These photographs were accumulated over the lifetime of Earl D. Eisenhower, a younger brother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. They include snapshots; studio portraits and group portraits of Eisenhower family members; vacation photos; press photos; photographs of the Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home in Abilene, Kansas; and commercially produced souvenir photographs. Photographic and non-photographic image postcards are also included, as well as small silhouette artworks, photomechanically reproduced images, and an engraving.
Subjects covered include presidential and other political campaigns and candidates; presidents and former presidents, mostly Dwight D. Eisenhower, his family, hobbies, and childhood home; Vice-Presidents including Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson; and vacation photos including many from fishing trips, automobile and rail travel, and visits to San Francisco, California, and Ocean City and Atlantic City, New Jersey, among other places.
Eisenhower family members appearing in this series include Earl’s wife, Kathryn, their son, Earl, Jr., and their daughter, Kaye, as well as Earl’s parents, David and Ida Eisenhower, his brothers, Arthur, Edgar, Dwight, Roy, and Milton; Eisenhower wives including Mamie Eisenhower, Louise Alexander Eisenhower, Lucille “Lucy” Eisenhower, and Edna Eisenhower, and others including John S. D. Eisenhower, Abraham L. Eisenhower, Ira A. Eisenhower, Chris and Amanda Musser, and John Sheldon and Elivera Doud.
Political personalities include Kansas Senator Harry Darby, Kansas Governor John Anderson, Illinois Senator Everett Dirkson, Illinois Governor William Stratton, and J. Edgar Hoover.
A small set of photographs features Lawrence A. Floro, Sr., a friend of Earl, and his surroundings in Japan during the U.S. Army occupation after World War II. Another set is of commercially reproduced images of destruction in Yokohama, Japan after the catastrophic Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.
There are a few snapshots taken at the University of Washington, Seattle, from which Earl earned his electrical engineering degree in 1923. There is a larger set taken when Kaye, Earl’s daughter, reigned as Apple Blossom Queen at the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival in Winchester, VA, in 1953.
The series also includes the contents of a photograph album of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s installation as President of Columbia University in 1948, and an album of the dedication of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in 1962. There are also a number of views of Abilene, Kansas, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
