In April 1937, Lyndon Johnson was in an Austin hospital recuperating from an appendectomy, requiring him to decline an invitation to the dedication of a new library building at Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

But the letter he wrote to College President C.E. Evans explaining his absence afforded him an opportunity to define the qualities of a college and the nurture he had received at his alma mater, from which he had graduated only seven years earlier.

The 28-year-old candidate for Congress wrote of learning “to think, to live, to grow. Here the real purpose of education is found — the growth of the individual to his highest possibilities, his broadest services and the greatest ultimate good.

“Here men and women are made. Here inspiration is sown; ambition is enlisted; energy is aroused… (along with) the zest of living, the joy of working, the hope of achieving.”

In a few sentences, the young man had captured what his experience at STSTC had brought to blossom in him. That the seeds for that growth already existed in the Texas Hill Country youth when he enrolled in March 1927 seems clear. But his years at the college focused his energy and talents and helped mature the qualities he described in his letter to President Evans.

 Although historians lack agreement on the early years of Lyndon Johnson, familial influences seem certain.

Father Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. reflected the hardscrabble virtues of his Hill Country ancestors, who persevered in a continuing struggle with the land and life. Mother Rebekah brought to her parenting the genteel elements associated with her own rearing. Although young Lyndon experienced the tensions inherent in this parental dichotomy, he also enjoyed the benefits of both influences: the toughness to engage challenges and the sophistication to aspire to high and worthy goals in life.

Lyndon Johnson graduated in the Johnson City High School class of 1924 at age 15 and independently set out on a path of his own. Spurning parental advice that he go to college, he and several friends boarded an old jalopy and drove to California. Young Johnson spent most of the next two years at poorly paid, sweaty, arduous physical and menial labor. Returning to Texas, he continued his back-breaking efforts at earning a living.

At some point, the young man, now 18, realized that his future lay in a different direction. Responding to his mother’s invocation of higher aspirations, Johnson decided to go to college.

Of course, the question was which college? His mother liked the idea of Baylor, which she had attended. And the University of Texas was a possibility. Money and distance were constraints for the Baylor option, and money for the state university.

Southwest Texas State Teachers College became the obvious choice. It was inexpensive and reasonably close to Johnson City. Southwest Texas served as the regional college, and its students came mostly from the smaller communities in the greater San Marcos area. Moreover, there were family connections with the college; Rebekah’s mother had worked there as a housemother.

In February 1927, Johnson enrolled in the sub college to prove his high school credits. Southwest Texas accepted him as a freshman on March 21, 1927.

In her biography of Lyndon Johnson, noted presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin marks this as a defining moment for the young man. He had developed skills necessary to maneuver through his parents’ differing approaches to rearing and now faced external forces just as challenging. He focused his prodigious energy on a search for accomplishment and approval among a new family.

The most compelling requirement for any college student is, of course, to meet the academic challenge. Lacking that, all other collegiate ambitions die unborn.

At his course work, Lyndon Johnson proved to be an average student, graduating with a grade point average on the line between B and C. His early efforts lacked consistency, gyrating term to term between solid B and solid C. During the last half of his college career, he settled into fairly uniform B-level grades. Overall, he earned 14 A’s, 10 of them in the last half of his college work. Five A’s were in history (his major) and three others in social sciences (his second minor). He also received an A in a journalism course that he lobbied the college to offer. His best grades came in courses that he especially valued, typical of most college students. He received no failing grades. He earned 18 hours of extension-course credit during the 1928-29 school year while teaching at an elementary school in Cotulla.

It was in a college classroom that young Lyndon Johnson met the professor who was to become the most influential member of the faculty on the future president. H.M. “Prof” Greene had come to the college in 1923 to teach history and government. He has been described as an individualistic free-thinker who came from a liberal-populist orientation, and his attire tended toward non-professorial informal. His classroom style frequently generated energetic debates among his students, an approach especially appealing to young Johnson, who most often prevailed in arguments when he was in one of Greene’s classes. Both in and out of class, Johnson sought time and ideas from Greene, who also coached the debate team, of which Lyndon Johnson was a member. Greene encouraged Johnson toward a political career and commented later to a biographer that that was where young Lyndon’s talents lay: “He was clearly the best student in government and politics I ever had the pleasure of teaching.”

Another influential faculty member was Tom Nichols, who was recruited by College Dean A.H. Nolle to teach the journalism course created in response to Johnson’s encouragement, as long as enough students would enroll to justify the class. Nichols recalled that LBJ told him that he would find the other students: “Leave it to me. I’ll get a class.” Johnson recruited four others, and Dean Nolle approved it.

In addition to other duties, Nichols was secretary to College President C. E. Evans. It was in that capacity that Nichols likely first met young Johnson. When the brand-new student first enrolled, he needed money to meet his modest expenses and came looking for work, probably approaching the president through Nichols. To help students financially, the college employed many of them at low wages for jobs that required little or no training. So the request for help was approved, and Lyndon joined the grounds crew picking up litter. He seemed always driven to do more and better than the minimum, so a promotion followed to assistant to the janitor in a campus building. By then the young man must have come to the attention of President Evans; one biographer reports that as soon as young Johnson had made a decision to go to college, his mother phoned the president with a request for help for her son. For whatever reason, Johnson was assigned the job as assistant to the president’s secretary, Professor Nichols.

The college had no telephone system, so Lyndon’s principal duty was to carry messages from the president to others on campus. When he was in the outer office of the president, Johnson on his own took the responsibility of announcing the arrival of persons to see the president, creating for himself additional status. It appears that President Evans began giving Johnson other campus responsibilities — and also asked LBJ to accompany him on occasion to Austin to visit the Texas Legislature. The fact that the young man was keenly interested in government and politics and that his father had served twice in the legislature likely influenced Evans. It is worth noting that, as his political career prospered, Johnson remained close to Evans, who died five years before LBJ became president of the United States.

Student Johnson’s rise from grounds-keeper to assistant to the president’s secretary provides direct meaning to LBJ’s 1937 observation that encouraging “the growth of the individual to his highest possibilities” served as an important quality of a college.

Although Lyndon was taking courses and working as assistant to the president’s secretary, his energy and ambition drove him to do more. He worked on the campus newspaper, twice as editor; he served on the college debate team, which then enjoyed the status of varsity athletics; he helped engineer the formation of a secret society that led to a revolution in student politics in which he was also involved; and he apparently also dated several times a week. His ability to sleep only a few hours a night allowed him to undertake these ventures. Even during his year teaching in Cotulla, 20-year-old Lyndon energetically launched a battery of extracurricular activities for his Mexican-American students. In retrospect, throughout his college years he seemed satisfied only if he were immersed in numerous demanding commitments simultaneously.

Before he was admitted to the college and while proving his high school credits, a Johnson essay was published in the campus newspaper, the College Star, and earned him a byline. It was the first of many. He served on the staff of the newspaper during the regular academic year and as editor of the Star during the summers of 1928 and 1929. His editorials tended to be preachy but otherwise mature beyond his years. They challenged students to think. They educated his readers on the U.S. Constitution and on the mastery of oneself. They argued against cynics and cynicism. And some of the editorials anticipated his 1937 letter to President Evans: College “inspires,” “discovers the talents and possibilities of a student,” “creates a vision of work for tomorrow,” elicits “the longing to achieve chosen ideas in life.”

Editor Johnson carried a stack of the Star with him to Houston in the summer of 1928 and used them to obtain press credentials to the Democratic National Convention. Three decades later, that energetic young man in the press gallery would be playing a central role in Democratic National Conventions.

Lyndon Johnson did a lot of politicking of his own in college. In the fall of 1929, Johnson and several other men organized Alpha & Omega, better known as the White Stars.Through that organization, he helped change student politics at the college, polishing all the while the skills at what would become his lifelong major.

Each Alpha & Omega member was assigned a number in the order of affiliation; LBJ was No. 3. A&O emerged in reaction to a student group consisting of athletes and student leaders who were the focus of campus social and political life; they had organized themselves as Beta Sigma, a secret society also known as the Black Stars. They controlled most student political offices and exercised some influence in the disposition of the student activity fund.

Johnson and his colleagues realized that control of the student council was critical to filling such important posts as editors of the Star and the Pedagog yearbook, both paid positions and both appointed by the council. Moreover, control of the council meant they would enjoy greater influence in the distribution of student activity funds — in their view, from athletics and into more academically oriented interests such as debate, theater and band.

The next election came in the 1929-30 winter term, and the White Stars selected their candidate for senior class president to run against a popular incumbent. The cause was both symbolic and politically important. The night before the election, the White Stars concluded that their candidate needed many more votes to win. The cause seemed hopeless, and everyone except Johnson conceded defeat. Lyndon spent the night calling girls’ dormitories and going from boys’ boarding house to boys’ boarding house, waking students and persuading them to vote for the White Stars’ nominee. The next day his efforts proved successful, and the White Stars’ candidate won. In addition, Johnson was elected to the student council. In the spring term, the White Stars succeeded in winning almost all student offices, presaging a campus primacy for the White Stars that lasted years.

As might be expected, given his presence on the college debate team, Johnson proved effective in the student council. He supported his views vigorously but without personal rancor. When necessary, he seemed ready to compromise, his defining characteristic in the view of a friend who also sat on the council.

In spite of his political success, or perhaps because of it, Johnson was not uniformly popular on campus. Some interpreted his energetic qualities as arrogance.

President Evans saw Johnson in an entirely different light. When Lyndon Johnson received his bachelor’s degree on Aug. 19, 1930, Evans told the audience, “Here’s a young man who has so abundantly demonstrated his worth that I predict for him great things in the years ahead. If he undertakes his tasks in the future with the same energy, careful thought and determination that he has used in all his work in the classroom, on the campus picking up rocks, or as an assistant in the president’s office, success to him is assured.”

Reflecting on the words of President Evans, young Lyndon Johnson surely must have seen his college experience as a step to something greater. Seven years later in a letter to President Evans, he identified Southwest Texas State Teachers College as the place where he had learned to think, to live, to grow, where he was inspired, and where he had found the zest of living, the joy of working and the hope of achieving.

Bruce Roche served as journalism instructor, chair of the Department of Journalism, director of the News Service and faculty adviser to the student newspaper, the College Star, 1958-67. He left the university in 1967 to work on his doctorate at Southern Illinois University, then began teaching at the University of Alabama. He retired from there and currently lives in Duncanville, Ala.