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Lady Bird Johnson Remembers
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Candidate
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| Contributor | The Sunset Provision |
| Last Edited | The Sunset Provision Sep 04, 2007 07:15pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Tuesday, December 2, 1980 01:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | When Lady Bird Johnson stops by the post office in Stonewall, Texas, to mail a letter, or waves to the tourists visiting the Johnson Ranch, or rides in the elevator of the LBJ Library in Austin, she is greeted with delighted smiles—sometimes of immediate recognition, sometimes of surprise—but always of pleasure. Her unassuming and invariably friendly presence is obviously one of the treasures of central Texas.
Claudia Alta Taylor was born on December 22,1912, in Karnack, a small Texas village near the Louisiana border. Her father was the town’s principal merchant, whose store carried the sign “T. J. Taylor—Dealer in Everything.” She picked up the nickname of Lady Bird as a child, and though she uses Claudia on legal documents, she has been called Lady Bird ever since. Her husband, in fact, who was amused by the fact that they had the same initials, usually called her simply Bird.
She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1934 and met Lyndon Baines Johnson the same year. On their first date he asked her to marry him, and although she had a “queer moth-in-the-flame feeling,” she thought at first that his proposal was some kind of a joke. They were married two months later.
Johnson was then a congressional aide to Congressman Richard Kleberg, and the young couple settled down to an intense life of politics in Washington, punctuated by the birth of two daughters—Lynda Bird in 1944 and Luci Baines in 1947. In 1937 Johnson was elected to the House of Representatives, and eleven years later he won a Senate seat, in a contested election, by the margin of eighty-seven votes. He served successively as Minority and Majority Leader, the youngest man ever to hold either post. In 1960 he was John F. Kennedy’s running mate, and he succeeded to the Presidency when Kennedy was assassinated in late 1963. Elected in his own right in 1964, Johnson chose not to run again in 1968.
The Johnsons retired to the LBJ Ranch in Stonewall, Texas, whi |
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