Drew Gillen ran Gillen Grocery & Market and later Gillen Chevrolet in Blooming Grove, held extensive land, and was one of the organizers and a director of the First State Bank. He served as the town's mayor from April 1963 to April 1966. He was a Mason and a member of the Karem Shrine, a deacon and trustee at Central Baptist, and for years the chairman of the Navarro County Democratic Executive Committee. Family called him Papa Drew.

He was also, by his own inscribed photograph, Lyndon Johnson's true friend. A letter to him on United States Senate, Committee on Armed Services letterhead, dated 20 October 1950 and signed “Lyndon,” reads: “Often I think back to those summer days of 1948 when you helped so effectively to give Texas a new Senator… As one of my key friends in Navarro County, you are in a better position than anyone I know to do this job.” Johnson had won that Senate race by eighty-seven votes, and the letter is the only document that ties Blooming Grove to it.

Fourteen years later Johnson was President, and after the 1964 election Gillen wrote to him on his own letterhead — Livestock, Bulldozing, Real Estate — to report the local result: “We only lost twenty seven (27) votes in Blooming Grove.”

The friendship reached back further still. Gillen held an invitation to Harry Truman's 1949 inauguration and a photograph of Truman signed in red ink across the front, the two of them standing together outside a clapboard house, both smiling.

His obituary, printed when he died in December 1976 at seventy-four, states plainly that he was “a frequent guest in the Johnson home near Johnson City and at the White House” and that “Johnson had also visited in Blooming Grove.” He is buried at Rose Hill Cemetery.

Every document that survives calls him only Drew Gillen. A third man stands beside Truman and Gillen in the wider print of that photograph, unnamed on the print and not yet identified.