Read this 2006 article and tell me this isn’t an old-style, conservative democrat: note God’s in control, teaching Sunday School, etc.
Palin is no longer my first choice. Sorry, Sarah, you waited too long.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/perry-watch/headlines/20060312-governor-almost-wasn_t.ece
Governor almost wasn’t
After years on ranch, Perry saw climate was right for politics
AText Size By CHRISTY HOPPE
Staff Writer
choppe@dallasnews.com
Published 12 March 2006 08:46 AM
Related itemsEditor’s note: This item originally ran on March 12, 2006.
AUSTIN - Rick Perry believes he is governor because it rained one day and thawed another.
Otherwise, today he would certainly be a commercial pilot or maybe a West Texas rancher. But fate, driven by barometric or divine pressure, changed the weather, his life and the future of Texas.
“I don’t think things happen by coincidence. I think there’s a grand plan out there, and if you’re paying attention, that the Lord speaks to you through a lot of different ways,” Mr. Perry said recently over a relaxed lunch of enchiladas and french fries.
The plan might be grand, but its margins have been tiny. He eked out a victory over populist Jim Hightower in the race for agriculture commissioner in 1990.
He barely beat Democrat John Sharp in the lieutenant governor’s race in 1998. And he was elevated to governor when George W. Bush became president - in overtime by 537 votes in Florida.
But now, Mr. Perry is poised to become the longest-serving governor in Texas history - an impossible thought to a young man trying to make peace with himself in 1977.
His most formative years were not in the Statehouse or at his beloved Texas A&M University, but as far from crowds and spotlights as a beat-up pickup and a dusty, worn-out pair of boots will take you.
For six years, starting around his 27th birthday, Mr. Perry lived an isolated life in a speck of a place called Paint Creek, a farming community 55 miles north of Abilene where time was measured in growing seasons. He calls them some of the happiest days of his life, “a really simple time.”
And he might have done it forever.
“I would load up my horse ... and my dog and go to the Clear Fork in the Brazos River and stay for two weeks,” he said. “I just went down there, pitched a tent. In my long hair.”
Were these his lost years?
Maybe, but his wife, Anita - who dated him for 16 years before she consented to move back to Haskell County and marry him in 1982 - said she wouldn’t dismiss them so quickly as happy-go-lucky days.
“I wouldn’t call them the lost years. I’d really call them the discovery years,” she said.
She remembered it as a time when Mr. Perry “centered” himself - a time when he was kind and patient with her but anxious about his own life. And she worried for him, too.
“I didn’t think he was very happy. He might have thought he was really content and happy, but I just saw there was some kind of restlessness, that he needed to fill his hours in another way,” Mrs. Perry said.
Those years saw Mr. Perry become a husband and father, mix flying and ranching, and - thanks to a timely thaw of a terrible West Texas freeze - take his first step toward the Governor’s Mansion.
“The ice storm was a blessing,” Mrs. Perry said.
Going home
On March 1, 1977, Rick Perry drove to his parents’ house on a two-lane road past fallow cotton fields, each mile carrying him both forward and back.
For four years and four months, he had served in the Air Force, rising to the rank of captain and commander of a C-130 cargo plane. It had taken him well beyond the flat horizons of West Texas. “Traveling wasn’t something that anybody did, not in our community, at least,” he recalled.
U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was ending, so he did not go to Asia, but he did see Europe and South America.
His last trip, just the month before, was to Bermuda, and on the way back, the C-130 lost an engine.
“We had three others. They worked fine,” he said matter-of-factly.
He was stranded in North Carolina for days waiting on a new engine when all he wanted to do was go home.
“I was burned out,” he said. “In 1977, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And actually, was a little lost - as a person, both in my temporal life and my spiritual life, a little lost.”
So three days before his 27th birthday, the man who had owned the skies and commanded a crew was finally heading home, where he would live with his parents, Ray and Amelia, and work on the family farm.
It was, of course, the roughest landing in his life.
“I go back into the house I had lived in 10 years earlier, and my room looked exactly the way it did when I left. It still had my football number on the door,” he said. “Nothing had changed. And it was really eerie.”
He and his father immediately began clashing.
“I was still a 17- year-old to him, and there was a very intense period of time,” he said.
For eight months they fought - most fiercely over how to run the cattle operation, but everything was a struggle.
“It was hard,” he said. “There was more than one time I’d come home in the evening and apologized to him about what I’d probably called him or what I’d said. He was a pretty forgiving soul.”
Eventually, the test of wills gave way to exhaustion, then acceptance. Father and son finally took a new measure of each other.
“My dad became my best friend,” he said. “ After a year, he asked me if I would be his partner. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was a nice compliment.”
They formed JR Perry Farms in early 1978. And then it stopped raining.
The green stalks wilted, and the ground began to crack. The Perrys watched their cotton crop fade, and then the wheat wouldn’t come up. The younger Mr. Perry had no money, and with no clouds on the horizon, he wondered if he ever would.
“I’m in the right place. I’m teaching Sunday school at the church. Life is good. I’m happy. But I’m broke,” he said.
Mr. Perry earned his Airline Transport Pilot rating and then won a hard-to-get interview with Southwest Airlines.
He went to his father in July to tell him of his new plan. “So I told my dad, ‘Listen, no offense, but I’ve got to go figure out some way to make a living. This farming thing ain’t working.’ I said, ‘I’m not sure it’s ever going to rain again.’”
His father understood. “Dad said, ‘You need to go do what you need to do. But it’ll rain. It always does.’”
A few weeks later, in the first few days of August, the remnants of Tropical Storm Amelia rumbled across the plains and JR Perry Farms, bringing - finally, emphatically - rain. More than 30 inches in 24 hours.
“And I’m figuring, ‘OK, I get it. You don’t want me to go fly airplanes. You want me to stay here and farm,’” Mr. Perry recalled.
He skipped the interview.
“If it hadn’t rained, I’d be a millionaire pilot with Southwest,” he said.
The next bit of weather that changed Rick Perry’s life arrived in December 1983.
A year earlier, Anita Thigpen had “run out of excuses” not to marry him, the governor said.
In a separate discussion, Mrs. Perry agreed. “We had a hard time with those planets aligning,” she said.
They had first met at a piano recital when he was about 8, and they began dating in high school. He went off to Texas A&M, and she went to West Texas State University in Canyon, near Amarillo. They survived the long distance.
“He came in April of ‘72 and proposed to me in the back yard of my parents’ house. And I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got two years of college, you’re getting ready to go in the Air Force, so what are you talking about?’” Mrs. Perry said.
Alone no more
So they waited. By the time he left the Air Force and returned to Haskell County, confident she would return home to settle down with him, she was living in San Antonio and well on her way to earning a master’s degree in nursing.
“I was loving it. It was a real intellectual awakening for me. So I was real stimulated intellectually - and he’d moved back home,” she said.
Mrs. Perry said her future husband spent a lot of time alone with his dog and horse. He was busy ranching and seemed happy to be home, but she sensed a restlessness.
Even after giving up a teaching job to join him, she said, she worried whether she alone could make him happy.
“I saw him struggling to fulfill that need to find that contentment,” Mrs. Perry said. “It’s almost like I’d look at him and go, ‘Am I sure I want to do this?’ Because I think he was in such turmoil and I was so happy and oh-so busy, and I was so challenged.”
But she knew that “I didn’t want to live without him. And hoped he didn’t want to live without me.”
So she called him and said she was ready to come home.
“He borrowed his granddad’s pickup and cattle trailer and came to pick me up in December of ‘79. It was a lot like the Clampetts. And it broke down on the way home,” she said.
Mrs. Perry moved in with her parents and became director of nurses at the Haskell hospital. Meanwhile, her husband-to-be ranched and continued to work with planes, fixing up Super Cubs and selling them. He also ran a little charter business and used his planes to check on his cattle herds.
“He had this old 310. Half of it was John Deere parts,” recalled longtime friend Cliff Johnson , a former state representative from Palestine. That plane, he said, “had duct tape all over it.”
Mr. Johnson recalled asking how the plane suffered some of that damage. Mr. Perry told him he “hit a mesquite tree herding cattle. Now that’s pretty darn close.”
Mr. Johnson said he doesn’t know whether Mr. Perry could have remained in ranching the rest of his life.
“He was restless,” he said. “He went back home, and it was a day-in and day-out kind of thing. I think he asked, ‘Is there more, and can I have both?’”
In 1980, when President Jimmy Carter embargoed grain shipments to the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan , American farmers were struggling. The issue pushed Mr. Perry into the agricultural movement, and he eventually became a delegate to the state Democratic convention. (Mr. Perry wouldn’t switch to the Republican side until 1990.)
About the same time, one of his friends from Texas A&M - John Sharp, who he would later beat to become lieutenant governor - had been elected to the state House, and Mr. Perry was intrigued.
“I’ve never seen anybody from 200 yards who could recognize a ring quicker in my life than an Aggie. It is a great, great network,” Mr. Johnson said. Mr. Perry, he added, “was kind of the aw-shucks, easygoing guy that was easy to talk to, and he made friends very easily.”
And then, again, the weather put Mr. Perry on his path.
Another opportunity
By December 1983, the Perrys had been married 13 months and had a 3-month-old son, Griffin.
And the hardest freeze Mr. Perry can ever remember hit West Texas. “It lasts for weeks of subfreezing weather. There’s ice associated with it. Power, in some cases, is limited at best. So we’re not watching TV or listening to the radio,” he said.
Most days, he barely managed to get to the ranch to cut ice so the cattle could drink. Most nights, the couple was managing a baby who “isn’t doing the best job of sleeping.”
“There comes a break in the weather,” Mr. Perry said. It was a huge relief, and he drove into Stamford, where he ran into an aide to U.S. Rep. Charlie Stenholm.
“He said, ‘Hey, you gonna run for Joe Hanna’s state House seat?’” the governor recalled. “And I said, ‘No, I’d never consider running against Joe. He’s a good guy.’ And he said, ‘Where have you been? Joe announced that he wasn’t running for re-election over two weeks ago.’”
Just three days remained to file for the 1984 election. Mr. Perry sped home to discuss it with his wife, who was minutes away from leaving on a trip with her parents.
“And I said, ‘Honey, I’m really considering running for the Legislature, and I’ve got to make a decision in the next three days because of the filing deadline. If I’m gonna do it, I’ve got to do it.’”
It was a snap decision, but she gave her blessing.
“I said, ‘Do what you want to do,’ because I knew he wasn’t happy,” Mrs. Perry said.
He won that election and two more to the House, two as agriculture commissioner, one as lieutenant governor and one as governor. In fact, he’s never lost a campaign.
“Had the weather not broken for another week, the filing deadline would have come and gone,” and he probably would have never run for office, Mr. Perry said.
Contemplating a life much different, Mr. Perry insists he could have been happy without politics despite those troubled years. He said he has always been content with the work he’s chosen - whether it’s sweeping hospital stairwells, selling Bibles door to door or ranching. “There’s nothing so important in life. If you’ve got your faith, your family and your health, after that it’s gravy,” he said.
But those close to him said he was always looking beyond the rails of the ranch to more challenging pastures. Throughout his 56 years, opportunity has had to knock just once.
“I don’t get confused [between] being satisfied with what you’re dealt in life and wanting to improve it, or wanting to test yourself. And frankly, that’s what a lot of this has been for me,” he said.
“I didn’t want to wake up at 65 years old and go, ‘Wish I’d tried that. ... Wish I’d’ve had the nerve.’”