So Glad, So Glad

In her first official trip outside Washington since becoming First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson visited the Appalachia section of Pennsylvania, where thousands of families live in the poverty of a dismal past. Last week she made her second trip--an excursion into the future at the Huntsville, Ala., Marshall Space Flight Center, where she saw the Saturn moon rocket.

A Request to Uncle John. Arriving at the Redstone airfield, she got in a few plugs for her husband's space record: "Since 1958 one of Lyndon's most intense interests has been space. It would make him mad to see anyone outstrip us. He was co-author of the space bill in the Senate."

At the space center, engineers tried to explain their work to Lady Bird in terms meaningful to her. The 182-ft.first stage of the Saturn I is "three feet taller than the White House," its thrust is "equal to the power required to drive 100,000 Cadillacs," and the concrete in a 400-ft.-high test stand "would be sufficient to build a four-lane highway from Dallas to Fort Worth." Said Lady Bird: "Thank you for putting it into words I can almost understand."

To the delight of photographers, Lady Bird donned a missileman's hard hat at a jaunty angle while Center Director Wernher von Braun clapped on his own head a Texas-style hat the President had given him on a recent visit to the L.B.J. ranch. At a cafeteria-style luncheon, she picked up the check for 59 of her visiting Alabama "kissin' cousins." She could hardly keep them straight, and small wonder. After all, her Alabama grandmother on her father's side had been married four times and had 13 children. She asked "Uncle John" Patillo, of Billingsley, if he would "take me walking through the pine trees like when I was a little girl." Uncle John allowed as how he might not be up to it these days. "I'm 87, you know."

A Ride with Aunt Effie. That afternoon, with fingers pressed to her ears against the thunderous noise, Lady Bird attended the test firing of a Saturn booster. "I never dreamed it would be that loud," she said, "It was fantastic. If you leaned up against this wall you just could feel it was quivering." Before leaving she recalled girlhood days in Alabama: "Until I was about 20, summertime always meant Alabama to me. With Aunt Effie we would board the train in Marshall and ride to the part of the world that meant watermelon cuttings, picnics at the creek, and a lot of company every Sunday. I am so glad, I am so glad I could come down and visit with you again."

In Alabama, where Governor George Wallace is backing a slate of independent electors for next fall, Lyndon Johnson faces an uncertain future. But after last week, if Lady Bird were running, there would be no doubt whatever about the outcome.

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