41: A Portrait of My Father

by George W. Bush

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  IN NOVEMBER 1945, George H.W. Bush stepped out of uniform and enrolled at Yale. Like many of his generation, college had been delayed by the war. Many incoming freshmen were parents. Mother and Dad joined their ranks on July 6, 1946, when I was born at Grace–New Haven Hospital. They named me George Walker Bush, after my father and great-grandfather—minus the Herbert. I recall asking Mother why I wasn’t a Junior. “Son, most forms don’t have room for five names,” she said. I took my time to arrive, entering the world only after my grandmother Dorothy Walker Bush administered a healthy dose of castor oil to Mother. (It was my first taste of the oil business.)

  Mother and Dad lived less than an hour from his parents in Greenwich, but life in New Haven must have felt worlds away from Prescott and Dorothy Bush’s house on Grove Lane. My parents first rented a tiny apartment on Chapel Street with their black standard poodle, Turbo. When I arrived, they had to move out because the landlord allowed dogs but not babies. They found a place on Edwards Street, where the owner allowed babies but not dogs. Fortunately, I made the cut and Turbo went to live at Grove Lane. In their final year in New Haven, my parents moved to a large house on Hillhouse Avenue occupied by about a dozen families with children. Mother still laughs about hanging my diapers out on the clothesline in plain view of the Yale President, who lived next door.

  My parents enjoyed their New Haven years. Any stresses of college paled in comparison to what my father had endured during the war. That’s not to say that Dad took it easy. As usual, George Bush threw himself fully into the task. He worked hard in the classroom, earning Phi Beta Kappa academic distinction and graduating in two and a half years. He was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He was very outgoing and made a lot of friends. On their first Thanksgiving at Yale, Dad learned that some of his classmates could not travel home to be with their families. So he invited ten friends over for dinner. Mother reminded him that they did not have a dining room. That did not matter. My parents and their friends sat on the couches and the floor and enjoyed the first Thanksgiving turkey that Mother had ever prepared. That impromptu meal was a preview of things to come. Throughout the years, my parents’ many homes were open to family and friends. While Mother occasionally complained about the endless stream of visitors, she was always a gracious hostess.

  Not only did my father make friends, he kept them. Decades later, he was in regular contact with his college friends. One of his friends was Lud Ashley from Toledo, Ohio. Like Dad, Lud eventually went into politics. Unlike Dad, Lud was a liberal Democrat. In Washington, they were on the opposite sides of some of the most heated political questions of their times. That did not affect their relationship. They spent time together and shared laughs just like they had at Yale in the 1940s. Once you were a friend of George Bush’s, you had that status for life.

  My father’s favorite collegiate pursuit took place on spring afternoons at Yale Field. As he later put it, he majored in economics and minored in baseball. He was captain of the team and, like his father, played first base. Mother and I attended nearly all his home games. During her pregnancy, she sat in an extra-wide seat designed for former Yale law professor William Howard Taft. She loved to keep score, and one of my favorite things to do as a little guy in Texas was to read her box scores of Dad’s games. The Yale team reached the College World Series in 1947 and 1948. They finished second to the University of California–Berkeley the first year and to the University of Southern California the next year. (For true baseball aficionados, the Cal Bears were led by Jackie Jensen, the American League MVP in 1958, and the USC Trojans were managed by the legendary Rod Dedeaux.)

  My father’s most famous moment as a college ballplayer took place on the pitcher’s mound. There he met Babe Ruth during the spring of his senior year to receive a signed copy of Babe’s autobiography for the Yale library. A photographer snapped a picture that would later become iconic: one great man near the end of his life, another just embarking on his.

  It’s hard to imagine how Dad managed to do it all—to be a top student, a star athlete, a man with a huge group of friends, and a devoted husband and father. As Mother put it with characteristic bluntness, “He worked hard.” That’s true. George Bush did not waste time. He filled every minute of every day with activity.

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  WHILE DAD’S MOST famous moment on the diamond featured Babe Ruth, his baseball hero was Lou Gehrig. Dad admired Gehrig’s ability, consistency, and modesty. He dreamed of following in Gehrig’s footsteps as a major league ballplayer. After one Yale game, a few interested scouts reached out. While my father’s fielding was excellent, he didn’t have a big enough bat to make the major leagues. His coach, Ethan Allen, described Dad with classic managerial brevity: “Good field, no hit.”

  My father ruled out other options as well. In June 1948, he received a surprising letter from a childhood friend, Gerry Bemiss. Evidently, Bemiss had heard that Dad was entering the ministry. While my father was always a religious man, he did not envision a career in the clergy. “I have never even thought about the cloth—only a tablecloth or a loincloth,” he wrote.

  One option was to go work for his uncle George Herbert Walker Jr., known as Herbie. Herbie adored my father. In later years, I sensed that the attention he showered upon Dad came at the expense of the love he gave to his own sons. He assured my father that he would have a prominent place at his Wall Street firm. Similarly, executives at Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott Bush’s firm, made a serious recruiting pitch for my father.

  It was not surprising that George H.W. Bush was in high demand. Few could claim the trifecta of war hero, Phi Beta Kappa, and captain of the baseball team. Dad took the Wall Street job offers seriously. He respected the work that his father did, and he wanted to put his economics degree to use. Plus, a job in finance would likely ensure he could earn a solid living for Mother and me.

  Yet something pushed my father in a different direction. Wall Street represented the conventional path. After flying bomber planes, landing on aircraft carriers, and working next to people from all walks of life, the idea of boarding a commuter train from Connecticut and sitting behind a desk in New York had limited appeal. Rather than trade paper, he wanted to build something. He wanted to do something different with his life. And he wasn’t afraid to take a risk.

  Dad also wanted to prove that he could succeed without help from his family. That independent streak ran in his blood. His great-great-grandfather Obadiah Bush had traveled west with the forty-niners during the Gold Rush. His grandfather G.H. Walker had broken away from the family business in St. Louis to strike out on his own in New York. His father, Prescott Bush, was proud that he hadn’t taken a dime from his parents.

  That still left the question of exactly what to do. My parents had read the book The Farm by Louis Bromfield, which touted the classic American experience of tending your own land. They flirted with the idea for a while but ultimately decided the lifestyle wasn’t for them. I could just imagine Mother milking a cow.

  In February 1948, Dad’s grandfather S.P. Bush died. My father joined family and friends on a flight to Columbus for the funeral. On the way he spoke to Neil Mallon, a close friend of Prescott Bush’s from Yale. Neil ran a company called Dresser Industries that sold drilling equipment and supplies to oil operators. Neil mentioned that Dad should consider working for Dresser. He could learn how a business operates from the ground up: managing inventory, making sales, and getting products to market. He could see firsthand a fascinating industry, the oil business. There was one caveat: He would have to move to the oil fields of the Permian Basin—an isolated, dusty, scorching-hot patch of West Texas populated mostly by ranchers and roughnecks, and full of oil.

  The opportunity intrigued Dad. He had read articles about the Texas oil boom, where colorful entrepreneurs like H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison were making fortunes. He had enjoyed his brief stint in Corpus Christi during his Navy flight training. And one thing was for certain: He would be on
his own. Prescott Bush and G.H. Walker cast a long shadow, but it didn’t reach Odessa, Texas.

  Shortly after graduation, Neil offered Dad a job with a Dresser subsidiary called Ideco, the International Derrick and Equipment Company. He accepted. There’s no doubt that my father got the position because of his family’s connections. I benefited from connections in my own life. I was fortunate that generous family members and friends helped create opportunities for me. But there’s a limit to the power of connections. While they can open doors, they cannot guarantee success.

  In my father’s case, Neil Mallon opened the door to a job as an equipment clerk at an Ideco warehouse in Odessa with a salary of 375 dollars a month. A clerk’s duties included sweeping floors, arranging inventory, and painting pump jacks. He would meet interesting characters and figure out whether he liked the oil business. Beyond that, there were no guarantees.

  For the second time in his young life, George H.W. Bush made a bold and life-changing decision. As a high school senior, he had given up the safety of college to serve in the war. Now he would leave behind the comforts of Greenwich, Connecticut, and move his young bride and infant son to West Texas.

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  GEORGE BUSH DID not make the decision alone. Barbara Bush made it too. Moving to West Texas was not a natural step for Mother. She had grown up in a relatively affluent family in Westchester County, New York. Her father, Marvin Pierce, came from Ohio, where he had been a star athlete at Miami University. He was a big, burly guy who used his fierce work ethic and Midwestern charm to build a successful career as President of the McCall Corporation, at that time one of the largest publishing companies in America.

  Her mother, Pauline Robinson Pierce, descended from James E. Robinson, a Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. She relished her family’s position in the social hierarchy and spent money lavishly on life’s “finer things.” She supervised her children closely; she bought all of Mother’s clothes and decided where she would go to high school and college. She doted on Mother’s older sister, Martha, a model who appeared in Vogue magazine. Mrs. Pierce believed in what might be called the refined life. I can only imagine her horror at the idea of her daughter living out in West Texas, where the only thing refined was oil.

  Fortunately, my father didn’t need to persuade Pauline Pierce. He only needed to convince Mother. That was not a hard sell. As she later told me, “I was young and in love. I would have gone anywhere your father wanted.”

  I think there was more to her willingness to move than her devotion to Dad. “Christmas was a nightmare,” she told me. “We would spend Christmas Eve in Greenwich with the Bushes. Then Christmas morning with my parents in Rye. Then back to Greenwich for Christmas lunch.” Moving west would free her from the pressures of competing families.

  Although she may not have realized it at the time, Mother too had an independent streak. Otherwise, she would not have been a willing partner in seeking new adventures. I can only guess how Dad’s life would have turned out if his wife had been less open to change. History might have been different.

  One of my favorite family stories occurred shortly after my parents got married. Mother lit up a cigarette, and my grandfather Prescott Bush asked jokingly, “Did I give you permission to smoke?”

  Before she could catch herself, Mother shot back, “Well I didn’t marry you, did I?”

  Usually nobody spoke to my grandfather that way. The sharp rejoinder just popped out. Fortunately, he responded with a big laugh. One thing was for sure: Barbara Bush was willing to speak her mind. That was something she did quite frequently in later years. Mother’s quick wit and self-deprecating humor endeared her to millions of Americans. Her willingness to speak her mind stood in contrast to some tightly scripted political spouses. As a result of her wide following, she helped many Americans understand and love her husband. Many people told me that anyone who married Barbara Bush had to be a good man.

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  IN THE SUMMER of 1948, George H.W. Bush had two immediate tasks: start his job, and find a place for Mother and me to live. While he scouted for housing in Odessa, Texas, we stayed with my great-grandfather G.H. Walker at his summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine.

  Life was a lot more comfortable on Walker’s Point than in West Texas. In those days, Odessa was a town of under thirty thousand people located twenty miles from its sister city of Midland and more than three hundred fifty miles from the nearest major airport in Dallas. Most streets were unpaved. Few buildings were taller than one story; the skyline consisted of oil derricks dotting the horizon. Summer temperatures routinely hit triple digits, sometimes before noon, and long droughts were common. The flat terrain offered no relief, nor was there any natural shade, since West Texas had no native trees. And the wind howled, often carrying with it punishing waves of dirt.

  Odessa took its name from the Ukrainian city bordering the Black Sea, and at first it must have felt like a foreign country to my father. He didn’t know a single person when he arrived. People he met were more like the folks in the Navy than those he knew back home. Odessa was a blue-collar town, home to oil field laborers: mechanics who fixed the equipment and roughnecks who worked on the rigs. One of my father’s coworkers once asked him whether he’d gone to college. As a matter of fact, Dad replied, he had just graduated from Yale. The fellow thought for a second and said, “Never heard of it.” The fashion in West Texas was different too. Dad once walked out of the house wearing Bermuda shorts. After several truck drivers honked at him, he went back home and packed away the Bermuda shorts for good. Even the food was unfamiliar. My father always remembered the first time he saw someone order a West Texas delicacy: chicken-fried steak.

  Dad found a house on East Seventh Street. The good news was that it had a bathroom, unlike most residences on the street, which had outhouses. The bad news was that we had to share the bathroom with two women who lived on the other side of the duplex—a mother-daughter pair who made their living by entertaining male clients throughout the night. The thirteen-family house next to the Yale President didn’t seem so bad by comparison.

  Life in West Texas required other adjustments. Shortly after Mother and I joined Dad in Odessa, she woke up during the night to the smell of gas. Thinking the house was at risk of explosion, she grabbed me and hustled out onto the curb. A neighbor who witnessed the evacuation kindly explained that a shift in the winds had brought the scent of the oil fields wafting in. Nothing was wrong. We could all go back to sleep. Mother’s experience confirmed a truth about West Texas: Life revolved around oil. It was in the ground below, the air above, and the minds of everyone who called the place home.

  The key to my parents’ successful transition to their new surroundings was their attitude. They didn’t approach life in West Texas as a hardship to be endured; they embraced it as an adventure—their first of many as a couple. They took an interest in people and made friends. In the process, they realized that they didn’t need chauffeurs and French maids to enjoy life. They had each other. And they could make the most of any situation.

  The three of us spent Christmas 1948 in Odessa. On Christmas Eve, Dad’s company held a party for its customers. He volunteered to mix drinks. To show his holiday spirit, he raised a glass of his own for almost every cocktail he poured. By the end of the evening, the jolly bartender was helped into the back of a company pickup truck. One of his coworkers drove him home, eased down the tailgate, and rolled him onto the front lawn. The Bushes were fitting in just fine in West Texas.

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  THE STORY OF the Odessa Christmas party, which Mother never let Dad forget, typified my father’s approach to work: When he committed to doing something, he did it all out. If George Bush was assigned to sweep the warehouse, the manager would find the cleanest floor he’d ever seen. If he had to paint rigs, he would come in Saturday morning to slap on an extra coat so that the job got done right. My father enjoyed working hard, and he liked to see the result of his efforts. The lessons his mother had instill
ed had taken hold: Do your best. Don’t be arrogant. Never complain.

  After a while, his supervisors recognized that their trainee was capable of bigger things. So in 1949, when I was three years old, Dad was transferred to California. There he worked seven days a week in an oil pump factory and then as a traveling salesman for Dresser subsidiaries, hawking drill bits and other equipment. We lived in four different cities that year: Whittier, Ventura, Bakersfield, and Compton. In Whittier and Ventura, we rented rooms in local hotels for extended stays. In Bakersfield, we lived for a few months in a rented 950-square-foot white frame house. In Compton, we lived in an apartment in the Santa Fe Gardens complex. (Sadly, the complex was condemned many years later after being overtaken by drugs and violence.)

  Our transient lifestyle in California was tough on Mother, who was constantly packing, unpacking, and taking care of me. On top of that, she was pregnant with my younger sister Robin, who was due around Christmas 1949. We were living in Compton at the time. Mother wanted to be sure that someone would be available to watch me when she went to the hospital, so she asked our next-door neighbor, with whom she had become friends. The neighbor agreed. Not long before Mother went into labor, she learned that the neighbor had fled with her children after her abusive husband came home drunk one too many times. So much for my babysitter. Somehow Mother found somebody to take care of me (nobody can remember who), and my sister Robin was born on December 20, 1949.

  Robin was named after my grandmother Pauline Robinson Pierce, who had died in a car accident three months earlier. My grandfather refused to let Mother travel to the funeral for fear that the trip would endanger the baby. It was tough on Mother to be so far from her dad—whom she adored—in his time of grief.