Lonely, shy child
SHE was born Claudia Alta Taylor on Dec. 22, 1912, to Minnie Lee Patillo and Thomas Jefferson Taylor. Her father was the prosperous owner of a general store in Karnack, Texas, a small, predominantly black town near the Louisiana border. Her mother was a well-read woman who believed in a woman's right to vote and promoted the welfare of the black population. Most of Lady Bird's playmates were black.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday July 19, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 61 words Type of Material: Correction
Lady Bird Johnson obituary: The July 12 obituary of Lady Bird Johnson in Section A said President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from the 1968 presidential race with the words "I will not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party...." In fact, he said: "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party ..."
One of three children and the only daughter, she received her nickname from a nurse who thought she was as "purty as a lady bird." She was raised by her Aunt Effie after her mother died in an accident when Lady Bird was 5.
A lonely and shy child, she found solace in the pine trees, muddy bayous and rolling hills that surrounded Karnack. Many years later, she said she chose beautification as her primary White House project because "what has given me the most joy, what surfaces when I think back over the last 50 years [are] things like walking through the piney woods of East Texas listening to the wind sighing, or along the banks of Caddo Lake with gnarled cypress trees heavy with moss."
A lover of the classics and an excellent student, she graduated from high school at 15, then attended St. Mary's Episcopal School for Girls in Dallas for two years. In 1933, when she was 20, she graduated in the top 10 of her class at the University of Texas in Austin. Not wanting to return to Karnack, she stayed another year to earn a degree in journalism and considered being a drama critic.
In 1934, a friend introduced her to Lyndon Johnson, then a 26-year-old congressional aide. True to his blunt and domineering nature, he asked Lady Bird to marry him the day after they met. She was both repelled by and attracted to this ambitious man who was five years her elder and who gave her a "queer moth-in-the-flame feeling."
A few months later, on Nov. 17, 1934, she yielded to his considerable pressure and married him in a hastily arranged ceremony in San Antonio. Then Lady Bird, who had never cooked a meal or swept a floor, quickly learned to become a Washington hostess.
"Lady Bird Johnson's remarkable ability to make anyone feel at home was ... to give her husband's career the biggest boost it had yet received," Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro wrote in his 1982 book "The Path to Power." One of the Johnsons' regular guests was Rep. Sam Rayburn of Texas, the longtime House speaker, who later told Lyndon that marrying Lady Bird was the wisest decision he had ever made.
