Word: birding
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Many political observers believe she can claim a big part of her husband's lopsided win over Barry Goldwater in 1964. The South, angry over LBJ's civil rights efforts, was smoldering when she whistle-stopped from Virginia to New Orleans on the Lady Bird Special, at first enduring catcalls and hostile placards ("Fly Away Black Bird") but the same soft tolerance she used on her husband she used on the southern crowds: "In this country we have many viewpoints. You are entitled to yours. Right now I am entitled to mine." By New Orleans the stories of her sweet...
Born in 1912, she was christened Claudia Alta Taylor, but dubbed "Lady Bird" by a family maid because she was "pretty as a lady bird" and Lady Bird she was for the rest of her life. A large portrait of her wearing a long, billowing pale blue dress, carrying a broad-brimmed hat amid a field of Texas bluebonnets stands in the LBJ Library, capturing both that southern gentility and her passion for nature. But her lilting, soft and round East Texas accent, her passion for natural beauty and her devotion to a man some found loud and crude, masked...
...fragile, her eyesight diminished by macular degeneration, a cruelty for a woman whose joy in life came from watching the birds and the flowers of her beloved Texas Hill Country, former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson passed away at her home in Austin from natural causes. A few weeks earlier, she had been admitted to a hospital for tests after suffering from what a family member said was a low-grade fever...
...first lady, Lady Bird created a legacy through her passion for what the press called "beautification" and the legislation it produced. She had the billboards and junk yards banished from the federal highway rights-of-way; and she inspired the carpets of daffodils and tulips that delight tourists who come to the nation's capital. She was more than a gardener. She was one of the first true environmentalists of our times. Even LBJ liked the idea, complaining proudly one day that he had a hell of a time taking a nap because Lady Bird and Laurence Rockefeller...
...Lady Bird never liked the term "beautification." What she was doing went beyond that, something to hold the land, bring grace and meaning to scarred lives. "You reporters come up with another word," she used to say. But nobody has yet. Maybe it was unnecessary because she was her own symbol, a woman very much in harmony with the natural world around her. She rafted down rivers, camped out in the national parks, studied ruins. She also founded what is now named the Lady Bird Johnson Wild Flower Center at the University of Texas...