Beatrice Gormley - George W. Bush: Our 43rd President

To my husband, Bob, who got me interested in politics

IN JULY 1946 GEORGE W. BUSH went to his first party. It was the lawn party after his christening in New Haven, Connecticut. He had been born only a few days before, on July 6. That made him a member of the baby boom generation, born after World War II.

This baby was the first child of Barbara Pierce Bush and George Herbert Walker Bush. The babys fathertall, lean, and good-lookingwas a student at Yale University. The lively, auburn-haired mother had been a student at Smith College. They named their baby George Walker Bushnot exactly George Jr., but very close. They called him Georgie.

Georgies father would become the forty-first president of the United States, but not for another forty-two years. However, even in those early days George Bush had already given his son a great deal to live up to. At Andover, a top-rate preparatory school in Massachusetts, he had been a baseball star. In World War II he had been a navy fighter pilot, a war hero.

Both of Georgies parents came from families who had done well in business. One of his grandfathers was a Wall Street investor, and the other was the president of a large publishing company. For generations both sides of the family had been influential in politics.

For two years after Georgies birth the Bush family lived in a little apartment in New Haven while George finished his degree at Yale. He was a baseball star in college, as he had been in prep school. Barbara, an enthusiastic sports fan, took her little son to the games to cheer on his first-baseman father.

After George Bush graduated from Yale in 1948, he could have stepped into a comfortable job in the financial world in New York, like his father and grandfather. But George was looking for a more adventurous career, away from his fathers eye. Barbara, who had grown up in the wealthy suburb of Rye, New York, encouraged her husband. She, too, was eager to get away from their families and do something different.

One of the most exciting business opportunities in the country at that time was in the oil fields of Texas. With the new technology developed during World War II, drillers could reach deeper oil deposits. And as the economy boomed, the demand for fuel was skyrocketing.

So in the summer of 1948 George Bush accepted a job in Texas. He was hired by Neil Mallon, a close family friend who headed an oil corporation. Revving the engine of his red two-door Studebaker, a graduation present from his parents, George drove all the way from the East Coast to West Texas.

A week later Barbara and Georgie flew out to Texas to join George. They found a place quite different from green, woodsy New England. Around the working-class town of Odessa the land stretched flat, bleak, and dusty all the way to the horizon. Instead of pine-scented sea breezes, there were hot winds that blew sand and tumbleweeds down the street. And when the wind blew a certain way, there was also the strong smell of oil fumes from the nearby plants.

The Bushes living quarters were not inviting either. Despite his wealthy background, George Bush was starting at the bottom in the oil business. The Bushes home in Odessa was a two-room apartment, and they shared a bathroom with another family. They were thankful to have a bathroom at all, though, since most of their neighbors used outhouses. And the Bushes had a refrigeratoralso unusual in that neighborhood.

But West Texas was a fabulous place, as George wrote to a friend the next year. Fortunes can be made in the land end of the oil business, and of course can be lost. He spent long hours out in the oil fields, learning the business from the ground up.

Meanwhile, Barbara took care of Georgie and got used to living where people were Eastern-prejudiced, as she put it in a letter to her family. She missed her old friends and family. But Barbara was naturally cheerful and good at getting along with all kinds of people, and she had unshakable faith in George. She adored their two-year-old son.

So did George. He is really cute, Georgies father wrote to a friend in August 1948. Whenever I come home he greets me and talks a blue streak, sentences disjointed of course but enthusiasm and spirit boundless. He is a real blond and pot-bellied. He tries to say everything and the results are often hilarious.... He seems to be very happy wherever he is and he is very good about amusing himself in the small yard we have here.

George and Barbara hoped to have several children, and they were delighted when a daughter was born in December 1949. They named her Pauline Robinson Bush, after Barbaras mother, and they nicknamed her Robin. Barbara came home from the hospital with Georgies new sister on Christmas Day. That was the same Christmas that Georgies grandfather Pierce gave the Bushes one of those new inventions, a television set. It was a hulking thing, with a tiny yellow screen.

The following year, 1950, the Bushes bought a house in Midland, not as close to the oil fields as their first home in West Texas. The house was in a new development, nicknamed Easter Egg Row because each of the little two-bedroom houses plunked down on the dirt roads was painted a different color. Otherwise, they were all exactly the same. The Bushes house, on East Maple (there were no actual maple trees, or any other trees), was light blue.

The Bushes new neighborhood was full of young families from other parts of the country, all hoping to strike it rich in the oil business. George and Barbara quickly made friends, and so did Georgie. One of his first and best friends was the boy next door, Randy Roden.

Although George Bush was working as hard as ever, he had plenty of energy left over for community life. He and Barbara led the drive to build a community theater in Midland. George and the other fathers started a Little League team, clearing tumbleweeds from the yellow sand to make a baseball diamond. Both he and Barbara taught Sunday school at the First Presbyterian Church.

Barbara also helped organize charities, volunteered at the Midland hospital, and pitched in to start a local YMCA. Among many other activities, the YMCA offered electric-train races for boys and their fathers. A few years later Georgie would get his picture in the Midland Reporter-Telegram for winning first place in the eight-year-old division.

Every weekend backyard barbecues filled Midlands dry air with the scent of grilled hamburgers. Friends and neighbors milled around the Bushes backyard, while little kids ran back and forth. Georgie often wore his beloved cowboy outfit, including hat, boots, bandanna, and lasso. His sister, Robin, was beginning to walk.

Less than a year after the Bushes moved to Midland, George decided to go into the oil business for himself. He and a neighbor across the street formed a company. Now George Bush was busier than ever. But he made a point of spending time with his son, often playing catch in the backyard.

Sometimes Mr. Bush took Georgie and his friend Randy out into the oil fields with him. The oil patch, with its towering derricks, was like a strange forest in that flat, treeless country. At night oil fumes blurred the bright stars of the desert sky, and machinery clanked as the pumps worked around the clock. The boys would sleep in the back of the station wagon while George Bush checked the wells.

During the hottest part of the broiling West Texas summers George, Barbara, Georgie, and Robin took off for the cool coast of Maine. All the relatives gathered at the family retreat on Walkers Point in Kennebunkport. Sometimes the Bushes stayed with Georges uncle Herbie Walker, who was backing Georges business. Grandfather Prescott Bush was always there, dignified and sternscary, the kids of the Bush-Walker clan called him. But Grandmother Dorothy Walker Bush was kind, and great fun for sports-loving children to be with.