American First Lady, wife of U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson. She made a mark as the First Lady from Texas, whose involvement in the conservation movement and the Highway Beautification Bill has left beautiful displays of native wildflowers along America’s highways. Johnson’s concern for the American natural heritage led her to be a strong representative for ecological activities. An excellent businesswoman, Johnson managed a radio-TV station and the family ranch in Texas. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s top civilian honor.
Claudia Alta Taylor grew up in the small rural town of Karnack, Texas. Her mother, Minnie (Patillo) Taylor was from Alabama and moved to Texas with her new husband. Her father, T.J. Taylor, was a farmer and merchant owning the general store in Karnack. Lady Bird was given her nick-name when she was a young girl by her father and while she did not like the name she went by it for all of her life. When she was five years old, Lady Bird’s mother died. The girl spent a lonely childhood by herself reading when she was inside, wandering around the dogwood trees and wildflowers and swimming in Caddo Lake, at times while alligators were lurking nearby. She graduated from Marshall High School third in her class in 1928. At the University of Texas at Austin she received her B.A. in the Liberal Arts in 1933 and then earned a Bachelor’s in Journalism in 1934. She received an honorary doctorate from John Hopkins University in June 1990.
She met her brash, impulsive future husband on 1 August 1934. It was love at first sight for him and he was determined to make her his bride. They married ten weeks later, on 17 November 1934, six weeks after he first proposed to her when out driving in the car. They wedding took place at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas. For their first seven years in Washington, D.C. the Johnson’s lived in a series of apartments.
Johnson borrowed from her inheritance to help her husband’s election to Congress in 1938. In 1942, they purchased their first house on the same block as the Peruvian Embassy and across the street from the home of J. Edgar Hoover. That same year she purchased KTBC, a struggling radio station in Austin, Texas. With keen business acumen, Johnson turned the station around financially and after WW II it included the new medium of television. Campaigning for her husband by train around Texas, LBJ captured the Texas Senate seat in 1942. In the ’50s under Eisenhower, LBJ became the Democratic majority whip and considered one of the most powerful players in Washington, DC.
Johnson suffered many miscarriages in her attempts to have children. She was of shy temperament and would have preferred to stay in her shell but her husband was determined to mold her into the perfect politician’s companion. Her clothes and hair style were changed to satisfy his ideal of a politician’s wife. Johnson suffered years of resentment for not being allowed to be herself. In the early years of their marriage, she contemplated divorcing her overbearing husband. Despite his infidelity with Alice Glass, a wealthy heiress in the late ’30s and his domineering pressure on her, Johnson grew to love her husband’s can-do philosophy and made him the center of her life. They had two girls, Lynda in 1945 and Luci in 1951. Both of her daughters married during their father’s administration.
It was with great anguish and shock the Johnson’s became the first family following the assassination of JFK in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. Though tragedy swept Lady-Bird into the role of the new First Lady, she loved living in the White House. The Highway Beautification Bill was LBJ’s gift to his wife who had grown concerned with the state of the nation’s aesthetic beauty disappearing under the billboard advertisements that littered the land.
After her husband’s death in 1972, Johnson concentrated on the LBJ Presidential Library on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin. Continuing her preservation of the country’s national heritage, she established the National Wildflower Research Center in Austin, Texas that moved to its permanent headquarters in 1996. In 1998, it was renamed “The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Research Center.”
She suffered a stroke in 2002 which affected her speech. In June 2006, she was hospitalized for a week with a low grade fever but had returned to her Austin home. She died there on July 11, 2007 of natural causes, age 94.
Link to Wikipedia biography