The torrent of action on education and the reminiscence about it that pour from the White House is forceful evidence that its occupant recalls his own school days with singular relish and vividness. Before he turned to politics in 1932 at the age of 24, Lyndon Johnson was a not-to-be-ignored student in half a dozen schools and a teacher at three levels: grammar school, high school and college.
Johnson's boyhood interest in schooling came by family tradition: his father had taught in two one-room country schools in Texas, and his mother, who was the granddaughter of a Baylor University president, had taught classes in "expression" in Fredericksburg, Texas, and later in her home. In 1912, when Lyndon was four, she taught him to read simple primers ("I see the cow") in their Texas hill-country home. Then she sent him trudging a mile down a ranch road, lunch pail in hand, to Kate Deadrich's one-room tin-covered Junction school, where rules were waived to let him enter first grade short of his fifth birthday. Mrs. Johnson's aim was not wholly pedagogical: with the lively Lyndon confined to school from 9 to 4, he was less likely to fall into the Pedernales River.
Lyndon's "Miss Kate," now Mrs. Chester C. Loney, 72, who lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Rough and Ready, Calif., was 19 then, remembers Lyndon well. "He was an adorable boy," she recalls. "He always sat on my lap when he recited his lessons. He would put a little finger under each word. You could see he was real pleased as he slowly made out the words, a letter at a time. He was bright and very affectionate." Yet for all her softness toward her youngest pupil, Kate Deadrich, at 5 ft. 10 in. and 165 lbs., was an imposing disciplinarian.
Tears over a Donkey. Next year, Lyndon shifted to another country school in nearby Albert, riding the four miles to and from school on a donkey. Johnson recalls that other kids poked so much fun at this that he often dismounted in tears. Then his mother told him about Jesus riding into Jerusalem on an ass. "I never cried again after that," says Johnson. "I felt like that little donkey was a white charger."
When his family moved into Johnson City (pop. then 350), Lyndon attended the two-story pink limestone school—biggest building in town. Five teachers taught grades one through eleven, carrying two or three grades each. Lyndon helped sweep the floor and stoke the potbellied wood stove. His favorite subjects, largely because of the able teacher, Superintendent Scott Klett, were civics and history. "I didn't like math or science much," says Johnson.
Lyndon was no angelic student. He was once thrashed for stamping on a board to splash muddy water on girls at the outdoor fountain. He got into a fistfight when a boy broke up his marble game, found solace in his teacher's judgment that he had a right to get mad.