The queen is dead, long live the queen
By BILL DUNCAN The founder and the queen mother of the Howl at the Moon Club has died. Liz Carpenter the sauciest press secretary I ever met, introduced my wife and me to the great pleasure of embarrassing our children by howling at the moon each time that great globe in the sky could be seen in its entirety. The moon is roughly full once a month as it actually takes 27 days for the moon to travel around the earth, but because the moon is traveling around the sun the calculation is that there is a full moon approximately 12.37 times a year. That’s the kind of trivia, Liz Carpenter, who died at age 89 in her Texas home last week, loved to share with the thousands of members of this unique club. My wife and I found it to be such fun that we formed a chapter here in Roseburg. Because this is an old person’s pastime, our members have dwindled from a crowd to a few. For several years we would meet in each other’s homes, share a repast, share literary gifts and all go outside when the moon was at its apex and howl. Now we just telephone each other on those night’s when the moon is full and share a howl. Liz frankly told us, the idea behind the club was to embarrass our children for all the embarrassing moments they caused us. You’d have to personally known Liz to appreciate her Texas style humor. She was known for her caustic and sometimes bawdy wit, but she was as irreverent about herself as she was about the powerful around her, when she was appointed to the Johnson administration. First she was an executive assistant to Vice President Lyndon Johnson and later, when he was president, she became press secretary to Ladybird Johnson. It was in that capacity that I first met her. The first indication of her wit, came when she organized a task force known as the Flying Tea Parties. She explained that it was her job “to take those funny-talking Kennedy ladies from Massachusetts through Texas and other Southern Bible Belt states and prove that Roman Catholics didn’t have horns and tails.” At one time Johnson yelled at her: “Why don’t you use your head?” She fired back, “I’m too busy trying to use yours.” She was in the motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated and wrote the speech Johnson delivered when Johnson left Dallas on Air Force One to return to Washington as the 36th president. This may sound like ancient history today, but Liz was one of the motivating forces that broke the glass ceiling to permit women to join the National Press Club, strictly a male domain since its founding in 1908. She first got a concession that allowed the women press members to sit in the balcony while their male colleagues ate below. It was not until 1971 that women were admitted as members. She was Ladybird’s press secretary for five years. In 1970 she wrote a book, Ruffles and Flourishes,” about her White House years. In 1987 she wrote a memoir “Getting Better All the Time.” My all time favorite book is one she wrote at age 71, when she became unexpectedly the mother of brother’s three young children when he died of cancer and their mother was unable to care for them. The book, written in 1994 is titled “Unplanned Parenthood: The Confessions of a 70-something Surrogate Mother.” The next full moon is on Wednesday, April 28. If you should hear some howling wolves don’t worry, it will just be the old Liz Carpenter Howl at the Moon Club, but as I remember in her Texas accent, she’d say, “Bay at the Moon.” (Bill Duncan invites you all to join him in a howl for a great American lady, one who made life interesting. If you would like to form your own Howl at the Moon chapter, you can reach Duncan at bduncan@nrtoday.com or write to him at P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)
The Elder Statesman