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He'd Rather Reason. Lyndon's saving grace was what a fellow student, Dr. Emmette S. Redford, now on the University of Texas faculty, calls his "inquisitive mind and intense interest in everything related to politics." That interest was encouraged by his father, a state legislator, and spurred Lyndon's lifelong interest in public speaking. As a high school debater. Lyndon with another student won a countywide debate competition. In most of his dealings, recalls Redford, Lyndon "tried to win his points with words—he'd reason and argue instead of fighting—and in those days kids had plenty of fights."
A bean-pole six-footer at 15, Lyndon played forward on the basketball team, pitched and played first base for the town baseball team, took studies casually. "I wouldn't say I overapplied myself at all," says Johnson. "I liked to play and enjoy myself." No bookworm, he shunned fiction—and still does. Whenever his mother gave him something to read, he would ask: "But Ma, is it real?"
Completing eleventh grade at 15 with just five 1924 classmates—every one of whom, surprisingly, went on to college —Lyndon disappointed his parents by not turning immediately to college. Instead, as he told a recent graduating class at Johnson City High, he "headed West to seek the fame and fortune that I knew America offered." Less grandly, that meant that he and a few buddies piled into a rattletrap car early one morning and stole away to California. Twenty months later, totally broke, he hitchhiked home, worked on a road gang under a searing sun for a dollar a day. His mother kept drumming college into his head, and Lyndon finally conceded that "I'd rather use my head than my back to earn a living." He chose Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos because "it was nearest my home, I could get in, and it was most economical."
Southwest Texas, then a collection of six drab stone buildings set amid giant live oaks and honeysuckle atop steep Chatauqua Hill, was, and still is, on no one's list of top colleges. Yet it gave the free-swinging youth plenty of elbow room. Since Johnson City school was unaccredited and had only eleven grades, Lyndon first had to take a sub-college cram course at San Marcos to qualify, was found fit in just three months, entered in March 1927.
His father had gone broke trading cotton, so Lyndon arrived on campus with just $75 borrowed from a Blanco bank and began earning $15 a month as a janitor. Yet board and room cost $30 a month. The school's kindly president, Dr. C. E. Evans, let Lyndon put a cot in a small room above Evans' garage. In return, Lyndon became Evans' long-striding legman, running errands all over campus. By eating just two meals a day, Lyndon cut his food expenses to $15 a month; his laundry cost 50¢ a week. When Lyndon ran short, Evans found odd jobs for him to earn cash, such as painting the garage. "They say the president's garage had more coats of paint on it than any house in San Marcos," says retired Government Professor Howard Mell Greene, the teacher Lyndon once introduced to President Kennedy as "the man that started the fires under me." Lyndon also peddled Real Silk socks and, recalls fellow student Bill Deason, "Dr. Evans wound up with more socks than any man in the U.S."