Re: Official Wiko Bloom 2 Stock Rom
Adalrico Drury
Notably well educated for a woman of her era, Lady Bird proved a capable manager and a successful investor. After marrying Lyndon Johnson in 1934 when he was a political hopeful in Austin, Texas, she used a modest inheritance to bankroll his congressional campaign and then ran his office while he served in the Navy.
As First Lady, Johnson broke new ground by interacting directly with Congress, employing her press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour. She advocated beautifying the nation's cities and highways ("Where flowers bloom, so does hope"). The Highway Beautification Act was informally known as "Lady Bird's Bill". She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1984, the highest honors bestowed upon a U.S. civilian. Johnson has been consistently ranked in occasional Siena College Research Institute surveys as one of the most highly regarded American first ladies per historians' assessments.
Claudia Alta Taylor was born on December 22, 1912, in Karnack, Texas, a town in Harrison County, near the eastern state line with Louisiana.[1] Her birthplace was "The Brick House", an antebellum plantation house on the outskirts of town, which her father had purchased shortly before her birth.[2] She was a descendant of English Protestant martyr Rowland Taylor through his grandson Captain Thomas J. Taylor II.
Nearly all of her maternal and paternal immigrant ancestors arrived in the Virginia Colony during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, likely as indentured servants as were most early settlers in the colony. Her father, a native of Alabama, had primarily English ancestry and some Welsh and Danish. Her mother, also a native of Alabama, was of English and Scottish descent.[citation needed]
Lady Bird was largely raised by her maternal aunt Effie Pattillo, who moved to Karnack after her sister's death. She also visited her Pattillo relatives in Autauga County, Alabama, every summer until she was a young woman. As she explained, "Until I was about 20, summertime always meant Alabama to me. With Aunt Effie, we would board the train in Marshall and ride to the part of the world that meant watermelon cuttings, picnics at the creek, and a lot of company every Sunday."[14] According to Lady Bird, her Aunt Effie "opened my spirit to beauty, but she neglected to give me any insight into the practical matters a girl should know about, such as how to dress or choose one's friends or learning to dance."[8]
Lady Bird was a shy and quiet girl who spent much of her youth alone outdoors. "People always look back at it now and assume it was lonely," she once said about her childhood. "To me it definitely was not. ... I spent a lot of time just walking and fishing and swimming."[15] She developed her lifelong love of the outdoors as a child growing up in the tall pines and bayous of East Texas, where she watched the wildflowers bloom each spring.[16]
When it came time to enter high school,[15] Lady Bird had to move away and live with another family during weekdays in the town of Jefferson, Texas,[17] since there was no high school in the Karnack area. (Her brothers were sent to boarding schools in New York.) She graduated third in her class at the age of 15 from Marshall Senior High School in the nearby county seat. Despite her young age, her father gave her a car so that she could drive herself to school, a distance of 15 miles (24 km) each way. She said of that time, "[I]t was an awful chore for my daddy to delegate some person from his business to take me in and out."[15] During her senior year, when she realized that she had the highest grades in her class, she "purposely allowed her grades to slip" so that she would not have to give the valedictorian or salutatorian speech.[4]
After graduating from high school in May 1928, Lady Bird entered the University of Alabama for the summer session, where she took her first journalism course. But, homesick for Texas, she stayed home and did not return for the fall term at Alabama.[18] Instead, she and a high school friend enrolled at St. Mary's Episcopal College for Women,[19] an Episcopal boarding junior college for women in Dallas. It influenced her to "convert to the Episcopal faith", although she waited five years for confirmation.[20]
After graduating from St. Mary's in May 1930, Lady Bird toyed with returning to Alabama. Another friend from Marshall was going to the University of Texas, so she chartered a plane to Austin to join her. As the plane landed, she was awed by the sight of a field covered with bluebonnets and instantly fell in love with the city.[21] Lady Bird received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history[22] with honors in 1933[23] and a second bachelor's degree in journalism cum laude in 1934.[24] She was active on campus in different organizations, including Texas Orange Jackets, a women's honorary service organization, and believed in student leadership. Her goal was to become a reporter, but she also earned a teaching certificate.[4]
The summer after her second graduation, she and a girlfriend traveled to New York City and Washington, where they peered through the fence at the White House.[4] Dallek described Lady Bird as having undergone a boost in her self-confidence through her years at the college. Her time there marked a departure from her timid behavior in her youth.[25]
A friend in Austin introduced her to Lyndon Baines Johnson, a 26-year-old Congressional aide with political aspirations,[26] working for Congressman Richard Kleberg.[4] Lady Bird recalled having felt "like a moth drawn to a flame".[27] Biographer Randall B. Woods attributed Johnson's "neglect of his legal studies" to his courting of Lady Bird.[28]
On their first date, at the Driskill Hotel,[5] Lyndon proposed. Lady Bird did not want to rush into marriage, but he was persistent and did not want to wait. Ten weeks later, Lady Bird accepted his proposal.[4] The couple married on November 17, 1934, at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas.
After she suffered three miscarriages,[4] the couple had two daughters together: Lynda Bird (born 1944) and Luci Baines (born 1947).[29] The couple and their two daughters all shared the initials LBJ. Their daughters lived in the White House during their teenage years, under media scrutiny.
Lynda Bird married Charles S. Robb in a White House ceremony. He was later elected governor of Virginia and U.S. Senator. Luci Baines married Pat Nugent in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and, later, Ian Turpin. Lady Bird had seven grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren at the time of her death.[4]
When Lyndon decided to run for Congress from Austin's 10th district, Lady Bird provided the money to launch his campaign. She took $10,000 of her inheritance from her mother's estate to help start his political career.[32] The couple settled in Washington, D.C., after Lyndon was elected to Congress.[33] After he enlisted in the Navy at the outset of the Second World War, Lady Bird ran his congressional office.[33]
Lady Bird sometimes served as a mediating force between her wilful husband and those he encountered. On one occasion after Lyndon had clashed with Dan Rather, then a young Houston, Texas, reporter, Lady Bird followed Rather in her car. Stopping him, she invited him to return and have some punch, explaining, "That's just the way Lyndon sometimes is."[34]
During the years of the Johnson presidency, Lyndon, in one incident, yelled at the White House photographer who failed to show up for a photo shoot with the First Lady. She consoled the photographer afterward, who said that, despite his feelings against President Johnson, he "would walk over hot coals for Lady Bird."[35]
She served as president of the LBJ Holding Co., and her husband negotiated an agreement with the CBS radio network. Despite Lyndon's objections, Lady Bird expanded by buying a television station in 1952. She reminded him that she could do as she wished with her inheritance.[4] The station, KTBC-TV/7 (then affiliated with CBS as well), was Austin's monopoly VHF franchise and generated revenues that made the Johnsons millionaires.[36] Over the years, journalists have revealed that Lyndon used his influence in the Senate to influence the Federal Communications Commission into granting the monopoly license, which was in Lady Bird's name.[37][38][39]
LBJ Holding also had two small banks; they failed and were closed in 1991 by the FDIC. But the core Johnson radio properties survived and prospered. Emmis Communications bought KLBJ-AM, KLBJ-FM, KGSR, and three other stations from LBJ Holding in 2003 for $105 million.[40]
Eventually, Lady Bird's initial $41,000 investment turned into more than $150 million for the LBJ Holding Company.[41] She was the first president's wife to have become a millionaire in her own right before her husband was elected to office.[2] She remained involved with the company until she was in her eighties.[4]
John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate for the 1960 election. At Kennedy's request, Lady Bird took an expanded role during the campaign, as his wife Jacqueline was pregnant with their second child. Over 71 days, Lady Bird traveled 35,000 miles (56,000 km) through 11 states and appeared at 150 events.[4] Kennedy and Johnson won the election that November, with Lady Bird helping the Democratic ticket carry seven Southern states.[4]
Reflecting later, Lady Bird said that the years her husband served as vice president and she as Second Lady were "a very different period of our lives." Nationally, the two had a kind of celebrity, but they both found the office of Vice President to lack power.[42]
As the Vice President's wife, Lady Bird often served as a substitute for Jacqueline Kennedy at official events and functions.[43] Within her first year as Second Lady, she had substituted for Mrs. Kennedy at more than 50 events, roughly one per week.[44] This experience prepared Lady Bird for the following challenges of her unexpected years as First Lady.[42]
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