Former Bangor mayor recalls visit of ‘gracious’ Lady Bird

BANGOR – A brief encounter with Lady Bird Johnson made a lasting impression on the man who was mayor in August 1964 when the first lady made a stopover in the city.

She was on her way to the dedication of the Roosevelt-Campobello International Park in neighboring Canada.

“She was a lady first and foremost,” Nicholas P. Brountas, 83, of Bangor said Saturday. “I sensed from her that she was a loving person to her family and people in general.”

The widow of President Lyndon B. Johnson was known to her friends and the world as Lady Bird. She was buried Sunday next to her husband at the family ranch in Stonewall, Texas, about 70 miles west of Austin. She died of natural causes Wednesday at age 94.

Mayor Brountas, Gov. John Reed, U.S. Air Force officials and more than 600 others greeted the first lady on Thursday morning, Aug. 20, 1964, at Dow Air Force Base, now the Bangor International Airport. Her visit lasted less than an hour before she left in a private plane for the ceremonies at Campobello. She ended her first visit to Maine with a brief tour of Eastport.

Lady Bird, who had been first lady for less than a year when she stopped in Bangor, was accompanied by Maine’s U.S. Sen. Edmund S. Muskie; Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who was undersecretary of commerce; Canadian Ambassador to the United States Charles Ritchie; and six members of the Hammer family, which donated the FDR summer house as an international park.

“She was very gracious,” said Brountas, who gave the first lady a key to the city. “She was very knowledgeable about Bangor’s history. The first thing she talked about was the city’s shipping days. She knew more about that than I did.”

The only person who was reported disappointed with Lady Bird’s visit was the governor’s 17-year-old daughter, Ruth Ann Reed.

“She’s so nice,” the girl told the BDN. “I wish she had brought her daughter Luci!”

Luci Baines Johnson also was 17 in 1964.

In addition to shaking hands and donating flowers to women who were patients at the base hospital, the first lady granted amnesty to 158 Air Force ROTC cadets on summer encampment at Dow, the BDN reported. She signed a petition from cadets that they be relieved of walking tours during the final week of their encampment.

“Mrs. Johnson granted the request, adding: ‘It’s the first time in my life I have ever done it, and I hope it is legal,'” the BDN reported.

Campaigning was more evident in Eastport, where she was greeted with signs urging swift federal funding for the Quoddy tidal power project.

Lady Bird and Muskie flew over the area that was to be affected by the proposed project, said Ralph E. Leonard, the Old Town pilot who took them Down East in his Piper Aztec.

“‘We made a couple of passes over Campobello, and I pointed out the FDR Memorial Bridge between the island and Lubec. Senator Muskie explained the Quoddy project to Mrs. Johnson and showed her how it would be dammed up when we flew over Passamaquoddy Bay,” Leonard told the newspaper at the time.

Although Lady Bird’s legacy is her dedication to preserving the environment and the highway beautification campaign, Brountas said Saturday that she really affected the nation in a very different way.

“The most marvelous thing she did was talk LBJ into not running” in 1968, he said. “The Vietnam War really was destroying him. You could see how he was suffering. I think if he had served a second term, he could have done a great deal for the country domestically, but Mrs. Johnson felt he wouldn’t be able to survive.”

It turned out she was right, Brountas said.

LBJ died of a heart attack at his ranch on Jan. 22, 1973, two days after his term as president would have ended had he been re-elected.