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He never did. Settling down to husband his fortune, he raised chickens, sat in his front-porch rocker shelling pecans and rubbernecking at the tourists who came to rubberneck at him. Plain-spoken to the last, he always regretted having given up his Speaker's role for the vice-presidency, which he said "wasn't worth a pitcher of warm spit."
Garner wanted to live to be 92 so that he could say he had spent half his life in government and the other half "in peace." He made that goal with almost seven years to spare before he died last week of a coronary occlusion, 64 years to the week from his first appearance in Congress. Uvalde, which was planning Cactus Jack's 99th birthday celebration, sorrowfully buried him in the Garner family plot.