Word: midlands
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...eyes. He helped put together the group that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team and plotted a run for Governor. It was as if someone had thrown a cosmic switch and his future came into focus. "Let's face it, George was not real happy [in Midland]," says oilman Joseph O'Neill, one of his closest friends. "It's the first-son syndrome. You want to live up to the very high expectations set by your father, but at the same time you want to go your own way, so you end up going kicking and screaming down the exact...
...office towers of Midland are monuments to the high hopes and short memory of man. The downtown buildings, which rise 20 stories above the West Texas scrub, sprang up during the good years--mid-'50s, late '70s, early '90s--and stand half-empty during the bad. In 1973, Midland's most feverish era was touched off by the Arab oil embargo, and suddenly everyone who had ever lived in or passed through the place came looking for oil. When George W. showed up in 1975, not yet 30, he was a curious amalgam of West Texas and East Coast...
...business by working for an established company a few years. George was too impatient for that. He hired himself out for $100 a day as a landman, searching mineral-rights titles in county courthouses around West Texas. "I basically taught myself," he says. Bush's move to Midland is at the heart of his official myth. Driving out in an old Cutlass with $20,000 and a dream, scraping by in tatty chinos and beat-up shoes. It's as close as the son of a President can get to calling himself a self-made man. The details...
...himself.) The decision to run violated a basic family tenet: First make your mark and your fortune, then run for office. Only those who knew him well had seen it coming. "He wasn't obsessed with politics, but it was always there," says Charles Younger, a Midland surgeon and longtime Bush jogging partner. A famously eligible bachelor, Bush had also surprised friends by courting and marrying--in just three months--a librarian named Laura Welch, who was as reserved and knowing as he was brash and noisy. She made him promise that she would never have to give a speech...
...Arbusto had oil prospects; Spectrum had a network of investors. The merger doubled the size of Bush's operation, and the Spectrum people wanted to upgrade his image with fancy furniture and a company car, but Bush wouldn't hear of it. "Those were the doodah days in Midland," says O'Neill's wife Jan, "and a lot of people couldn't resist--jets, boats, cars. George didn't go for that." He liked the image...