by Laura Bush
George and I lived a life far removed from this extravagant wealth. Our biggest indulgence was a membership in the Midland Country Club, although George did earn enough that I had the luxury of being able to stay home with the girls.
Still, living in Midland in 1982 was like having drawn up a chair to a card game where the bettors at the table held a flush in every hand.
George started in the oil business as a landman. He had moved to Midland in 1975 after he graduated from Harvard Business School. He spent hours combing courthouse records to determine who owned the mineral rights on a particular tract of land, which could be leased for oil well drilling. After he lost his 1978 congressional race, he started a small, independent oil exploration business, Arbusto Energy (arbusto is "bush" in Spanish). Independent oilmen find and drill new wells. When prices are high, the risks are good ones. In the early 1970s, a West Texas oil driller had a one in fifty shot of hitting a small oil field, a one in one thousand chance of striking a big one. But at the start of 1983, oil prices in Texas plunged.
A barrel of West Texas crude lost five dollars in a single week in January. As opposed to twenty-six or twenty-eight dollars a barrel, it was now just over nineteen. The Midland banks were the first to fail. George walked into First National Bank on the morning of its demise. Mr. Cowden, the descendent of one of Midland's first ranching families, was standing in the gray marble lobby pleading with his depositors not to withdraw their funds. His weathered face taut with emotion, he promised them, "Your money is safe here. Please don't take your money. Your money is safe." But the line of customers stretched across the lobby and down the block as people waited to cash out their holdings. By the time the final slip had been passed to a teller, the bank's last cent was all but gone. In a concluding touch of irony, First National, the largest independent bank in the state, had been chartered back in 1890, during the cattle days, after the devastating drought of 1886 and 1887. Cowboys who rode the range to round up what animals remained called it the "Great Die-off." Ranches were abandoned from the Rio Grande to the farthest reaches of the Great Plains. After that disaster, three Midlanders, including John Scharbauer, whose family later built the fancy downtown hotel, chartered a bank designed to see cattlemen through the "bad times." Slightly less than a hundred years later, Midland's First National would not survive this one.
George was anxious about the future of his own small company and his seven employees. He merged with another, larger company, Spectrum 7, in 1984. Oil prices briefly stabilized, then dropped again. We watched as drilling rigs went idle one by one. The top owners lost their vacation homes, their jets, even the desks and the few spanking-new computers that had been in their now-empty buildings. Moving trucks pulled up to downtown towers, and the contents of entire offices were carted out by burly men. The remnants of prosperity were bundled off to warehouses and sold for cents on the dollar at periodic public auctions. But it wasn't just the wealthy oilmen. Oil drilling is built on a scaffold of engineers, geologists, scientists, pipeline men, and roughnecks, pumpers, and roustabouts out in the field. They were among the first to be let go. Families picked up and fled, houses sat for months, even years, unsold. I'd see the signs planted on lawns, or swinging forlornly from posts as I drove around. Friends, acquaintances, and stalwarts around Midland edged toward ruin. The "big oil" I knew were the people who worked at decent jobs, who bought homes, sent their children to school, prayed in church, and pushed their shopping carts down the supermarket aisle next to mine.
With that peculiar West Texas pluck, car bumpers sported stickers that read: "Please, Lord, let there be another boom. I promise I won't piss it away next time." George took a 25 percent pay cut, shaved whatever costs he could, and tried to hang on.
We had already been going to church since before the girls were born; it was where I felt, at last, the gentle embrace of faith again. Now some of our friends, like Don Evans and Don Jones, started a Wednesday-night Bible study for men. George was one of the first to begin attending.
One summer during college, I had a date with a boy in Midland. We'd gone downtown to see the Summer Mummers, the local theater group, perform, and he was driving me home. During the show, he had constantly refilled his frosted glass from a pitcher of beer. I had paid no attention until we were in the car. His face was flushed, and his eyes shone like glass. He drove me back home without stopping at a single red light or slowing for a stop sign. We screeched through the streets of Midland, and I gripped my seat until my knuckles were white, and I could feel rivulets of sweat sliding down my skin. Whenever the engine slackened, I wondered if I could simply open the door and jump out, leaving him and the car to sail on alone. We made it to my front door, but I was shaking. Yet after I was back at SMU, I still got in cars with people who had been drinking, because that was just what everyone did.
Midland was a drinking town. After Prohibition was repealed, Midland County remained largely dry; residents repeatedly voted against allowing alcohol sales. But that only changed how people drank. Range-weary cowboys drank; cattlemen, railroad men, oilmen coming in from the fields, all of them drank. But so did the operators, the engineers and scientists and geologists who came after that. For years, liquor and mixed drinks couldn't be served in restaurants, but private clubs could pour a drink straight from the bottle, so people joined clubs, especially country clubs, where their individual "bottles" could be kept in their lockers. Vodka, bourbon, scotch, gin, anything with a kick, came out, glass after glass. Those who didn't join clubs, like my father, simply drove to package stores at the county line and carried out their bottles in brown paper bags. At Johnny's Bar-B-Q, Daddy could pour his own drinks from Johnny's private stash in the kitchen.
All through my growing up, adults hosted dinner parties laced with cocktails and finished with nightcaps. More than once, men and women would weave their way from the hostess's front steps to their cars and drive home. My mother rarely drank, and certainly not to excess. She might nurse a Tom Collins through an evening. But my father drank every night. On the weekends, he and his buddies would watch football, betting on the games and mixing martinis or pouring generous fingers of bourbon. During the week, the downtown men usually ordered cocktails with their lunches behind the thick walls of the Petroleum Club.
Women drank too. I remember one girl I knew in high school who we all thought was wild and who had a bad reputation. Twenty years later, back in Midland, I was working on the high school reunion committee. She came and told us that throughout high school, her mother had been falling-down drunk in her house. But in Midland, no one talked about those things. Any escape had to be her own.
Two decades out, almost nothing had changed. We were wealthier than our parents, we were less frugal because none of us had been scarred by a depression, but we were living much the same lives--dinners out on Friday, dinner parties in on Saturday--and alcohol was part of each one.
On Fridays, we usually ate Mexican food, and the women drank margaritas and the men drank beer. On Saturdays, it was dinner at someone's home, usually a barbecue where everyone would bring something--appetizers, salads, desserts. And alcohol. There was wine, there was vodka, and there were mixed drinks, and we drank them. My father, who was retired, now liked to have a martini with lunch and a bourbon or two with dinner. George drank the three Bs, a bourbon before dinner, a beer with dinner, and then B & B, a sweet after-dinner drink. It was lethal, and it was completely accepted because that, or some version of it, was the drinking life of most men. At parties as the night deepened, the men grew louder, the cut of their jokes sharpened, and they laughed at everything. In many homes, the morning began with coffee and aspirin. George would go for a run. He is an incredibly disciplined athlete, and he ran every day, even at lunchtime in the summer, when the sun seemed to stand still atop Midland. He ran and he sweated out the dregs of the alcohol. But come nightfall, he'd pour another drink.
He didn't have three drinks every night; many times all he had was a beer. But when he'd
poured enough, he could be a bore. Maybe it's funny when other people's husbands have had too much to drink at a party, but I didn't think it was funny when mine did. And I told him so. But I never said the line "It's either Jim Beam or me." That joke came much later. I was not going to leave George, and I wasn't going to let him leave me with twins. Our marriage was enduring, we loved each other, and we were two people who did not have divorce in our DNA. But I was disappointed. And I let him know that I thought he could be a better man.
In 1986, we planned a July trip to the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs to celebrate our fortieth birthdays, George's, mine, and Don and Susie Evans's. Jan and Joey O'Neill came, and so did our good friend Penny Slade-Sawyer. Neil Bush, George's younger brother who lived in Colorado, came too. The men played golf, and the women sunned by the pool. And on the last night, everyone, especially the men, ordered too much to drink at the bar. I heard the same toast repeated twenty times. I've joked that George quit the next day because he got the bar bill, but it was a combination of things. It was the fact of turning forty; it was the fact of his father being the vice president and the expectation that Mr. Bush would run for president. None of the Bush children ever wanted to do anything to embarrass their dad. But it was also having talked with Billy Graham the summer he turned thirty-nine, when we were visiting his parents in Maine, and it was joining that Wednesday-night Bible study in Midland, which fixed George's mind on a higher purpose. It was living through an oil bust when people we knew had lost everything and recognizing that failures are best met head-on, clear-eyed. And some of it was growing into being a father and a husband. There had been many drunken and half-drunken weekends, there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about this one, except that it was one weekend too many. It was to be the last one.
When George decided that he was done with alcohol, he never complained, he just stopped drinking. And he was surprised by how quickly he felt better, by how great it is to wake up in the morning when you haven't had a drink the night before. He ran better, he read better. We had always taken books to bed and read at night, but George never read for very long. Now reading became a pleasure for him again.
We kept going to the same parties, but George would have a nonalcoholic beer. And gradually, many of our friends stopped or slowed their drinking, one after being stopped for drunken driving, another after a stay at the Betty Ford clinic. Others just put away their bottles and six-packs and moved on. One friend told me, after she had joined AA and progressed through the twelve steps to the one for making amends, that she had driven Barbara and Jenna to their art lessons after she had been drinking. I had seen her, waved to them as she got behind the wheel, and had never known. A few of the heaviest drinkers who didn't quit, women and men, are in their sixties now, and my heart breaks at how much they are struggling.
Years after George quit, as Mother and I sat talking one quiet afternoon, she turned and said that, unlike me, she had never thought to ask Daddy to stop drinking.
Although George H. W. Bush was in his second term as vice president, George and I had not been invited to a single state dinner. We read newspaper accounts of the Reagans' black-tie evenings, where the women wore long, shimmering gowns and strappy high heels and everyone toasted equally elegant foreign guests. Once, George's dad did ask, "Have y'all been invited to a state dinner?" And George and I both said no. He immediately promised that we would receive an invitation. Months passed. George finally said, "Dad, I thought we were going to be invited to a state dinner." He replied, "Oh no, I said a steak dinner." We all laughed and assumed that our invitation would never come as the Reagan administration ticked toward a close. Then, a lovely embossed envelope with the perfect pen-and-ink calligraphy arrived, inviting us to a state dinner at the White House. It was one of the last dinners that the Reagans held. And it was on the same day the movers were coming to our house to load our boxes and start on the journey up to Washington, D.C. George H. W. Bush, the man our children called Gampy, was going to run for president, and his campaign manager, Lee Atwater, had asked George to move to Washington to work on his father's race. We were leaving Midland.
I had been working with the movers for over a month to arrange everything. Traveling to Washington for the dinner would require two plane flights and considerable expense. It seemed impossible to change our dates and rearrange everything. I called the White House's social secretary to decline, and she made a surprised sound into the other end of the phone.
Indeed, during the first Reagan-Bush term, when George and I were invited to a Sunday-afternoon concert performed by Itzhak Perlman, we had decided to make a special trip to Washington. George packed his nicest suit; I had a fancy dress. We were both nervous about going to the White House. Inside, women gingerly picked their way along the slick marble stairs and halls. My eyes wandered, taking in the velvet and brocade and the heavy wooden tables and carved chairs, the high ceilings and glittering chandeliers, and the crush of far more elegantly dressed people in each room. We sat on gold banquet chairs that had been precisely arranged in rows across the East Room, with a special roped-off section for the most important dignitaries, and waited patiently in the receiving line to shake President and Mrs. Reagan's hands. When the military aides announced us, both George and I were speechless. We smiled and stayed mute, having no idea what to say. Now, after years of receiving lines, I'm grateful for the people who don't say anything except "I'm so happy to be here," and just keep moving. It can take hours for the president and the first lady to shake all those hands.
Before the movers came, we had a big yard sale. I sold off furniture, books, baby clothes and toys, almost anything that wasn't nailed down. Susie and Donnie Evans helped us tag everything, including the baby beds and baby things that we had kept in storage for so long, and set it out on our front lawn. We were shedding our life of almost ten years. Some things we got rid of I wish I'd kept, like an old Ronald Reagan movie poster that we had framed. I don't know what possessed me to sell it, just the frenzy of divesting ourselves.
I've always traveled light; I look back on over thirty years of marriage, and aside from shelves of scrapbooks and books, we've accumulated startlingly few things. As we've moved, we've donated or given away many of our furniture pieces and rugs, even posters and paintings. I prefer to keep memories rather than things. Some of it is my dislike of clutter and its complications. Some of it comes from being a librarian, when I had to manage a collection. I had to catalog each piece, check bindings and repair tears; I culled the volumes, removing copies that had grown too tattered or worn. Every object had to pass through my fingertips. It has made me wary of the responsibility of too many things.
We set off for Washington with a small moving van and our Pontiac sedan and Chevy station wagon, leaving behind our friends and our home. I had never lived outside of Texas for more than a few weeks. I was forty-one years old. For more than twenty-five of those years, Midland had been my home; for more than twenty years, it had been George's. It was not just the pan-flat arid land that we were leaving behind with each mile of road but a way of being and of speaking. People in West Texas believe that they think differently, and to a large degree they do. There is a plainness to the way West Texas looks that translates into how people act and what they value. Those who live there are direct and blunt to the point of hurt sometimes. There is no time for artifice; it looks and sounds ridiculous amid the barren landscape. From the era of the first settlers, people or animals could freeze or starve or roast if debates went on too long or too many niceties were observed.
The West Texas plains were seared on each of us like an invisible brand. I am struck sometimes by the words spoken by Ten Bears, the Great Comanche war chief, as he pleaded with Abraham Lincoln's men not to force his people onto a reservation: "I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath." And how similar his words sound to
the rougher-edged lament of the cattlemen--the same men who had driven the Comanches from their land. As he grew old, the Midland rancher W. C. Cochran wrote, "For anyone who loved God's own creation, it was a paradise on earth. . . . The hills and valleys abounded with deer, turkey, bear, and antelope. Bee trees were numerous and buffalo common. . . . Every old-timer cowman remembers these times. The wire fences took all the joy and thrill out of the cow business for the old boys, who remembered when they used to sit around camp and talk about who had the best horses and play a little ten cent ante when it was not their night to ride fifteen or twenty miles. Those good old days passed away with the coming of the wire fence."
Out on that range, people adapted to the land; the land contoured them, not the other way around.
We left Midland, but never truly left it behind. And it invariably found us. After George was elected governor, he chose as his official desk an old oak piece that had belonged to his father. He was sure it had been his dad's congressional desk, and George had a brass plaque made identifying it as the desk of Rep. George H. W. Bush. The desk was installed at the Texas Capitol, and when his father first saw it, he laughed. That desk had never been to Congress. A young oilman named George H. W. Bush had bought it for a hundred dollars, secondhand, on a sidewalk in downtown Midland.