SAM JOHNSON HAD, moreover, married someone as romantic and idealistic as he.
Rebekah Baines had been raised, on the outskirts of the little Hill Country town of Blanco, in a large two-story stone house painted a smooth and gleaming white. A house of Southern graciousness, it should have been set behind a long green lawn, among tall and stately trees; instead, it towered over the stunted mesquite around it, and over the spindly little fruit trees in the recently planted orchard on one side. Grass grew in its front yard only in brown, scattered clumps. It seemed very out of place near Blanco's rickety wooden stores and dog-run log cabins.
For a while, Rebekah's father was the area's most prominent attorney. Descended from a long line of famous Baptist preachers—his father, the Reverend George Washington Baines, had been president of Baylor, the Texas Baptist university—Joseph Wilson Baines had been a schoolteacher and then a lawyer, a newspaperman (founder of the influential McKinney Advocate) and Secretary of State under Governor John ("Old Oxcart") Ireland. Moving to the Hill Country in 1900, he was elected to the Legislature—to the same seat Sam Johnson would later hold—and practiced law and rented land to tenant farmers, accumulating "quite a fortune." But the qualities most remarked about him were his piety ("A Baptist, strict in doctrine … he was the chief pillar in the Blanco Church"; "for clean speech and morals, he could hardly have been surpassed"); his love of beauty in literature and nature; and his principles, both as a legislator "public-spirited, profoundly concerned for the welfare of the people … high in ideals," and as a lawyer who, his law partner said, "was always more concerned about doing right and acting honorable than he was about the success of the suit." A Hill Country historian wrote of Joe Baines: "He loved the good and the beautiful."
Rebekah was devoted to her father. It was he, she was to recall, who taught her to read, and "reading has been one of the great pleasures and sustaining forces of my life. … He taught me the beauty of simple things. He taught me that 'a lie is an abomination to the Lord.' … He gave the timid child self-confidence." As an elderly woman, looking back (with some exaggeration) on her girlhood, she would write:
I am grateful for … that simple, friendly, dearly loved town, Blanco. I love to think of our home, a two-story rock house with a fruitful orchard of perfectly spaced trees, terraced flower beds, broad walks, purple plumed wisteria climbing to the roof, fragrant honeysuckle at the dining room windows whose broad sills were seats for us children. Most of all I love to think of the gracious hospitality of that home, of the love and trust, the fear of God, and the beautiful ideals that made it a true home.
But Blanco was in the Hill Country. "On account of disastrous droughts, protracted four years," and "by over-kindness to farm tenants and by overconfidence in men," as his brother put it, Baines' farming operations "brought financial ruin." He lost his home, moving in 1904 from "dearly loved" Blanco to the German community of Fredericksburg, where he built a smaller house for his family and tried to establish a new practice. But his health had fled with his fortune, and he died in November, 1906; his wife had to sell the house, move to San Marcos, and take in boarders.
Rebekah later wrote that she had "adjusted readily and cheerfully to the financial change"—she worked in the college bookstore to earn enough money to graduate from Baylor—but that she had experienced greater difficulty adjusting "to life without my father, who had been the dominant force in my life as well as my adored parent, reverenced mentor, and most interesting companion." Shortly before he died, while Rebekah, having graduated, was back in Fredericksburg teaching elocution and working as a "stringer" for the Austin newspaper, he had suggested that she interview the young legislator who had won the seat he himself had once held. She would recall that when she did—in 1907, shortly after Sam had been turned down by Mabel Chapman—"I asked him lots of questions but he was pretty cagey and I couldn't pin him down; I was awfully provoked with that man!" but she also recalled that he was "dashing and dynamic," with "flashing eyes"—and, however unlike her father he may have been in other respects, the two men were similar in the one she thought most important: she could talk with him, as she had with her father, about "principles." As for Sam, she said, "He was enchanted to find a girl who really liked politics." Soon, in what she called a "whirlwind courtship," he was riding the twenty miles to Fredericksburg to visit the slender, blonde, blue-eyed elocution teacher, and taking her to hear political speeches at the Confederate Reunion and in the Legislature—"We heard William Jennings Bryan, who we both admired extravagantly"), and on August 20, 1907, they were married and he brought her to the Pedernales.
NOTHING IN HER LIFE had prepared her for life there.
As they rode away from comfortable, bustling Fredericksburg and its neat green fields, the land faded to brown, and then gray. It became more and more rocky, more and more barren. The farmhouses were farther and farther apart. Dotting the hills were hulks of deserted farmhouses, crumbling rectangles of logs out of which reared tall stone fireplaces which stood in the hills like tombstones—monuments to the hopes of other couples who had tried to earn a living there. And then, finally, they came to the house in which she was to live.
It was a small shack on a long, shallow slope leading up from the muddy little river.
A typical Hill Country dog-run, it consisted of two boxlike rooms, each about twelve feet square, on either side of a breezeway. Behind one of the rooms was the kitchen. One end of the porch had been enclosed to form a tiny "shed-room"; the roof was sagging as if pulled down a little by the added weight on that side, and the porch slanted down, too. The walls of the house were vertical boards. Out back were a barn—little more, really, than a lean-to shelter for animals—and the toilet facilities, a pair of flimsy, tilted "two-holers." In front of the house was a swinging wooden gate, set not in a wooden fence but in a fence made of four strands of barbed wire which enclosed the front yard. The yard was mostly dirt with a few clumps of grass or weeds stuck up here and there. Sam had painted the house a bright yellow to welcome her.
Rebekah's father had created a niche in the Hill Country, and had raised a daughter who fitted into that niche: a college graduate, a lover of poetry, a soft-spoken, gentle, dreamy-eyed young lady who wore crinolines and lace—and broad-brimmed, beribboned hats with long veils; "She had a flawless, beautiful white skin and never held with this business of going out in the sun and getting tan; she felt that women should protect themselves from the sun," recalls one of her daughters. Now, overnight, at the age of twenty-six (Sam was almost thirty), she was out of the niche—a fragile Southern flower suddenly transplanted to the rocky soil of the Pedernales Valley.
Transplanted, moreover, to a world in which women had to work, and work hard. On washdays, clothes had to be lifted out of the big soaking vats of boiling water on the ends of long poles, the clothes dripping and heavy; the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women's hands; the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday. And Rebekah wasn't strong. With no electricity in the valley, all cooking had to be done on a wood stove, and the wood for it—and for the fireplace—had to be carried in from the pile outside, and just carrying those countless loads of wood was hard for a frail woman who had never in her life done physical labor. The pump on her back porch made it unnecessary for Rebekah to lug buckets of water up from the Pedernales as most of the women in the valley had to do, but even working the pump was hard for her. Rebekah was a good cook, but of what the other farm wives called "fancy" foods: delicate dishes, for elegant meals. Now, at "the threshing," the fifteen or twenty men who came in to help expected to be served three huge meals a day. The farm wife had a hundred chores; Sam hired girls to help Rebekah with them, but the girls were always quitting—no girl wanted to live out there in those lonely hills—and even when there was a maid in the house, there was so much work that Rebekah had to do some of it. When, in later years, Rebekah Johnson wrote a memoir, she painted her life on the ranch in terms so soft that it was all but unrecognizable to those who knew her. But seeping through the lines of one paragraph is emotion they believe is true:
Normally the first year of marriage is a period of readjustment. In this case, I was confronted not only by the problem of adjustment to a completely opposite personality, but also to a strange and new way of life, a way far removed from that I had known in Blanco and Fredericksburg. Recently my early experiences on the farm were relived when I saw "The Egg and I"; again I shuddered over the chickens, and wrestled with a mammoth iron stove. However, I was determined to overcome circumstances instead of letting them overwhelm me. At last I realized that life is real and earnest and not the charming fairy tale of which I had so long dreamed.
Years later, in a statement that may have been more accurate, she would write to her son, Lyndon: "I never liked country life, and its inconveniences. …"
It was not, however, the work that was the most difficult aspect of farm life for her.
From Rebekah's front porch, not another house was visible—not another human structure of any type. Other houses were scattered along the Pedernales—and some not far away; Sam's parents now lived just a half-mile up the road, and not much farther away lived two of Sam's sisters, with their husbands. And there was his brother Tom—it was a Johnson valley again; there were Johnson brothers, again named Sam and Tom, working on the Pedernales as there had been forty years before. But the Johnsons were a boisterous crew. They told jokes—the kind of jokes Rebekah's father had so disliked. They might pass around a bottle—and her father had taught her what a sin that was. Going to church on Sundays was great fun for them; they would all meet at Grandfather Johnson's, each family behind its own team, and race, shouting back and forth, pulling up in front of the Christadelphian church in a flurry of dust and laughter. That wasn't the way to go to church! After services, they would gather around the piano in the church and sing—all the Johnsons could sing; Sam had once won a medal in a singing contest. It was not at all like the quiet, reflective Sundays in the Baptist church in Blanco that had been so important to Rebekah's father and to her.
In other ways, too, she couldn't fit in. She was a college graduate, and a college graduate who loved what she had learned, who loved to recite poetry, and to talk about literature and art, and who had spent her life in a home filled with such talk. The other Johnson women were farm wives, raised on farms; when necessary, they worked in the fields beside their men; Rebekah's sister-in-law, Tom's wife, was a sturdy German girl quite capable, if Tom fell behind in the plowing, of hitching up a second team and handling a whole quarter-section by herself. In conversation, the Johnson women were as earthy as Rebekah was ethereal. Many of them "had their letters" and that was all; they could sign their names and laboriously pick out words in a newspaper, but they didn't read books, and didn't talk about them. Some of the women on nearby farms in the valley, and in the rolling hills that stretched away from it, didn't have even their letters; the German women didn't even speak English. Without a telephone, Rebekah could talk only with the people in the valley, and there wasn't a person in the valley with whom Rebekah enjoyed talking.
Sam was "opposite"—loud and boisterous, impatient and cursed with a fierce temper—but he and Rebekah were very much in love. "She was so shy and reserved all the time," says a girl who lived with them on the Pedernales for several months. "Then she'd hear Sam coming home. Her face would just light up like a little kid's, and out she'd go flying down to the gate to meet him." They loved to talk together—long, serious talks, usually about politics; the girl recalls the two of them sitting beside the coal-oil lamp late into the evening, talking about "things I couldn't understand." But when Sam was away, Rebekah had no one to talk to.
And Sam was often away, traveling to Austin on legislative business or to Johnson City to deliver cotton to the gin or pick up supplies, or all over the vast Hill Country to buy and sell farms—in 1908, he had decided to try to supplement his farm income by going into the real-estate business. And it wasn't always possible to come straight home when his business was concluded; more than once, having spurred a mount or whipped a team through the sixty miles of mud that constituted the only road between Austin and Stonewall in a wet spell, he would come to a creek too high to ford.
When Rebekah walked out the front door of that little house, there was nothing—a roadrunner streaking behind some rocks with something long and wet dangling from his beak, perhaps, or a rabbit disappearing around a bush so fast that all she really saw was the flash of a white tail—but otherwise nothing. There was no movement except for the ripple of the leaves in the scattered trees, no sound except for the constant whisper of the wind, unless, by happy chance, crows were cawing somewhere nearby. If Rebekah climbed, almost in desperation, the hill in back of the house, what she saw from its crest was more hills, an endless vista of hills, hills on which there was visible not a single house—somewhere up there, of course, was the Benner house, and the Weinheimer house and barn, but they were hidden from her by some rise—hills on which nothing moved, empty hills with, above them, empty sky; a hawk circling silently high overhead was an event. But most of all, there was nothing human, no one to talk to. "If men loved Texas, women, even the Anglo pioneer women, hated it," Fehrenbach has written. "… In diaries and letters a thousand separate farm wives left a record of fear that this country would drive them mad." Not only brutally hard work, but loneliness—what Walter Prescott Webb, who grew up on a farm and could barely restrain his bitterness toward historians who glamorize farm life, calls "nauseating loneliness"—was the lot of a Hill Country farm wife.
Loneliness and dread. During the day, there might be a visitor, or at least an occasional passerby on the rutted road. At night, there was no one, no one at all. No matter in what direction Rebekah looked, not a light was visible. The gentle, dreamy, bookish woman would be alone, alone in the dark—sometimes, when clouds covered the moon, in pitch dark—alone in the dark when she went out on the porch to pump water, or out to the barn to feed the horses, alone with the rustlings in the trees and the sudden splashes in the river which could be a fish jumping, or a small animal drinking, or someone coming, alone in the storms when the wind howled around the house and tore through its flimsy walls, blowing out the lamps and candles, alone in the night in the horrible nights after a norther, when the freeze came, and ice drove starving rodents from the fields to gnaw at the roofs and walls, and she could hear them chewing there in the dark—alone in bed with no human being to hear you if you should call.
SHE TRIED TO MAINTAIN her standards. Her favorite quotation, she said, was one from Browning: "The common problem, yours and mine, everyone's/Is not to fancy what were fair in life/Provided it could be—but finding first/What may be and how to make it fair up to our means." She refused to use the customary oilcloth on her table; she used tablecloths, no matter how much work it was to wash and iron them. "She made a ritual out of little things, like serving tea in very thin cups," one of her daughters says. Never—even in her old age—was she able to reconcile herself to the fact that three of her five (they came at two-year intervals) children were delivered by a midwife: when labor pains began for her first child, Lyndon, her husband sent for a doctor, but the nearest one was twenty miles away, and the creeks were on the rise; as morning approached, and the pains came closer together, it became obvious that he wouldn't arrive in time. Sam Johnson, Sr., sixty-nine years old, saddled his most reliable horse, Old Reb, rode along the Pedernales until, half a mile above the usual ford, he found a low spot, and then spurred the horse into the raging water to bring back a German midwife, Mrs. Christian Lindig, and it was she who presided at the delivery; when, in 1951, Lyndon asked his mother to jot down some family reminiscences, she did not mention Mrs. Lindig as among those "present at his birth," but credited as "the attending physician, Dr. John Blanton of Buda"—who actually didn't arrive until quite a few hours later. (Says Sam's sister Jessie: "Rebekah was always, always dignified, you know, in everything. … I don't think Rebekah would have ever wanted anybody to say that Lyndon came with a midwife instead of a real doctor. I don't think she would have ever said.")
(There was one other character-revealing note in the episode. As old Sam—the gallant, unselfish Johnson—saddled his horse, his wife, Eliza, who was a Bunton and believed that "Charity begins at home," tried to stop him from going, shouting, "You will be drowned!" as he rode off.)
IN 1913, after Lyndon and two girls had been born, Sam and Rebekah moved into Johnson City, into a snug, three-bedroom white frame house with lacy Victorian "gingerbread" scrollwork on the gables and with trellises on which she soon had wisteria growing. But gingerbread and wisteria couldn't make Johnson City into Blanco or Fredericksburg. Stella Gliddon, who moved there from Fredericksburg about the same time as Rebekah, says: "When I came to Johnson City, I thought I had come to the end of the earth."
She couldn't believe the primitiveness of the living conditions she found there, Mrs. Gliddon says. Registering at the only hotel in town—already appalled at its rickety shabbiness—she asked where the bathroom was, and was told there wasn't any, not even a sink to wash in. Nor, she was told, did most homes in Johnson City have indoor plumbing: "I don't think there were three bathrooms in the whole town," she recalls, meaning, by bathrooms, rooms with sinks and bathtubs; no one in Johnson City had a toilet in the house. When she asked where she could eat, she was told that there was one café in town, but that it was only open when the proprietors, King and Fannie Casparis, felt like opening it, and that they hadn't felt like it for some time. (Another visitor recalls going to Casparis' Café at noon one day and finding on its door a sign he considered somewhat unusual for a restaurant: CLOSED FOR LUNCH.) Since there was, therefore, no place in Johnson City where a meal could be purchased, Mrs. Gliddon decided to make herself a sandwich, but when she went shopping, she learned, to her astonishment, that no local store stocked bread because there wasn't enough demand for it; "you couldn't buy a loaf of bread in Johnson City."
Fredericksburg was a town with only 4,000 residents, but its homes were solid German rock houses with arbors and orchards (and indoor plumbing); it had handsome churches and a large, sprawling hotel and a long Main Street lined with bustling shops. Johnson City looked like the set for a Grade-B Western. Its single commercial street, Main Street (unpaved, of course), was a row of a few one-story stores, each with a wooden "awning," supported by poles, extending over the rickety wooden sidewalk that ran in front of them. It was almost wholly a one-story town: the only larger structures were a rickety water tower; a corrugated-tin cotton gin; the bank; Doc Barnwell's "Sanitarium," which had four or five beds upstairs over his office; and two square two-story stone buildings: the school and the courthouse. Scattered around that Main Street were a few homes—very few. About 1916, two of the Redford boys, Cecil and Emmette, climbed into the school belfry, from whose platform they could see about five miles in every direction; counting children and hired hands—"because," Cecil says, "we knew every person in every house anywhere around"—the total population of the area, as far as the eye could see, was 323.
The sense of isolation—of being cut off from the rest of the world—was overwhelming, Mrs. Gliddon remembers. From the top of Lookout Mountain, about four miles away, it was possible to see farther than from the school belfry, and from its crest, the hills, ridge after ridge, rolled endlessly away in an awesome, empty landscape. And then one looked down and saw Johnson City—a tiny cluster of houses huddled together in the midst of immense space.
Cars and roads would one day bridge that space, but when Sam and Rebekah moved to Johnson City, there were almost no cars—three or four in the town—and no paved roads for cars to travel on. Even by car, it took long hours to reach Fredericksburg or Austin—when the roads and creeks were passable. Often they weren't, and then someone who wanted to go to Fredericksburg or Austin had to be "brought out" of Johnson City as if out of darkest Africa. "Once I wanted to go home to Fredericksburg for Christmas," Mrs. Gliddon recalls. "I had to have a man with a hack and horse take me out to Stonewall, and a car was able to come out from Fredericksburg to there and take me the rest of the way." Johnson City was, she says, "an island town," a town surrounded by—and cut off by—an ocean of land.
Rebekah saw it the same way. And its people, while friendly—"the people [in Johnson City] were the friendliest, warmest people I met anywhere," Mrs. Gliddon says—were not people who could provide Rebekah with the things so important to her. "She was probably the best-educated woman in the whole county," her son Sam Houston has written, and she probably was; she was the only woman with a college degree in Johnson City; no more than two or three residents of the town—of either gender—had spent any time at all in college; Johnson City was, in fact, a town with hardly any books except for the textbooks used in school. One farmer, Robert Lee Green, was so desperate for something to read that when there was some evening event at school, he would sneak out of the auditorium and down to the high-school classroom and sit there reading a history textbook until it was time to go home. Worst of all for Rebekah, the schools were terribly inadequate; her children, she believed, were getting hardly any education at all. Once, when her mother came to visit, she said to her with desperation in her voice: "I don't want to bring up my children in Johnson City!"
Shortly after they moved to Johnson City, their fourth child, Sam Houston, was born. Rebekah had wanted to have her confinement in the Sanitarium, but Doc Barnwell told her that its handful of beds was needed for patients more seriously ill. Although the doctor was present this time, the birth was hard; recuperating from the delivery took several weeks, and for years thereafter, Rebekah Johnson would periodically take to her bed for days or weeks at a time. She had always hated the drudgery of routine housework, and now she all but stopped doing it. Her mother came to visit more and more, staying for weeks at a time to help out, and Sam hired a local girl to come in and clean—Rebekah's neighbors said that what the mother and the maid didn't do remained undone.
Nor, the neighbors said, was Rebekah thrifty. In this desperately cash-poor country, where pennies mattered, women watched them. "Make, or make do" was the saying. The reason there was no bread for sale in Johnson City was that the baker in Marble Falls, who had to cart it in by wagon, wanted five cents a loaf; rather than spend that money, Johnson City women baked their own bread—although that task required them to spend the entire day adjusting the fire in their stoves, continually putting in wood to keep it at the correct temperature. Johnson City women scrubbed their floors on their hands and knees; "brooms," Ava Johnson Cox, Lyndon's cousin, remembers, "were too expensive, so you didn't dare use them every day." Rebekah didn't live like that; in the opinion of her neighbors, she couldn't. Says Ava, whose mother received ten dollars from her husband, Tom, every month for household expenses and, by making or making do, always had two dollars left at the month's end: "Our mother learned as a girl how to can, how to preserve, how to do all the things that a farm woman had to do. She [Rebekah] had never been taught that, and she didn't want to learn. And a woman like Rebekah, even if she had wanted to learn—she just would never fit in to the life that we had. She couldn't learn that around here every penny mattered."
But at the time, Rebekah Johnson's neighbors didn't think badly of her for not working the way they did. They saw that she had other qualities—and that she was generous in their use.
By volunteering her services, she persuaded the school board to start a "literary society," in which she taught poetry, and "elocution," which to her meant the whole art of public speaking. Teaching public speaking to these shy country girls and boys—many of whom came to school only occasionally from their isolated farms and ranches—was difficult. She started the younger students on spelling bees and "'rithmetic matches," which gave them their first chance to stand up in front of an audience. Then they progressed to "declamation" of poems, to "pantomimes and dialogues," then to debates, and, finally, the high-school pupils would have to speak extemporaneously on subjects they would study in the books, pamphlets and magazines Rebekah ordered from the extension library at the University of Texas in Austin. The girls felt keenly that they were "country"—that they lacked social graces—so Rebekah expanded the curriculum to include dancing: fifty years and more later, one of her pupils, asked what kind of dancing, suddenly became lost in reverie and then, all at once, began humming, very softly, with her wrinkled old face smiling in reminiscence, "Little red wagon painted blue, little red wagon painted blue, little red wagon painted blue, skip to m'Lou, my darling." To records played on a Victrola, which she brought to school—the school couldn't afford one—Rebekah taught not only square dances but waltzes and Virginia reels, and then, in the words of another elderly Johnson City resident, "she teached girls how to stand, … how to sit down properly." She did the work without pay—there was no money to give her, and she didn't ask for any—and her students were grateful to her. "We didn't have anything before," one recalls. "Before Lyndon's mother came to school and got this going, school was only sitting in class and not raise your finger or say a word or you got spanked. We didn't think they'd let her do the literary society; that was play, that was taking your mind off your books."
They were grateful also for the lessons Lyndon's mother gave in private—in the living room of the Johnson home. "Those lessons were the highlight of my young life," says Doc Barnwell's daughter, Gene.
Those lessons changed lives, in fact.
One girl who received them was Lyndon's cousin Ava. Ava's sister, Margaret, was beautiful and lively and outgoing. Ava was not. She was very shy, a little stout, and although she wasn't homely, she considered herself so. Rebekah was taking one grade at a time in her literary society, working her way toward the older pupils, and Ava dreaded the day she would get to her grade.
When Mrs. Johnson did, and began assigning speech topics, Ava recalls, "I said I couldn't do a speech.
"'You come over to the house this afternoon.'
"At the house, I said, 'I just can't do it, Aunt Rebekah.' And she said, 'Oh, yes, you can. There's nothing impossible if you put the mind to it. I know you have the ability to deliver a speech.' And I cried, and I said, 'I just can't do it!'
"Aunt Rebekah said, 'Oh, yes, you can.' And she said, 'Pretty is just skin-deep, darling.' Ooooh, I'll never forget her saying that. And she repeated that Browning poem to me. And she never let up, never let up. Never. Boosting me along, telling me I could do it. She taught me speaking and elocution, and I went to the state championships with it, and I want to tell you, I was one scared chicken. And I won a medal, a gold medal, in competitions involving the whole state. And she still kept boosting me along. I wanted to be a teacher, but I never thought I could: I just didn't think that I could ever get it over to a child. I had always wanted to be a teacher, but I couldn't sell myself. I had an inferiority complex that wouldn't quit. She told me, 'You have everything that it takes to make a good teacher. Just make up your mind to do it.' She never let up, telling me I could do it. And I did. And I became a teacher, and taught for eighteen years. I owe a debt to Aunt Rebekah that I can never repay. She made me know that I could do what I never thought I could do."
Many children owed a similar debt to Rebekah Johnson. Her patience in teaching English to German-American children who spoke no English at home and often not in school, either (classes in Fredericksburg and the Hill Country's other German communities were often conducted only in German), became so legendary throughout the area that German families brought their children long miles to the Johnson home. Asked years later why he had done so, one man—from San Marcos, thirty miles away—said: "I had heard praises of Mrs. Johnson since the time when I was a child."
Her husband adored her. Their marriage was a "miss fit," says Ava, pronouncing that last word as two words to give it the emphasis she feels it needs for accuracy. "It was a miss fit, but she wanted to make the best of it because she loved him. And he loved her. Oh, he adored her. He worshipped the ground she walked on."
A miss fit it was, in the sense that their personalities were indeed as "completely opposite" as Rebekah wrote. "Mrs. Johnson was always cheerful, kind and considerate. … She was a gentle, gentle woman," Mrs. Gliddon wrote. "Quite the contrary was her husband, Mr. Sam." If nothing could ruffle her calm, so nothing could tame his temper. The Buntons burned without matches, and his fuse was terribly short. And often his anger was directed at his wife.
But it was a temper as quick to die out as to blaze up. As his wife wrote: "Highly organized, sensitive, and nervous, he was impatient of inefficiency and ineptitude and quick to voice his displeasure; equally quick, however, in making amends when some word of his caused pain to another." Once, recalls Louise Casparis, daughter of one of the poorest families in Johnson City, who worked in the Johnson home, "Mr. Sam lost his temper at me—really got mad about something I had done wrong." But when she arrived at the house the next day, "there on the mantelpiece was a beautiful box of candy for me." He never said a word of apology to her, but she learned he had driven all the way to Fredericksburg to get it. Louise—and other women who worked (and, in some cases, lived) in the Johnson home—agree with neighbors and relatives that the attempts of some biographers to portray the Johnson home as one of unending and bitter conflict between husband and wife are incorrect. "That's not the home I saw," says Cynthia Crider. What most of them recall most vividly is the way Sam would kid Rebekah—about the house he had bought for her ("He used to grumble, kiddingly, about all that gingerbread and all"), about the fact that while she liked to boast of her Baines ancestry, she never mentioned her maternal—Huffman—line ("When she got stubborn over something, Sam would say, 'That's your German blood again. German blood! Look at your brother's name. Huffman! Probably was Hoffmann once—in Berlin!' And Rebekah would say, 'Sam, you know it's Holland Dutch.'"). They recall how "You could see that underneath the kidding he had so much respect for her, for her learning and—well, just for her." And they recall how Sam and Rebekah would sit and talk—for hours. If he had been yelling at her one minute, the next he would be making amends in his own way—telling a funny story. "One minute he'd be shouting, and the next minute she'd be laughing at something he said. He could make her laugh and laugh and laugh." Sam loved to talk politics with Rebekah. She herself was to write that "In disposition, upbringing and background, these two were vastly dissimilar. However, in principles and motives, the real essentials of life, they were one." And that was true: they were both idealists. "The Baineses were always strong for high ideals," she would say, years later. "They talked about high ideals. We felt that you have to have a great purpose behind what you do, or no matter what you do, it won't amount to anything. Lyndon's father always felt the interest of the people was first." Says Louise Casparis: "It was something to see how glad she always was to see him when he came home. There was never any question in my mind that these were two people who …" Louise's voice fades away at this point, and she expresses what she saw of their feelings by making a gesture with her arms—an embracing motion.
And for a while, it didn't seem to matter that Rebekah couldn't help Sam as his brother's wife helped him.
For a couple of years out in Stonewall, the cotton crop was good, and Sam got good work out of his hired hands. "Men who worked for him used to joke that if they could have been anywhere else, they would rather have been," Ava says. "He was a driver, Uncle Sam was. He was a hard worker, and he wanted everyone else to work hard, too." And he did well in "real-estatin'." In at least one case, where he purchased a ranch for about $20,000 and quickly sold it to Emory Stribling for $32,375, he made a huge profit by Hill Country standards. He hired girls—Louise Casparis and Addie Stevenson and others—to come in and clean the house; and Louise's mother would take the Johnson wash home—lugging it on her back in a bedsheet—and when she returned it, Old Lady Spates would come in and iron it. He even hired a "chauffeur" to take Rebekah and the children for rides in the big Hudson he had purchased: the "chauffeur" was only Guy Arrington, a local teen-ager, but no one else in the Hill Country had one. Rebekah's health was still not good—she had to stay in bed a particularly long time after the birth of her fifth and last child, Lucia, in 1916, and the next year she had two "minor" operations from which she was slow recovering—but she had plenty of leisure to do what she enjoyed and was gifted at: the Literary Society at school, elocution lessons; her needlepoint was much admired. She "put on" plays at school, and, to raise money for local organizations, in her front yard, with the townspeople paying admission; her favorite was Deacon Doves of Old Virginia. Sam was always bringing home surprise presents for her, and one day in 1916 he arrived home to announce that Gordon Gore was leaving for Arizona because of ill health and had sold him two items which Sam was sure Rebekah would like: a new Victrola and his newspaper, the Johnson City Record, an eight-page weekly. That didn't work out too well—people in Johnson City were so short of cash that many couldn't afford subscriptions; Sam had to take cigars, cabbages, and, on one occasion, a goat, in payment; and Rebekah was unable to cope with the mechanical intricacies of the old hand press; after four months she asked Sam to sell the paper; for years thereafter, Sam would laughingly tell the new owner, Reverdy Gliddon, "I'll tell you, Gliddon, that was one time I got into something I didn't know anything about." But Rebekah's interest in writing had been reawakened. She became the Johnson City correspondent for the Austin and Fredericksburg newspapers, mailing in local news items once a week, and wrote poetry, none of which was ever published. Sam saved little; everything he made, he used to buy more: more ranches; the little auditorium (derisively called the Opera House) over the Johnson City bank where movies were occasionally shown; the town's only hotel. He almost seemed to be trying to achieve, on a much smaller scale but still the largest available to him, what the original Johnson brothers had tried to achieve: to build a little business empire in the Hill Country.
He did a lot of strutting. "You can tell a man by his boots and his hat and the horse he rides," and Sam Johnson's boots were hand-tooled in San Antonio, and his big pearl-gray Stetsons were the most expensive that could be purchased in Joseph's Emporium down the street from the Driskill Hotel in Austin, and his Hudson—his chauffeured Hudson—was the biggest and most expensive car in the whole Hill Country. He dressed differently from the other men in Johnson City—that was very important to him. "You never saw my father go out of the house in shirt sleeves," his daughter Rebekah recalls.
But people didn't take the strutting amiss then, for, as Stella Gliddon puts it, "Sam Johnson had a good heart." On the day she arrived in Johnson City, Stella recalls—on that terrible day when she felt she had come "to the end of the earth"—the nineteen-year-old girl was sitting on the porch of the hotel in the fading evening light, dreading the moment when the light would be gone and she would have to go up to her shabby little room, and thinking that she "could never live in a town like this" and would have to give up her new job and go back to Fredericksburg in the morning, when Sam Johnson came by, and seemed to see at once how she was feeling. "Sam knew my father real well, and he knew me, too," she recalls. "He came right up on the porch and said, 'Stay the night with Rebekah and me, and we'll find you a place tomorrow.' And I did—I slept in the room with the girls—and the next day, he found me a place. And I was real grateful for that. And that was the way Mr. Sam Johnson was. He was good for helping people. If you needed money and he had one dollar, he'd give you half of it—that's the kind of man Mr. Sam was."
People in the Pedernales Valley turned to "Mr. Sam"—that was what he was called, as a mark of respect; no one ever referred to him without the "Mister" then—when they were in trouble, and if they didn't turn to him, he sought them out. Once, he heard that an impoverished German who had done odd jobs for him, a man named Haunish, was in jail in Fredericksburg. Convinced that Haunish had been convicted only because, unable to speak English, he didn't know the law, Sam drove to Fredericksburg, hired a lawyer, went with him to see the judge, and got Haunish released. (A few days thereafter, there was a knock on the Johnsons' front door; it was Haunish, who had determined to repay Sam by doing any odd jobs that needed doing. He painted the house, laid sidewalks, put up more trellises; he wouldn't leave until he was convinced that he had done every bit of work for Sam that he could.)
And Sam was always friendly—laughing and joking; when he walked into the Fredericksburg bank, a teller recalls, he soon had all the tellers laughing; even the bank's stern old president, whom Sam would have come to see because he was constantly paying off old loans or making new ones to buy more property, would sit there laughing with Mr. Sam. And he loved to talk—to discuss politics or world affairs. If, strolling along the wooden sidewalk of Main Street in Johnson City, he bumped into a friend and began talking, he would sit down with him on the edge of the sidewalk and continue the conversation there. Robert Lee Green's daughter recalls that Green was "in hot water with the church-going people in town" because "he believed in the Darwinian theory, so they accused him of being an agnostic." But, she says, "Sam Johnson was broad-minded. He would come by and they'd sit there by our fire spitting tobacco juice into the fire and talking about Darwin and other things all night. My father loved to talk with Sam Johnson. There were a lot of people who loved Sam Johnson then." He was not only friendly but respected. When, in April, 1917, America entered the war, Blanco County farmers, who desperately needed their sons to help work the farms, were very much concerned that decisions of the draft board be just, and they picked Mr. Sam as one of its three members. And when, in November of that year, a special election was announced to fill a vacancy in the district's legislative seat, the seat Sam had been forced to give up ten years before, and Sam, able now to afford the job, announced for it, no one even bothered to run against him.
AFTER HIS ELECTION, Sam was very happy. As he swung open the front gate, coming home in the evening, he would be met by what his daughter Lucia was to call "a flying mass of children." (Lucia, the baby, always beat the others to him.) Swinging her up on his shoulders, Sam would put his arms around his other children and they would walk to the kitchen, where Rebekah would be cooking, and then demand of her and the children—in a ritual the children remembered fondly decades later: "I've brought a bag of sugar" (or a loaf of bread, or some candy) "and what will you give me for a bag of sugar?" "A million dollars," the children—or Rebekah—might shout. "A million dollars isn't enough!" Sam would reply, refusing to surrender the package until he had been paid in kisses.
Supper at the Johnsons' long, narrow table, at which the children sat on benches down the sides, was like supper in no other home in Johnson City. "The first time I ate there, I was a little shocked at how loud it was," recalls a friend of Lyndon's. "The laughing—and the arguments that went on, arguing and fussing. Back and forth with everyone joining in. Mostly about politics—that was the thing that dominated his [the father's] conversation. But about everything under the sun. Every time it calmed down, he would start it up again on some new topic. And then as the meal was ending and the kids were getting up, Lyndon's father, he sort of winked at me, and said: 'I argue with them to keep their wits sharp.' And that was a revelation to me. That he was doing this all on purpose."
After supper, with the light flickering in the painted glass kerosene lamp which hung from the high ceiling on long chains—the lamp swung gently in a breeze, the glass pendants which hung from it tinkling softly—Sam Johnson might open a blue-backed speller and "give out" words in an informal, but fiercely contested, spelling bee. Or he might stage debates: Stella Gliddon was present one night when the topic was: "What's better, sorghum or honey?" Or the whole family might go into the front parlor, a warm room with its two horsehide sofas and pink flowered wallpaper and the big portrait of Grandfather Baines in its gilt frame, and the two bookcases—small, but they contained far more books than any other home in Johnson City—on either side of the fireplace, and, while Mrs. Johnson sat doing needlework, listen to records (or "Edison discs," as they were called); "Red Wing" by Frederick Allen Kerry, was a favorite, and so was a recording of William Jennings Bryan's speeches—largely because hearing Bryan's voice would move Sam to tell stories about him, and the children loved to hear Sam's stories.
"They loved their father," says Wilma Fawcett, who, as one of Lucia's closest friends, spent many evenings at the Johnsons'. "When I see that family in my mind, I see him laughing, laughing with the kids. It was harum-scarum—not like my house, where everything was decorum. But it was fun. We had such hilarious good times together. I see them as a warm, happy family."
On this point, the people who know—the people who were there, who were in the Johnson home with the Johnsons—agree. Ask a score of them, and a score agree: it was a warm, happy family.
Except, they also agree, for one of its members: the eldest son.