two generations, a man who throughout the whole of my childhood had his finger on The Button – the book was West of the Pecos by Zane Grey.
From Gettysburg, I headed north up US 15 towards Bloomsburg, where my brother and his family had recently moved. For years they had lived in Hawaii, in a house with a swimming-pool, near balmy beaches, beneath tropical skies and whispering palms, and now, just when I had landed a trip to America and could go anywhere I wanted, they had moved to the Rust Belt. Bloomsburg, as it turned out, was actually very nice – a bit short on balmy beaches and hula girls with swaying hips, but still nice for all that.
It’s a college town, with a decidedly sleepy air. You feel at first as if you should be wearing slippers and a bathrobe. Main Street was prosperous and tidy and the surrounding streets were mostly filled with large old houses sitting on ample lawns. Here and there church spires poked out from among the many trees. It was