Like many others, I was sad to see Lady Bird Johnson's passing this week, but for somewhat more personal reasons. I met Mrs. Johnson when I was a graduate student at the LBJ School working in Washington for her daughter Lynda Robb on the National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality in 1988. As a fellow Marshallite I claimed the privilege of escorting her into a auditorium at an event that fall (a pretty neat experience for a young college student), and visited briefly about people we both knew from Marshall - she of course is from just outside Marshall, and graduated from Marshall High School about sixty years before I did. It's amazing how familiar she seemed - she sounded and acted just like every little old lady I grew up around - once she looked at you and said something it was impossible to think of her as a former First Lady - she was just like my grandmother's bridge friends, around whom you were supposed to be on your best behavior. And I tried very hard to be.
The following spring I shared the stage with her at my graduation when I introduced our speaker, White House Director of Personnel Chase Untermeyer at my graduation ceremony at the LBJ School (I introduced him as a "kinder and gentler" commencement speaker, which was somewhat funny, if I do say so myself, coming right after the first President Bush's election). I visited with Mrs. Johnson backstage, and then after the ceremony when I introduced her to my family as that lady that I got to work with last summer in Washington.
I include this picture of her meeting my mother because this is exactly what she was like - she made eye contact with you and spoke to you as if you were the only person in the world, and you just knew - being from the same corner of the world - that's that's how she had been raised - to be courteous and polite because that's what your family expected of you, and you eventually came to expect of yourself. She was also quick to laugh - this picture is one of my favorites.
Here are a few others of her meeting my sister Emily - yes, that's what Texas hair looked like in 1989. 
About six years later in the fall of 1995 I received a call early one Sunday morning when Mrs. Johnson was in town and needed someone to let her into the Harrison County Historical Museum in the old county courthouse in Marshall to check on a dress and some other items she'd donated to the museum in 1965. I was the museum's immediate past president, but the only person they could find that had keys to the building and knew where everything was (we'd just completely redone our exhibits). The very interesting details of the visit are in the attached story from the paper at that time Download lady_birds_hchm_museum_visit.pdf (including the Secret Service's having to come to my office the next day to pick up her cane, which she'd left), but it was at that visit that she realized that while we had one of her red silk inaugural ball gowns, LBJ's suit with it was a brown business suit. (Her eyes were bad, but not that bad!) She immediately got us a black tuxedo of President Johnson's, so that our display had an appropriate counterpart to her gown. We also spent several hours going through the museum's other collections and I narrated what we had at her request. I didn't realize at the time how bad her eyesight was, but it was an interesting experience trying to narrate what was in the display cases of a small county museum to someone who had seen probably more of the world than anyone else I'd ever meet. But again, it was exactly like talking to one of my grandmother's friends - I'd been around little old ladies like her all my life. We pulled out her old report cards from high school, and Secret Service staff detail really perked up - they were immensely pleased to see that she had not always had perfect conduct grades. And I'll always remember the conversation we had about Sam Houston in the military room while looking at one of his 1860 gubernatorial campaign posters - because as I later realized, the conversation wasn't really about Sam Houston at all. I think what I was getting was an echo of what LBJ thought of himself after he left the White House, and I have ever since wondered if any LBJ historians have picked up on that - that he thought he was a misunderstood hero in much the same way as Houston, who was the father of Texas the nation and state, yet by the time of his death he was almost universally hated within the state.
Almost anyone in Texas knows the debt we owe to Lady Bird every spring for the wildflowers that line our highways, and I certainly know the debt I owe her family for what I get to do for a living and where. If it hadn't been for her family I wouldn't have attended graduate school at UT Austin, where I studied under Professor Barbara Jordan, who encouraged me to attend law school, and then recommended me for a clerkship with her former congressional colleague Sam B. Hall, Jr., who was by then a federal judge in Marshall, which was where I really wanted to practice. But above all else, we all owe a debt to Lady Bird for her graciousness and kindness and dignity in the public eye over half a century, and under extraordinarily trying circumstances.