TEXT B Dwight attended Lincoln
elementary school, directly across the street from his home. The curriculum
emphasized rote learning. "The darkness of the classrooms on a winter day and
the monotonous hum of recitation," Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs ...” are my
sole surviving memories. I was either a lackluster student or involved in a
lackluster program." He came to life for the spelling bee and arithmetic.
Spelling contests aroused in him his competitive drive and his hatred of
careless mistakes —he became a self-confessed martinet on the subject of
orthography. Arithmetic appealed to him because it was logical and
straightforward —an answer was either right or wrong. The
subject that really excited him, however, was one that he pursued on his own,
military history. He became so engrossed in it, in fact, that he neglected his
chores and his schoolwork. His first hero was Hannibal. Then he became a student
of the American Revolution, and George Washington excited his admiration,
He talked history to his classmates so frequently that his senior yearbook
predicted that he would become a professor of history at Yale (it also predicted
that Edgar would become a two-term President of the United States).
During Dwight’s high school years his interests were, in order of
importance, sports, work, studies, and girls. He was shy around the girls and in
any case wanted to impress his male classmates as a regular fellow, just one of
the gang. Paying too much attention to the girls was considered somewhat sissy.
He was careless of his dress, his hair was usually uncombed, and he was a
terrible dancer on the few occasions he tried the dance floor.
Studies came easily to him and he made good to excellent grades without
exerting himself. He got all Bs in his freshman year, when. the subjects were
English, physical geography, algebra, and German. He did a bit better the next
year, and as a junior and senior he was an A or A-plus student in English,
history, and geometry. His sole B was in Latin. Sports,
especially football and baseball, were the center of his life. He expended far
more energy on sports than he put into his studies, lie was a good, but not
outstanding, athlete. He was well coordinated, but slow of foot. He weighed only
150 pounds. His chief asset was his will to win. He loved the challenge of the
games themselves, enjoyed the competition with older and bigger boys, bubbled
over with pleasure at hitting a single to drive in the winning run or at
throwing the other team’s star halfback for a loss. It was in
sports that he first discovered his talents as a leader and an organizer. As a
boy, he provided the energy and leadership that led to a Saturday-afternoon game
of football or baseball. Later, he was the one who organized the Abilene High
School Athletic Association, which operated independently of the school system.
Little Ike wrote to schools in the area to make up a schedule, and solved the
problem of transportation by hustling his team onto freight trains for a free
ride from Abilene to the site of the contest. He also organized
camping and hunting trips. He got the boys together, collected the money, hired
the livery rig to take them to the camping site, bought the food, and did the
cooking. The central importance of sports, hunting, and fishing
to Little Ike cannot be overemphasized. He literally could not imagine life
without them. Dwight was shy around the girls because he was ______.
A.a poor dancer and was afraid of being laughed at B.engrossed in sports and was not interested in girls C.afraid to be viewed as abnormal by his classmates D.self-conscious about his poor dress and untidy hair