Where She’s From (Transcript)

Editor Jake Silverstein talks to the former first lady about growing up in Midland—and the accident that changed her life.

June 2010

In Spoken From the Heart, Laura Bush writes evocatively of her childhood in Midland, a place of endless skies and stinging sandstorms. Though she lived for six years in the Governor’s Mansion and another eight in the White House, it was the time she spent on the high plains of West Texas that made her who she is today. Midland was where she found friends that would last a lifetime—and met an aspiring politician named George W. Bush. I visited with Mrs. Bush in the library of her home in Dallas.

Jake Silverstein: This is a very lovely home. Actually, this room is quite nice, I was just saying—

Laura Bush: It is, it is.

JS: —it’s a wonderful room.

LB: It was a real selling point when I came to look at the house. The guy we bought the house from had a great collection of new first editions.

JS: Oh, wow.

LB: And so he’d have a section of books, all, you know, the jackets covered in the Mylar covers. And then next to it would be a little snapshot of him with Larry McMurtry, or him with John Updike. I think he’s active in the Arts & Letters Live in Dallas. So, he would go here and read and get a picture.

JS: And now Dallas—obviously both then and now, and even before then with family connections—has been an important city for you, but when you left Washington, the first place you went to was Midland.

LB: We went back home to Midland for the very first day. Flew low over Midland so the thirty thousand people that had congregated in downtown Midland could see it. And then we rode in a motorcade from the airport back to downtown. And that’s what we had done when we left Texas. We had stopped on our way to Washington in Midland, because Midland was our childhood home, both of us. George moved to Midland when he was four and left when he was in the eighth grade, and so really we have a lot of the same friends from those years, even though we went to two different elementary schools. So it was great to be home and to be in Midland. We got there just as the sun set. We could see how beautiful the sky is at home in Texas.

JS: You’re from a very unique place. Can you just describe for somebody who’s encountering it for the first time, what it feels like to be in this place?

LB: Well, Midland is perfectly flat—and very few trees. In fact, there are really no native trees. When I was little, Midland was really during the middle of a dust bowl, it was a longtime drought in the early part of the fifties and, you know, it’s a really sort of hardscrabble life in Midland. That’s what the landscape is like. But the sky is magnificent. And the view of the sky is never obscured because there aren’t any trees.

JS: Right.

LB: One of the things my mother liked to do—my mother, growing up in far West Texas in El Paso, so she knew that great West Texas sky—was lie on the ground in the summer on blankets and look up at the stars. And I remember that.

JS: You would identify constellations?

LB: She’d point out constellations. Of course, mainly the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, the easiest ones to find.

JS: That’s great. Now, the driving culture was so important in Midland. How old did kids learn to drive out there?

LB: Well, we got our driver’s license when we were fourteen—on our fourteenth birthday—and that was the law in Texas then. Of course, we started driving before that with driver’s ed. And we drove every once in a while at twelve and then at thirteen and then got our driver’s license at fourteen, and that was really what we did. That’s what we did on dates, you drove around at night and might go to the drive-in movie, but you’d definitely go to Agnes’s, the drive-in, and get a Coke, or some of the other drive-ins that were in Midland—A&W Root Beer and Mr. X and the Rendezvous, those were the drive-ins.

JS: And so Agnes’s, that was the main one.

LB: That was the main one.

JS: So what was the scene on like a Friday or Saturday night?

LB: Well, the Friday or Saturday night would be a lot of cars parked in the front of Agnes’s for a long time. You’d stay there for a long time. You’d order a Coke, but you’d, you know, stay there longer than that, because we didn’t eat out. We didn’t order hamburgers. I mean, we ate at home.

JS: You mentioned earlier how so many of these friends are still very close friends of yours. You had a real cohort out there. What were some of the kind of innocent escapades that y’all got into?

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