After finishing high school in 1924, LBJ had what some historians have called a "lost period" in his life. With five friends, he bought a car to drive from Texas to California, where he worked some odd jobs for about a year. He hitchhiked back to Texas, where he did some manual labor on a road crew.

In 1927, Johnson enrolled in Southwest Texas State Teachers College. He was a student-teacher at a small Hispanic school in an impoverished area.

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When Johnson graduated in 1930, his first teaching job paid $1,530 ($21,796 when adjusting for inflation) for the year. He worked briefly as a teacher before getting a job as a Congressional aide.