Granddaughter honors Lady Bird with updated Tuesday tradition

During the final 8 1/2 years of her grandmother’s life, Catherine Robb kept a regular Tuesday night date with Lady Bird Johnson, whom she and the other Johnson grandchildren called Nini.

They watched TV, shared dinner and chatted, then Robb might read aloud, a special treat because Johnson was a lifelong lover of books but suffered from strokes and advanced macular degeneration during her later years.

RELATED: Oral History rekindles Lady Bird’s voice

After the former first lady died on July 11, 2007, Robb, an Austin attorney and avid runner, found herself unexpectedly unmoored on Tuesdays.

“I had a bunch of friends and they all knew,” says Robb regarding the regular grandmother-granddaughter dates. “They took care of me the next few Tuesdays. And family was in town.”

Later, Robb initiated a new Tuesday routine of intimate dinner parties, just close friends and family. That seemed to keep the day consecrated in a sense.

Meanwhile, the longtime congregant at St. David’s Episcopal Church downtown also occasionally volunteered with the group’s Trinity Street religious services on Sundays, aimed at the church’s neighbors without homes.

“I love what we are doing with the Trinity Center,” Robb says of the service group that holds its annual Barbara Jordan Celebration and benefit April 24. “I also knew Diane Holloway (a former American-Statesman reporter) when she was volunteering there, before she ran the volunteer program. I reached out to her and said, ‘I’d like to do it on Tuesdays, women’s day. What can I do that day to give back?’ I wanted to do things that were in keeping with the spirit of my grandmother.”

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So for the past year and a half, Robb has devoted Tuesdays to helping the church’s neighbors with the kinds of things that lawyers already do well.

“I help fill out forms, help apply for identification,” Robb says. “I provide information on how to find services and whatever else is needed, while the center helps with payment vouchers. That can mean replacement IDs, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, whatever they need to get a job, get housing, get health care, enroll their kids in school.”

The busy center at Seventh and Trinity streets is only a few blocks’ stroll from her law offices at Sixth Street and Congress Avenue. Robb is sure that her grandmother, who taught the value of philanthropy to her children and grandchildren, would have approved of the latest Tuesday tradition.

“Some days you feel more successful than others,” she admits. “There are days when you realize how helpless you are to help someone. So many things we take for granted. The best I can do here are the things you need to do, and here’s how we start the process. …”

Johnson legacies

Robb met this reporter for an interview in the lobby bar at the Driskill Hotel, a place of tremendous significance for her grandmother and her grandfather, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who died in 1973 when she was only 2 1/2 years old. Her grandparents met for their first date here. LBJ ran much of his political career from these hallways, and Lady Bird started her broadcasting business in the corner offices of the old hotel at East Sixth and Brazos streets.

(The book to read is “The Grande Dame of Austin: Driskill Hotel” by Monte Akers.)

Robb, the daughter of Lynda Johnson Robb and Charles Robb, grew up with two sisters in Virginia, where her father was elected governor and then U.S. Senator. She moved to Austin, a place she had visited often, to study at the University of Texas Law School in 1995.

After a judicial clerkship in Midland, she received offers of jobs in Austin and Washington, D.C.

“If I was ever going to work for a law firm, it was going to be here, and be with my grandmother,” she recalls. “So I was confident about settling here. I knew I loved Austin and already had a place here.”

She started out at the law firm of George and Donaldson, and later joined Haynes and Boone, specializing in media, First Amendment law and intellectual property litigation.

“I was so busy being a lawyer that I decided to dedicate every Tuesday to Nini,” Robb says. “We had a deal that if either of us got a better offer, they could bow out. She was too kind to say she had a better one; I was smart enough to know that I wouldn’t get a better one.”

RELATED: Lady Bird’s tradition lives on

At the time, Robb was living in a condo in Old West Austin, while Johnson lived in West Lake Hills off Toro Canyon Road. Early on, the pair visited restaurants, but after Johnson suffered her worst stroke in 2002, they were less interested in dining out.

“We transitioned to staying in,” Robb says. “We’d watch the Lehrer ‘News Hour’ on PBS, then I’d read to her. She was more private in the late years.”

Johnson’s death hit her caretakers hard.

“We all kind of looked out for each other,” Robb says. “On the 10th anniversary of her passing, two women instrumental in her home care as well as my aunt and one or two people important to my grandmother got together to tell stories.”

The Tuesday gigs at the Trinity Center in the St. David’s complex seem almost fated. Robb was baptized at St. David’s by Charles Sumners, who served there almost 39 years. She attended the church, Austin’s oldest, while she was in law school, and she re-upped after her return from Midland.

Helping homeless people with the paperwork that bedevils even people with limitless advantages is a nice fit with her legal background.

“Of course, it makes you appreciate what you have,” Robb says. “It’s easy to get discouraged. But each time we help someone, we are making progress.”

Elsewhere, Robb also volunteers for the Back on My Feet program, which helps people experiencing homelessness through daily jogs and other services. She thinks it’s hard to tell if there are fewer homeless Austinites these days because so many people are moving to town. Yet she hears from the neighbors about the efficacy of the programs.

“St. David’s staged a crawfish boil in the parking lot for the community,” she says. “So that’s parishioners, neighbors, people living in condos. One woman asked me to teach her how to eat crawfish. Then she asked, ‘Do you go to this church?’ I said yes. ‘Oh my gosh, they do so much, I can’t tell you how thankful we are to have the Trinity Center.’ This was completely unsolicited.”

At her grandmother’s funeral, Robb told a related story taken from her Tuesday night rituals.

“We’d go out to dinner, and people would come up all the time,” she remembers. ‘They were gracious and didn’t want to bother her. But they would say under their breath, ‘Thank you, Lady Bird,’ or ‘We love you, Lady Bird.’ I can’t imagine anything greater than a spontaneous ‘I love you’ for making people kinder, lovelier.”

Barbara Jordan Celebration for the Trinity Center