When Charles left in 1968, the family’s geography became organized by Diane’s needs and resources. They moved to Houston — a larger city, more work, more opportunity for a legal secretary working alone. Houston in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a city in rapid expansion, its economy tied to the aerospace industry (NASA’s Johnson Space Center had opened in 1963) and to petrochemicals. It was also, for Diane Harrelson, the city where she could find steady employment and raise three sons without the father who had gone.
Woody attended the Briarwood School in Houston — a private school, which raises the obvious question of how a legal secretary supporting three sons on one income managed private school tuition. The answer is not documented in the available sources, and it is one of the biographical details that the public record does not fully explain. What is documented is that the family eventually left Houston for Lebanon, Ohio — Diane’s hometown — in 1973, when Woody was eleven or twelve.
Lebanon, Ohio is a very different place from Houston or Midland. It is a small city — population approximately twenty thousand — in Warren County in southwestern Ohio, about thirty miles north of Cincinnati. It is the kind of middle American city that exists in a state of gentle decline: historically significant (it was founded in 1802 and has a downtown that reflects its nineteenth-century prosperity), economically dependent on manufacturing and services, and socially organized around the institutions — churches, high schools, fraternal organizations — that bind small American communities together.