The George W. Bush Childhood Home

Midland Reporter-Telegram, Ed Todd – Staff Writer
January 23, 2001

 Earlier Monday, an Arizona couple visiting friends in Odessa drove to Midland to view the former Bush houses. The couple, Roger and Thelma Thomson, noted they had viewed the Bush Ohio Avenue house on television.

“It’s a surprise,” Thomson said, “because you always think they (presidential houses) are larger and more opulent – just a surprise to see it. It’s a nice corner lot.”

In their travels, the couple have toured houses of several U.S. presidents: George Washington’s Mount Vernon home and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Harry Truman’s house and library, and Herbert Hoover’s boyhood home. They drove by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Hyde Park, New York, homeplace.

“Monticello was more like a monument,” she said. Truman’s white, two-story home in Independence, Mo., was “very humble,” and Hoover’s boyhood was “very modest,” Mrs. Thomson said.

And the old Bush home-place on Ohio Avenue in Midland “kind of surprises me,” Mrs. Thomson said. “He (the senior Bush) moved in here when he wasn’t president. So he didn’t need to have a big, opulent home.”

The house, she said, “would be a nice museum for this town.”