Lady Bird and Lyndon

by Betty Boyd Caroli

  3

  GETTING OUT OF KARNACK, WITH THE RIGHT MAN

  ON A bright Sunday morning in 1930, seventeen-year-old Claudia Taylor, now “Bird” to her friends, was back in Karnack at the Brick House. It was April, spring vacation time at St. Mary’s College in Dallas, and she was spending a few days with her father. Since that meant having as little as possible to do with her stepmother, she set off on one of her favorite walks, looking for any magnolia trees that were already flowering.

  Bird had a lot more on her mind than magnolias that day. Her time at St. Mary’s would end in a month, and she still had no firm plans for what to do next. Her well-heeled classmates, who had traveled far more than she and enjoyed the kind of adventures she suspected her mother had yearned for but never found in Karnack, had widened her eyes, and she liked to think she was making some progress toward a life as exciting as theirs. With a virtually unlimited checking account and a little black Studebaker her father had given her, she liked to treat her classmate Emma Boehringer, whose widowed mother could provide her children with few luxuries, to trips to Shreveport where the two young women would eat in a fancy restaurant and then see whatever was playing at the Strand, a theater so ornate they imagined it must have been imported from Europe. One weekend, Bird gathered up a couple of Karnack friends and struck out for New Orleans, 350 miles away. Discussing that trip much later in her life, she could not remember if they had a chaperone, but brushed off the question with: “Well, let’s hope we did.”

  But her permanent address was still “Karnack, Texas,” a town so small people laughed at the pretension implied in naming it after a monumental temple complex in Egypt and then changing the spelling from Karnak. If the two years away from home had clarified anything for Bird—it was just how wide a chasm separated Karnack from the woman she wanted to become.

  As much as she adored her father, she already knew that she could not live his life, or anything remotely like it, talking only about weather and crops. She had long ago dismissed Aunt Effie as a role model. Without a life of her own, Effie had had to attach herself to one or another kin, like a clingy, injured dog, just to survive. Neither of Bird’s two humdrum brothers presented an example worth following. Tommy was becoming paunchy like his father, and both brothers were running modest businesses. No, there had to be something beyond what any of them were doing, perhaps that place her mother was looking for on those trips to Chicago, or the one she seemed to dream about while riding around Karnack in a chauffeured car, a veil covering her face.

  The popular magazines that Bird read offered examples of women who had made careers for themselves and utterly altered their lives—journalists like Bess Furman, who covered Washington for the Associated Press, and Amelia Earhart, who gained headlines as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Even if Bird could not imagine matching their feats, she felt confident she could do something similar, on a smaller scale. But she wanted more than a career—she wanted to marry and have children. So she had to find the right man, one who took her breath away and was going places, but one who would also let her deploy her ambition. How could she manage all that?

  It was on that Sunday morning walk that Bird came face-to-face with the answer. Eugenia “Gene” Boehringer, Emma’s older sister, was also visiting her hometown, and like Bird, had gone out exploring the countryside. Although only six years older than Bird, her confident bearing and take-charge manner made her seem at least a generation wiser and more experienced. As Gene started updating Bird on all that had happened since the two last met, it became clear that Gene was living exactly the life that Bird had dreamed of.

  Gene had made the brave decision to leave Karnack and go to college in Austin, the state capital, three hundred miles away. It wasn’t easy. Knowing her mother could not possibly pay her way, Gene, the oldest of six children, got a job and worked while also studying at the University of Texas. After she graduated, she didn’t take the easy route, retreating back to Harrison County where she knew people and could live near her mother. She remained in Austin.

  But the eye-popping part of Gene’s story was the job she now held—as a secretary at the Railroad Commission. In spite of its bland-sounding name, the Railroad Commission regulated far more than trains—it controlled the gas and oil industry as well as the pipelines that delivered those vital commodities all across the immense Lone Star State. Working there, as a secretary, Gene met the most important businessmen and leading lawmakers, and she regaled a wide-eyed Bird with stories of how she regularly chatted up big-time investors about deals they were making, and how she ferreted out details of pending legislation from the legislators themselves. Here was a flesh-and-blood example of those career women Bird had read about, but unlike them, Gene had grown up just down the road from Bird, and she, too, planned to find a husband and combine marriage with a career.

  Before the two women parted that spring day, Bird had accepted an invitation to come visit Austin. Rather than drive or take the train, she flew, something few of her friends would risk in 1930. The three-hundred-mile flight got bumpy and made her sick, but as soon as she landed, any reservations about why she had come to Austin vanished. She fell in love with the city at first sight.

  Bluebonnets, in bloom from March to May, swathed the hillsides in lush color. Around the state capitol, its dome an imitation of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., stood a mixture of buildings that looked nothing like Harrison County. The Driskill Hotel, a few blocks south of the capitol, dwarfed anything Bird had seen in Shreveport, and its huge chandeliered lobby and uniformed doormen suggested an opulent world she had explored only in books. A fifteen-minute walk northeast of the capitol took her to the University of Texas campus, which spread across several blocks, its vine-covered fraternity houses flanking rambling Victorian buildings where classes met. To the west lay a motley collection of homes, some close to the ground but others three stories high, surrounded by well-tended lawns. Beyond them, across the Colorado River, stretched an unsettled hilly expanse, with leafy trees, flowery patches, and trails for hiking and horseback riding. It was a world away from Karnack and Bird immediately decided this was a “magic place” for her.

  The following September, she drove down to Dallas in her little black Studebaker, hoping that the experience would be all that Gene had made it out to be. Though she was one of only a few students who did not have to worry about money (this was less than a year after the stock market crash of 1929) she did not rent an apartment for herself but shared a room in a very modest house at 301 West 21st Street. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Felix Matthews, provided breakfast for their half dozen paying guests but sent them for other meals to cheap eateries in the neighborhood. Bird, who had grown up with hired cooks preparing food just the way she liked it, now ate from set menus in greasy spoons. The biggest impression she left on her housemates was how disciplined she was. She stuck to healthful dishes and ate lots of vegetables, as she had been taught to do on her excursions to the Kellogg Sanitarium with Aunt Effie. Bird’s housemates, thrilled to be liberated from parental supervision, liked to indulge in rich desserts with whipped cream.

  The highlight on weekends was a visit to Gene Boehringer’s quarters at the Austin Women’s Club. Bird counted on Gene to introduce her to the most promising of the state capital’s young set, especially handsome bachelors who had already made names for themselves. Dawson Duncan, a reporter, was one of her first blind dates, and he struck her as exactly what “a romantic newspaperman” should look like. When he dropped her, after a single date, she took it stoically, realizing how naive and unworldly she must have seemed to him. But she did not forget him, and decades later when their paths crossed again she would be the one in a position to ignore him.

  In Austin, Bird was a little T.J., sleuthing out opportunities at UT and sizing up her options. She wasn’t going to rob a train, but she would look for a ladylike equivalent to get her where she wanted to go. That meant taking the right courses and meeting the right man.

/>   Only about one third of the 5,400 students lived in fraternities and sororities, but Bird quickly decided she wanted to be part of that third. They were the big names on campus, the men and women who got their photos in the school paper; they captained the athletic teams and ran the student government. But in a rare show of parental will, T.J., probably influenced by stories of fraternities’ hazing rites, vetoed his daughter’s plans to join a sorority, and she remained at the Matthewses’ rooming house her entire time at UT.

  Still, there was no stopping T.J.’s little Bird from tasting all that life had to offer, including double dates with her roommate, Cecille Harrison, on two-hundred-mile trips across the Mexican border, where they partied until dawn. Spring was a particularly exciting time. Bird remembered falling in love every April, when she and Cecille went with their current boyfriends to Dillingham’s Pasture, just north of Austin, for what they called “Navajo parties.” The “Navajo” came from the blankets they spread out on the grass, with an alarm clock alongside, so they would be sure to be back in their room before the Matthewses’ 11 p.m. curfew.

  Bird may have fallen in love every spring, but any man she dated more than once had to have something special. From student body president Chilton O’Brien to politically motivated Victor McCrea and personable premed Jack Mayfield, they were all very ambitious. While still students, they managed to distinguish themselves as go-getters, a cut above their less achieving classmates. Gene Boehringer’s brother, on the other hand, got dropped immediately when Bird decided he would “never amount to anything.”

  While sizing up young marriage material, Bird also wanted to see what older, more experienced men could teach her. When Gene introduced her to well-heeled business types and retired lawmen, some of them old enough to be her father, she accepted their invitations for afternoon horseback rides in the hills and late night suppers. Why would a UT coed do that, except to find something that was missing on campus? The older men could pay for Prohibition-outlawed cocktails, and Bird discovered her very favorite was a Tom Collins, with extra lime. She left no evidence that she became sexually involved with any of these older men, but she admitted to a curiosity about what they knew. At the home of a retired Texas Ranger, she took to reading his large collection of fully illustrated, sexually graphic books, until he stopped her, saying, “That one’s not for you.”

  In UT classrooms, Bird played it safe. With a major in history, she knew she would have trouble finding a job. So she also took the education classes required of teachers, and to maximize her chance of employment she signed up for typing and shorthand. But she didn’t stop there. Although slated to pick up a bachelor’s degree in May 1933, she stayed another year to take more journalism classes. She had already written a few columns for the university’s Daily Texan, and now, rather than becoming a teacher or secretary, she envisioned herself as a reporter somewhere beyond the forty-eight states, maybe Alaska or Hawaii.

  Not much escaped Bird at UT, and later descriptions of her as shy and timid just don’t fit. Active enough in college sports to be elected to the board of the Women’s Athletic Association, she appeared in the group’s yearbook photo in a fetchingly low-cut black dress, looking more like a debutante than a team player. Politically engaged, she liked to fill a free afternoon by walking over to the capitol and listening to debates; intrigued by new places, she booked herself a trip east as a graduation present.

  Many of her classmates settled for destinations close to home after picking up their degrees in June 1934. But not Bird. She had listened so many times to her Karnack neighbor Dorris Powell extol the fascinations of New York City that she knew she had to see it, and her roommate, Cecille, agreed to go with her. Leaving the port of Galveston, they stopped briefly in Miami, and then sailed up the Atlantic Coast to Manhattan, where they intended to get a firsthand look at the Broadway lights and see some plays before going to Washington for a tour of the national landmarks.

  New York City was a huge disappointment. Dorris Powell had touted its raised rail tracks and multiethnic throngs as gritty and exotic. But Bird, who got a lot more excited about a field of bluebonnets than about jam-packed streets, failed to see the appeal of a city with nearly seven million people. She liked the Broadway shows she saw with Cecille and made sure to reconnect with some of those Texas “oil men” who were also in New York and took her to the “Casino de Paree” nightclub. But the thrill that Dorris promised just wasn’t there.

  Washington, on the other hand, with its wide streets and imposing monuments, intrigued her. She dragged her roommate along with her to the Supreme Court building, where they sat in the justices’ chairs, and then to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where they peered through the iron fence at the White House. Cecille soon had enough of what she considered dry civics lessons and went back to New York. That left Bird on her own, and she immediately looked up an old boyfriend, Victor McCrea. He introduced her to his sister and other young Texans, who had also taken summer jobs in the capital, keeping her so busy she forgot all about the telephone number Gene Boehringer had given her, with instructions to call a young man named Lyndon Johnson.

  Back in Texas, Bird had to decide what to do with herself now. At twenty-one, she had two bachelor degrees from the University of Texas, one in liberal arts, with a major in history, and the other in journalism. But she had no prospects for a job. It was the gloomiest trough of the Great Depression, when one out of four Americans did not have work, and even with shorthand and typing skills she was unlikely to get hired. T.J. was still making money, and he could have afforded to cover the costs of her staying in Austin. But remaining in the capital without a paycheck was hard to justify, and most of Bird’s friends, including Cecille, were going back home to live with their parents.

  In Bird’s case, the home scene had drastically changed. After fourteen years of marriage to his second wife, Beulah, T.J. had sent her packing and sued for divorce on the grounds that she was enjoying male companionship that did not include him. Although he had shown utter disregard for monogamy himself, and even his daughter recognized that he kept women on the side, or as she cryptically put it, “lady friends” who had no place in “his domestic life,” he was not about to permit his wife the same freedom. It was a painful ego buster for “Mr. Boss” to find himself cuckolded, and one neighbor expressed surprise that he did not kill Beulah.

  The daughter who still worshipped T.J. as “the gentlest of men” decided she would come to his aid, while her two older brothers looked the other way. Tommy and Tony had collected their portions of their mother’s estate as soon as they were old enough, but they had little to do with their father. They still called him “Mr. Boss,” because that’s what he insisted they call him, but like their deceased mother, they saw the title as nothing more than a hollow honorific. Bird and her father had so little contact with Tommy, who lived only a few miles from the Brick House, that she admitted it was easy to “forget we’ve got him.”

  Bird’s return to Karnack was definitely a marking of time, until the right job and/or the right man showed up. It wasn’t what she wanted but she would make the best of what she had, and in the process do something for her father. After fourteen years under Beulah’s management, the Brick House was showing signs of neglect. Her very modest origins had not prepared her to manage a large showplace residence: the handmade bricks were crumbling and flaking away, and the once meticulously tended garden, where young Lady Bird spent hours in solitary contemplation, was now so wildly overgrown she had to stoop to distinguish vines from weeds.

  A project to renovate and spruce up the property fit nicely with Bird’s work ethic—the idea that one always had to have a project or a goal. She certainly wasn’t feeding any nesting instinct because she had no intention of living there for long. Her father wasn’t asking her to do it—he spent all his time at work and showed little interest in what his house or garden looked like. And he never read books. So why would he care about the bookcases Bird intended to have built? Were
they just to serve as showcases for the precious leather-bound volumes that Minnie Pattillo had brought with her from Alabama? Bird may very well have been thinking ahead—to the day when she would bring a prospective husband to meet T.J. and want the Brick House to show at its best.

  Like a graduate student in home economics, the methodical Bird started drawing up a list of proposed repairs to the house. For professional advice, she turned first to architects in Shreveport, and then when they lacked the sophistication she sought, she went to a bigger name, architect Hugo Kuehne, in Austin. It was on a trip to confer with him, on September 5, 1934, that she dropped in at the Railroad Commission office to catch up with Gene Boehringer. Someone else happened to come by for a visit at the same time, giving Gene the chance to make in person the introduction she had tried to engineer from a distance, when she had given Bird that Washington phone number three months earlier.

  In the years Bird had been distancing herself from Karnack, first in Dallas and then in Austin, Lyndon Baines Johnson had made much bigger strides away from Johnson City. Following his few weeks teaching in Pearsall, he moved to Houston, where a job teaching civics and coaching debate had just opened up at the school where his Uncle George taught. Lyndon immediately turned loose his immense energy on his work and flabbergasted his colleagues by the amount of extra time he spent, in evenings and on weekends, drilling the debaters and escorting them to tournaments. It all paid off. His team won so many trophies they became local heroes, rivaling the football players.

  Even with all the glory and recognition his debaters earned him, Lyndon was restless, eager to move on. Ignited by the legislative forays with his father and then by his San Marcos professor’s passion for government, he wanted to get into politics, and even before graduating he had begun moving in that direction. Pat Neff, a former governor who currently headed the very important Railroad Commission, was running for reelection in 1930, and since he had once given Sam Johnson a job, Sam was eager to do what he could to help in the campaign. He suggested Lyndon get involved, too, and at the next Neff rally Lyndon was there, prepared like one of his debaters. When the candidate failed to appear, Lyndon stepped forward, and in what one observer described as a ten-minute “stem-winding, arm-swinging speech” from the tailgate of a vehicle, he delivered a glowing endorsement of Neff in terms so enthusiastic and persuasive that few of those present ever forgot it.