A few months after we arrived in Midland, my father received an unexpected letter from Tom McCance, an executive at Brown Brothers Harriman. The firm had renewed its offer. Dad’s knowledge of the Texas oil business would be valuable on Wall Street. The offer could have provided a perfect escape hatch. My parents could say that they had enjoyed living in West Texas, had learned something new, and were ready to return to their roots. That’s not what they did. My father thanked Mr. McCance for his generosity, but he declined. He had staked his claim in West Texas.

—

SOME OF MY warmest memories of our Midland years are of the time I spent with Dad. He was busy building his business and traveling. He was active in the community, teaching Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church and leading fund-raising drives for the United Way and the YMCA. Yet I never felt his absence. He always made it a point to spend as much time with his children as he could. As my brother Jeb put it, George H.W. Bush invented “quality time.” He would come home from work, pull out a mitt, and toss the baseball with me in the yard of our home at 1412 West Ohio Avenue, where we moved in 1951. That house is now the George W. Bush Childhood Home. (I’ve always wondered why the museum isn’t called the George H.W. Bush Home Where George W. Bush Lived as a Child.)

On some weekends, Dad and his friends would take me dove hunting—a ritual for many in West Texas. I carried the .410 that he gave me for Christmas after he was convinced that I had mastered gun safety lessons. We would congregate around a water hole in the middle of the dry land, cooking burgers on a portable grill and waiting till sundown in hopes that the doves would fly in to quench their thirst. He also took me out to the oil fields, where I saw the rigs and pumping units up close. Those trips helped spark an interest in the oil business that I would later pursue by becoming an independent oilman in the mid-1970s.

Our house was a hub of activity. One day he brought home an engineer from Yugoslavia whom he’d met through his oil business. He stayed with us for a week, and my father showed him around the West Texas oil fields. During one of our summers in Midland, my father’s younger brother Bucky, fourteen years his junior, and Bucky’s college pal Fay Vincent—who later became Commissioner of Major League Baseball—came to live with us while they roughnecked on the oil rigs.

My parents were constantly inviting their neighbors over for backyard barbecues or cocktails. I remember one Christmas when I received a horn as a gift. I blew the horn a few too many times, and my father took it away from me and broke it. A few days later, one of our neighbors acquired the same model horn, called the house until my father answered, and then blew the horn into the phone. Another time, my father played a prank on his good friend and fellow Yale graduate Earle Craig, who was known to bite into the pearl onion that floated in his martini with a grand flourish. One night Dad mixed the drink with a rubber onion. When the Earle of Craig (as he was known to some) dramatically bit into the faux onion, the circle of friends (likely a few martinis deep) had a good chuckle. Earle knew it was all done in fun. Life in Midland was friendly and carefree.

I don’t remember a lot about our conversations from those years, but it’s safe to say that we spent most of our time talking about school or sports. My father was not the kind of man who gave us lectures on politics or philosophy. He believed in leading by example. If I had a question, he was there to answer it. He always gave good advice.

When I was about six years old, I went with some friends to a general store in Midland. I saw a couple of plastic toy soldiers in a jar on the shelf. I decided to put them in my pocket and walk out of the store without paying. Later that day, my father noticed me playing with the pilfered soldiers in the front yard.

“Hi, son,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

“Playing soldiers,” I said.

“Where did you get those?” he asked.

I hesitated. He asked the question again.

After a little soul-searching, I confessed. “I took them from the store,” I said.

“Come with me,” he said. We got in his car and drove to the store. He instructed me to walk into the store alone, return the soldiers, and apologize to the manager for stealing them. I did what he asked and felt genuine remorse. When I got back in the car, Dad didn’t say another word. He knew he had made his point.

Most of the day-to-day work of raising my siblings and me fell to Mother. She drove me to baseball practice and kept score at my games, just like she had for Dad. She was the den mother who took our Cub Scout troop to Carlsbad Caverns and the Monahans Sandhills. Mother always welcomed my friends for lunch or dinner between marathon sessions of baseball or football. She administered the discipline when necessary. Unlike my father, she did not believe in subtlety. One of her favorite tactics when I was young was to wash my mouth out with soap when I said or did something “smutty,” like the time she caught me urinating in the hedges in our yard. For the most part, though, she gave me the slack to have fun and be a free-spirited boy.

My parents’ approach to raising their children reflected the attitude of their generation. My father spent more time with us than his father had with him, but dads in those days were not as involved as they are today. Most weren’t as emotional, either. In our early years, my father was not a hugger, nor did he say “I love you.” But he didn’t need to. We always knew that he loved us unconditio

nally.

We knew that my parents loved each other, too. In the sixty-nine years that I have observed my parents’ marriage, I have never once heard them exchange harsh words. Sure, there’s a little needling here and a good-natured disagreement there. But I have never sensed anger or frustration. Their solid, loving bond was a source of stability for me when I was a child—and a source of inspiration for me when I married Laura.

At the time, my siblings and I didn’t fully appreciate how lucky we were. Others did. At Laura’s fiftieth high school reunion, my boyhood friend Mike Proctor pulled me aside for a chat. Mike had lived across the street from us when we were growing up. We were the same age and in the same grade. Mike spent a lot of time at our house. We rode bikes together, played football together, and were part of the same Cub Scout troop. Unbeknownst to me, Mike’s family had some serious problems at home.

At the reunion, Mike said, “There’s something that I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time. I need you to do me a favor.”

“Sure thing, Mike,” I said. “What is it?”

“Tell your mother that I said thanks.”

He continued, “Back then, you probably didn’t realize how dysfunctional my family was. Because of your mother’s kindness, I saw how a real family works.”

The next day I called my mother and told her what Mike had said. I could tell that the expression of gratitude touched her heart.

“Tell Mike that I send my love,” she said.

—

WHEN MY SISTER Robin was three years old, Mother noticed that she didn’t have much energy. Mother would ask what she wanted to do, and Robin would say that she wanted to sit on the bed or lie on the grass. That didn’t sound normal for a three-year-old, so she took Robin to our family doctor in Midland, Dorothy Wyvell.

Dr. Wyvell ran some tests. Mother worried that the results were bad when the doctor called and told her to come back to the office with Dad. Every parent can imagine the agony of the conversation that transpired. Dr. Wyvell told them that Robin’s blood test had revealed that she was suffering from leukemia. Not only did she have the disease, but her white blood cell count was off the charts—the highest that Dr. Wyvell had ever seen.