The grey-haired man bounded off the red, white and blue campaign bus towards a modest single-storey home in the dusty heart of the west Texas oil patch.
“I’m Jeb Bush,” he said. “Is this my house?”
It was. The third child of George HW Bush and Barbara Pierce spent the first years of his life at 1412 West Ohio Avenue, an ordinary house on an ordinary street less than a mile from downtown Midland. Thirteen months after his visit in support of his son George P’s successful bid to become Texas land commissioner, Jeb is set to return to the city next week for a fundraiser.
His trip to a part of the Lone Star State that helped mould his father and brother into presidential material comes amid continued scepticism about his own White House credentials and renewed attention on the Bush family’s history prompted by a new biography of George Bush Sr.
Their Texas timeline began in the 1940s in Midland and nearby Odessa – windswept, functional places 300 miles from the nearest big cities, where fortunes rise and fall like the nodding black pumpjacks that blot the plains.
In 1948, two years after George W’s birth in Connecticut, the Bushes relocated to Odessa so his father could become an equipment clerk for an oil company on $375 a month. Moved from its original location and now tucked to the rear of Odessa’s Presidential Archive and Leadership Library is a little-visited green, two-bed, 800-square-foot home where the family lived in late 1948 and early 1949 before heading to California for a year.
A quotation from George HW is carved into the path that leads to the front door: “At Odessa, we became Texans and proud of it.” The kitchen wallpaper has an ivy-like pattern – perhaps designed to remind Barbara of her former life in the verdant north-east as she watched tumbleweeds blow past the window and tried to ignore the stench of gas from the fields.
Clamouring more loudly for tourist attention and hoping for a boost from the new book is the house in Midland, part of an ongoing $1.9m project that has seen the home restored to its 1950s condition. A gift shop in an adjacent building sells books and W baseball caps and coffee mugs.
Though the home of two presidents and two governors, the star attraction is clear: it is called “The George W Bush Childhood Home”. It was bought from a private owner in 2001 and opened to the public in 2006. Some 1,800 local fifth-graders visit annually to learn about the clan that helped put Midland-Odessa on the map – along with oil and high school football.
Inside, most rooms are returned to how they looked when the Bushes lived there between 1951 and 1955, when they left the 1,400-square-foot, three-bed property for a larger abode. Most memorable is George W’s toy-filled bedroom, with its croquet mallets, Roy Rogers’ rider’s rules above the bed and train set. “He and his dad were crazy about electric trains,” said Gayle Dodson, a tour guide who has welcomed Jeb and George W to the house. “He said, ‘Oh, there’s my train!’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a replica.”
Junior would ride his bike around town with a friend, she said, carrying a handwritten copy of the actor’s cowboy code so he knew how to behave in any situation. Dodson said that Jeb remembered nothing about the house where he was born but had a vague recollection of a nearby playground. The family relocated 500 miles south-east to Houston in 1959 when George HW went to oversee his offshore oil business.
Jon Meacham’s new book, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, details family football games on Thanksgiving and an anecdote from Jeb about watching a Houston Colt .45s baseball doubleheader against the Dodgers in hundred-degree heat that caused spectators to pass out.
Despite the summer weather, the Bushes loved Texas, with its friendly atmosphere and frontier spirit that intimated some risk but promised great reward. Midland boomed in the 50s, its population doubling in a decade to about 60,000, and George HW Bush formed an oil company with a neighbour he’d met on a new development of colourful houses dubbed Easter Egg Row.
“It gave him an opportunity to step out on his own,” said Bill Scott, a realtor who led the drive to restore the house. “In the 1950s it was an idyllic town, a place – and it still is a place – of quiet faith, and I think it left an impression. Faith, family and community.”
The bold, independent streak needed to strike it rich in an environment like Midland became a defining trait for a family that hailed from a comfortable, establishment New England background. And prosperity also demanded flexibility, a nimble pragmatism that was evinced in the way the Bushes moved from house to house and city to city – and in the brothers’ choice of careers.
“As early as 1977, when George W Bush was considering a run for Congress in Texas, his father wrote him a letter saying that you have to be your own man, that the critical element for any political undertaking is that people believe that you will call them as you see them. This code of not giving advice unless asked was not something they invented on the fly in 2000; the roots go back to 1977,” Meacham said.
“What’s so interesting about the Bushes is that they simply decided that their code was going to be that insofar as members of the House of Bush were members of the House of Bush, they would be free agents, they would be autonomous. That’s why the ‘dynasty’ word doesn’t quite work because dynasty suggests shared vision. The Bushes share ambition and they share values and they share a love for each other, but they are different political creatures operating in different political environments.”
The Bushes, said Paul St Hilaire, the home’s executive director, “really immersed themselves in the culture of the area” and contributed to Midland’s social and political life. One of the family’s defining moments was a tragedy, though, when George HW and Barbara’s second child, Robin, died of leukaemia aged three in October 1953.
Carrying a record player with a classmate through Sam Houston elementary school, the seven-year-old George noticed his parents’ green Oldsmobile pull up and thought he saw Robin’s blond curly hair in a window. When he got to the car, her seat was empty and Barbara gave him the news. The ride home was the first time he saw his parents cry, according to Meacham’s biography.
Barbara had remained at her daughter’s bedside while she was treated in New York, adopting a “no tears in front of Robin” rule that meant her husband often had to leave the room. The strain showed in her hair, which started to turn white at the age of 28. Back in Texas, with George HW working long hours and often away, her young son’s upbeat personality helped her handle the grief and return to her role as the family’s rock.
Meacham described Barbara as “savvy and strong … a dominant but not domineering figure within the Bush clan”. Her husband told Meacham: “She really is the leader of the family in the sense, ‘You’re not going to do this,’ or ‘You’ve got to do this,’ and I just kind of float above it all.”
George W’s response to his sister’s death perhaps set the template for a light-hearted approach to life that political analysts would contrast with his more serious younger brother, who was born in Midland a few weeks before Robin’s diagnosis and eight months before she passed away.
As Meacham writes: “After graduating from Harvard Business School in the 1970s, [George] moved to Midland ‘with no possessions, lived in an alley’. He went to Alaska one summer just to check it out and was reluctant to buy a house in Midland until a friend talked him into it. ‘It’s totally different from Jeb, who falls in love early and gets married in college and has babies early,’ George W recalled. ‘He’s just a different kind of person.’”
Despite his east coast ties, George W was embraced by Midland and Odessa as an honorary Texan; the former state governor’s wife, Laura, is a Midlander – they met at a barbecue. He stopped here for a triumphant rally en route to Washington in 2001, stepping on to the podium in a cowboy hat to declare his love for Texas, “where I learned what it means to be a good neighbour ... where I learned to trust in God”.
There is more ambivalence about the presidential bid of the Bush who is actually a native Texan. Locals are conscious that the surname does not resonate so positively now, including among highly conservative Republicans.
“People are a little wary but I think would be supportive,” Scott, the childhood home director, said. “There’s a feeling that the rest of the country might not be ready for that even though we would. My sense is there are so many candidates … it’s more of a wait and see.”
It’s not surprising that Jeb, the former Florida governor, would visit: his backers include several ultra-wealthy north and west Texas oilmen, including Midland-based GOP donor Javaid Anwar. But he faces competition for dollars and votes from Ted Cruz, the rambunctiously rightwing Texas senator who grew up in Houston.
“George Jr got the personality and Jeb got the brains, I think,” said Larry Pearson, standing on the front porch of his small house next door to 1412 West Ohio Avenue. Living by a landmark has its disadvantages: there was the time that W visited and the secret service blocked Pearson’s driveway.
Then again, he reflected, a Jeb presidency might lead to grandiose expansion plans for the site and a generous offer on his own dwelling. “It would benefit me personally as eventually they’d turn this property into one national parks-type thing,” he said.
The odds, though, look slim. To trace the Bush family’s Texas origins is to examine not only what the siblings share, but where they diverge. “Jeb don’t even claim Midland much,” said Pearson. “He just don’t have that outgoing personality that it takes. He can’t be loose and tell jokes like his brother.”
- Additional reporting by David Smith in Washington
