Bush Makes a Wistful Trip to a Boyhood Home
The last time George W. Bush came here, on Jan. 17, 2001, an estimated 10,000 people clogged the downtown to cheer a hometown hero who was about to be inaugurated as the 43rd president of the United States. The streets were bedecked with American flags, and Mr. Bush’s sunny optimism filled the air as he spoke of “a spirit of possibility that was as big as the West Texas sky.”
Now the sun is setting on the Bush presidency, and on Saturday, he made a wistful return to Midland, stopping at one of his childhood homes to reflect, if only briefly, on what had changed and what had stayed the same.
Mr. Bush’s modest boyhood home, which has been restored to its 1950s condition complete with family photos, his mother-in-law’s teal 1955 General Electric refrigerator and a red tricycle in the yard is now a museum. His visit was not announced; the official reason for the trip to Midland was to raise money for Republican Congressional candidates. The president is spending the weekend at his ranch in Crawford, about an hour’s plane ride from here, and he will attend a fund-raiser on Monday in San Antonio.
All of the events were closed to reporters, which gave Mr. Bush’s visit to Midland an entirely different feel from the one he made nearly eight years ago, when the town was strung up with banners proclaiming him “Midland’s Rising Son.”
Mr. Bush slipped into Midland quietly. Just a handful of people, including his old friend Donald Evans, the former commerce secretary, and the mayors of Midland and nearby Odessa, were on hand to greet him when Air Force One touched down.
There were no banners and no cheering crowds along the motorcade route, just a sparse group of curious onlookers, some of whom took snapshots with cellphone cameras of Mr. Bush’s black limousine as he and his wife, Laura, made their way to the home of Representative K. Michael Conaway, the host of the fund-raiser.
The three-bedroom house, operated by a private nonprofit group, is called the George W. Bush Childhood Home, although it was also the home of Mr. Bush’s father, the former president, and his brother Jeb, a former governor of Florida. It is one of three homes the president lived in as a child; his parents, who had moved to Midland in 1948, bought the house in 1951, when Mr. Bush was about 5, and kept it until 1955. On Saturday, the president confessed that his memory of the place was a little fuzzy.
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Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 7:54 pm under