They Know When You Die

THERE was a quiet flurry on the morning of Lyndon Johnson's burial. A little more than might be expected for the normal funeral in and around Johnson City, Texas, but no hint of frenzy. Death is a part of life there. The people always gather when one of their own dies, drawn together by the profound humanness that gives these tiny clusters the strength to cling, generation after generation, in the wash of the Great Plains.

Lyndon was dead. Not the President. Not Lyndon Baines Johnson. Just Lyndon. Sadness was there, of course, but there was, too, the pride in having tempered this man. There was also the understanding that comes from living in a land where everything rises from nature, flourishes and then is taken back.

Mrs. Stella Gliddon's phone jangled. "I want to go," she told her caller.

"But this weather is so bad. They say they had snow over at Harper." Chili beans bubbled on the stove, and the Bible lay in the center of the kitchen table. "I thought when I was tired of working I would move out of Johnson City," she said. "But I can't. I can't leave these people. They are so wonderful...I think Lyndon felt the same way."

She was a child in an elocution class when the teacher, Rebekah Baines Johnson, brought her first-born for the youngsters to admire. It was Lyndon. Mrs. Gliddon was in the Johnson home one night when the father, Sam Ealy Johnson, lined all the kids up in front of the fireplace and made them speak on a chosen subject. Lyndon shone.

"I'd say, 'Come on over, I've got some fried chicken,' " recalled Mrs. Gliddon. "He used to sit right here in this kitchen. He'd tell me, 'Miss Stella, I like your fried chicken better than anything in the world.' " When the Gliddon girls would gather with friends, Lyndon would show up to pester them. "But you know," Mrs. Gliddon said, looking out at cold clouds, "even in playing, Lyndon would look out for the underdog."

It is one of the ironies of our crowded times that these tiny, isolated places provided such opportunity for the talented ones. And through a community's celebration of their deeds, a lasting human attachment is forged. Lyndon shined shoes in front of Maddox's Barber Shop, hoed the weeds in the town's yards for a dollar, debated, rang the church bell, and played first base on the vacant lot across the creek.

"He could reach ten feet in either direction," said George Byars, as he was getting ready to ride over to the ranch for the last rites. "Nothing could get by him."

But no matter how big he got, Lyndon came back.

L.B.J. AT SEVEN "His father always said he wanted to be in Johnson

City because 'they cared when you were sick, and they knew when you died.' Lyndon felt the same way."

Ohlen Cox couldn't go to the burial. He watched it on TV because he was sitting with an ailing friend. Lyndon would have understood that, of course. He understood a lot of things. There was the time he had come home from Washington as Congressman Richard Kleberg's secretary. Lyndon came to Cox's garage and the two had a couple of drinks, and Lyndon said, "I'm learning a lot up there in Washington. I'm going to be up there myself some day." Ohlen Cox never doubted him. He knew Lyndon had it figured out.

Mrs. Simon Lewis couldn't go to the ranch either. She had had a stroke and it confined her to her home. When she was a teenager, Rebekah had hired her to tend the Johnson children while Rebekah taught her elocution students. Mrs. Lewis remembered the time that Lyndon had taken the younger ones up in the loft of the barn and while he was going down a ladder with one of the girls he had fallen. "He held onto the little girl," said Mrs. Lewis. "She wasn't hurt. But Lyndon broke his leg."

Standing there last Thursday in the town square of Johnson City, hearing and sensing these people, one was suddenly aware that this was a great American saga of sorts--the beginning and the struggle, linking all these people, then the rise to undreamed-of eminence of one of their own, and finally the return to the same land and the same people.

It won't take long before the story begins to fade and yellow, to be pushed aside by new men and new events. In another generation it will be another dusty volume, thin and brittle in the library stacks. But right now it is a book of unusual history, something very rare and very rich.

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