Read Online Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Laura Bush
Tags: United States, General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Political, Biography, Women, Autobiography, Presidents & Heads of State, Presidents' spouses, Women In The U.S., 1946, First Ladies, U.S. President, Bush; Laura Welch;
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wrinkled up her nose at the anchovies and the oysters, but I tried them all and loved most of them.
We ate out too. The fanciest restaurant in Midland was the Blue Star Inn, where they served delicacies like fried shrimp and grilled sirloin. But Daddy said that he loved his Jenna's cooking best of all. He wasn't like the other downtown men, who ate lunch out at a restaurant or ordered at the counter at Woolworth's. And so Mother would listen each day for his car to come humming up the street right around noon.
I had largely forgotten about those lunches until my wedding. When George and I got married, George was also working in downtown Midland. Daddy stood up at our rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding to give a toast. He ended it by looking at George with a quick wink and saying, "If you go home for lunch, make sure that when you go back to the office, you have on the same tie."
The main streets in Midland were named Wall Street and Texas and Broadway. From there, they were christened for distant states, like Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri, and also for some of the old ranching families, like the Cowdens and the Nobles. But gradually, as the town spread out into a city and men from the East began to drift in, the street names changed. First they were named for universities, like Princeton and Harvard, and then for the oil companies, Gulf, Humble, Shell, and Sinclair. And then, in the later boom years, when the crosshatch of streets pushed farther into old ranchlands and cotton fields, they had names like Boeing and Cessna, and eventually lofty English names, like Wellington and Keswick and Coventry, which graced subdivision cul-de-sacs.
We lived on Princeton Avenue now. Our neighbors were mostly company and professional families, whose fathers put on ties to go downtown. Many were geologists and scientists and chemical engineers, men who had studied the science of oil. A few bankers wore suits. But even the roughnecks who worked on the wells in the fields and came home covered with grease didn't walk around in their heavy boots and Wrangler jeans when they came into Midland. The most you might see was the black oil under their nails, which were almost impossible to scrub clean.
People dressed up to go to church and to go out. At the Blue Star Inn, women wore dresses and did up their hair, while over at Johnny's Bar-B-Q, men wore jackets and ties to sit at the rough picnic tables covered with plastic cloths and drink from cold, dripping pitchers of ice tea. Midland remained a dry town. It wasn't legal to order a mixed drink at a restaurant with lunch or dinner. Johnny Hackney's friends circumvented the rule by wandering back into the Bar-B-Q's kitchen to pour their own drinks from a jug of vodka that Johnny kept in a cabinet.
Midcentury Midland was, however, far from a cultural wasteland. The Yucca Theater, which abutted Hogan's Folly, showcased musical acts before it was taken over by the movies. My mother remembers dancing to Guy Lombardo and his orchestra when they came through Midland on the train from Dallas and stopped for a night to play before moving on to El Paso. By the mid-1950s, Midland had its own symphony. But the city was small; it was a place of ice cream sundaes at the Borden dairy and Saturday morning pony rides around a nearby lot. My own little world didn't extend much beyond the same four blocks that I walked each morning to James Bowie Elementary School or the blistering hot metal swings, merry-go-round, and slide at the Ida Jo Moore Park.
During most of my childhood, drought paralyzed West Texas. I recall wind but very little rain. In a wet year, Midland averages fourteen inches. What few rainstorms we had became spectacular events, with water rushing down the streets in fast-moving torrents. Certain roads were built like natural arroyos, with dips in the middle to channel the runoff into the big parks, like A Street Park, which for the majority of its historical life had been a buffalo
We ate out too. The fanciest restaurant in Midland was the Blue Star Inn, where they served delicacies like fried shrimp and grilled sirloin. But Daddy said that he loved his Jenna's cooking best of all. He wasn't like the other downtown men, who ate lunch out at a restaurant or ordered at the counter at Woolworth's. And so Mother would listen each day for his car to come humming up the street right around noon.
I had largely forgotten about those lunches until my wedding. When George and I got married, George was also working in downtown Midland. Daddy stood up at our rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding to give a toast. He ended it by looking at George with a quick wink and saying, "If you go home for lunch, make sure that when you go back to the office, you have on the same tie."
The main streets in Midland were named Wall Street and Texas and Broadway. From there, they were christened for distant states, like Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri, and also for some of the old ranching families, like the Cowdens and the Nobles. But gradually, as the town spread out into a city and men from the East began to drift in, the street names changed. First they were named for universities, like Princeton and Harvard, and then for the oil companies, Gulf, Humble, Shell, and Sinclair. And then, in the later boom years, when the crosshatch of streets pushed farther into old ranchlands and cotton fields, they had names like Boeing and Cessna, and eventually lofty English names, like Wellington and Keswick and Coventry, which graced subdivision cul-de-sacs.
We lived on Princeton Avenue now. Our neighbors were mostly company and professional families, whose fathers put on ties to go downtown. Many were geologists and scientists and chemical engineers, men who had studied the science of oil. A few bankers wore suits. But even the roughnecks who worked on the wells in the fields and came home covered with grease didn't walk around in their heavy boots and Wrangler jeans when they came into Midland. The most you might see was the black oil under their nails, which were almost impossible to scrub clean.
People dressed up to go to church and to go out. At the Blue Star Inn, women wore dresses and did up their hair, while over at Johnny's Bar-B-Q, men wore jackets and ties to sit at the rough picnic tables covered with plastic cloths and drink from cold, dripping pitchers of ice tea. Midland remained a dry town. It wasn't legal to order a mixed drink at a restaurant with lunch or dinner. Johnny Hackney's friends circumvented the rule by wandering back into the Bar-B-Q's kitchen to pour their own drinks from a jug of vodka that Johnny kept in a cabinet.
Midcentury Midland was, however, far from a cultural wasteland. The Yucca Theater, which abutted Hogan's Folly, showcased musical acts before it was taken over by the movies. My mother remembers dancing to Guy Lombardo and his orchestra when they came through Midland on the train from Dallas and stopped for a night to play before moving on to El Paso. By the mid-1950s, Midland had its own symphony. But the city was small; it was a place of ice cream sundaes at the Borden dairy and Saturday morning pony rides around a nearby lot. My own little world didn't extend much beyond the same four blocks that I walked each morning to James Bowie Elementary School or the blistering hot metal swings, merry-go-round, and slide at the Ida Jo Moore Park.
During most of my childhood, drought paralyzed West Texas. I recall wind but very little rain. In a wet year, Midland averages fourteen inches. What few rainstorms we had became spectacular events, with water rushing down the streets in fast-moving torrents. Certain roads were built like natural arroyos, with dips in the middle to channel the runoff into the big parks, like A Street Park, which for the majority of its historical life had been a buffalo
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