:D....too funny!
A Shrub Grows in MidlandBY KAREN OLSSON
They keep getting shorter. Prescott Bush, the investment banker and senator from Connecticut, was 6’4" and aristocratic looking. His son, President George H.W. Bush, grew to a handsome 6’2". The man they once called Junior, who currently serves as governor of Texas, is barely six feet, and cute.
The Senator has been portrayed as an imperious man, the President as a somewhat likeable snob, and the Governor alternately as a jokey guy with a temper (pre-1994) and a nice guy with a gift for remembering names (1994-?). Scanning down that bosky line of descent, however, one notices certain similarities of form and function among the Bushes – for instance, in their provincial exploits as young men.
Each felt some impulse to reenact the American rise to riches, to make his own fortune. So in 1922, after Yale and a brief tour of duty in France, Prescott took not a penny of his father’s railroad money but instead signed on with the Simmons Hardware Company of St. Louis. Twenty-six years later George H.W., after graduating from Yale, set out in a red Studebaker for West Texas ("We wanted to make our way, our own mistakes, and shape our own future," he later recalled) to work for a friend of his father’s. He eventually started his own oil company in Midland, and George W. spent his early youth there. The younger George would return to Midland – perhaps driven by the congenital will to succeed in business, or perhaps attracted by the familiarity and ease of his childhood home, the path already trodden by his father. In all likelihood it was a little of both. This was 1975, as W. closed in on thirty: with Yale, the Air National Guard, a couple of party-boy years in Houston, and Harvard Business School behind him, the shortest Bush took the advice of his father’s old friends and moved back to West Texas. He was a good-looking single guy with a political lineage and fancy degrees and not much of a résumé, and $20,000 left in his trust fund.
The elder George had come to Midland for the first Permian Basin oil rush, and George W. arrived just in time for the second, as did a number of Sons of Oil. "It was the time for reinvestment in the oil industry," says second-generation oilman and gubernatorial friend Joseph I. O’Neill III, "and there were twelve or so of us, who all moved back out here at the same time. It was a boom type atmosphere." President Bush had begun his career sweeping warehouses for a drilling supply company; George W. started out as a landman, studying deed records at the courthouse and buying and selling leases. He set up shop on the fourth floor of the Midland National Bank Building, where he shared an office with landman F.H. "Buzz" Mills, Jr. "George did a little bit of everything," Mills says. "We would sometimes discuss what we were doing, but George didn’t need a lot of help…. With his dad’s background, he knew something about the oil business, and in Midland all of his friends, or most of them, had been in the oil business."
http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=1175
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