Lurleen Wallace - Early Years

Early Years

Lurleen Brigham Burns was born to Henry Burns and the former Estelle Burroughs of Fosters in Tuscaloosa County. By taking summer classes, she graduated in 1942 from Tuscaloosa County High School at the age of fifteen. She then worked at Kresge’s Five and Dime in Tuscaloosa, where she met George Wallace, at the time a member of the United States Army Air Corps. The couple married on May 21, 1943, when she was sixteen.

Over the next twenty years, Lurleen Wallace focused on being a mother and a homemaker. The Wallaces had four children: were Bobbi Jo (1944) Parsons, Peggy Sue (1950) Kennedy, George Wallace, III (1951), and Janie Lee (1961) Dye, who was named after Robert E. Lee. George Wallace's political career and neglect of his family resulted in his wife filing for divorce in the late 1950s; she later dropped the suit.

Mrs. Wallace assumed her duties as First Lady of Alabama in 1963 after her husband was elected governor to the first of his four nonconsecutive terms. She opened the first floor of the governor's mansion to the public seven days a week. She refused to serve alcoholic beverages at official functions.