More tribute and remmebering...
Lady Bird brought Town Lake dream to life
First Lady spurred almost $4 million of work along Austin's front yard.
By Ben Wear
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, July 13, 2007
Lady Bird Johnson didn't dream up the beautification of Town Lake. She didn't plant the first tree. And pieces of the hike-and-bike trail were nearing construction before Mrs. Johnson hefted a golden shovel at Vista Point along the lake's north bank in late 1971.
But the historical record, and the people who were intimately involved at the time, make it clear that Mrs. Johnson — using her White House fundraising cache, her own money and time and energy, and her reputation as the First Lady of Flora — breathed life into a moribund concept. People had been talking about sprucing up Austin's shoddy front yard for a generation; Mrs. Johnson turned the talk into action.
"It was her. It was her, 150 percent," said Les Gage, a former Austin City Council member who was the chairman of the Committee for a More Beautiful Town Lake. "Mrs. Johnson came along and had the ability to make the vision happen. She was the driving force, in her sweet, charming way."
She was the honorary chairwoman of that committee, which the City Council formed in 1971. But there was nothing honorary about her involvement, Gage says. She was at almost every meeting, Gage said, and "was personally on the (Town Lake) site many, many times during construction."
Mrs. Johnson and that committee, in just a few years after that 1971 kickoff, managed to raise more than $300,000 in private funds and cajole the federal Bureau of Outdoor Reclamation and the City of Austin into ponying up another $3.5 million. That money turned what had been a shoreline virtually denuded of trees into a 10-mile-long green gift — Gage says 3,600 trees, bushes and shrubs were planted — that keeps on giving.
"Town Lake was not the jewel of Austin that it is now," said Roy Butler, who took office as mayor just a few months before Mrs. Johnson's committee was formed. "I think it's probably our finest and best element."
Town Lake's problem, initially, was that it had been only a river, a sometimes low-running stream rife with sandbars and industrial facilities on its banks. In wet periods, however, it could overflow. Gage said that in the mid-1950s federal regulators, concluding that the old-growth trees along its banks only worsened the flooding, ordered most of the trees felled.
The completion of Longhorn Dam in East Austin in 1960 created a constant-level lake, and right away talk began of adorning the newly impressive stretch of water. The council formed a Town Lake Study Committee in 1961. And the late Roberta Crenshaw, chairwoman of the city's parks board in the 1960s when she was Roberta Dickson, conceived of a "lake of lights," including blue-and-green bulbs in the trees, lights on the bridges, and footpaths with gas lamps.
The City Council in 1968, while Mrs. Johnson still had a Washington ZIP code, approved a Town Lake Comprehensive Plan that included trails, more trees and a number of scenic additions. Crenshaw spent her own money to plant 385 flowering peach and redbud trees and build a flagstone walk on the north shore near Congress Avenue. But little else besides planning happened over the next three years because of "lack of creativity, indisposition to spend money, drag in land purchasing and lack of coordination between city departments," Crenshaw said in a 1971 Statesman article.
Enter Lady Bird.
Mrs. Johnson and the committee put out a brochure with a hand-drawn map of Town Lake, showing the projected path of the trail (some of which was already nearing construction in 1971) and soliciting donations for different tree varieties. The city suggested donations for various trees — $20 for a eight-foot redbud, $30 for a crepe myrtle, for example.
There were fundraisers, including a big shindig at the LBJ Ranch in 1973 where a not-yet-hot Willie Nelson and his band played for free and $500 donors got a free private shuttle by air to the ranch from Austin. Mrs. Johnson herself gave $19,000 in the first few months, including proceeds from her "A White House Diary" book. Junior Leaguers were out there along the lake, Gage said, tilling the ground and spreading wildflower seeds.
Federal regulators, perhaps responding to direct calls from the first lady or at least appeals made in her name, suddenly were in a giving mood, and the City of Austin found room in its priorities for a prettier river bank. By the end of the decade, most of what thousands of walkers, joggers and bikers see now along Town Lake, albeit with a generation's less growth, was in place.
Occasionally, that beautiful scenery included a gentle lady from Stonewall.
"She'd call me up sometimes in the years later and say, 'Let's go walk the lake and see how it's doing,' " Gage says.
From now on, however, Gage and the rest of us will have to make do with what she left behind.
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