Letter, Lady Bird Taylor to Lyndon Johnson, 9/20/1934?

Specific Item Type:

Correspondence

Type:

Text

Format:

Paper

Identifier:

pp-ctjandlbj-letters-ctj-9-20-34

Date:

1934-09-20

Date Note:

Precise date uncertain: extrapolated here by LBJ Library archives staff

Time Period:

Pre-Presidential (Before Nov. 22, 1963)

Transcript:

[September 20, 1934 ?]
Thursday Nite
Lyndon, My Dearest -
That was a lamb of a letter! I just pounced on it--I was so happy to get it.
Today is your second day in school…What courses are you taking, dear? Contracts, for one, I suppose? I’m glad classes are from five to seven, so we can have the rest of the evening-- or most of it--off when I come up. (I’ll watch you study when you need to--I’d like it.)
I’m glad you sent me the pictures of Georgetown U. They are beautiful--and besides I like to be able to picture
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where you are.
Today has been a most busy day. I’ve been applying the first coat of varnish--and what a job it is! The more jobs I learn how to do the more I discover that there’s an art in each one of them, no matter how simple they look from the outside….This room may turn out to be a regular Bluebeard’s chamber which I will keep solicitously locked from the outside world… Or it may turn out to look very fine!
Last night Hugh and Dorris and I drove down to the line (Louisiana) after
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some cases of beer for Dad and Hugh. Lyndon, it was the most beautiful night I’ve nearly ever seen…I just worship beautiful things. But they’re always more fun seen with someone you’re quite close to, who likes them too.
I feel so cosmopolitan! Yesterday at Dorris’ I picked up a “Travel Magazine”, and the first advertisement I saw was of the Pierre Hotel, New York, where one of my friends was staying last week. And the next was the Casino de Paree, N. Y., a night club where Cecille and I had dinner with some oil men one night. And the next
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was the “Dodge Hotel, under the Shawow of the Capitol, the hotel with the Garden”!...I think I’ll mail your next letter there.
The thing I miss most here is good conversation. Gene and I, and Emily and I, and any number of my good friends down at Austin and I used to have the richest, raciest conversations about the Russian playwrights, and the value of money, and the relative merits of Viennese music and Spanish music, and college love, and life with a capital L. And here all one talks about is what we’re going to plant when it rains, and recipes for Mayhaw jelly,
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and who does the best upholstering work for the wicker chair. I miss the old zest!...(I do like to know about all the practical things too--but not talk about them much.)
Dearest, I’m so glad you got Nettie Lee and Dan Quill’s sister jobs! How do you do it? Whatever does, or doesn’t, happen to us I hope you’ll keep me as proud of you as I am sometimes. (This is quite incoherent---but I mean I love for you to be as genuinely interested in people as you seem and I love you to be able to Get Things Done.)
I went by to see Mrs. Boehringer the other day. She said she thought you were
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such a fine boy! She appreciated your call.
Karl--Gene’s hare-brained brother and one of my oldest friends--came down this afternoon. He is an idiot and everybody loves him--rather like Gene only not as smart. He gave me a drink--which is such an oddity in my life these days!
Darling, the idea of your coming down Thanksgiving makes me so happy!! Only you mustn’t if its not best for either your job or your finances or your law. ‘Cause I want to be good for you and not hard for you. But I hereby extend you an invitation to come spend every minute you possibly can with me if you decide its oke to come. Goodnight, Lyndon dear--
Bird