Oral History Transcript - Carolyn Kellam Curtis and Nita Louise Kellam Mayo - May 19, 2008
Interview with Carolyn Kellam Curtis and Nita Louise Kellam Mayo
Interviewer: Barbara Thibodeaux
Date of Interview: May 19, 2008
Location: Austin, Texas
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Interviewees: Carolyn Kellam Curtis and Nita Louise Kellam Mayo are the daughters of the late J.C. Kellam who managed the Johnson broadcast affiliates in Austin for many years. A distinguished Texas State graduate, Mr. Kellam was chair of the Texas State University System Board of Regents.
Carolyn Curtis, a longtime Austin resident, retired as Associate Vice President of Development from the University of Texas and continues to be active as a community volunteer. Her service continues to connect her to the Johnson family as a founding member of the boards of the Committee for a More Beautiful Town Lake, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, and UT Advisory Council for LBJWC.
Nita Louise Mayo and her husband, John B. Mayo were the first two students to receive Masters of Arts in Communication at the University of Texas’s new School of Communication in 1966. Following graduation, the Navy assigned the Mayo family to Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington D.C., and San Diego. In 2000, the Mayos retired to Austin where they remain active with family, travel, and volunteer activities for Rotary International.
BARBARA THIBODEAUX: This recording is part of the LBJ Oral History Project sponsored by Texas State University. Today is May 19, 2008. My name is Barbara Thibodeaux. I am interviewing Carolyn Curtis and Nita Louise Mayo in Austin, Texas.
Mrs. Curtis and Mrs. Mayo, even though you have agreed to the terms and conditions of the release pertaining to this interview in writing, will you also verbally acknowledge your acceptance with a yes or no.
CAROLYN CURTIS: Yes.
NITA LOUISE MAYO: Yes.
THIBODEAUX: Thank you very much. Is it all right if I call you Nita Louise and Carolyn?
CURTIS: Absolutely.
THIBODEAUX: Thank you very much. Whoever wishes, would you tell us what your connection is to the Johnson family?
CURTIS: I’ve always termed it as an inherited friendship, and I think the best thing you can inherit from your parents are wonderful friends that become part of your life.
MAYO: That’s a good way to put it because our grandmother was a friend of the President’s mother, and so it started in their generation. Daddy and the President became friends. We became friends with the Johnson girls, and it has carried on to our children. Very gratifying.
THIBODEAUX: Can you tell me anything about the relationship between your grandmother, Juliet Kellam and Rebekah Johnson, Lyndon Johnson’s mother?
CURTIS: Juliet Kellam lived in Blanco as did Rebekah Johnson. They knew each other in that small town. Everybody knew everybody. Our grandmother Juliet Cage Kellam moved to San Marcos and began a boarding house for the college girls attending, at that point Southwest Texas State Teachers College. In due course, Lyndon Johnson came to school and Rebekah called up, I guess you wouldn’t call, to write in those days, asking our grandmother could you help him settle in, find a job, find a place to live, and those kind of things that you felt comfortable asking your friend to help your child. Our grandmother knew the president of the college, as did, I’m sure, everybody in San Marcos.
MAYO: Especially the boarding house mothers.
CURTIS: Uh huh.
MAYO: She had to be approved by the college.
CURTIS: So she inquired and that’s how, I believe, he got his first job.
MAYO: It was definitely she that did it because at that point, Daddy had already graduated and was off teaching in Lufkin, Texas.
CURTIS: So I would have thought they crossed paths on campus. I don’t know honestly whether they crossed paths on campus or not.
MAYO: Well the eight year difference in their age would have worked against it.
CURTIS: Yes, I think it might have.
THIBODEAUX: But they probably met at Mrs. Kellam’s boarding house off and on?
CURTIS: Could be. If anything, I mean Daddy was a really faithful son…
MAYO: Yes.
CURTIS: … over the years. He had a very good and close relationship with his mother. We went down there every Sunday for years on end.
MAYO: For lunch on Sundays.
CURTIS: And so that is very possible that they would have met that way.
THIBODEAUX: I didn’t ask this before, but do you know if Lyndon Johnson was friends with Doris [Jesse Kellam’s sister] also? Separately from your father or was it just kind of all mixed up with family relations?
CURTIS: I think they probably knew each other.
MAYO: They would have been on campus at the same time because Doris was born in 1905.
CURTIS: They knew each other, but I know that it was not as close of a relationship as Daddy and President Johnson.
THIBODEAUX: When your father was on campus he belonged to Sigma Beta, was the formal name of it. Do you know what that was, the slang name it was called?
CURTIS: The Black Stars, I believe, which were an organization maybe predominately, and I don’t know this for a fact, you would have to clarify, the athletes. Daddy definitely was interested in sports and played sports.
THIBODEAUX: He was a football player?
CURTIS: Football and baseball. In fact I have a picture of him in sports in those days. I don’t see how anyone lived through it because they so weren’t wearing much padding and very flimsy helmets, it looks like. (laughing) Leather, leather helmets in those days.
THIBODEAUX: I think his younger brother, Claude, he was also in sports?
CURTIS: He was in sports and actually ended up being head of all the sports for the San…
MAYO: athletic director for the San Antonio public schools.
CURTIS: So they both grew up in that and always loved it.
MAYO: And Claude was the man who got Alamo Stadium built over in San Antonio.
THIBODEAUX: The family has really had an impact in this area.
Doris married Bryan Wildenthal. Can you explain the Wildenthal family connection with Cotulla?
CURTIS: Bryan Wildenthal, who married our aunt Doris Wildenthal and was Daddy’s sister had two sisters. Neither of whom married. They were Mamie and Adele, and they were school teachers and they taught in Cotulla, Texas. They were a few years older than Lyndon Johnson. When Lyndon Johnson graduated and became a teacher, he went to Cotulla and became a teacher. The story goes that either Mamie though it was inappropriate for a man to be a teacher and for her to be a principal, and so she resigned and allowed him to be principal, or another version of that story, and I can’t verify either one of them, was that the school board thought that it was inappropriate to have a man as a teacher and a woman as a principal. So they asked Mamie to resign so Lyndon Johnson could be principal. But in any case, Mamie and Adele were both in Cotulla at the same time that Lyndon Johnson was there.
MAYO: Is it possible that they all could have been teachers at the same time there, because we see the famous picture of Lyndon Johnson with the class he taught in Cotulla.
CURTIS: That I don’t know.
THIBODEAUX: Do you know if his connection to the Wildenthal family through the Kellam family influenced his hiring in Cotulla at the Welhausen School?
CURTIS: You know, I don’t know that it did. I just don’t know.
THIBODEAUX: It may just have been a coincidence?
CURTIS: I guess the best answer is I just don’t know.
MAYO: Way before our time.
CURTIS: Uh huh. (laughing)
THIBODEAUX: Yes, we will make that point. Way, way, way before your time. (laughing) Do you know if they had any kind of relationship in Cotulla? Did they socialize on a regular basis or become close friends?
CURTIS: I doubt it. But I don’t know that. I would say it is such a small town that it might have been, but an older lady teacher would not necessarily be the person I can envision Lyndon Johnson wanting to date. (laughing)
THIBODEAUX: Good point.
CURTIS: So it would have been more of a formal relationship than informal, I would guess, particularly if one had been a principal when he came as a teacher.
THIBODEAUX: And while we are on the Wildenthals, you had mentioned John Wildenthal. Was he connected to the family in Cotulla?
CURTIS: Yes, he is connected to that family and is part of that family. He is, I believe, a first cousin to Hobson and Kern Wildenthal who are Doris’s sons. He was an intern for Lyndon Johnson when Lyndon Johnson went to work in Washington.
THIBODEAUX: So he is someone that Lyndon Johnson associated with in Cotulla?
CURTIS: Not necessarily. I don’t know where the relationship started.
THIBODEAUX: Because he was significantly younger than Lyndon Johnson?
CURTIS: Yes. Yes.
MAYO: He is a retired judge in Houston now.
CURTIS: Uh huh.
THIBODEAUX: The reason we kept asking about the Wildenthal family is because there was always a mention of a Miss Wildenthal that was principal at the Welhausen School, but we never could figure out the connection.
MAYO: That would have been one of Bryan’s sisters.
CURTIS: You know, I do think it makes sense in those days that it is a wonderful connection to know somebody, that you would ask somebody that you knew about where you could teach, where you could apply, who do you know, when you are trying to get a job. Particularly in the days when jobs weren’t necessarily easy to get.
MAYO: It was a more refined version of maybe what we call the “old boys network” now.
THIBODEAUX: Yes, it worked well back then, especially for Lyndon Johnson.
MAYO: Especially when you look back to these young girls who grew up together in Blanco and in a day when writing letters was almost a religion. I can remember my grandmother when I was five and six years old, every morning she would sit down and she would write her letters. And then when mail came twice a day, and in the afternoon she got another letter, that evening she would write that answer so it would go out the next morning.
THIBODEAUX: Going from Cotulla, can you give us a connection, how your father, Jesse Kellam, hooked up with Lyndon Johnson in a more permanent relationship?
CURTIS: I think after school, after he got out of Southwest Texas and graduated, he went off to teaching and coaching in Lufkin [Texas]. I think they hooked up again through an interest in, honestly you shared this with us, that Lyndon Johnson was good about asking Daddy what is it you really want to do. And through the interview that you already have, he said that he was directed into the State Department of Education. That maybe life as a coach of high school kids was not everything that he thought it was. (laughs)
MAYO: Daddy had already discovered that coaching football meant that you were at the mercy of having a winning or losing football team. If your football team lost, you were out of a job.
CURTIS: And you were out of a teaching job simultaneously.
MAYO: Because in those days you taught math all day in order to coach football for two hours a day.
THIBODEAUX: So it wasn’t a secured position.
CURTIS: No.
MAYO: No.
CURTIS: It really was not and so I think that’s how he ended up in the State Department of Education. And that expanded his view. He did a lot of traveling in those days, all over the state. So he learned a lot about education from that experience, touring around and seeing all the different types of situations Texas had to offer.
THIBODEAUX: You were telling an interesting story, Nita Louise, about the way it was back in those days in the 30s, the pay for teachers?
MAYO: During the depression, teachers were not paid totally in cash. Part of their salary came in script, which meant that someday you might be able to redeem that for cash. But the more significant thing to our parents was, there was only one job per family. Mother was an English teacher; Daddy was a math teacher /(slash) football coach. So they put off getting married for six years so they could both have a job and save money. So they did not get married until 1934 and that was about the time Daddy left teaching and went to the State Department of Education.
THIBODEAUX: And it is my understanding from there he took leave of absence?
MAYO: In 1937 when the President went to Congress, he persuaded Daddy to come to the National Youth Administration and take over that billet, so to speak. Daddy didn’t know how long this young Congressman would be in Washington, so he took leave from the State Department of Education.
CURTIS: I can’t say all of our relatives thought that was a good decision. Some of them are of a pretty conservative bent and the story goes that some of them thought throwing in with these new concepts – President Roosevelt, wasn’t necessarily the best decision.
MAYO: But Daddy never burned his bridges behind him. He was still on leave with the State Department of Education in 1977 when he died, forty years later.
I have often wondered if he had a retirement fund from that. (laughing)
THIBODEAUX: I don’t know. Today that might be investigated like PEC. (laughs) But that is interesting that he stayed on leave.
MAYO: He was a good teacher at home all of his life too, and always a lot of good help with our math problems.
THIBODEAUX: So he was able to continue with his education interests with y’all.
MAYO: Very much so. There was never a question of if we went to college; it was when we went to college.
THIBODEAUX: You were telling a story, I maybe skipping up in time quite a bit, but speaking of education, you were talking, Nita Louise, about a time when your father and Lyndon Johnson, at separate times, talked to you about your education.
MAYO: Yes. I had received my bachelor’s degree in 1962 and gotten married, and was widowed shortly thereafter. They both told me, separately, with or without the other’s knowledge, I have no way of knowing, that a woman with only a bachelor’s degree would have to get a master’s degree in order to make the same income that a man did with a bachelors or less. This was in 1962.
THIBODEAUX: So they were both aware of women’s inequality in pay.
MAYO: Well they both hired women. We knew that.
THIBODEAUX: And you worked as an intern for Vice-President Johnson in 1961?
MAYO: I spent part of the summer of 1961 with them and had the opportunity to help out a little bit.
CURTIS: I didn’t know you were on staff.
MAYO: I helped out. I wasn’t paid. You got paid when you went.
CURTIS: I was going to say, I think I had a better deal.
MAYO: It never occurred to me that they would pay me for all of that slave labor, woman.
CURTIS: No, I actually had a wonderful job. [I] worked in what was then…
MAYO: Maybe Daddy noticed they didn’t pay me and when you went the next year, you got paid. (laughing)
CURTIS: In those days it was called P-38. It was a beautiful, it’s a ceremonial office now for the Vice-President. A beautiful suite of offices. You worked with identifying everybody who walked in the front door. You were responsible for knowing all the senators by sight and most of the representatives, although it was mostly senators he dealt with. But it was a real…
MAYO: No wonder you are so good with names.
CURTIS: It was a real education as to how responsive you had to be. Even though he was not a senator then, he still got lots of calls in the context of his formerly being a senator.
MAYO: And knowing how to get things done in Washington.
CURTIS: Uh huh. So lots of Texas constituents still utilized him in that regard. One of the interesting jobs was he basically had us clipping on certain issues. So you learned a lot about what were the ongoing issues he had to deal with.
THIBODEAUX: What was your experience like – the slave labor part?
MAYO: (laughs) Well, just like out at the ranch or KTBC, you did what you were asked to do to the best of your ability and tried to get out of the way quick if you goofed. (laughs)
THIBODEAUX: Carolyn, you did mention that you saw another side of Vice-President Johnson when you were working there. Can you describe what it was like to work for him?
CURTIS: You did not get any favors just because you had grown up around him. You were treated really like everybody else and he held everybody to the standards that he held himself to. That is the most gracious way of saying that you got yelled at sometimes. He really could lose his temper. He would turn around, I don’t think he could apologize easily, but he did do something correspondingly so nice that you knew that was his way of saying I’m sorry you got yelled at. One day, I was asked to get his limousine to take him to the White House and I sent it to the wrong door at the capitol. So he went down and no car. I really heard about that. On the other hand he could just as easily swoop you up and go buy you a new suit.
MAYO: He was so generous.
CURTIS: He was very generous and particularly wanted you to look your best.
MAYO: Generous with the criticism if you didn’t. (laughs)
CURTIS: But mostly he just wanted every woman to look their best. So he would further their effort along. He would tell you to comb your hair, put your lipstick on, or
MAYO: Or get out of the elephant colors. (laughs)
CURTIS: He had very specific ideas on what he wanted you to look your best. Not too many men would be engaged in that amount of truly criticism meant in the best way.
MAYO: But his criticism always followed up by something to help you achieve what he had just criticized, like a new suit or new lipstick, whatever.
CURTIS: He was truly generous – hearted.
MAYO: Yeah.
THIBODEAUX: Were there many interns from the Hill Country area of Texas?
CURTIS: Do you know, I think there were. I think if you went through the list, many of them were the children of friends. He had this wonderful theory that if you really want to be good to a friend help their kids. I am sure that if you went down the list many of them, we were not picked for our skills or our talent necessarily. We were told to go and learn shorthand. We were expected to know how to type fast and that really was required. But I don’t know if I was selected for any sort of brilliance, I think I was selected because my father was a good friend.
MAYO: He saw to it that as many of his friends’ children as possible had a chance to spend at least part of one summer during their college years in Washington. I don’t know about Carolyn or the others, but my short time in Washington convinced me that was the last place on God’s green earth I wanted to live. So of course, from 1969 until 1977, that’s where my Navy husband and I lived and did our fair share of commuting back and forth to the Pentagon. For a while he was the legislative liaison officer, etc. We had to show at the White House or the Pentagon or the State Department or wherever his skills needed or his social presence was demanded. It was a totally different part of Washington than I had seen the summer of 1961. It turned out to be a lovely place to live because we had Texas friends, we had Navy friends, and we had Texas State society friends,
THIBODEAUX: So you went to Texas State?
MAYO: No, no. Texas State Society is a social group in Washington D.C. of all the Texans. Remember Scooter Miller and that family? I think you got to know their daughter real well.
THIBODEAUX: (pause) I’m sorry I lost my train of thought for a second with that. Oh I know what it is, it came back to me. Sorry about that. You had talked about your parents going to visit the White House. Was that right after he became president or when he was still vice-president?
CURTIS: It was.
MAYO: Immediately after.
CURTIS: He became president November of ’63 and so in a matter of weeks Mother and Daddy were asked to go up to the White House.
MAYO: It was before Christmas.
CURTIS: A really thoughtful thing to do. And fortuitous because Mother died in February so it was a blessing that she had the opportunity and fun.
MAYO: Six weeks later.
THIBODEAUX: Did she have any memories that she told you about the trip.
CURTIS: Oh she did.
MAYO: And she wrote each of us on White House stationary.
CURTIS: She had actually wonderful memories, but he was very generous in opening all of the White House to visitors. That had not been the habit. Usually visitors to the White House did not go upstairs. They usually were far more restricted. But President and Mrs. Johnson allowed guests to come into the family quarters that [were] typically off-limits. Mother loved saying that the history – and loved saying what Mrs. Kennedy had done because that had received a lot of publicity. She had done some of the upstairs quarters as well as downstairs [with] some just beautiful, beautiful antiques and it was just a thrill to see it.
MAYO: It was all fresh and new from Mrs. Kennedy’s redo when Mother and Daddy went that first time in the fall, no, December of ’63.
THIBODEAUX: I bet it was beautiful.
CURTIS: It was, it was.
MAYO: They got to see it all decorated for Christmas. They had waited until the official period of mourning was over to decorate for Christmas. So the week they were there, the Christmas decorations went up.
CURTIS: Mother’s sister has a daughter and she is another one who fell into the wonderful opportunity to go to work in Washington. When President Johnson was really president, Mary Slater, Mother’s niece, our cousin, went to work in the White House and literally traveled around the world with him. When she got married, President Johnson asked us all to come stay at the White House for her wedding. He was very generous-hearted, very generous-hearted.
THIBODEAUX: I can’t believe a stay at the White House for someone else’s wedding beside his own children. Speaking of social events, can you describe events or visits to the LBJ Ranch? I’m sure there were many throughout the years.
CURTIS: You know, it’s odd what you remember, but I remember being thrilled at – I learned how to horseback ride there, Silver J.
MAYO: Yes, a Tennessee walking horse that – who had given him, don’t remember, one of the senators?
CURTIS: Maybe Senator Gore, who knows.
MAYO: Or [Stuart] Symington?
CURTIS: They always had somebody who would teach, teach you pretty well. So they brought in a teacher and Lynda, Luci, Nita Louise and I all learned to horseback ride. We got independent and later could go just all over the ranch on the horses. I look back at those days, to go get a horse and go out to a tank…
MAYO: The only rule was if you opened a gate, you damn sure better close it. (laughing) Woe being to someone who didn’t.
CURTIS: Then the golf cart. You got to take the golf carts out and go tour around the fields until the batteries ran out and that was not a good thing.
MAYO: (laughs) Do you remember the car that would go into the river?
CURTIS: There was an …
MAYO: It is still out there.
CURTIS: … amphibious car. In fact, I think the park service fell heir to that.
MAYO: Good.
CURTIS: He loved toys. He was sort of like a boy in that regard.
MAYO: He had an old fire engine out there.
CURTIS: Uh huh.
MAYO: I don’t know where that came from or when he acquired it. But one year, a year or two before the President died, the whole family picture was taken on the old fire truck.
CURTIS: It’s there in the hall. You will see it. Oh no, I take that back; that’s a different picture. But at any rate, that is when you are a kid. Later we had trips as a young married couple up there. We had trips for baptismals, marriages – Luci’s second marriage – we were out at that wedding. I guess the last time we were at the ranch, Lynda asked, and this was after her mother died, “Would you like to go sleep in Daddy’s bed?” Tom and I had that occasion because they have turned over, I am sure you know, the house to the park service. But I thought that was really a sweet, sweet, generous thing to do.
Lots of events out there. The first event for the raising money for Town Lake Trail was out there. So we had a huge party the first time they opened up the ranch to a fundraiser. Mrs. Johnson and he said you may do this while I am still alive. He died in January and she went on with the party, the party was slated for May. She said, “Absolutely we will go ahead with it.”
MAYO: We hauled the hay bales down by the river and covered [them] with quilts and stuff. It was kind of…
CURTIS: We had several fundraisers for the Wildflower Center out there. They did the auction when they auctioned off the cattle herd after he died. I helped with that. So it was just a patchwork quilt of different events.
THIBODEAUX: So it is my understanding that your father, Jesse Kellam, did not have a true political connection with Lyndon Johnson, but he did have, beside a personal relationship, a business relationship. Can you describe that?
MAYO: Daddy was president of what used to be called the Texas Broadcasting Corporation which owned KTBC. He was the president and general manager. It was his job to take this little daytime only, miniscule power radio station with no network affiliation in 1945 to what became a full-powered CBS affiliate that branched into T.V. and then FM and then something called Muzak. And that kept him pretty busy.
THIBODEAUX: I can imagine, especially working for the Johnsons.
CURTIS: Well it started out Mrs. Johnson had a small inheritance. She invested it in buying this radio station, I guess, in 1945 after the war. They had gone through State Department of Education days and NYA days together. I think it was a trusting relationship and [Johnson] knew he was not interested in politics. He was more attuned to business.
MAYO: In fact he fought taking the job because he said, “I don’t know anything about radio.” Mrs. Johnson said, “But you know a lot about people and how to get them to do a job. You can learn about radio.” And he did. I remember when they talked about going in to cable television in the early 60s. Daddy hired me briefly to go do all the research that could be done on what was then known as cable vision. So I assembled a stack of stuff. Fortunately I did not have to draw him any conclusions from it. My job was to assemble the research and turn it over to him. That was what they based their decision on to go into what is now called Time-Warner Cable? It was originally KTBC – Cable Vision effort.
THIBODEAUX: What was it like socially? How the families interacted as much together and with the Johnsons. Can you describe that?
CURTIS: I guess it was a very hard-working atmosphere. You went seamlessly from the office to sometimes a big backyard barbeque on Dillman. There was no division between talking business at picnics that involved everybody’s kids and no division between work and play. You were just as likely to talk business…
MAYO: Over a game of dominoes.
CURTIS: …or on a weekend you are invited out to the ranch, you take your briefcase. That was true of President Johnson, also true of Mrs. Johnson. When we were working on Wildflower events or something of that nature, you knew that over dinner you might be discussing basically work related functions or work related issues. It was true of Lyndon Johnson around the dinner table – Tom was one time asked when we were early married and out there, “What do you eat for dinner? Where do you shop? What do you buy? What’s the menu like?” Trying to get a grasp on what life was for somebody our age and stage. So it was, you knew everybody’s kids, you babysat for them when you got a little bit older, you were babysat by, you know, somebody Daddy worked with and they had a daughter old enough to baby-sit us. The friends that you were thrown together with were usually work related.
MAYO: It was also a time when Austin was a much smaller town. I think that had a lot to do with it. Everybody here was sort of in tuned with each others values and you knew the people you knew you could trust. They very seldom let you down.
THIBODEAUX: What was it like growing up being friends of such a well-known politician, vice-president, then president? Did you realize that this was out of the ordinary?
CURTIS: You know, I don’t think it was then. They knew a lot of people.
MAYO: A lot of our friends at school had no idea who Daddy worked for. We had no idea who their daddies worked for.
CURTIS: It was really a different stage and I laugh now to think that one of Daddy’s really good friends was Joe Koen. I never knew he was Jewish. The dividing lines between work and play, you just didn’t have many dividing lines at all.
MAYO: We grew up from ’46 to ’52 on West Sixth Street, right where it now goes under Mopac. In those days the choo-choo trains puffed out lots of coal smoke and stuff.
CURTIS: It was not a fancy neighborhood.
MAYO: No. It was a full block from Clarksville. The lady who did our ironing had kids and we played with them. Then we couldn’t understand why her black children went to a different elementary school than we did and they were only two blocks apart. We were young and naïve. The answer we were given was that’s the way it is.
CURTIS: But in truth, our father really was, and I’m sure Lyndon Johnson really was, it was not politically far, of not being prejudiced. So his stint in the State Department of Education, for instance, one place he went was a black…
MAYO: Prairie View.
CURTIS: Prairie View State College. They would have Daddy sitting with the faculty upstairs and not really mixing with people downstairs.
MAYO: But even then…
CURTIS: He said no (laughs) this is not the way I can learn about what’s going on.
MAYO: They set a table in the main dining room and because the lines were so firmly drawn in the 30s, in order for him to sit at the same table with the black teachers, the table was put in a doorway. He sat over here in one room and they sat in the other room, but at the same table.
CURTIS: It was an odd…
MAYO: But he insisted we will eat together. And he certainly had no objections when one of my debate partners at Austin High School was a black girl.
THIBODEAUX: I’ve heard stories of the tables divided by the doors. That is amazing.
CURTIS: Times have changed.
MAYO: Thank goodness.
CURTIS: He really was, I can’t remember how we got a-field, you look back on it and you see they shared the same philosophies.
MAYO: But, where we went a-field was an interesting point. We grew up in a way less than affluent environment and that was probably the biggest difference between us-ums and them-ums. (laughs) That when the President asked Carolyn and Tom about how do young newlyweds fair in Austin, Texas, he knew that a young lawyer and his wife were in a whole different world than he was in the White House. He really, genuinely wanted to know what’s it like, because he had grown up with a lot less than he acquired later on.
THIBODEAUX: Moving on to Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State University, I have such a hard time remembering when they changed names the many times they have, I think it was Southwest Texas at that time. Were you in attendance on campus when Lyndon Johnson announced the J.C. Kellam Award?
CURTIS: I was and I always thought that was one of the sweetest things he did to let Tom and me share that and see Daddy get that award. He picked us up at Camp Mabry in a helicopter and we flew down there, which was just a thrill. He saw to it that, you know, I’m sure because he did it and he was there and it was a wonderful occasion with lots of things I really had not known about Daddy being said. I thought that was really so thoughtful.
THIBODEAUX: And you were telling me how the award evolved?
CURTIS: It has evolved. It started out as an award in the athletic department and Daddy played sports for Texas State, his career in the early days as a coach so it made perfect sense. Later on, really after President Johnson died, Mrs. Johnson called. Every year this award had been given, a cash award for the J.C. Kellam [Award], whoever received the J.C.Kellam Award got , I take it, a wonderful piece of paper and …
MAYO: some kind of Bobcat award or something.
CURTIS: … cash. She said should I change the way I’m handling things and are you interested in examining that and what your thoughts are about it – whether or not you want to change it to perhaps to be a more enduring thing, which was her very gracious way of saying I may not be able to do a cash award every year as an annual gift. So we talked about it and she said, “Well, I believe after this conversation, we will start an endowment and that will be for a perpetual honor for your father.” Nita Louise and I both added to it to be sure it endures. So it is now awarded to a student in the McCoy School of Business.
MAYO: And it has been a great joy to know that some of the recipients have been females. (laughs) Daddy would like that.
THIBODEAUX: Most definitely. This is a question that I ask everyone, kind of an opinion question. The Common Experience theme for this next academic year at Texas State University has to do with civic responsibility and also LBJ’s legacy. I was wondering what you think is Lyndon Johnson’s legacy, especially in this area, the Central Texas area.
CURTIS: You know, I think in the long view it may be education. I hope it is because he invested so much in that field whether it was early childhood education, college education, just across the board. Another connection with Daddy was he appointed him to the Carnegie Board that examined education in that day and time.
MAYO: It also created public broadcasting.
CURTIS: I hope that’s it. I think it will be broader than that but I think that’s the focus Texas State ought to in this history, ought to be proud of and hope that it is true. Nita Louise, what would you…
MAYO: I think his greatest legacy is probably for the kids who start out without much. You too can become president. I think people who go to the boyhood home out at the ranch and who look around Johnson City and Stonewall, which is a lot better off now than it was in 1908, they look around and they think – they didn’t have a whole lot. And yet the boyhood home is a lot more spruced up than I understand it really was. It looks really nice. I think really that says so much to so many people; and I hope what it says to them is you don’t have to have a handout. You can do this for yourself. You can work hard. You don’t have to have a scholarship or grant. You can get a job as a janitor. You don’t have to have rich family friends to do well. You can work hard and do well. To me that is a legacy that I think he would be proud of.
THIBODEAUX: Sounds like a good one for sure. Anything that I have missed, any other memories that you have of your father and Lyndon Johnson or experiences you have had with the Johnson family that we have skipped over?
MAYO: The thing I remember most of all is how they included us. If they hadn’t there would have been long periods when we wouldn’t have seen much of them because when the President was in Texas they needed to be together. So we all went out to the ranch or we all went over to Dillman Street, or in some cases back in the 40s, we all went to Woolridge Park for a political rally and the Jesse James Band would be playing down there in that little pavilion. But we were included, Lynda, Luci, Carolyn, and I. And we got to meet some interesting people, but mostly we got to be with our parents and their friends. That meant a lot.
THIBODEAUX: You mentioned Dillman Street. What was on Dillman Street?
MAYO: 1901 Dillman Street was…
CURTIS: … was just a big old house.
MAYO: … was a big old house and it actually had three apartments in it, two good size apartments and an efficiency. And at one point the President’s mother occupied the little efficiency while she was acquiring a home over on Harris Boulevard. But when the President wasn’t in Congress, and Congress didn’t use to meet all year, Lynda and Luci, in fact, would spend the fall in school here in Austin and then in the spring they attended school in Washington. That must have been awfully difficult. But Dillman was the center of their life at that point because this was before they had the ranch. The ranch didn’t come into their possession until 1952. Political rallies, business meetings, family dinners, KTBC parties, I have pictures of the KTBC staff parties at Dillman Street and they were always held on Mrs. Johnson’s birthday because it always turned into a big birthday party for her.
CURTIS: You know the thing I guess that I would say that has remained special to me, and I don’t know if I have really dealt on it, is that a friendship of two women that would start back in the late 1800s would evolve into seeing literally my grandchildren playing with Luci’s grandchildren and Lynda’s grandchildren, and having a relationship that goes over four or five generations in this day and time when people move around and change. I think it is very unusual to where you have a shared history with your friends in this day and time. It’s not just that your parents were friends, and gosh wasn’t that nice or your grandparents were friends and isn’t that nice, but that your grandchildren are friends. I just treasure that.
MAYO: Well if Luci hadn’t moved back to Austin that wouldn’t have been possible.
CURTIS: So it is something that is just lovely.
MAYO: It is special. It is special.
THIBODEAUX: And Luci has worked to more or less continue her mother’s work and legacy here?
CURTIS: She is. She works very hard at that. I think Lynda works at it too. You don’t hear as much about it simply because she is in Washington. All the events that, for instance Mrs. Johnson is going to be honored in mid-June by an exhibit at the National Botanical Gardens, and Lynda will be and Luci will be a part of that in Washington and there are centennial events in Washington coming up.
MAYO: Well today and tomorrow [May 19th and 20th, 2008].
CURTIS: Uh huh. And they will be involved in that so they have the blessing and the burden, and sometimes it is a little bit of each to divide themselves out between their own interests, children’s interest, and their parent’s interest.
MAYO: Well it has been an interesting thing for my husband and me over these years. For the first fifteen years of our marriage, we were under a military edict to keep our distance because there’s this thing called political influence on a military officer’s career that you don’t want. It’s death. So when we went, in fact, to stay at the White House for a cousin’s wedding, my husband had to take a leave of absence from his military job to go to Washington. Then, of course, they had to have an address and a phone number. Fortunately the White House is a half of a block from what use to be the main Navy [building], and said can I use your address as my leave address. Yes. But we did give the White House phone number and fortunately nobody called. (laughs) But it was interesting that you could have friends in high places, but none of your friends at work knew it. I think for you here in Austin it was completely different because everybody knew you were Daddy’s daughter and who he worked for.
CURTIS: Oh, Nita Louise, not really, no.
MAYO: Good, well that helps.
CURTIS: When you change your name, you know, I have always thought you change your name and your life goes on.
MAYO: But the interesting thing is that we lived here a year after I got married, so nobody knew my married name. (laughs)
THIBODEAUX: Did you find in those years at the end of Johnson’s presidency, that you did not want to be known to be associated – was there controversy over Vietnam?
MAYO: We have never been embarrassed by that association.
CURTIS: You know, you had good friends on both sides of that issue. Interestingly, when the Wildflower Center was started, Mrs. Johnson made it very clear that she wanted this very bipartisan. That has been true of their friends, as they really worked at keeping friends who, particularly Mrs. Johnson, was very good at keeping friends that might have opposing views. Didn’t always work. Didn’t always succeed, but I always admired her for the effort. It was harder for him because he had to take so much more of the lightening, but I think her effort was always to keep the voices that may not agree with your own around. I think he did always seek out opinions. Maybe fifteen people would be asked the same question. Each one of them thought gosh I am the only one asked that, but he liked those opposing views to make decisions.
MAYO: It is interesting you mentioned [Vietnam]. My husband was in Vietnam when the President died and he called me from Saigon before Daddy had a chance to call me which was before it hit the news because as soon as he died, the whole defense department went on full alert. My husband was assistant chief of staff for whatever it was there in Saigon and he picked up the phone and got through to me on one of those rare thirty second phone calls. He was crying and he said, “Honey, the boss is dead. Call your dad.”
THIBODEAUX: How amazing even after – he wasn’t even in the presidency anymore. So the military still retains respect.
MAYO: When a former president dies the military goes on full alert. Leaves are cancelled, everything.
THIBODEAUX: That is interesting.
MAYO: That is one reason they can get all of the military organizations to march in the funeral and stuff because all leaves have been cancelled.
THIBODEAUX: Are there any other stories to share?
CURTIS: Oh no, I think you have done such a good job.
MAYO: I am so glad you are doing it.
THIBODEAUX: Oh, thank you. It has been an interesting project so far. I’ve learned a lot.
CURTIS: Who could I refer you to who could help you? Do you want any other contact information?
(End of interview)