05/14/2026
LBJ
He was twenty years old in the summer of 1928 when he took a small teaching job at the Welhausen School in Cotulla. At the time, he was a freshman at Texas State University in San Marcos and needed the money to finish his degree. His old friend Henry Evans had told him there was an opening to teach fifth, sixth, and seventh grades at the small school in Cotulla, a farming and ranching town halfway between San Antonio and Laredo.
The Welhausen School served the Mexican-American children of Cotulla. Built through a municipal bond approved in 1926, the school had been named for county judge G. A. Welhausen. He took the long bus ride south and arrived in September of 1928. On his first morning at the school, he was the youngest of the five teachers on staff. A few weeks later, the principal asked him to assume the role as well. By then, he was only twenty-one years old.
He spent his first paycheck on softball bats, gloves, volleyballs, and basketballs for the children, who had never had athletic equipment at the school before his arrival. He organized the Welhausen Athletic Club, debate teams, and spelling bees. Using cars borrowed from some of the few car owners in town, he took the children to competitions in neighboring communities. In October of 1928, he wrote home to his mother in Texas asking her to send tubes of toothpaste for the students.
He did not speak Spanish, and many of his students did not speak English. Each morning, he taught them English by holding declamation contests at the front of the classroom. He remained in Cotulla for nine months before returning to San Marcos in the spring of 1929 to complete his degree.
In the years afterward, he often said that the faces of the children at the Welhausen School never left him. In November of 1966, he returned to the school as Lyndon B. Johnson. Every account of the day says the entire population of Cotulla came out to greet him. He gave a speech in the school auditorium and said the country had still not done enough.
The year before, while signing the Higher Education Act of 1965 at his alma mater in San Marcos, he said he would never forget the faces of the boys and girls in that little Welhausen School. He explained that in 1928 he had made up his mind that the nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.
