page_title: Lady Bird Johnson
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Lady Bird Johnson / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: The Brick House, the childhood home of First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, a Neoclassical house in Karnack, Texas.
context_page_description: Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson was an American socialite and the First Lady of the United States as the wife of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson. She also served as the Second Lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963.
  Notably well-educated for a woman of her era, she proved a capable manager and a successful investor. After marrying Lyndon B. Johnson in 1934 when he was a political hopeful in Austin, Texas, she used a modest inheritance to bankroll his congressional campaign and then ran his office while he served in the Navy. She bought a radio station, and, later, a television station which generated revenues that made the Johnsons into millionaires.
  As First Lady, she broke new ground by interacting directly with Congress, employing her own press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour.
  Johnson was an advocate for beautifying the nation's cities and highways. The Highway Beautification Act was informally known as "Lady Bird's Bill." She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honors bestowed upon a US civilian.
context_section_description: Claudia Alta Taylor was born on December 22, 1912, in Karnack, Texas, a town in Harrison County, near the eastern state line with Louisiana. Her birthplace was "The Brick House," an antebellum plantation house on the outskirts of town, which her father had purchased shortly before her birth. She was a descendant of English Protestant martyr Rowland Taylor through his grandson Captain Thomas J. Taylor II.
  She was named for her mother's brother Claud. 
  During her infancy, her nursemaid, Alice Tittle, 
  said that she was as "purty as a ladybird." 
  Opinions differ about whether the name refers to a bird or a ladybird beetle, the latter of which is commonly referred to as a "ladybug" in North America. The nickname virtually replaced her first name for the rest of her life. Her father and siblings called her Lady, 
  and her husband called her Bird—the name she used on her marriage license. During her teenage years, some classmates would call her Bird to provoke her, since she reportedly was not fond of the name.
  Nearly all of her maternal and paternal immigrant ancestors arrived in the Virginia Colony during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, likely as indentured servants as were most early settlers in the colony. Her father, a native of Alabama, had primarily English ancestry, and some Welsh and Danish. Her mother, also a native of Alabama, was of English and Scottish descent.
  Her father, Thomas Jefferson Taylor (August 29, 1874 – October 22, 1960), was a sharecropper's son. He became a wealthy businessman, and owned 15,000 acres (6,070 ha) of cotton and two general stores. "My father was a very strong character, to put it mildly," his daughter once said. "He lived by his own rules. It was a whole feudal way of life, really."
  Her mother, born Minnie Lee Pattillo (1874–1918), loved opera and felt out of place in Karnack; she was often in "poor emotional and physical health." When Lady Bird was five years old, Minnie fell down a flight of stairs while pregnant and died of complications of miscarriage. In a profile of Lady Bird Johnson, Time magazine described Lady Bird's mother as "a tall, eccentric woman from an old and aristocratic Alabama family, [who] liked to wear long white dresses and heavy veils [... and who] scandalized people for miles around by entertaining Negroes in her home, and once even started to write a book about Negro religious practices, called Bio Baptism." Her husband, however, tended to see blacks as nothing more than "hewers of wood and drawers of water," according to his younger son Anthony.
  Lady Bird had two elder brothers, Thomas Jefferson Jr. (1901–1959) and Antonio, also known as Tony (1904–1986). Her widowed father married twice more. His second wife was Beulah Taylor, a bookkeeper at a general store. His third wife was Ruth Scroggins, whom he married in 1937.
  Lady Bird was largely raised by her maternal aunt Effie Pattillo, who moved to Karnack after her sister's death. She also visited her Pattillo relatives in Autauga County, Alabama, every summer until she was a young woman. As she explained, "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." According to Lady Bird, her Aunt Effie "opened my spirit to beauty, but she neglected to give me any insight into the practical matters a girl should know about, such as how to dress or choose one's friends or learning to dance."
  Lady Bird was a shy and quiet girl who spent much of her youth alone outdoors. "People always look back at it now and assume it was lonely," she once said about her childhood. "To me it definitely was not. ... I spent a lot of time just walking and fishing and swimming." She developed her lifelong love of the outdoors as a child growing up in the tall pines and bayous of East Texas, where she watched the wildflowers bloom each spring.
caption: The Brick House, Lady Bird Johnson's birthplace and childhood home in Karnack, Texas
exif: {}