Ike Hopes to Visit Colorado Again When Term Ends, Koshare Scouts Told
Pueblo Star Journal
(6/17/1958)
President Eisenhower said Monday his doctors want him to avoid Colorado's altitude because he suffered a heart attack there, "But I think they're nuts."
The President made the remark to a group of about 40 Explorer Boy Scouts from La Junta. They called on him at the White House.
The scouts, known as the Koshare Indians, reminded Eisenhower they had been scheduled to put on an Indian dance for him while he was vacationing at Denver in 1955. It was there, in the fall of that year, that Eisenhower was stricken with a heart attack which hospitalized him in Denver for seven weeks.
With a smile, and an obvious reference to his physicians, Eisenhower told the scouts:
"They won't let me go there much any more."
A bit later in chatting with the scouts in the White House rose garden, the President said in further reference to Colorado:
"When I get out of this job I hope to go back there. Only because I got sick out there one year the docs say I can't go there."
"But I think they're nuts."
Maj. Gen. Howard M. Snyder, the White House physician, once told newsmen he personally was against , letting the President return to Colorado for any length of time because of the altitude. Denver, which was Eisenhower's vacation headquarters from 1952 through 1955, is a mile high and at the edge of the Rocky Mountains.
Eisenhower also frequently visited a fishing camp at Fraser, situated almost 10,000 feet high in the Rockies.
At Monday's rose garden session, Eisenhower asked the scouts several questions about their activities. And when he found they are traveling on their current trip by bus, he remarked:
"Good, that way you can see the country."
The President also urged the boys to be sure to visit George Washington's old home at Mount Vernon, Va. He added that he used to go there whenever he could, and said:
"I think the sentiment that you feel when you go there - well, you get a lift."
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