I'm a long way from Ike Turner.

I had a career. His name was Ike.

The Russians feared Ike. They didn't fear me.

Ike runs the country, and I turn the pork chops.

I was a sort of son to Ike, and it was the other way round with Kennedy.

What happened to the America we grew up in, the America of Truman, Ike, JFK and Reagan?

As kids, we traded 'I like Ike' and 'All the way with Adlai' buttons in elementary school.

Never, never, never should the pocket square be of the same pattern as your ties. You are not 'Reverend Ike.'

It must have been the fall of 1952 when my father returned to London sporting a neck tie emblazoned with the words 'I Like Ike.'

I never put a lot of praise on myself because of my relationship with Ike. I was just happy when I started to like myself - when I divorced and took control of my life.

Today, one year after their divorce, Pamela and Tommy Lee announced they're getting back together. You know what that means? There's still hope for Ike and Tina Turner.

My very beloved and deceased third-grade teacher, Cliff Kehod, was the one that I really remember calling me Ike a lot. It just stuck. It is a dog's name, but I love dogs.

I did meet 'The Everly Brothers' once, and we talked for awhile. Then we figured out we were first cousins! My late mother was the sister of Don and Phil's father, Ike Everly.

After I moved with my mother to St. Louis, my older sister and I went to see Ike Turner, who was the hottest then. His music charged me. I was never attracted to him, but I wanted to sing with his band.

My favorite movie out of the old movies was 'Escape to Witch Mountain.' We were working with horses and bears, and when you have a great friend like Ike and a great director... it was a great experience.

My mother, Betty, was an entertainer - she opened up for James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner - and I had an uncle who would work as a chef in a restaurant, 6-foot-3 or 6-foot-4. I was young, so he could have been shorter, but in my mind, that's how tall he was.

Ike's problem was that he was a musician that always wanted to be a star; and was a star, locally, but never internationally... so he then changed the name to Ike and changed my name to Tina because if I ran away, Tina was his name. It was patented as you call it.

Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan each suffered through his second four years. FDR was checkmated by Congress and the Supreme Court. Ike was dogged by Sputnik and reckless charges that the United States suffered from a Missile Gap. Reagan had to wend his way through Iran-Contra.

One Christmas, Dennis Dermody, the movie critic of 'Paper,' gave me 'Rock Hudson: A Gathering of Friends,' the master invitation list from Rock Hudson's memorial service. It's so great. Everyone's in it, with personal addresses all bound into a book. Someone else once gave me Ike Turner's will. I get great stuff.

During his last 18 months in office, Eisenhower flew to Asia, Europe, and Latin America and deployed his war hero's popularity to seek new friends for America while trying to improve relations with Moscow. By the time Ike left office, most Americans had forgotten their anger over losing the space race to the Soviets.

My brother and I were still in high school playing football, and we were both middleweight, and we couldn't find anyone else to fight in our weight class, so we'd fight each other. I was a stand-up fighter, and Ike was a weaving type of fighter, and we fought that way out there at Cy Young's farm, and we put on quite a show.

At a book festival in Fort Lauderdale, I met David Eisenhower, Ike's grandson, who was promoting his book 'Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower,' in which he describes attending the Yankees' 154th game in 1961. The whole family had been following Mantle and Maris chase Babe Ruth's home run record across the country.

Share This Page