FROM AUGUST 2007
Jim Wright:
Former Speaker of the House
reflects on growing up in
Weatherford
SPONSORED BY AMIRA SPA
BY JERI PETERSON
PHOTO BY TONYA HAYES
W
“No, it wasn’t; it was easy as pie. It was just what I
liked and just what I wanted,” he says. “I discovered it
was a cornucopia of secret delights. I felt that I belonged,
that I owned a little piece of it. It seemed that it took no
time at all for me to become a living, breathing part of
the atmosphere.”
At one point, however, he had to prove himself to his
new friends. His mother had made him a book satchel,
and although proud of her workmanship, he was secretly
embarrassed that not another child— boy nor girl—
had such an article. When the proverbial town bully
snatched the bag prancing in the street and calling him
a sissy, Wright tackled the boy, threw him to the ground
and began pummeling him until he begged for mercy.
If Weatherford children had thought him a city boy, the
satchel incident changed their minds. Even the bully
became friendly.
Growing Things
“When I discovered bantam chickens, a new world
opened up to me of animal husbandry and so forth. I
enjoyed that phase of my life so much that in years to
come and in different places that I lived I would raise
chickens. I would plant flowers and tomatoes and things.
I enjoyed it. It was an eye-opener for an 8-year-old kid.”
Wright’s seventh-grade year was spent in Duncan,
Okla., where agriculture was a required course.
“I had to plant all kinds of things and report on them
and bring specimens in from my planting,” he says.
When he retired from political life in 1989, he thought
DEC EMBER 2015 PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
hen a Western Union delivery boy rang the bell
at the large Victorian house on the corner of Oak
and Waco Streets, two little girls stood wide-eyed in the
hallway. First they wanted to know what a telegram was,
then they wanted to know who it was from.
“Well, it’s from the Speaker of the House.”
“What’s a speaker?”
“He’s a very important man.”
“Is that like a president?”
“No, the president’s different from the Speaker; the
Speaker is the head of the Congress.”
“Are you going to be president someday, Uncle Jim?”
“No— I want to be Speaker.”
Jim Wright was a young congressman from
Weatherford, Texas, when his daughter Ginger and her
best friend, Jamie Bodiford, got their first tutorial in the
telegrams and elected officials. But he had had his eye
on the House Speakership since a high school football
injury resulted in a detour to the debate club. Sidelined
for months, his coach - who also was his world history
teacher - persuaded him to try debate, and he was
hooked. He reveled in the mental challenge of analyzing
issues and he emerged a gifted orator. It was then he set a
goal of serving in the United States Congress.
“I don’t think he ever aspired to any higher office,”
said Jack Borden, a Weatherford attorney and long-time
Wright friend.
The Jim Wright who became one of the most powerful men in the country, advising presidents and rubbing
shoulders with international leaders, shaping public policy and influencing decision makers, is the same individual who, as a boy, conspired to smuggle a dead mouse
under the pastor’s nose one Sunday at the Presbyterian
Church of Weatherford.
And 8-year old Wright, whose family moved from a
large two-story house in Dallas to Weatherford in 1931,
was intrigued with the sights, sounds and smells he
encountered for the first time in his life: churning butter;
raising bantam chickens in the yard; following the ice
man to retrieve cooling chips that flew from chunks he
delivered to each house; farmers and artisans congregating on Saturdays to hawk their wares on the large courthouse green; and swimming naked in Curtis Creek.
Asked whether the transition to country life was difficult, Wright shakes his head emphatically.
Continued on page 32
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