Conscious Choice Seattle: At the Crossroads

July 2004 | Back Woods

At the Crossroads

Attending his high school reunion in the West Texas town of Midland, the author confronts a tragic memory about Laura Welch-the same Laura who married George and became First Lady

by Rex Weyler

In Midland, Texas, everything is connected to oil. The town of 96,000 is the executive center for the Permian Basin oil and gas region, comprising one fifth of America’s petroleum reserves. My father, a petroleum engineer, worked in one of the modest office towers overlooking the desert plateau.

For Gregg Hurt and me, rolling down the Rattlesnake Raceway in Gregg’s white Chevrolet Trailblazer, Midland was nothing more than our old hometown, where we went to high school, kissed our first girlfriends and drove our first cars. Gregg was the pole-vaulter on our school track team. I ran the mile.

Gregg convinced me to come to this high school reunion, themed “Celebrating America.” When I graduated in 1966, I left for college in California and hadn’t returned for 37 years. I feared that my old classmates would resent me. Not only had I left Texas, but I dodged the draft, became an antiwar activist, took illicit drugs in exotic lands and fled to Canada, where I made my home.

Gregg, who earned a service medal in Vietnam, didn’t hold any of this against me. “I’m apolitical,” he told me in the SUV. “All I did in Vietnam was shuttle dignitaries like Bob Hope and Gerald Ford around in a Saberliner [aircraft].”

By the time we were in high school, Midland resident and future president George Walker Bush was off to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., but his wife, Laura, was our classmate at the more commonplace Robert E. Lee High. She was a friend of Gregg’s older sister, Betsy.

Laura Welch was a top student, a member of the yearbook staff and the Student Council and a homecoming queen nominee. She liked to drive around with her friends in her family’s brand-new 1963 Chevrolet Impala.

Laura’s idyllic teenage life, however, was shattered two days after her 17th birthday, when she hit a car driven by her classmate Michael Douglas. The accident occurred on Wednesday night, November 6, 1963.

According to friends, Laura was upset about something that had happened at home. She left in the car and picked up her friend Judy Dykes a few blocks away. They drove north out of town and turned east on Farm Road 868, which we called “The Loop.” At the corner of Big Springs, the highway that continues north to Lubbock, Laura ran a stop sign and slammed into the right front of Michael’s southbound 1962 Corvair.

Laura was being treated for minor injuries at Midland Memorial Hospital when she learned that Michael had broken his neck and died at the scene. She was devastated. At school, students talked of a relationship between Laura and Michael. Stories circulated that he was her boyfriend, but whether this was true remained unknown to all but Laura’s closest friends. Years later, Regan Gammon, Laura’s confidant since childhood, would say only that Michael was “a very close friend of Laura’s.”

Michael was a leader among the leaders, smart, handsome and kind to everyone.

The accident overwhelmed Laura. She didn’t come back to school until after Christmas. When she did return to complete her senior year, she never mentioned the accident, even among her friends, and no one brought it up in her presence.

Old friends in Midland remember young George Bush as an average baseball player, but clever at trading baseball cards. The future president wrote to famous players, got autographs on the cards and sold them at high prices to his friends.

The reunion was held at the Midland Country Club later that evening. To get there, Gregg and I drove through the fateful intersection, State Highway 349 and Farm Road 868, which is now a four-lane highway that carries traffic around the north side of the city. New suburban homes have swallowed up the old lovers’ lane. An IHOP restaurant stands off to the east. The crossroads is now an overpass. Here at this intersection, I imagined, world history was altered.

During the presidential election, pundits claimed that there had been a cover-up, but this was partisan rumor. She was just a young girl who made a mistake. Normally, however, if a driver breaks a highway law and someone is killed, the driver would be cited, perhaps for manslaughter. Laura received no citation. Judy Dykes, in the car with Laura, told the Dallas Morning News, “It is not worth digging into. It was an accident, a horrible, horrible accident years ago.”

Laura found happiness, married into a successful family and became the First Lady of the United States. But there seemed to linger some unspeakable grief.

I imagined our lives shaped by twists of fate. What if Laura hadn’t hit Mike’s car, or if Mike hadn’t died? Would the world be different? I had my first traffic accident only a few blocks from this crossroads, only a month after Laura’s. I too drove my family’s 1963 Chevy Impala, ran a stop sign and hit another car. No one died, but I got a ticket. What if I had killed someone and Laura had sailed through the intersection unscathed, had a normal high school graduation and married her sweetheart, perhaps even married Michael Douglas? What then? Who would George Bush have married? Perhaps he never would have overcome his manic drinking or become president.

At the Midland Country Club, we talked about who married their high school sweethearts, those killed in Vietnam, a mysterious classmate who reportedly worked for the CIA, and tragic tales of alcohol and drugs.

The first lady and the president weren’t there. No one had expected them to come. But there in a copy of the old yearbook was Laura Welch. She wore a Jackie flip.

“She never gossiped about anyone, so she didn’t have enemies,” said Mary Ann Ryerson.

I asked the band to play “Tell Laura I Love Her,” but it didn’t happen. When they struck up Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” Gregg and I left.

Rex Weyler has lived in Vancouver, Canada, since 1972. His next book, Greenpeace: The Inside Story, will be published by Rodale in September.

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