The Johnsons scrimped to send Lyndon to summer courses at Southwest Texas State Teachers College to supplement his meager rural education. Sam Johnson's financial troubles took a toll on his health and his family. Lyndon graduated in 1924, president of his six-member senior class. Johnson City High School was a three-mile mule ride away from home. School, at first, was a one-room, one-teacher enterprise. In fact, when he was twelve, he told classmates, "You know, someday I'm going to be president of the United States." Later in life, Johnson would remember: "When I was fourteen years old I decided I was not going to be the victim of a system which would allow the price of a commodity like cotton to drop from forty cents to six cents and destroy the homes of people like my own family." The climb out of the Texas Hill Country, however, would be a steep one. Lyndon, like his father, wanted more for his future. The family house, while comfortable by the standards of the rural South at the time, had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. In 1913, the Johnsons abandoned the farm and moved to nearby Johnson City. He served five terms before he switched careers and failed to make a living solely as a farmer on the family land seventy miles west of Austin. ![]() Sam Johnson won election to the Texas legislature when he was twenty-seven. His mother was reserved and genteel while his father was a talker and a dreamer, a man cut out for more than farming. Lyndon was born in 1908 to Sam and Rebekah Baines Johnson, the first of their five children. ![]() They had been cattlemen, cotton farmers, and soldiers for the Confederacy. ![]() His family included some of the earliest settlers of the Lone Star State.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |