In post World War II days, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower took on legendary proportions.

Folks would go to extreme lengths just to shake the hand of the hero of the Normandy landing several years before both major political parties tried to draft him for president.

This was especially true in Ike’s hometown of Abilene, Kan.

Young Ward Lutz, whose family lived in the western Kansas town of Sharon Springs, was just 7 when a friend of his family, Brick Garrison, called them and told them that the general was coming home to Abilene.

“During the war the citizens of Abilene got together and purchased and restored Ike’s boyhood home and turned it into a museum,” said Lutz, who has lived in Athens with his wife, Saralyn, for the past 20 years. “Eisenhower was just back from Europe and he hadn’t seen his restored home. Brick, who was my dad’s fraternity brother and best friend, said to bring our family down for a chance to meet the general.”

Lutz, his sister, Helen, his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lutz, and the Garrisons and their two daughters were among the crowd waiting Ike’s arrival.

“His entourage drives up and since he’d been in Europe, they’d invented bubble gum. So Brick says, General, let me line up these kids and let them blow you some bubbles.”

The young Ward Lutz knew he was doomed.

“I couldn’t blow a bubble,” he said. “I was embarrassed, but they said I had to get in the picture, so I got behind this sign and the General got a big kick out of that.”

Lutz can be seen peering over the “Eisenhower Home” sign, surrounded by little girls blowing for all they are worth and Ike laughing at their sides.

It was a moment that Lutz would never forget, although he was barely 7. His mother, a watercolor artist, was so impressed by the meeting that she painted the Eisenhower home place and sent it to Ike after he was elected president in 1952, and sent it to the White House in 1954.

“She sent the picture and got a letter back thanking her,” said Lutz. “After he left the White House (in 1961) he sent the painting back and it now hangs in the Eisenhower Home Museum.”

Lutz’s father, Harry “Swede” Lutz, was a Republican member of the Kansas House of Representatives for eight years and had been a long-time supporter of Bob Dole. The elder Lutz was also a close friend of Congressman Wint Smith, who came for what would become a fortuitous dinner at the Lutz home when Ward was a high school senior.

“Wint was campaigning for his last term when he came to Western Kansas on a campaign swing. Dad was county chairman and brought him home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, Wint asked me where I was going to school. I told him that everybody I my family had gone to Kansas State so I thought that’s where I’d go. He said, ‘Have you ever thought of going to a military academy?’ I told him ‘no.’

“He said he had permission to appoint someone to either West Point or the Naval Academy as long as the person could pass the test and had a high enough grade-point average.”

Lutz said he was impressed by the prestige of West Point, and because his family always had been staunch supporters of one of West Point’s most famous graduates, Dwight Eisenhower, he immediately seized on the opportunity.

“And that’s how a kid from Kansas got to go to West Point,” said Lutz.

Graduating in the top 25 of his class in 1963, Lutz was to spend the next 26 years in the Army, retiring as a full colonel. His Army tenure included two tours of duty in Vietnam.

“In 1966 I was an adviser to a Vietnamese Ranger Battalion and in 67-68 I was with the First Cavalry Division,” he said.

During his first tour he was wounded during an operation, shot through the back of his neck a mere one-eighth inch from his spine. While he recuperated in the field hospital he saw no reason to inform his parents in Kansas. But then ABC News interviewed him while his neck was still bandaged.

“In was only in the hospital a week and a half, and then I went back to my unit,” he said. “I didn’t see any need to tell my folks.”

He said television reception in Western Kansas in the mid-60s was not always dependable.

“A friend called my Dad and said, ‘is Ward O.K.? I saw him in an interview of him in the hospital talking to some newsman. Well, I got a scorching letter from home.”

Lutz said his father wrote ABC and got a tape of the interview. Lutz later had it converted to VHS.

Lutz wound up in North Alabama because his last military assignment was at Redstone Arsenal. He fell in love with the area and went to work for COLSA, a defense contractor in Huntsville, and retired again in 2003.