Early Life, Education, and Military Service
Tower was born in Houston to Joe Z. Tower (1898–1970) and Beryl Tower (1898–1990). Joe Tower was a Methodist minister, and John traveled wherever his father was named to pastor a church. He attended public schools in East Texas and graduated in Beaumont, the seat of Jefferson County, in southeast Texas in the spring of 1942.
Tower was active in politics as a child; at the age of thirteen, he passed out handbills for the campaign of liberal Democrat and future U.S. Senator Ralph William Yarborough while Yarborough was running unsuccessfully for attorney general. Yarborough and Tower would later be paired as Texas's Senate delegation, though of opposing political perspectives. He entered Southwestern University in Georgetown (Williamson County near Austin) that same year and met future U.S. President and political opponent Lyndon Baines Johnson on a campus visit while Johnson was the local congressman.
Tower left college in the summer of 1943 to serve in the Pacific Theater during World War II on an LCS(L) amphibious gunboat. He returned to Texas after the war in 1946, discharged as a seaman first class, and completed his undergraduate courses at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, having graduated in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science. Tower worked as a radio announcer for a Country music station in Taylor, east of Austin, during college and for some time afterward. Tower, however, remained in the Naval Reserve and achieved the rank of Master Chief Petty Officer, having retired from the military in 1989.
In 1949, he moved to Dallas to take graduate courses at Southern Methodist University and to work part time as an insurance agent. He left SMU in 1951 and entered academia as an assistant professor at Midwestern University (now Midwestern State University) in Wichita Falls. In 1952 and 1953, he pursued graduate coursework at the London School of Economics and conducted field research on the organization of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom. His research was presented in his thesis, The Conservative Worker in Britain. He received his Master of Arts degree from SMU in 1953. While a professor at Midwestern University, Tower met Lou Bullington, whom he married in 1952. A California native, Lou was the organist at the Towers' church. She was five years his senior. One of her cousins, Orville Bullington, was the unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial nominee in 1932 against former Governor Miriam Ferguson and a leader of the Robert A. Taft forces in Texas in 1952. Orville Bullington was also an uncle by marriage of the Midland Republican figure Frank Kell Cahoon, a Wichita Falls native who was the only Republican in the Texas House of Representatives in the 1965 legislative session.
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