by Laura Bush
But little, isolated Midland was also more diverse than it appears to many of the people who find it so easy to condemn.
When it came to class, we were far more integrated than other parts of the country. Midland was a working-class town. Most of the people who made money in the oil business came from working-class roots. Quite a few of them had grown up with close to nothing. Even the men from wealthier families, like Mr. Bush or the Philadelphia-bred Mr. O'Neill, who had driven the car for my first "Daddy date" with his thirteen-year-old son, Kevin, had moved out to the West Texas plains determined to prove themselves. They didn't carry with them the trappings of moneyed East Coast homes. That kind of showmanship would not have sat well in midcentury Midland. The children of roughnecks and roustabouts went to the same schools and played on the same teams and were friends with the children of geologists and engineers and landmen and ranch owners, both those with oil leases on their properties and those with nothing but dry grassland. When people retract their noses ever so slightly at the mention of Midland, or West Texas more generally, I am reminded that there are many ways to denigrate a place or demean a person.
In the years that followed, my friends and I watched the civil rights movement unfold, and we embraced it. We had already learned not to judge a man or a woman based on the place that he or she called home.
And so, on those late November days, we watched and grieved in Midland as an Irish Catholic from Boston was buried at Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington, D.C.
It cost twenty-five dollars a semester to attend the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy when my mother enrolled, in the fall of 1936. She waited until the night before final registration to ask her father for the money. It was a bleak seven years into the Great Depression, and twenty-five dollars was a significant sum. There were women who took jobs making sandwiches in soup kitchens just so they could be guaranteed one meal a day. Education was a luxury. My mother barely worked up the nerve to say anything. In the morning, Hal Hawkins handed over the twenty-five dollars, likely counted out in part in quarters, nickels, and other small change. After that, his daughter never asked him for school fees again.
When my mother went off to college, she could no longer afford to live at home and ride the bus some fourteen miles from the upper valley down to El Paso and back each evening, so she boarded with a family in town, taking care of their daughter in return for a room and food. The father worked for the Royal Dutch Shell oil company. Mother once chaperoned the little girl, Charlotte, all the way to New York on the train and then down the length of the East Coast on an oil company tanker--"the biggest ship I had ever seen in my life," she recalled--to Aruba. Charlotte's parents insisted that Mother pay her own way to New York, and she had to "scrounge" to gather enough to cover train fare. By 1938, she had dropped out of school altogether to earn her way in the world. My father had long since quit his own college in Lubbock.
But they never doubted that I would attend college. When I was in the second grade, my father proudly announced that he had bought an insurance policy designed to pay for my college when the time came. He walked into our brick house on Estes Avenue and said, "I bought this college plan for you." When I actually went to college, that little plan was worth only enough to cover one semester, but my parents were always determined that I have a college education. That was what so many of our parents in Midland wanted, a future beyond the best of what theirs had been.
And it was all the more remarkable that my father kept his promise. By the time I left Midland for Dallas, in 1964, an oil bust had struck. Some 4,500 people ultimately left the city. Homes went unsold or were foreclosed. My father did not build a single new house the entire time I was away at school.
After traversing what seemed like half the state of Texas with my parents looking at schools--the sprawling University of Texas campus in Austin, Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and all the way over to Sophie Newcomb in New Orleans--I chose Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By East Coast standards, it was a young school. The same year that it was founded, 1911, the venerable Yale University in Connecticut turned 210 years old. But SMU looked old. Its buildings were brick, and the centerpiece, Dallas Hall, had massive white columns that appeared to have stood in exactly that spot since the time of King George III. Unlike in the University of Texas system, many of SMU's students came from other states; it drew its applicants from up and down the corridors of the Midwest. And I liked the fact that it was in Dallas, home to my uncle Mark and city of innumerable visits, especially each fall to the Texas State Fair. I had first become enchanted with SMU in the seventh grade, when I read a biography of Doak Walker, SMU's legendary football running back--not at all an odd choice for a girl from Midland, where we breathed football each autumn. Walker won the Heisman Trophy in 1948; the Dallas Cotton Bowl used to be called "The House That Doak Built." But my girlish crush was not on the running back, it was on his campus, and I nurtured it for six years. I would also be going with a group of Midland girls, including Gwyne Smith, my friend from elementary school.
The fall of 1964 on college campuses around the country was not the spring of 1968 or 1969. Far from being hotbeds of radical activity, most schools were bastions of youthful irresponsibility, worlds of brimming punch bowls and the nervous social banter of night after night of sorority rush in antebellum-style houses that looked like backdrops for Gone With the Wind. In our dorm rooms and sororities, we had curfews, 10:00 p.m. on weekdays, midnight on weekends. House mothers came to do bed checks. Irresponsibility could occur only during preset hours. We dutifully followed the rules, having no sense of the seismic fault lines that trembled beneath our feet.
At SMU, the boys were clean-cut. The girls didn't wear pants, only dresses or skirts, which grazed the knee. The miniskirt was not invented until 1965, and it was worn in Great Britain first. I can still remember how daring it felt to wear jeans to class when I was a senior; I was the only one in denim in the entire seminar room. During my sophomore year, when I went to a Bob Dylan concert, I wore a little wool skirt suit that I had bought in El Paso the summer before with Mother at the Amen Wardy department store. My date wore a jacket and tie, and so did all the other boys around him. The crowd booed when, after the first half of the show, Dylan came back and reset the amplifiers to switch from folk music to hard rock 'n' roll. They wanted him to remain a folk singer. "The times they are a-changin'" didn't yet apply to North Texas.
I lived in the women's dorms in my first years and joined a sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, in my second. My best friends were now a new orbit of girls, Jane Purucker and Bobbie Jo Ferguson from Kansas City, Janet Kinard from Abilene, Mary Brice from Snyder, Texas, a West Texas oil town far smaller than Midland, and Susan Englehart from Corpus Christi. I was only seventeen when I started college, at a time when many of the girls I knew aspired more to getting married than to attending their own university graduations. SMU was coed; it was not a suitcase school, like so many women's colleges of the time, where girls packed up and headed off each weekend to marathon excursions with boys, trying to make a good impression as the clock ticked down the seconds until Sunday afternoon. But we had girls who pined after loves on other campuses and hundreds of others who were searching for lifelong mates among the fraternity boys on our own.
In the beginning, I didn't know whether to be social or studious. I spent too many nights on dates at the El Toro Room, and my first-semester grades were embarrassing. Not since the fifth grade at Bowie Elementary, when I received a C in social studies, had I been so devastated. Back then, my pediatrician, Dr. Dorothy Wyvell, had ordered me to come home and lie down in the afternoons to recover from a bad cough. The result was that I missed weeks of social studies and ended up with a C. Worse than my own disappointment was the thought that I had failed Mother and Daddy. Now, eight years later, that failure was magnified. I called home, cried, and apologized. It was not just my own opportunity that I was squandering; it was theirs as well, the oppor
tunity that they had given to their only daughter, out of love and without demands or strings. After that, I became, if not a model student, then certainly a very serious one. And I had one tremendous advantage. I had already studied many of the classics during my senior-year course in Western thought in Midland.
One of my favorite classes was a course in children's literature taught by Harryette Ehrhardt. Ironically, my mother had already studied children's literature in Midland when I was in junior high as part of the local college extension program. One night a week, while she headed off to discuss children's classics, I would fix dinner and silently roll my eyes. Now I saw that some of history's greatest writers had penned their best works for children. I was enchanted by the words of E. B. White, Madeleine L'Engle, the Brothers Grimm, and my childhood favorite, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and by the way Dr. Ehrhardt unraveled the layers upon layers of meaning in what others saw as merely whimsical turns of phrase. The class was demanding, and I was one of the few students to make an A. I already knew that I wanted to be a teacher.
Having a chosen profession was a rather new concept for women in the South. Women had always worked, doing the backbreaking labor of running a home, cooking, cleaning, hefting piles of sopping wet laundry onto the line to dry. And many women did work in jobs before they married or if they were widowed young. A few in Midland, like Mary White, worked for most of their married lives, although the oilmen whose offices they ran rarely promoted them beyond the typewriter and steno pool. Most girls, though, were schooled to dream of being wives and mothers. Their curious minds were largely self-taught--my brick-laying grandmother with her intricate garden or my mother with a book open in her dishwater-dry hands. When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, in 1963, their lives, my life, and those of my friends were not upended. What I see now in retrospect is that so many of my friends broke barriers not by intention but simply by doing.
With the exception of my uncle Mark, who had gone to medical school, I was the first person in my family to earn a university degree. And even Mark had not technically finished college. When he was accepted to medical school in Arkansas, he just left Texas Tech rather than spend another semester's tuition during the Depression. Mine was not an immigrant story, aside from Eva Louise LaMaire, but simply the story of families who had moved beyond the bare-bones life of small Arkansas and before that Mississippi and Kentucky farms, where families made do with a cow, a garden, and a clutch of chickens.
But in the mid-1960s, the present quickly became all-consuming.
At SMU, we stayed up late at night smoking cigarettes and engaging in discussions about the larger meaning of life, great debates without any final resolution. They were our own private versions of the heated debates being waged around us, debates that we watched, but sometimes with a bit of remove. When I entered SMU, the Vietnam War was not yet raging. America's ground war in the jungles did not begin until the spring of 1965. Even as the conflict escalated, SMU was not an early hotbed of antiwar protests, although the school did briefly have a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. And boys I knew in Midland or at SMU were among those who enlisted or were drafted. One of our friends, Buddy Hensley, spent hours shirtless in the steamy Southeast Asian heat, filling giant barrels with the chemical defoliant Agent Orange; another, Mike Proctor, was a helicopter pilot. Both survived the war and remain our close friends. The only casualty I knew from Midland was Bob Zonne, the big brother of one of my high school classmates, Bill Zonne. Among our friends who fought, he was the one who did not make it home. His name is inscribed on the Wall in Washington, D.C.
What we felt much more keenly in the mid-sixties was the civil rights movement. In 1961, when I was just a high school sophomore, SMU students had already picketed local barbershops and movie theaters that practiced segregation, and even though SMU had few African-American students, the student body as a whole had voted strongly in support of a completely integrated campus, where all admissions would be color-blind. I was proud that SMU had the first African-American football player in the Southwest Conference, Jerry LeVias. In two years, he went from being pummeled on the field by other players long after the whistle had blown to winning the Fort Worth Kiwanis Club Award for Sportsmanship and becoming an all-American player in his senior year. When LeVias came to SMU, fellow coaches had told Coach Hayden Fry that they "would never allow" a black player on their team.
The civil rights cause gave us the words to talk about the racial divide that still stubbornly clung to our cities and towns, even our own homes. At last, I had a language to understand what I had intuitively known, that naming Lee High School in 1960 for a man who a century before, in 1861, chose his state of Virginia and his slaveholder ties over abolition while Midland's black students were still assigned to George Washington Carver High School was wrong. Suddenly everything was open for question: why my father's black friends were the men who worked the stove and the grill at Johnny's Bar-B-Q or why the only black women the rest of us knew were the ones who cleaned homes.
I was not a placard-waving protester. But the scenes from the Alabama marches or the riots that left Detroit and Newark in flames cemented my desire to do what I could, and that was to teach in an inner-city, minority school. I wanted to work with children who had been left out and, too often, left behind, simply because of the color of their skin. When I taught, I always asked to be placed in what were called "minority schools."
In 1964, when I arrived on the SMU campus, panicked students would ask the student health center, located only a few doors down from my dorm, for amphetamines to stay awake late to study for exams. One of my girlfriends even experimented with a California turnaround, what truckers used to stay awake on the road. She didn't sleep for three days. It was perhaps a frail line separating that kind of officially sanctioned self-medicating from the other, illegal drugs that would start to creep onto college campuses. By 1968, marijuana had arrived at SMU, although none of my Midland friends ever smoked pot. And the few girls at school who did try it would never admit it, in the same way that they would never reveal private details about their boyfriends. These were considered deep secrets, which girls kept to themselves alone.
Even if there was no "Summer of Love" at SMU, we did know that there was another world being unleashed beyond our white columns and redbrick walls. A few students played tracks from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper or "Light My Fire" by Jim Morrison and the Doors, although at parties we danced to the sounds of what is now Motown but was then called "soul music," the Supremes, the Isley Brothers, and Cookie and the Cupcakes. Once, during my senior year, I was curious to see what real hippies looked like. My roommate, Jane, and I dressed in jeans and bare feet and hung beads from our necks. Then we headed off to Lee Park, one of the largest parks in Dallas and named for Robert E. Lee, to look for the fabled hippies. But there were none--instead, everyone else in the park turned to stare at us, imagining that we were the hippies who had come to commune with nature in the middle of the city.
One thing we did in our cute skirts and bubble hair, which we teased and sprayed and rolled on big, bristly rollers clamped tight with pins, was drink, even though we were underage. All the fraternity parties served alcohol, especially in lethal blends of spiked punch, and we drank, way too much, and smoked, even in class. By the early 1970s, our drinking would seem almost passe. By then, the drug culture had overwhelmed college life. Graduating in the South in 1968 put us just slightly ahead of the wave. But in time, alcohol would prove to be equally devastating for far too many of my friends.
At SMU, the wild boys were not the drunken fraternity brothers who would go on to become bankers and businessmen; they were the boys who drove motorcycles and who rebelled against anything that smacked of authority. Yet even they were not as freed from convention as it seemed. Chuck, the long-haired boy with the devil-may-care smile, who rode a motorcycle and dated Bobbie Jo, volunteered to go to Vietnam. Another of his biker friends once stole a suit, which he wore to his seminary interv
iew for the Episcopal priesthood. He got in. But there was a James Dean-style restlessness that gripped our college years, a desire to throw off one by one the conventions of our parents and our grandparents. The gross injustices underpinning the need for the civil rights movement, the pat explanations that "certain groups had to earn their rights," in order to justify the sins of segregation, and subtle racism made many of the previous generations' values seem suspect and shallow. A few of the more vocal among us rejected everything.
Indeed, most of the class of 1968 had grown up during a period of unprecedented abundance. We had never known a great depression or a global war that ran hot rather than cold. Our parents' sacrifices had shielded us from these things. But now our own generational discontent had produced a highly combustible equation. I remember sitting in our sorority house on the last day of March 1968, when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection. We watched largely in silence; there was no collective gasp of regret.
At my commencement, just over a month after Martin Luther King was assassinated and a few weeks before another bullet felled Bobby Kennedy, SMU's president, Willis Tate, implored students not to abandon rational thought and judgment, saying, "We live in a day when contagious hysteria and social pressures can completely anesthetize a person's ability to reason," and adding, "In times of rapid change, the old may be destroyed along with the decayed. There are some time-tested, eternal values."
Not everyone participated in the upheaval of the late 1960s. Many of the girls I knew, including most of my Midland friends, were getting on with the next phase of their lives. They had become engaged or had already returned home to their childhood churches for their weddings. I fully expected to be married by the end of my senior year. I thought about it whenever I caught sight of a beaming bride preparing to walk down the aisle under the serene cream spire of Perkins Chapel at the center of the SMU campus. I even dated a young medical student at the start of my senior year and assumed for a while that I would settle down with him. But I graduated with no ring on my left hand and no immediate prospects for one.