The Path to Power (13 page)

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.

A
FTER 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.”