This memorial monument to Liz Carpenter is located near the statue of Salado College founder Elijah Robertson, her great grandfather.
The monument reads as follows:
"SALADO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
[Daughters of the Republic of Texas Medallion]
LIZ CARPENTER
Girl from Salado
September 1, 1920 – March 20, 2010
Mary Elizabeth “Liz” Sutherland carpenter was a nationally known White House official, writer, and speaker. Her choice of Salado College Hill, where her parents met, for the scattering of her ashes completed full-circle her remarkable life journey.
Her great-great-grandfather, Sterling Clack Robertson, migrated from Tennessee to Central Texas to become impresario of Robertson’s colony. He was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, which Liz’s cousins thrice removed, George Childress, drafted. Robertson’s son, Elijah Sterling Robertson, founded Salado College, and built the plantation house where Liz was born. Meanwhile, Liz’s paternal Sutherland forebears migrated from Alabama to form the settlement in Jackson County. Her great-great-grandfather, George Sutherland, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto after his son William died at the Alamo.
Liz’s family tree also sprouted talented, adventurous women equal to the men, including great aunts, Luella Robertson Fullmore, who eloquently advocated educational equality for women at Salado College, and the prominent suffragist, Birdie Johnson, who became the first Democratic National Committee woman from Texas.
After obtaining a journalism degree from the University of Texas in 1942, Liz headed for Washington, DC, where she married her high school sweetheart, Leslie E. Carpenter. They formed a news bureau and raised 2 children, Scott and Christy. In 1961, she joined Vice President Johnson’s staff, later writing the new presidents words that would comfort a nation in shock after President Kennedy’s assassination. As press secretary and staff director to first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, Liz was in the forefront of such major initiatives as Head Start, beautification, and the creation of many national parks.
After leaving the White House, she wrote 5 books and traveled the nation as a speaker and humorist, settling again in Austin in 1976. A passionate feminist, she cofounded the National Women’s Political Caucus and co-chaired a national campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. For 25 years, she probably served as a trustee of the Robertson Colony-Salado College Foundation.
Summing up her remarkable story, she once wrote that: “Life has always led me where things were happening; where people were exhilarating, where actions and laughter came quickly.”
From the Dallas Morning News:
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"Liz Carpenter, Texas humorist, women's rights crusader and aide to Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, dies at 89
by Robert T. Garrett / The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN - Liz Carpenter, a Texas humorist and women's rights crusader who trolled the corridors of power in Washington as a journalist and trusted aide to Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, never shedding her common touch and flair as a friend-maker, party-thrower and mentor, died Saturday morning in Austin. She was 89.
Carpenter, who had been suffering from pneumonia, died at University Medical Center Brackenridge in Austin, her daughter Christy Carpenter told The Associated Press.
Liz Carpenter, who was in President John F. Kennedy's motorcade Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, penned the 58 words Mr. Johnson spoke to a grief-stricken nation as he arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., hours after Kennedy's assassination elevated him to the country's highest office.
"I will do my best," Mr. Johnson concluded. "That is all I can do. I ask for your help, and God's."
Ms. Carpenter later wrote a best-selling book, Ruffles and Flourishes , a memoir of her service as a vice presidential aide and her White House years as Mrs. Johnson's staff director and press secretary.
"The President's press secretary would worry about all of the news from the President, Kosygin, Vietnam and De Gaulle," she wrote, referring to her boss; the leader of the former Soviet Union; the war that short-circuited Mr. Johnson's presidency; and the French president.
Ms. Carpenter said her job was to field media inquiries about the personal lives of the Johnsons and their two daughters, Lynda and Luci, who lived in the White House.
"I just had to worry," she wrote, "about women, dogs, old brocades, Luci changing the spelling of her name, Luci becoming a Catholic, Luci having her ears pierced, Luci getting engaged, Luci getting married, Lynda and a broken engagement with Bernie Rosenbach, Lynda's engagement to Captain Charles Robb and Lynda's wedding ... a hot-tempered French chef and 40 Lady Bird trips that covered 200,000 miles."
Self-deprecating
The book's lighthearted tone and self-deprecating wit became Ms. Carpenter's trademark as she went on to write three other books and a syndicated newspaper column.
She had strong convictions about politics. Ms. Carpenter was an unabashed New Deal Democrat and ardent feminist who co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971 and hit the national lecture circuit in an unsuccessful push for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
"She is our conscience and our support system," former Gov. Ann Richards said as Ms. Carpenter turned 80 in 2000. "She's always there to remind us that the fight for equality continues."
Ms. Carpenter credited former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt with helping her and other women become political reporters in wartime Washington.
Mrs. Roosevelt admitted only women to her news conferences, so editors at newspapers and wire services "had to put women on straight news for the first time," Ms. Carpenter recalled in 2000. She recounted her own struggle to break into the newspaper business as a half-secretary, half-reporter for a regional news bureau in Washington.
Ms. Carpenter also idolized then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and she later imitated his nonpreachy style and bonhomie as she fought for women's rights.
"I have gray hair. I'm overweight. I'm a grandmother. I'm not a screamer," she told the Houston Post in 1981. "I can get to people many screamers can't get to."
"She has proven to the world that the women's movement has a sense of humor," Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem said.
Ms. Carpenter, the former Mary Elizabeth Sutherland, was born in Salado and was a sixth-generation Texan. Her father was a highway contractor and her mother was fond of poetry. The Sutherlands moved to Austin when Liz was in second grade. At Austin High and the University of Texas, she wrote for the school papers.
DeWitt Reddick, a UT journalism professor, whetted her desire to be a reporter, she later recounted. Armed with her diploma and $250 from her parents, she moved to Washington in 1942 and pounded the pavement until Esther Van Wagoner Tufty, operator of an independent news bureau, gave her a job.
Two years later, she married former UT classmate Leslie Carpenter. After he finished a stint in the Navy, they launched Carpenter News Service, which gathered news in the nation's capital and grew until it had 18 newspaper clients in the South and Southwest.
Johnson recruit
In 1960, Mr. Johnson, then U.S. Senate majority leader, recruited her for his vice presidential campaign. Ms. Carpenter worked for him until he returned to Texas in 1969, after deciding against seeking a second term as president.
In the early 1970s, Ms. Carpenter was a vice president in the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm. But she left Washington and returned to Austin in 1976, two years after her husband died.
She wrote free-lance magazine articles, lectured on journalism at UT, served as a consultant to Friends of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, and returned briefly to Washington to help launch the Department of Education during the final year of Jimmy Carter's presidency.
Back in Austin, after the 1981 death of her brother, Tommy Sutherland, Ms. Carpenter took in his three teenage children. In her book Unplanned Parenthood, she recounted the experience of raising them to adulthood, though she had "one bosom gone, one deaf ear, a swollen arthritic ankle and the weakest bladder in Travis County."
Known as a lively, hilarious raconteur and determined matchmaker, Ms. Carpenter loved people, parties, politics and poetry - and especially her friends, both old and new.
"Liz is on a very short list of people that I would call at 2 o'clock in the morning if an emergency arose," said Mrs. Johnson, who died in 2007. Before she had a stroke in 2002 the former first lady was a frequent guest at Ms. Carpenter's limestone house, "Grass Roots," that overlooks Austin.
"The big lesson I've learned from her is that political capital is like love - the more you give, the more you get," said Dallas Democratic activist and lawyer Susan Hays, a protégé and traveling companion of Ms. Carpenter in her final years.
Survivors include daughter Christy Carpenter of New York City, executive vice president of The Paley Center for Media, formerly the Museum of Television & Radio; son Scott Carpenter of Vashon Island, Wash., and his wife, Jean Carpenter; grandson, the Rev. Les Carpenter of Indianapolis; step-granddaughter Bonnie Bizzell of Seattle; and nieces Liz Sutherland and Mary Sutherland, nephew Tommy Sutherland and sister-in-law Jean Tabor Sutherland, all of Austin."