TXTexas Famous People

The Texas president nobody counts, and two who were born in New England

Dwight Eisenhower was born on October 14, 1890, in a small frame house beside the railroad tracks in Denison, where his father worked as a wiper in the engine sheds. The family left for Abilene, Kansas, the next year, and hardly anyone thinks of him as a Texan. Lyndon Johnson was born in a farmhouse on the Pedernales near Stonewall in 1908 and ran the country from 1963 to 1969 with the Hill Country ranch functioning as a second White House. The two Bushes, who are the presidents most people picture when they hear the word Texas, were both born in the Northeast: George H. W. Bush in Milton, Massachusetts, in 1924, arriving in Odessa in 1948 to sell oilfield equipment, and George W. Bush in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1946, raised in Midland and Houston and governor from 1995 to 2000. Texas has put four men in the office and produced the birth certificates of two.

Rayburn, Jordan, Nimitz, Murphy

Sam Rayburn grew up on a cotton farm near Bonham and held the Speaker's gavel for seventeen years across three separate stretches, longer than anyone in the history of the House. Barbara Jordan came out of Houston's Fifth Ward in 1936, became the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South in 1972, and opened the Nixon impeachment hearings in July 1974 with a statement about her faith in the Constitution that is still assigned in schools. Chester Nimitz was born in Fredericksburg in 1885 above the hotel his grandfather ran, took command of the Pacific Fleet at the end of December 1941, and signed for the United States at the Japanese surrender. Audie Murphy was born to sharecroppers in Hunt County in 1925, left the Second World War the most decorated American soldier in it, and then played himself in the film of his own memoir. Ross Perot, born in Texarkana in 1930, built EDS and took 18.9 percent of the vote as an independent candidate in 1992.

Lubbock, Port Arthur, Abbott, Lake Jackson

Buddy Holly was born in Lubbock in 1936 and was dead at twenty-two in an Iowa cornfield in February 1959. Janis Joplin grew up in Port Arthur and hated it. Willie Nelson was born in Abbott in 1933, wrote hits for other people in Nashville, gave up, came home and rebuilt an entire genre out of Austin. Selena Quintanilla was born in Lake Jackson in 1971 and shot dead in Corpus Christi in 1995 at twenty-three, at which point her posthumous English album went to number one. Roy Orbison came from Vernon and grew up in Wink. Beyonce Knowles was born in Houston in 1981. Reaching further back, Scott Joplin was born in northeast Texas around 1868, and Blind Lemon Jefferson in Freestone County around 1893, which puts the roots of ragtime and of recorded country blues in the same corner of the state.

Names that catch people out

Sandra Day O'Connor was born in El Paso in 1930, grew up on a ranch that straddled the Arizona line, and became the first woman on the Supreme Court in 1981. Walter Cronkite was born in Missouri and raised in Houston; Dan Rather was born in Wharton in 1931, so both of the men who anchored the CBS evening news for forty years were Texas products. Wes Anderson of Houston and Owen Wilson of Dallas met at the University of Texas at Austin and made Bottle Rocket together. Tommy Lee Jones was born in San Saba in 1946 and roomed with Al Gore at Harvard. Matthew McConaughey came from Uvalde, Renee Zellweger from Katy, Woody Harrelson from Midland. Bonnie Parker was born in Rowena and Clyde Barrow in Ellis County, which is how a Depression crime spree ended up as a Texas story.

Oil money, integrated circuits and a dorm room in Austin

Howard Hughes was born in Houston in 1905 and inherited the family drill bit patent at eighteen, which financed everything that came afterwards. Jack Kilby built the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in Dallas in September 1958 and collected the Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 2000. Mary Kay Ash opened her cosmetics company in Dallas in 1963 with five thousand dollars in savings. Michael Dell was born in Houston in 1965 and was assembling and selling upgraded computers from a University of Texas dorm room in 1984, the year he dropped out.

Athletes the state is measured by

Nolan Ryan was born in Refugio in 1947, raised in Alvin, threw seven no-hitters and struck out 5,714 batters, both records nobody is close to. Babe Didrikson Zaharias grew up in Beaumont, won two golds and a silver in track at the 1932 Olympics, then switched to golf, won ten majors and helped found the LPGA. Jack Johnson was born in Galveston in 1878 and became the first Black world heavyweight champion in 1908. Michael Johnson, born in Dallas in 1967, won the 200 and the 400 metres at the 1996 Atlanta Games in gold shoes, a double no man had managed before.

Famous people from bordering states

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