The Swearing-In at Hye

On 3 November 1965 a Postmaster General of the United States was sworn into the cabinet on the porch of a country store, and the president who swore him in used the occasion to make a point about his own childhood. Lawrence F. O'Brien took the oath at the Hye post office, with the outgoing Postmaster General John Gronouski standing by, newly appointed ambassador to Poland, and Levi Deike, the postmaster, who had been appointed in 1934. Lyndon Johnson said from that porch that it was about fifty three years since he had mailed his first letter from the building. He was born in August 1908, which puts the letter around 1912, when he was three turning four. The state marker that went up the following year rounds it to age four, and the president's own account is the earlier of the two. He added that Deike had come a long way since the pair of them played baseball in his backyard, and reported that O'Brien had promised to go and find that first letter and deliver it.

The building is more interesting than the ceremony. Hiram Brown, called Hye, built a store south of the Pedernales on the Austin to Fredericksburg road in 1880, and the post office opened in it on 17 April 1886 with Brown as postmaster and his nickname as its name. The present building dates from 1904. Its upper facade is elaborate pressed metal, stamped to imitate rock faced stonework, with courses of scrollwork and a mock balustrade above a pierced wooden frieze, all documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey. Fritz Deike bought the store from Brown's widow in 1923, and nine Deike sons fielded what was said to be the only all brother baseball team in Texas.