Odessa took its name from the Ukrainian city bordering the Black Sea, and at first it must have felt like a foreign country to my father. He didn’t know a single person when he arrived. People he met were more like the folks in the Navy than those he knew back home. Odessa was a blue-collar town, home to oil field laborers: mechanics who fixed the equipment and roughnecks who worked on the rigs. One of my father’s coworkers once asked him whether he’d gone to college. As a matter of fact, Dad replied, he had just graduated from Yale. The fellow thought for a second and said, “Never heard of it.” The fashion in West Texas was different too. Dad once walked out of the house wearing Bermuda shorts. After several truck drivers honked at him, he went back home and packed away the Bermuda shorts for good. Even the food was unfamiliar. My father always remembered the first time he saw someone order a West Texas delicacy: chicken-fried steak.
Dad found a house on East Seventh Street. The good news was that it had a bathroom, unlike most residences on the street, which had outhouses. The bad news was that we had to share the bathroom with two women who lived on the other side of the duplex—a mother-daughter pair who made their living by entertaining male clients throughout the night. The thirteen-family house next to the Yale President didn’t seem so bad by comparison.
Life in West Texas required other adjustments. Shortly after Mother and I joined Dad in Odessa, she woke up during the night to the smell of gas. Thinking the house was at risk of explosion, she grabbed me and hustled out onto the curb. A neighbor who witnessed the evacuation kindly explained that a shift in the winds had brought the scent of the oil fields wafting in. Nothing was wrong. We could all go back to sleep. Mother’s experience confirmed a truth about West Texas: Life revolved around oil. It was in the ground below, the air above, and the minds of everyone who called the place home.
The key to my parents’ successful transition to their new surroundings was their attitude. They didn’t approach life in West Texas as a hardship to be endured; they embraced it as an adventure—
The three of us spent Christmas 1948 in Odessa. On Christmas Eve, Dad’s company held a party for its customers. He volunteered to mix drinks. To show his holiday spirit, he raised a glass of his own for almost every cocktail he poured. By the end of the evening, the jolly bartender was helped into the back of a company pickup truck. One of his coworkers drove him home, eased down the tailgate, and rolled him onto the front lawn. The Bushes were fitting in just fine in West Texas.
—
THE STORY OF the Odessa Christmas party, which Mother never let Dad forget, typified my father’s approach to work: When he committed to doing something, he did it all out. If George Bush was assigned to sweep the warehouse, the manager would find the cleanest floor he’d ever seen. If he had to paint rigs, he would come in Saturday morning to slap on an extra coat so that the job got done right. My father enjoyed working hard, and he liked to see the result of his efforts. The lessons his mother had instilled had taken hold: Do your best. Don’t be arrogant. Never complain.
After a while, his supervisors recognized that their trainee was capable of bigger things. So in 1949, when I was three years old, Dad was transferred to California. There he worked seven days a week in an oil pump factory and then as a traveling salesman for Dresser subsidiaries, hawking drill bits and other equipment. We lived in four different cities that year: Whittier, Ventura, Bakersfield, and Compton. In Whittier and Ventura, we rented rooms in local hotels for extended stays. In Bakersfield, we lived for a few months in a rented 950-square-foot white frame house. In Compton, we lived in an apartment in the Santa Fe Gardens complex. (Sadly, the complex was condemned many years later after being overtaken by drugs and violence.)
Our transient lifestyle in California was tough on Mother, who was constantly packing, unpacking, and taking care of me. On top of that, she was pregnant with my younger sister Robin, who was due around Christmas 1949. We were living in Compton at the time. Mother wanted to be sure that someone would be available to watch me when she went to the hospital, so she asked our next-door neighbor, with whom she had become friends. The neighbor agreed. Not long before Mother went into labor, she learned that the neighbor had fled with her children after her abusive husband came home drunk one too many times. So much for my babysitter. Somehow Mother found somebody to take care of me (nobody can remember who), and my sister Robin was born on December 20, 1949.
Robin was named after my grandmother Pauline Robinson Pierce, who had died in a car accident three months earlier. My grandfather refused to let Mother travel to the funeral for fear that the trip would endanger the baby. It was tough on Mother to be so far from her dad—whom she adored—in his time of grief.
The year in California was not easy for my father, either. He was on the road almost all the time. He estimated that he put about a thousand miles a week on his car. He was not a fast-talking pitchman, but he developed a sales approach that proved effective. He would forge personal relationships, just like he had in school and the military. Over time, he offered his customers something more than drill bits: He earned their trust.
In the spring of 1950, my father received the news that Dresser had transferred him back to West Texas. He could live in either Odessa or Midland. As a twenty-five-year-old father of two, he wanted to settle down. He and Mother chose Midland, which was then home to 215 oil companies and about 21,000 people. We would call Midland home for the next nine years. It is the first city that I remember living in, and it will always be the place I consider my hometown.
—
MIDLAND, TEXAS, took its name from its location halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso on the Texas and Pacific Railway. Like Odessa, Midland gave you the feeling of life on the edge. I remember my father going into the backyard of our house in Midland and confronting a huge tarantula on the porch with a broom. The hairy critter took a big hop, and it took all of Dad’s skill as a first baseman to keep it from slipping past him into the house.
While Midland and Odessa had similar topography, they had different demographics. Most people in Odessa worked in the oil fields; most people in Midland worked in offices. Like Odessa, Midland was a boomtown, and it was hard to find housing. We lived briefly at a hotel and then moved into a new 847-square-foot house on the outskirts of town. The neighborhood was called Easter Egg Row, because the developer had chosen vibrant paint colors to help residents tell the houses apart. Our Easter egg at 405 East Maple was bright blue.
Midland in the 1950s featured an equally colorful cast of characters. There were people who were broke one day and rich the next. There were old ranch families who had lived on the land before the oil strikes. There were Texans from other parts of the state, especially graduates of the University of Texas and Texas A&M. My father was part of a small contingent of Ivy League graduates who had turned down opportunities on the East Coast so that they could scratch an entreprene