The Bush Family Fantasy

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In the restless, get-rich-tomorrow Permian Basin economy, the Bush family actually lived in three houses in nearby Odessa in 1948 and 1949, and in three Midland houses between 1950 and 1959. Claiming the Bushes is all part of a continuing competition between Midland and Odessa, prairie cities that sit 20 miles apart, reveling in their differences. Midland is richer; Odessa is blue collar. Odessa is tougher, a better place to drink; Midland has more country clubs. The airport bears Midland’s name, but Odessa landed University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

If you’re from Midland or Odessa, you feel deeply insulted when outsiders say they always get the cities confused. Can’t people see the profound differences? Nobody else cares, but in the Permian Basin, confusing Midland and Odessa are fighting words—or evidence that you might be in serious need of a working brain.

You can forget about Odessa when you’re in Midland. “I tell people this is the only house in America that was the home of two presidents, two governors, and one first lady,” a volunteer docent at the Midland house said.

Since it opened to the public in April 2006, the house has attracted thousands of visitors from 33 countries and 48 states. (Alaska and New Hampshire are the only holdouts.) The plain frame house, built in 1939, has been restored to a painstaking recreation of a 1950s family home. The paneling in the living room is knotty pine; Venetian blinds shade the sun. There’s an old television with a small screen that resembles the one Barbara Bush’s father once gave the family for Christmas, and an enclosed porch with a stick horse and a chalkboard.

The kitchen boasts a speckled linoleum floor and a dazzling turquoise refrigerator that still works. In a bedroom, a neatly folded Cub Scout uniform lies on a twin bed. There’s a photograph of George H.W. Bush as a lanky Yalie standing next to Babe Ruth, and George W.’s Little League roster.

It’s an impressive job, this careful, airbrushed paean to a simpler time, to a warmhearted city of good neighbors and backyard barbecues, to a hardworking and unassuming family. “It seems improbable now, but in that little house on Ohio Street right down the road from here, it was hard to envision then the future . . . of two presidents and a governor of Florida,” George W. told the Dallas Morning News in 2001.

Not quite so improbable when you consider the family’s hefty ties to Eastern financial and political establishments, but why quibble? It makes a better story that way, when fate singles out a young family for political destiny—even if it wasn’t much less likely, given the circumstances, than a dust storm slamming into Midland every spring.

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