The bad news is that Claudia Alta Taylor “Ladybird” Johnson has died at the age of 94. The good news is that she won the bar fight.
My maternal grandmother, who’s even deader than Ladybird, used to babysit her at Ladybird’s grandparents’ home (current pics of that house [taken from my grandmother’s grave, ironically as the house adjoins the Baptist cemetery]- can’t tell to look at it now, but there was once a wraparound porch with columns and inside still there’s a gorgeous three story spiraling staircase and a few original stained glass transoms, and that’s also the original slave-kitchen; for $2 million worth of renovations you could have a million dollar mansion there).
Scurrilous trivia: Popular gossip there was that Coretta Scott King was Ladybird’s illegitimate half-sister as “her daddy liked to run around with colored gals”; the fact that Coretta Scott King was a generation younger than Ladybird and that Ladybird’s father was long gone from the area by the time Coretta was conceived did little to quiet the rumor (it’d have made more believable slander to say she was the granddaughter of Ladybird’s father, though I suppose illegitimate niece doesn’t have the immediacy).
She didn’t cure cancer, end hunger, or war, but she did help get rid of ugly-ass billboards on interstate highways, encourage planting and studying wildflowers and she left the world nicer than she found it.
Dunno. Pat Nixon was old school First Lady too. She had a lot more friends in Washington than her husband did.
Betty Ford I’d put on the list too, as well as Barbara Bush.
The rest of them since, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy, were political beings in their own right, and their causes and their public behavior were somewhat more controversial than those adopted by most First Ladies historically.
She was also an incredible businesswoman who began investing in TV stations in the 1930s (before 1% of the nation had TV sets) and who received the first license for a television station granted by the FCC after WW2.
Mmm, I’ll give you Pat Nixon – but Betty Ford broke the mold. Her openness about her breast cancer and her alcoholism would have been unimaginable to Lady Bird. Barbara Bush, also, though a traditional “wife and mother” type in many ways, was much more outspoken than the “old school” First Ladies.
If those things include, “She helped cut down on the visual pollution of our highways by having billboards removed,” I’m still going to count that as a good thing.
Umm…which highways are these? Cause I see billboards everywhere (well, everywhere but here, since we have our own state law outlawing them.) Is it just a “less than X billboards per mile” type of thing, or are there designated highways/sections of highways that are always billboard free?
Sorry to hear about her passing, though. She seemed like a real class act.
We still have billboards, but fewer than we used to have. I’m not sure exactly what the laws are, but I think the goal is to virtually eliminate them over time – too long a period of time if you ask me! Get rid of them!.
AIUI, what she lobbied for was a ban on billboards on the right-of-ways of Federal highways. Ergo, you could still put up billboards, but they had to be off the gov’t land.
Lady Bird went to the same church as my mother. She recently donated a large sum of money to the church so they could pay off the mortgage (and then some!). Very generous, that.
She was easily the most famous person I’ve ever met (for about five minutes, in 2000), and she struck me as having a lot of class, even in that short time. R.I.P.
When I heard this news, I immediately thought of you, Sampiro. Thanks for refreshing my memory on your connection to Ladybird.
She had plenty of backbone. She could stand up to LBJ and put him in his place, which is saying something considering what a bully he could be. On morning edition this morning they played a recording of a phone conversation of her critiquing one of his speeches. She pulled no punches, but was thoroughly ladylike.
My mother used to tell me constantly when I was a kid that “your room could get a grant from Ladybird” in reference to my neatness and cleanliness. And Fannie Flagg’s Ladybird is one of the great forgotten comedically brilliant impersonations of all time.
