Lady Bird Johnson - Early Life

Early Life

Claudia Alta Taylor was born in Karnack, Texas, a town in Harrison County, near the state's border with Louisiana. Her birthplace was "The Brick House," an antebellum plantation mansion on the outskirts of town, which her father had purchased shortly before her birth. Nearly all of both her maternal and paternal forebears had arrived in the Virginia Colony during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Her father was a native of Alabama and primarily of English ancestry with small amounts of Welsh and Danish; her mother was also a native of Alabama and of English and Scottish descent.

Though she was named for her mother's brother Claud, during her infancy, her nurse, Alice Tittle, commented, she was as "purty as a ladybird,". Opinions differ about whether the reference was to an actual bird or a ladybug (sometimes called a 'ladybird') which is a brightly colored beetle. That nickname virtually replaced her actual first name for the rest of her life. Her father and siblings called her Lady, though her husband called her Bird, which is the name she used on her marriage license. During her teenage years, her schoolmates had called her Bird, though mockingly, since she reportedly was not fond of the name. Her father was Thomas Jefferson Taylor (August 29, 1874 – October 22, 1960), a sharecropper's son who became a wealthy businessman and the owner of 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 was the former Minnie Lee Pattillo (1874–1918), an opera lover who felt out of place in Karnack and who was often in "poor emotional and physical health." When Lady Bird was five years old, Minnie, while pregnant, fell down a flight of stairs and died of complications after miscarrying. 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, liked to wear long white dresses and heavy veils 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 unreconstructed husband, however, tended to see blacks as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," according to his younger son.

Lady Bird had two elder brothers, Thomas Jefferson Jr. (1901–1959) and Antonio, also known as Tony (1904–1986). She also had two stepmothers; the second, Ruth Scroggins, who married Thomas Taylor in 1937.

She was largely raised by her aunt Effie Pattillo, who moved to Karnack after her sister's death, although Lady Bird 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 environment as a child growing up in the tall pines and bayous of East Texas and watching the wildflowers bloom each spring.