The Search for Judy from Moody   

Pursuing rumors about candidates' pasts can be tedious and unrewarding.

F OR MONTHS, she was simply "Judy from Moody."
Among the small band of journalists assigned to full-time backgrounding of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, that lyrical nickname embodied an enduring riddle.
Who was the woman regularly seen on Bush's arm during his 1969 pilot training at Moody Air Force Base just outside Valdosta, Georgia? And what could she tell the world about the future candidate's self-described young and irresponsible years?
The mystery was more nagging than acute. And after it was solved, we knew just a hair more about George W. Bush than before.
More than unearthing scandal, the search for Judy demonstrated the sometimes tedious, low-return side of trying to journalistically define the would-be leader of the free world. As the dominant paper in Bush's home state, the Dallas Morning News has accepted the formula: For every bushel of information harvested, a grain may eventually make it into print.
My colleague George Kuempel and I first learned of Judy in late 1998, when we interviewed a number of Bush's flight-class colleagues for a biographical takeout that ran that November. We assumed that Judy was from Valdosta and knew that she was a frequent attendee at the weekly officers' club parties--the only place in town where liquor was served. We tracked down the Moody officers' club manager from those days. Never heard of her, he said. We placed an ad in the Valdosta paper. One response, no luck. We mentioned her by description only in a story about Bush's early years, then moved on to other areas.
On a subsequent trip to the Southeast, I stopped by Valdosta and visited the county historical society, where I was able to browse through yearbooks from the local high school and Valdosta State University from the late 1960s and early '70s. The result was a list of 29 young women named Judy who would have been between the ages of 18 and 22 when Bush was in town. I also jotted down the names of class officers, figuring those people could help me with my search.
That information gathered dust until last fall, when two biographies of Bush were published with mentions of Judy that piqued our interest. One of the books, "First Son," was written by Dallas Morning News writer Bill Minutaglio. He independently verified our published accounts of Judy. The other, "Fortunate Son," by J.H. Hatfield, added noteworthy details we had never heard before: Hatfield portrayed Bush as an utter cad. He quoted unnamed friends of Bush as saying the Texan had promised a young lady named Judy to take her back to Texas and marry her, all the while drunkenly telling his buddies he had no such intentions.
Hatfield's publisher ended up recalling his book, after the Dallas Morning News broke the story that he was, in fact, an ex-felon who had served five years in prison for hiring a man to car bomb his boss. Nonetheless, Hatfield's account reminded us that Judy was out there, and that until we talked to her we couldn't be sure what she would have to say about Bush.
The situation recalled that of another ex-girlfriend, Bush's fiancée during his days at Yale, whose engagement to the congressman-elect's son was chronicled in a January 1, 1967, Houston newspaper clipping. We had discovered that this woman was living in northern California, but she was not returning telephone calls, and there was no pressing reason to seek her out.
Then the Houston Press, an alternative weekly, speculated that Bush broke off the engagement because "the prospective bride had a Jewish background." In short order, that theory was picked up and repeated in at least one other paper. To investigate the claim, I flew to California. Bush's ex, Cathryn Wolfman Young, shared with me her fond memories of Bush, her belief that religion had nothing to do with their breakup, and this fact: She, like the Bushes, was Episcopalian. (Bush later became a Methodist.)
Having decided to seek out Judy, I dredged up my Valdosta notes, then entered the names and other yearbook information into a computerized database. I discovered three women who had attended both high school and college locally, and among those was cheerleader Judy Grondahl.
Her uncommon surname presented an inviting place to launch the journalistic scavenger hunt. There are only two Grondahls in the Valdosta phone book. A wary family employee at one of those residential numbers confirmed that her boss' sister had once dated Bush, but that her name wasn't Judy. She declined to elaborate.
A check of marriage licenses at the local courthouse gave me Judy Grondahl's married name, as well as the middle name that she goes by now: Judy Sigrid Kingsbury, wife of H. Kenneth Kingsbury Jr. An electronic check of newspaper clippings pinpointed a real estate executive by the name of Sigrid Kingsbury in the Baltimore area. Another clipping identified her as Judy, recently divorced from Kenneth. (Her divorce was granted in April 1999.)
I called Kingsbury's office and verified that she would be in town. Within a few days I was in a Maryland restaurant, sharing an Italian dinner with Judy from Moody. Luckily, my quarry was talkative and charming. She got a kick out of learning she had become something of a brass ring on the journalistic carousel.
By her account, there was nothing extraordinary or scandalous about her long-ago romance with Bush. They dated for nearly a year, she said, and he treated her just swell.
After Bush's training stint ended in Georgia, Kingsbury rode back to Houston with him, she said, where he was stationed with an Air National Guard Unit. She recalled that there was no talk of marriage and said they parted friends, gradually losing touch until recent months. Kingsbury, 50, paid $1,000 to attend a July 1999 Bush fundraiser, reintroduce herself and wish her former beau well.
No headlines there, but the interview could lend itself to an upcoming feature story.
The cost of that trip to Baltimore was small, compared with the expense of covering the Bush campaign day to day.
The hunt for Judy from Moody might seem like a ton of effort for an ounce of return, until you consider the potential cost of not having found her.
Judy could have packed a bombshell, and somebody else could have found her first.