WASHINGTON -- What Laura Bush remembers about her childhood is a big sky above a world without end.

Rodger Mallison. Fort Worth Star-Telegram via AP

First lady Laura Bush talks with reporters after addressing the Greater Texas Community Partners, a statewide volunteer-based program that helps Child Protective Services case workers provide for abused and neglected youngsters, in Fort Worth, Texas, Friday. Mrs. Bush was awarded the organization's Children's Medal of Honor for "significant and lasting contribution to the welfare of children." ROAD to the WHITE HOUSE Laura Welch Bush and Teresa Heinz Kerry, in effect the major party candidates for First Lady, are often depicted as stereotypes. Bush seems the "traditional" political wife who stays largely in the background, except when it comes to her passion for literature and her campaign for literacy. But she takes pride in her career as teacher and school librarian, and she doesn't much like the title, "First Lady." Heinz Kerry, a European-educated professional, emerged as a major player in public policy after her first husband died and she began to run a trio of foundations with more than $1 billion in assets. She tacked the "Kerry" onto her name only after husband John decided to run for president, but says nothing takes precedence over family. Over the next couple of weeks, the Post-Gazette will profile the complex worlds and interests of the women closest to the men who would be our next president. We begin today with the incumbent, Laura Welch Bush.

Midland, Texas, was an oil town, a treeless place perpetually under construction. Her father built houses for families that would be rich one day, poor the next, sometimes rebounding on the third. It was a settlement of pioneers in split-levels.

The television station didn't power up until 4 p.m. and opened with "Two Gun Playhouse." Housewives knew enough to pull down the laundry as dust storms reached the outskirts of town, where the streets faded into empty prairie.

"Very, very difficult to scratch out a living. A very unforgiving landscape. Hot summers and cold winters when the northers blow down from the Midwest, straight down into the panhandle of Texas," she said at her current digs along the un-Midland-like Pennsylvania Avenue. "Women are particularly strong there. They're not very pretentious."

Laura Lane Welch did the usual stuff: joined Brownies, watched Elvis when he premiered on the "Ed Sullivan Show," attended church. But always, there was a book nearby. On hot, summer afternoons she could retreat indoors to read, while the rest of Midland toiled at becoming outrageously wealthy or sinking deeper than a dry well.

"They always think that oil well might be over there, just the next one they drill might be the one. Like in the movie 'Giant,'" she said.

Before Giant ever made it to the screen starring James Dean as Jett Rink, the smoldering wildcatter-turned-millionaire, it was a book, by Edna Ferber. Jett Rink flames out just as he tries to become governor of Texas, stuffed full of boozy anger for the lack of a lady love to take the cutting edge off his sharp corners.

As she talks, a White House photographer and two press aides hover as, one wing away, the nerve center of the Free World buzzes with the quiet assurance that says someone struck it big, and that young Laura Welch, the bookworm from Midland, knew what to do with the moment.

First, her husband became governor of Texas.

She started a book fair.

Then her husband became president.

Books became a national cause.

Consider the possibilities: Mrs. Jett Rink.

A world of words
"I think the truth about Laura," said lifelong friend Marge Petty, "is she fits wherever she is. I don't know that I know anybody that has more presence and more calm and more compassion. Her world is not about her. Her world is about what's around her."

It is common for First Ladies -- a term Laura Bush dislikes; she prefers to call her White House enclave The Office of Laura Bush -- to have a cause.

Lady Bird Johnson beautified America. Betty Ford raised awareness of women's health issues after beating both breast cancer and alcoholism. Nancy Reagan said, "Just Say No."

Laura Bush fits into her world by words.

She has just finished, "The Tale of Despereaux," a 270-page children's book about a mouse who rises from his humble station in a dry corner of a castle to rescue the princess he loves.

"It's really cute," she said. She is, after all, a former school librarian.

Cute, any librarian would know, is but one door into literacy. And the tale of a mouse that saves a princess has to be a good antidote for the book she read before that, "Fugitive Pieces," Ann Michaels' novel about a 7-year-old Holocaust survivor.

Books. With Laura Bush, it's about books.

"I've always loved to read. My mother was a great reader. I think you can ask everybody who loves to read and they usually had a parent or grandparent who loved to read and read to them."

On her husband's elevation to governor of Texas, Laura Bush, who left her work as a school librarian to rear their two children, decided to take up reading as a cause. A woman who spent her youth tucked inside worlds created by writers suddenly had the chance to meet the creators.

She started a statewide book festival on the grounds of the capitol in Austin. Texas writers, such as Larry McMurtry, or Hispanic authors like Carlos Fuentes, were brought in to read their stories.

"That festival is right inside the Texas capitol," she said. "So the Senate and House floors and committee hearing rooms are the rooms that are used for the readings and panel discussions."

The festival became an endpiece to a larger Laura Bush project: to reverse the sometimes dismal rate of illiteracy in her home state.

She had misgivings about her husband running for governor, but when he won, Laura Bush took the unusual step of personally lobbying for House Bill 1640, allocating $215 million in tax dollars for reading programs among children and adults. Legislators she lobbied called it, "Laura Bush's Bill."

Its passage was a unique moment for a young woman who once made her husband promise she would never have to give a political speech and who only now confesses to enjoying the attention she gets, although she won't read either of the two books written about her. In another way, she evinces no surprise at how things have turned out.

"Texas is a very wide-open landscape," she explained. "Besides, I think it's wide open psychologically and emotionally for people. And I grew up in a little town that had a huge sky because there were no native trees in west Texas, in Midland. And the town's motto was 'The Sky Is The Limit,' and in a lot of ways I think that really was everyone's motto...."

The Midland bond
Laura Welch was an only child, with a wide circle of friends in a town where isolation and economic peril combined to make friendship a lifeline for youngsters who, by and large, shipped in and out on waves of oil wealth.

	Laura Bush Born: Nov. 4, 1946. Raised: In Midland, Texas. Political experience: None, except as spouse of Texas governor, U.S. president. Education: Southern Methodist University in Dallas, bachelor's degree in education, 1968; University of Texas at Austin, master's degree in library science, 1973. Work experience: Elementary school teacher in Dallas and Houston; librarian at Houston Public Library and at Dawson Elementary School in Austin. Spouse: Married George W. Bush in 1977. Children: Twins Barbara and Jenna, born in 1981 and named after their grandmothers. Signature issues: Reading and education; women's health issues, especially heart disease and breast cancer; women's rights in Afghanistan. Quote: Asked about issues on which she disagrees with her husband: "I'm not the one who was elected." Website: www.whitehouse.gov/firstlady/

One of them was George W. Bush, son of a New England Yale and Andover graduate. The elder George H.W. Bush went to Midland to make his fortune in oil and put his own stamp on a life spent, until then, under the guidance of his father, a U.S. senator from Connecticut.

The pair would not meet for decades, but when they did, she said, they united around their common bond: Midland schools, mutual friends.

"We had the same values, you know? We'd grown up in the same place."

Friends who remember the courtship were amazed that Laura Welch, until then a young woman noted for deliberation and care, got married in little more than three months.

"When she started going with him she actually lived here in Austin," said Regan Kimberlin Gammon, the First Lady's best friend.

Laura Welch had come to Austin to work. George Bush was there for a visit. Friends introduced them. Bush, at that time running for Congress back in Midland, suddenly appeared in Austin constantly.

"He just started coming. Man, he'd come on the weekends. He'd come on Thursday and leave on Monday. He rushed her," Gammon said.

"Even though we hadn't known each other when we met...it was really like we had grown up together," Laura Bush said. "And we had the same friends, we had the same values, we'd grown up in the same town. So, you might have said that was taking a risk to marry after three months and maybe it was. I think we were a little more certain."

Laura Bush had been a Democrat most of her life. She changed parties when she married into a Republican dynasty, but her own political self-definition was not entirely clear. She doesn't volunteer much on the subject now.

Was she conservative?

"No, probably not," she said. "I mean, I wouldn't say that I was particularly, wildly liberal."

In the course of nearly an hour's conversation, Laura Bush talked about the things that shaped her and the pivotal moments in her life.

There were the books, of course, especially the ones that made the deepest impressions. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevski's tale of dark souls in a cold Russian night, stays with her, especially the chapter about Alexi, the one immediately preceding "The Grand Inquisitor," a chapter she said still eludes her.

"I read it in college and then I read it when I was a young schoolteacher in Houston," she said. "In fact, I read it around the swimming pool one summer. Read all Russian novels. So they all have this sort of heat of a Houston bayou summer when I re-read them, even though that's not in the book."

The other events that changed her?

"Well, you know, all the events that change everybody, I guess. Each passage. The moving from home to going off to college. The babies. Having the babies."

She read David McCullough's "Mornings on Horseback" while waiting for Barbara and Jenna to arrive.

"I don't know if change is the word as much as the word should be matured."

Unmentioned was an event so horrible she almost never addresses it, other than to express sadness. On Nov. 6, 1963, a few days after her 17th birthday, Laura Welch and a friend hopped into her family's car for a drive down Farm Road 868, a long stretch of rural road outside Midland. At a remote intersection, the scene of several other accidents around that time, she missed a stop sign and plowed into a car driven by Michael Douglas, a classmate at Robert E. Lee High School.

Douglas, a popular athlete and a friend of Laura's, died instantly. Laura stayed away from school for weeks. Friends have said she returned a more subdued young woman.

Police never cited Laura Welch. While she had driven through a stop sign, she was not speeding. It was a time when fatal accidents were treated more as accidents than opportunities for prosecution and the matter was written off as one of those tragedies that commonly befall the young as they enter into the adult world and suddenly discover the fragility of life.

"It was life-changing for all of us," said Gammon. "He was a very dear friend of ours. It just was a very tragic, sad event."

Nurturer-in-chief

At the end of 2000, the country was in turmoil. They had just elected a president, but it was unclear precisely who that person was.

A hair-thin margin in the state of Florida was being disputed at the U.S. Supreme Court and Laura Bush was back in Texas. Laura Bush's husband might or might not be president-elect, but he was still governor of Texas and she was still in charge of the program that, by year's end, would have raised money for every public library in Texas.

Kansas state Sen. Marge Petty, D-Topeka, arrived for a visit. It had been a Republican year in Kansas and that meant Petty, after three terms in the state senate, had been defeated.

Petty won't say just what her childhood friend, the next Republican First Lady, had to say. Only that they managed to joke about it.

Topsoil in the Permian Basin, where Midland is situated, is dust-thin, a hard spot to put literal roots, but the kind of spot perfect for the figurative kind.

Laura Bush and her hometown friends, Petty among them, regularly reconnect, and politics is rarely a topic. Instead there are camping trips, during which Laura Bush can identify every flower, every bird. There are class reunions and luncheons.

After George Bush took the White House, Laura Bush set about upsizing her literacy campaign. Now there is the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress, an annual event hosted by the First Lady.

What she had not expected -- what nobody could have -- was that she would be pressed into service as a sort of national reassurer after terrorists seized four jetliners, crashing three into buildings and a fourth into a field in Somerset County, Pa.

Laura Bush was at the U.S. Capitol that morning. She had just introduced the first National Book Festival to the country. She was headed to Congress to testify before the Senate Education Committee on the importance of early learning.

As airplanes began plowing into the World Trade Center, and later the Pentagon, Mrs. Bush was brought before the cameras, fighting tears, for a brief statement. She expressed sympathy for the victims.

A reporter called out as she left: "Mrs. Bush, what do you say to the children."

She spoke of the need to reassure children that most people are good. Then she added this clincher: "We can turn off the television, and we can spend time reading to our children."

Within hours, Laura Bush became the nurturer-in-chief, as traditional a role as can be cast for a president's wife, but one she embraced.

"I'm really glad to be called to that area, because I am interested in that. It's what I've been interested in all my life," she said.

At the same time, this "National Dad/National Mom" dichotomy, she admits, is "a box that you are traditional or you're not traditional. Instead of recognizing the complexity of everyone, of all people, but certainly of First Ladies."

She runs through the list, but almost always comes back to Lady Bird Johnson -- a fellow Texan and, for a while at least, a fellow Democrat. Johnson's "Beautify America" campaign pushed to plant seedlings along the ugly scars through which were dug the interstate highways, and she urged states to line the roads with indigenous grasses and wildflowers.

It's a thought Laura Bush says she keeps in mind for years to come, when she returns from Washington to her home. "We're right now planting 50 acres of Little Bush Stem," she said.

It is a native plant, much like the woman from Midland who shares its name.

Laura Bush fits into her world by words.