41: A Portrait of My Father

by George W. Bush

  The year in California was not easy for my father, either. He was on the road almost all the time. He estimated that he put about a thousand miles a week on his car. He was not a fast-talking pitchman, but he developed a sales approach that proved effective. He would forge personal relationships, just like he had in school and the military. Over time, he offered his customers something more than drill bits: He earned their trust.

  In the spring of 1950, my father received the news that Dresser had transferred him back to West Texas. He could live in either Odessa or Midland. As a twenty-five-year-old father of two, he wanted to settle down. He and Mother chose Midland, which was then home to 215 oil companies and about 21,000 people. We would call Midland home for the next nine years. It is the first city that I remember living in, and it will always be the place I consider my hometown.

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  MIDLAND, TEXAS, took its name from its location halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso on the Texas and Pacific Railway. Like Odessa, Midland gave you the feeling of life on the edge. I remember my father going into the backyard of our house in Midland and confronting a huge tarantula on the porch with a broom. The hairy critter took a big hop, and it took all of Dad’s skill as a first baseman to keep it from slipping past him into the house.

  While Midland and Odessa had similar topography, they had different demographics. Most people in Odessa worked in the oil fields; most people in Midland worked in offices. Like Odessa, Midland was a boomtown, and it was hard to find housing. We lived briefly at a hotel and then moved into a new 847-square-foot house on the outskirts of town. The neighborhood was called Easter Egg Row, because the developer had chosen vibrant paint colors to help residents tell the houses apart. Our Easter egg at 405 East Maple was bright blue.

  Midland in the 1950s featured an equally colorful cast of characters. There were people who were broke one day and rich the next. There were old ranch families who had lived on the land before the oil strikes. There were Texans from other parts of the state, especially graduates of the University of Texas and Texas A&M. My father was part of a small contingent of Ivy League graduates who had turned down opportunities on the East Coast so that they could scratch an entrepreneurial itch in the oil patch. There were professionals who provided support services for the oil industry: doctors, bankers, lawyers, teachers, and homebuilders, including a kind man named Harold Welch whose only daughter, Laura Lane, I would marry years later at Midland’s First United Methodist Church.

  Midland was a competitive place. Oilmen hustled to beat their neighbors to precious leases and royalties. The uncertainty of the business had a leveling effect. Anyone could hit it big; anyone could drill a dry hole. For all the hard work and science that went into the business, every oilman would have traded it all for good luck. Yet Midland also fostered a sense of community. People banded together in the harsh and isolated environment.

  Life in West Texas was simple, like the names of the towns along its dusty roads: Big Lake (barely a lake), Big Spring (just a little water), and Notrees (not even one). My pals and I spent our days outside, playing baseball or football. On Fridays in the fall, people packed into Midland Memorial Stadium to watch the Midland High Bulldogs. One of my favorite Midland players was Wahoo McDaniel, who later starred for the Oklahoma Sooners, the New York Jets, and the professional wrestling circuit. On Sunday mornings, most people went to church. Looking back now, I can see why my parents liked Midland so much. The mixture of competition and community reflected my father’s upbringing. He had taken the values that he learned at home and plopped them down in the middle of the Texas desert.

  A few months after we arrived in Midland, my father received an unexpected letter from Tom McCance, an executive at Brown Brothers Harriman. The firm had renewed its offer. Dad’s knowledge of the Texas oil business would be valuable on Wall Street. The offer could have provided a perfect escape hatch. My parents could say that they had enjoyed living in West Texas, had learned something new, and were ready to return to their roots. That’s not what they did. My father thanked Mr. McCance for his generosity, but he declined. He had staked his claim in West Texas.

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  SOME OF MY warmest memories of our Midland years are of the time I spent with Dad. He was busy building his business and traveling. He was active in the community, teaching Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church and leading fund-raising drives for the United Way and the YMCA. Yet I never felt his absence. He always made it a point to spend as much time with his children as he could. As my brother Jeb put it, George H.W. Bush invented “quality time.” He would come home from work, pull out a mitt, and toss the baseball with me in the yard of our home at 1412 West Ohio Avenue, where we moved in 1951. That house is now the George W. Bush Childhood Home. (I’ve always wondered why the museum isn’t called the George H.W. Bush Home Where George W. Bush Lived as a Child.)

  On some weekends, Dad and his friends would take me dove hunting—a ritual for many in West Texas. I carried the .410 that he gave me for Christmas after he was convinced that I had mastered gun safety lessons. We would congregate around a water hole in the middle of the dry land, cooking burgers on a portable grill and waiting till sundown in hopes that the doves would fly in to quench their thirst. He also took me out to the oil fields, where I saw the rigs and pumping units up close. Those trips helped spark an interest in the oil business that I would later pursue by becoming an independent oilman in the mid-1970s.

  Our house was a hub of activity. One day he brought home an engineer from Yugoslavia whom he’d met through his oil business. He stayed with us for a week, and my father showed him around the West Texas oil fields. During one of our summers in Midland, my father’s younger brother Bucky, fourteen years his junior, and Bucky’s college pal Fay Vincent—who later became Commissioner of Major League Baseball—came to live with us while they roughnecked on the oil rigs.

  My parents were constantly inviting their neighbors over for backyard barbecues or cocktails. I remember one Christmas when I received a horn as a gift. I blew the horn a few too many times, and my father took it away from me and broke it. A few days later, one of our neighbors acquired the same model horn, called the house until my father answered, and then blew the horn into the phone. Another time, my father played a prank on his good friend and fellow Yale graduate Earle Craig, who was known to bite into the pearl onion that floated in his martini with a grand flourish. One night Dad mixed the drink with a rubber onion. When the Earle of Craig (as he was known to some) dramatically bit into the faux onion, the circle of friends (likely a few martinis deep) had a good chuckle. Earle knew it was all done in fun. Life in Midland was friendly and carefree.

  I don’t remember a lot about our conversations from those years, but it’s safe to say that we spent most of our time talking about school or sports. My father was not the kind of man who gave us lectures on politics or philosophy. He believed in leading by example. If I had a question, he was there to answer it. He always gave good advice.

  When I was about six years old, I went with some friends to a general store in Midland. I saw a couple of plastic toy soldiers in a jar on the shelf. I decided to put them in my pocket and walk out of the store without paying. Later that day, my father noticed me playing with the pilfered soldiers in the front yard.

  “Hi, son,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Playing soldiers,” I said.

  “Where did you get those?” he asked.

  I hesitated. He asked the question again.

  After a little soul-searching, I confessed. “I took them from the store,” I said.

  “Come with me,” he said. We got in his car and drove to the store. He instructed me to walk into the store alone, return the soldiers, and apologize to the manager for stealing them. I did what he asked and felt genuine remorse. When I got back in the car, Dad didn’t say another word. He knew he had made his point.

  Most of the day-to-day work of raising my siblings and me fell to Mothe
r. She drove me to baseball practice and kept score at my games, just like she had for Dad. She was the den mother who took our Cub Scout troop to Carlsbad Caverns and the Monahans Sandhills. Mother always welcomed my friends for lunch or dinner between marathon sessions of baseball or football. She administered the discipline when necessary. Unlike my father, she did not believe in subtlety. One of her favorite tactics when I was young was to wash my mouth out with soap when I said or did something “smutty,” like the time she caught me urinating in the hedges in our yard. For the most part, though, she gave me the slack to have fun and be a free-spirited boy.

  My parents’ approach to raising their children reflected the attitude of their generation. My father spent more time with us than his father had with him, but dads in those days were not as involved as they are today. Most weren’t as emotional, either. In our early years, my father was not a hugger, nor did he say “I love you.” But he didn’t need to. We always knew that he loved us unconditionally.

  We knew that my parents loved each other, too. In the sixty-nine years that I have observed my parents’ marriage, I have never once heard them exchange harsh words. Sure, there’s a little needling here and a good-natured disagreement there. But I have never sensed anger or frustration. Their solid, loving bond was a source of stability for me when I was a child—and a source of inspiration for me when I married Laura.

  At the time, my siblings and I didn’t fully appreciate how lucky we were. Others did. At Laura’s fiftieth high school reunion, my boyhood friend Mike Proctor pulled me aside for a chat. Mike had lived across the street from us when we were growing up. We were the same age and in the same grade. Mike spent a lot of time at our house. We rode bikes together, played football together, and were part of the same Cub Scout troop. Unbeknownst to me, Mike’s family had some serious problems at home.

  At the reunion, Mike said, “There’s something that I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time. I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Sure thing, Mike,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Tell your mother that I said thanks.”

  He continued, “Back then, you probably didn’t realize how dysfunctional my family was. Because of your mother’s kindness, I saw how a real family works.”

  The next day I called my mother and told her what Mike had said. I could tell that the expression of gratitude touched her heart.

  “Tell Mike that I send my love,” she said.

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  WHEN MY SISTER Robin was three years old, Mother noticed that she didn’t have much energy. Mother would ask what she wanted to do, and Robin would say that she wanted to sit on the bed or lie on the grass. That didn’t sound normal for a three-year-old, so she took Robin to our family doctor in Midland, Dorothy Wyvell.

  Dr. Wyvell ran some tests. Mother worried that the results were bad when the doctor called and told her to come back to the office with Dad. Every parent can imagine the agony of the conversation that transpired. Dr. Wyvell told them that Robin’s blood test had revealed that she was suffering from leukemia. Not only did she have the disease, but her white blood cell count was off the charts—the highest that Dr. Wyvell had ever seen.

  My parents had expected that something was wrong, but they had not imagined this. Finally my father asked, “What’s the next step? How do we treat her?”

  As she began to answer, Dr. Wyvell’s eyes filled with tears. She was not only my parents’ doctor; in close-knit Midland, she was also a friend. “There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “She probably has only a few weeks left. You should take her home and make her as comfortable as you can.”

  My father could not accept that there was no hope to save his little girl. He went home and called his mother’s brother Dr. John Walker at Memorial Sloan Kettering, the best cancer hospital in New York. His uncle told him about some recent advances in treatment that might help Robin. He also confirmed what Dr. Wyvell had told them: Childhood leukemia had no cure.

  My parents took Robin to New York. They knew the odds were long, but they refused to give up on their daughter. As Dr. Walker told my father, “You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you don’t try to treat her.”

  My parents never really told me what was going on. They just said that Robin was sick and that she and Mother were going to New York to see Uncle John so that she could get better. My father shuttled back and forth between New York and Midland. Sometimes Robin’s cancer would go into remission, and she would come home for a few weeks. Then she would suffer a setback, and they would fly back to New York. When my parents were gone, they left me and my brother Jeb, who had been born a few months earlier, with Midland friends and neighbors. They became our surrogate parents without a second thought.

  My parents approached Robin’s illness differently. My father was a whirlwind of activity. When he was in New York, he was meeting with doctors, checking test results, and asking about new treatments. In Texas, he raced out of the house early in the morning, stopped at church to pray for Robin, and then threw himself into his work. Looking back on it, I can see that the frantic activity was his way of coping with the helplessness he felt. George Bush, the Navy pilot who swam to the life raft and paddled away from death, must have found it unbearable not to be able to do anything to help the girl he loved.

  In contrast to my father’s constant motion, Mother spent almost every waking hour at Robin’s bedside, playing with her, reading to her, and trying to keep her spirits high. She stayed with the Walkers in New York, and family members would drop by the hospital to offer support. My great-grandfather, gruff old G.H. Walker—who at age seventy-eight was in the final year of his own life—spent hours teaching Robin how to play gin rummy. She called the game “Gin Poppy,” the nickname the family used for my dad.

  Robin’s treatment was painful. The chemotherapy and blood transfusions drained her strength. Mother imposed a rule: No crying in front of Robin. My father had a hard time abiding. Mother sat stoically by her side, comforting her daughter as she suffered and slipped away. As the biographer Richard Ben Cramer described my mother’s character in those days, “It was beyond strength—it was heroic, an act of will and love.”

  One day when Robin was resting, Mother went to visit Dad’s parents in Greenwich, Connecticut. My grandfather Prescott Bush, who had just been elected to the U.S. Senate, took her for a long walk through Greenwich’s Putnam Cemetery. There he showed her the burial plot that he and my grandmother had selected as their final resting place. There was room for an extra headstone. That was his gentle way of telling my mother that they would take care of Robin when the time came, and that he wanted his granddaughter to be at his side. (Decades later, my parents moved Robin’s grave to the plot where their graves will be at Dad’s presidential library in College Station, Texas.)

  The end arrived on October 11, 1953. Robin died peacefully after battling for seven months. In one of her final moments with my father, Robin looked up at him with her beautiful blue eyes and said, “I love you more than tongue can tell.” Dad would repeat those words for the rest of his life.

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  I HAVE A vivid memory of the day my parents told me that Robin had died. One of my teachers at Sam Houston Elementary School had asked me and one of my classmates to carry a record player to another wing of the school. As we walked outside, I saw my parents pull up in their pea-green Oldsmobile. I had no idea why they had shown up at school in the middle of the day. As I sprinted over to the car, I thought that I saw Robin’s blond curls in the backseat. I was so excited that she had come home. But when I got to the car, she wasn’t there. Mother hugged me tight and told me that she was gone. On the drive home, I saw my parents cry for the first time.

  After Robin’s death, my parents switched roles. My father became the strong one, dealing with the funeral planning and logistics. One of their first decisions was to donate Robin’s body to Memorial Sloan Kettering. The doctors told them that they could learn from studying her disease, and my pa
rents hoped that Robin’s death might lead to some benefit for other suffering children. Childhood cancer research became a lifelong cause for them. Today the childhood cancer clinic at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center bears Robin’s name.

  After seven months of staying strong, Mother cratered. She suffered bouts of depression that would plague her periodically. At twenty-eight years old, her dark brown hair started to turn white.

  While I was too young to fully understand Robin’s death, I sensed that Mother was hurting. She later told me that I stopped playing with my friends so that I could stay inside and try to cheer her up with jokes. My father found ways to lift her spirits, too. He planned visits with friends and gently helped my mother to move forward with life. Instead of focusing on Robin’s loss, they gave thanks for the years they were able to spend with her.

  Robin’s death did not drive my parents apart, unlike many couples who find their relationships broken after losing a child. In their case, the shared pain brought them together, and their marriage emerged stronger. When they needed each other most, they were both willing to go three-quarters of the way.

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  MY FATHER NEVER talked much about losing Robin. Back in that era, people didn’t really discuss topics like that. A few years after Robin died, Dad wrote his mother a touching letter about how lonely he felt. “We need some soft blond hair to offset those crew cuts. We need a doll house to stand firm against our forts and rackets and thousand baseball cards,” he wrote. “We need a girl.” His prayer was answered when my sister Dorothy was born in 1959. When he first saw her in the hospital, he pressed his face against the nursery glass and sobbed.

  During the 1980 presidential campaign, a journalist asked my father whether he had ever faced any “personal difficulty.” The subtext of the question was whether someone with a life as comfortable as George Bush’s could relate to ordinary people.