Return of the Native

THE PRESIDENCY

When Lyndon Baines Johnson enters the voting booth this week at the Pedernales Electric Co-Op in Johnson City, his name, for a change, will not be on the ballot. After 31 years in Washington and ten consecutive election victories, L.B.J. will be coming home. His fellow-Texans in Johnson City will be pleased to have him back.

They should be. During Lyndon Johnson's three decades in Washington, the community has been transformed from a decaying, unpaved cow town into a humming tourist mecca. As Congressman, Senator, Vice President and President, Johnson City's native son has showered largesse on his home hill country. First, in New Deal days, came the Lower Colorado River Authority, whose dams harnessed and tamed waters that had ravaged the countryside. Then he won for Johnson City the Pedernales Co-Op, which today provides power from the authority's steam plants to some 18,500 customers in seven counties. Lately there has been more: a handsome 50-unit $650,000 housing development for the aged and the poor, an $840,000 federal grant for a badly needed 30-bed hospital, and a small, as yet unannounced federal building that will house the post office and local federal agencies.

House of Parlors. Johnson City (pop. 854) has also helped itself. A new dam on the Pedernales, with storage tanks that have raised the town's water reserves to a quarter-million gallons, was assisted by a federal matching grant after Johnson Citians had voted a $217,000 revenue bond issue to finance their half. Still, Lyndon Johnson gets the credit for most improvements: there is a Lake Lyndon B. Johnson in nearby Kingsland, a Lyndon B. Johnson High School, a Lyndon Baines Johnson State Park, and several roads bearing the presidential name. In the Texas state capital of Austin--an hour's drive from Johnson City--there will be the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library at the University of Texas. About the only local institution that does not commemorate L.B.J. is Johnson City itself, which was named for his pioneer forebears.

The biggest magnet for visitors is L.B.J.'s elaborately cosmeticized "Boyhood Home," a Texas Historical Landmark, which after three years of operation greeted its 200,000th visitor last summer. The modest white frame house is something more than "restored." All the rooms are furnished as parlors, stuffed with turn-of-the-century furniture and L.B.J. memorabilia. More rustic, but open to the public only when the President is away, is a rebuilt "birthplace" cabin on the edge of the ranch itself.

Johnson Water. The 80,000 pilgrims who visit these shrines yearly have their choice of a myriad of mementos, ranging from genuine "L.B.J. hats by Stetson" at the O. & S. Dry Goods Store to L.B.J. mugs, plates and silverware and Ladybird birdhouses at Minnie Cox's curio shop. There are even 490 vials of water from the Pedernales and Lake Lyndon B. Johnson. Mrs. Margaret Withers, whose husband owns a hardware store, opened an "Art Gallery and Historical Association" that won a lot of guffaws at first from sidewalk critics--until its serene, pastoral oils and watercolors began to draw carloads of visitors. Ten-term Mayor George Byars argues that all this vitality has something to do with the hill-country climate. Claudialea Watts, editor of the weekly Record-Courier, thinks it's just the people themselves: "We're steady here."

Some Johnson Citians think that the town's quiet, rustic ways may be just a bit too steady to hold down so rambunctious an activist as their celebrated ex-President. True, there is the newly added attraction of the Southwest Live stock Sales Company, ten miles north at Round Mountain, a $400,000 air-conditioned complex of shops, restaurants and stockpens that will doubtless be the most luxurious livestock auction center in the world. It is an open secret that President Johnson may be an owner of the complex, but even that may not hold his attention long.

He has already agreed, after all, to lecture at the University of Texas School of Public Affairs. He has also agreed to give a series of lectures at Rice, and has invitations from 40 more universities, including such places as Harvard, Princeton and M.I.T. One project that may keep him closer to home can only be described as monumental-- assembling the memoirs and papers of his entire political career. But wherever he is, the home folks expect that Squire Lyndon will continue to keep Johnson City on the map.

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