re: #263 Dave In Austin

Rep. Roger Williams
✔
@RepRWilliams
#OTD 117 years ago, the Bluebonnet was named the official Texas state flower.

Do you have memories of your family pulling over to the side of an interstate and taking some photos in bluebonnet fields as a kid? Tweet me your photos!

Does Rep Williams know that the reason that there are bluebonnets instead of litter all over Texas is Ladybird Johnson?

I never saw what the American landscape looked like before Lady Bird Johnson came along, but my father did. When he was a kid in Texas, his parents would take him and his brothers for long drives in the country. Dad remembers his father’s approach to litter control. If anybody had a paper bag or a bottle cap or an apple core, he’d say, “Get that out of the car,” and one of the boys would roll down the window and toss it out. The inside of the car stayed clean, and nobody gave much thought to what the highway looked like as they blew past it. In a state as big as Texas, who would even notice one more little scrap of paper?

But that’s not the Texas I knew. In 1969, the year I was born, Lady Bird Johnson started handing out the Texas Highway Beautification Awards and writing personal checks to the winners. Soon everybody was planting bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes, and black-eyed Susans in the hopes of winning her approval. Driving out to see the wildflowers bloom was something everybody did in the spring. As for the trash? Lady Bird thought that people just wouldn’t have the nerve to throw garbage on a field of bluebonnets, our state flower. She was right.