They Called It the War Effort : Oral Histories from World War II Orange, Texas [1 ed.] 9780876112595, 9780876112502

Citation preview

They Called It the War Effort Oral Histories from WWII Orange, Texas

Louis Fairchild

Afterword by Thomas L. Charlton Se cond E d it ion

They Called It the War Effort

The author and the Texas State Historical Association gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Nelda C. and H.J. Lutcher Stark Foundation of Orange, Texas, with regard to the publication of this book.

They Called It the War Effort Oral Histories from WWII Orange, Texas

By Louis Fairchild Afterword by Thomas L. Charlton Second Edition

Texas State Historical Association Denton

Second Edition. Copyright © 2012 by Louis Fairchild First Edition. Copyright © 1993 by Louis Fairchild Published in the United States of America by Eakin Press An Imprint of Sunbelt Mediia, Inc. P. O. Drawer 90159, Austin, Texas 78709-0159 All Rights Reserved. No Part of this book my be reproduced in any form without witten permission from the publisher, escept for brief passages included in a review appearing in a newspaper or magazine.

I n m emory of Patricia J. Wilson Fairchild Time, what an empty vapor ’tis, And days how swift they [were]: and Those who did not return

Everybody was busy with the war effort, they called it. . . . There wasn’t anything quite like the war. I don’t think there was anybody that was grown that lived through it [and] was not changed. I almost want to cry when I say that, ’cause there’s so much of memories— wonderful memories—and frightening. Anne Brandt Quigley Dear Connie and Ruth, Sunday afternoon about four o’clock as I went to the door and saw the telegraph boy I was fearful as always these days. I’m sure you are as crushed and heartbroken as me. Sometimes I’m just numb, with no feeling at all it seems . . . Pops was playing golf, and I was so afraid he might hear it at the club. . . . The news hadn’t gotten around so I had to tell him when he came home about six. . . . I went to Mass yesterday and this morning; it seemed that church was the one place I wanted to go for consolation. There is no use mentioning the terrible ache in our hearts; you know what it is. Your loving, Moms January 16 ’45

Contents Foreword by Thomas L. Charlton to the First Edition Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Acknowledgments to the Second Edition Acknowledgments to the First Edition Introduction: Just the Way it Was

xi xiii xvii xxi xxiii xxv

 1. This Is My Town  2. Coming to Orange  3. Children at a Unique Time  4. Teenagers Live Forever  5. The Women: Very Good, Very Strong  6. Being Black in Orange  7. Top People in Shipyard Management  8. They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards  9. Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business 10. Health, Education, and Welfare

1 52 71 117 163 206 238 265 332 394

Conclusion: Like a Hybrid Epilogue Afterword Appendixes  1. Orange 1944  2. Seeing, Remembering  3. Procedure Notes Index

437 451 453 457 461 465 467 491

Foreword to the First Edition

W

orld War II is vivid in my memory, particularly scenes of the home front in southeastern Texas. As an elementary-school student whose parents demonstrated much interest in the progress of the United States during World War II, I remember well our lives during the four agonizing years the nation was at war. My hometown of Beaumont, Texas, ranked high as a possible target for any enemy attack by air, and I soon came to understand how critical to the Allied effort our community’s refineries, shipbuilding facilities, and other war-related industries were to the wartime economy. My Averill Elementary School classmates and I supported the war by buying bonds and stamps, wearing patriotic articles of clothing, and helping our parents cultivate Victory Gardens on vacant lots in town. We visited the port on the Neches River whenever newly completed naval vessels were launched or U.S. Navy submarines docked and allowed us to climb aboard for tours. Gradually, I learned that most of the Beaumont-Port Arthur-Orange area was playing a vital role in the war. Nearby Orange, Texas—twenty-five miles to the east of Beaumont— was a place I scarcely knew prior to the war except as a coastal town through which we drove on occasional trips into Cajun Louisiana to visit my mother’s side of the family. The naval base at Orange, the town’s bustling shipyards, and other sights around the port on the Sabine River all held my youthful attention as my father would guide the family car through town and across the large bridge which linked the two states. Well do I recall the astonishment of my parents as they commented on Orange’s unusual growth in population during the war and the resulting critical housing shortage. I never witnessed firsthand the worst of Orange’s wartime housing situation, but I imagined how serious it was when I heard about that

x

they called it the war effort

town’s sudden growth from about 7,000 folks to around 33,000 residents in 1943. Substantial growth was also occurring in Beaumont and Port Arthur, and it was exciting for us schoolchildren to be living where Americans were flocking to find jobs and contribute to the home front war effort. It was Orange, however, about which I heard repeated talk during those years of challenge and productivity. Later, when my parents moved to Orange in 1955, the effects of the war could still be seen, and I recall spending many hours as a curious, young historian piecing together a picture of the boom which had occurred there less than fifteen years earlier. Since my father worked for the electric power company for more than forty years, he was in a position to help me understand what had happened in Orange during my formative years, the industrial development that remained intact for some time, and the overall vestiges of the war in southeastern Texas. I learned much from him and wondered who might bring this interesting subject to light. Twenty years later, when I joined the faculty of Baylor University to teach Texas history, I found myself including informal accounts of Orange’s growth in lectures on urban growth during World War II. My perspective was broader and more mature now, and the wartime story of the town and people of Orange soon became part of a larger context. On visits to my parents in Orange I often thought that far more historical research should be done in Orange. (Years before, I had briefly considered writing a history of Orange County as a master’s thesis, but had been drawn to other subjects.) The story of the traumatic, exhilarating experience of Orange during the forties would await the attention of a scholar such as Louis Fairchild, himself a former resident of the area. Fairchild’s new study of the effects of World War II on Orange may be seen as a significant work from three standpoints. Most obviously, this is a timely publication during the nation’s four-year observance of the war, now seventy years in the past. Our reading appetites for books on subjects as popular as the Second World War, a time when military and civilian objectives seemed so clear, are enormous, and serious studies are needed for most, if not all, communities impacted heavily by the war. The Fairchild study focuses not on arms, ships, and official participation, but on the lives of ordinary citizens and the community in general. They Called It the War Effort is unusual in this regard. Recent added emphasis on the study of social history in the United States provides yet another way for us to view the Fairchild book. Preferring to approach history from the bottom up, with sensitive studies of non-elites and new attention to ordinary events, social historians since the 1960s have greatly expanded our definition of history in general. Narrative

Foreword

xi

accounts of ordinary citizens’ lives, many of whom might not otherwise be heard, are now seen as building blocks in larger historical research and writing. While he has made only modest claims about his study, Louis Fairchild’s book will probably find a place in the genre of local social history, which continues to gain acceptance and momentum in the U.S. and throughout the world. Oral history, as a highly regarded method of local research, has grown into a global movement since World War II. Now a part of almost every social historian’s arsenal of research methods, oral history is often seen as an essential approach to the past as informants recall and document their lives and their communities’ experiences. As an oral history-based study, the Fairchild book merits special attention. Using both historical and psychosocial-oriented questions, the author evokes pictures of wartime Orange—heroic, poignant, exciting—never before available. The people of the town are given voice as they tell about the war and its sweeping effects. Readers should notice that the author resists the temptation to paraphrase interviewees’ recollections and present them as polished prose. To his credit, Fairchild’s pages ring with the voices and word pictures of his living sources, and their personal accounts are refreshing and highly beneficial. This is not to say that this book will not be favorably regarded by psychologists, sociologists, and other social and behavioral scientists, but to commend both the author and the publisher for allowing us to receive and evaluate the discrete human stories of the people of Orange and weave our own tapestries from them. Fairchild’s insightful interpretations and sensitive conclusions are interesting, but I suspect that many other conclusions will be drawn from his work by those who compare Orange’s experiences with those of other communities. My hope is that this work will stimulate Texans everywhere to fund and carry out studies of their own World War II-era communities. Now is a great time for us to do this! Thomas L. Charlton

Preface to the Second Edition

Let’s Have Some News of Orange “Of course he is sadly missed by all of us who knew him so well. I cannot believe that his death is meaningless. Every man with whom he came in contact respected him and respects his memory I know. It is not possible for a man to know Grant without being a better man himself. His memory will continue with us, a treasured possession as long as we shall live.   “Grant is not lost. He lives with all of us in our hearts and he shall continue to live with us as long as life lasts. Years and years from now, God willing, we shall think of him, still young, and fresh, and healthy and full of the energy and enthusiasm of life’s best days, unchanged and unchanging.” Robert T. Phillips, Captain, Medical Corps

S

tationed with the 17th Pursuit Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Forces in the Philippines, Lieutenant Grant Manley of Orange, Texas, wrote a number of letters to his family between September 2 and November 11, 1941. The letters speak to a youthful confidence and maturity. In addition to references to family and friends, investments and money matters are mentioned. They will be reassured to know that the happy-go-lucky bunch of guys with whom he serves is as fine a lot as can be found anywhere. There is the rain. Twenty-five inches in three days. Thirty inches in four days. The 1931 Chrysler he and four buddies bought for $100. makes it easier to get around in these typhoons. Christmas is in his thoughts. He has, in fact, already started addressing cards. “Have some nice ones this year. They are in color and portray Philippine rural scenes.” Hopefully, those back home can help him out by purchasing his gifts for him. He misses playing bridge (there are too few players) so he has to settle for poker. Red

xiv

they called it the war effort

Shepherd has taught him how to play squash, and he’s coaching some of the fellows in Spanish. Moms, a devout Catholic, would appreciate the Sunday mass conducted on what he thought had to be the most unusual altar ever, the wing of an airplane. The Philippine sunsets, “the most beautiful things imaginable,” take him back to the sunsets he witnessed on Lake Pontchartrain as a four-year-old. The sunsets make him homesick. Manley and his Chrysler pals are comfortable in a five-room house in Manila, attended by a cook, houseboy, and two washwomen. Leo, the cook, makes biscuits that “melt in your mouth.” Hose, the houseboy, is spoiling them. Every evening he grabs their clothes almost before they can get them off, and into the hamper they go. He shines their shoes after taking them off their feet. “I’ll be a no count son of a gun when and if we get back to the states.” They subscribe to a number of magazines, and nearby Nichols Field library is shelved with current releases. The men are looking forward to seeing Bette Davis in The Little Foxes, opening November 11. Manley recalls the “spiffy” club in Manila and the squadron party and dance when they all dressed up in their service dress white uniforms. “Saturday night always calls for a party of some description and we do it up brown as long as there’s any money in the exchecquer [sic].” But they also have a swell time just sitting around in the evenings reading, listening to the radio, or simply talking. Squadron responsibilities are demanding and physically taxing. The rigors of flying make for “a pretty quiet bunch of fellows on week days.” He’s rather pleased with the mustache he has been recently sporting, “it’s so trim and neat.” But maybe Pops should tell Moms that he would probably keep it only “until ” he comes home. “People are used to me now and would miss it if I shaved it.” Flight training, base and squadron activities are recurring topics. The pilots are “cracking up planes aplenty.” Were the Japanese to attack, they might well find that the Americans have already done their mischief for them, having wiped out most of their own air corps. He leaves it to Pops’s judgment whether Moms should be told about one serious Clark Field take-off accident in which he was involved. “We were quite lucky.” There is the thrill of simulated aerial combat, “scattered all over the sky from hell to breakfast.” After one hour of dog-fighting “you feel like you’ve been pulled thru a May Tag wringer.” Excitement abounds over the Kittyhawk, the new Curtiss-Wright P-40E fighter. It’s “the ‘hottest’ ship any of us have ever flown.” The P-40 was the topic of conversation among the men. Despite questions about the dependability of the engines, “They look wicked and solid and they are both. Just imagine four tons of metal moving

Preface to the Second Edition

xv

faster than six miles a minute and able to shoot 7200 bullets a minute and you get the picture pretty well.” Lieutenant Manley shares his impressions of the Pacific Front. If the Japanese only hold off until the Americans have completed their gunnery practice, well then, they would be ready for them. But he and his comrades actually have little knowledge of what’s happening in the Pacific, “even close to us out here.” They are certainly unaware of any warlike moves, and he ponders escaping this menace without a fight. He consoles his mother: “Don’t let the newspaper and radio scare you too much about the situation out here. We anticipate little danger and don’t worry about it at all. So don’t you.” Also, if soldiers and officers, planes, tanks, equipment, and other “mechanized stuff ” continue arriving in such numbers the Philippines would soon be “a spot . . . pretty unhealthy to tackle.” Manley surmises that from all appearances the United States has every intention of defending these islands. There would be no backing down. America would not be caught “flatfooted.” Mail from home was treasured. The day he received letters from both Moms and Pops, well, “[L]et me tell you that they were plenty well received.” But what about Orange? One undated letter to his mother signed off with “Write soon and let’s have some news of Orange and you all.” His October 27 letter to Moms repeated his interest. “How is Orange progressing[?] Have any ships come off the ways yet? Are they still building new houses all over the place and is the population moving upward by leaps and bounds? I like to hear about those things but you don’t often mention them.”* This is the news about Orange during those years of WWII, and like the guns of that war, time has silenced many, if not most, of these voices. I take this opportunity to repeat my earlier emphasis on the dignity of the people who contributed to this volume. My respect and admiration for each individual interviewed has but grown over the years. And special recognition is paid to Leatha and Harold Herrington, whose names I misspelled in the first edition. It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon when I knocked unexpectedly on their door. Leatha said Harold was still in bed *It is unknown from his letters whether Grant Manley ever learned about the transformation occurring in Orange. He was killed on November 27, 1941. (Details of his death are discussed in chapter 1.) In a letter to the young pilot’s father, Captain Phillips, surgeon attached to the 17th, remembered him for his “remarkable sense of humor.” He was “talented, courteous, amiable, always dignified and thoughtful.” By January 16, 1942, seven other pilots in Lieutenant Manley’s squadron had been killed.

xvi

they called it the war effort

because he had not slept well the night before, but she would see if he was up to talking. He graciously trooped out in pajamas and robe and, along with Leatha, ready and willing to be interviewed. They could not have been more cordial. There were instances, too, where Ethelaura Hare Ramey and Alpha Burdine were victims of misspellings. For these errors I apologize. And now, the news of Orange as told by those who were there. To paraphrase the words of Whitman: “This is no book; Who touches this touches lives.” Louis Fairchild Ardsley, New York

Preface to the First Edition

Like a Montage montage n. 1.a. The art, style, or process of making one pictorial composition from many pictures or designs closely arranged or superimposed upon each other [. . .] 3. A mixture of images.

The American Heritage Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary

O

n answering the phone she said, “Speak slow and loud. I am hard of hearing.” I explained the purpose of the interview, and she responded, “Nothing makes an old woman happier than to talk about the past.” A time to meet was arranged. The white frame house, set close to the street, was modest and traditional with a full, screened-in porch. She came to the door and her face was flushed. It was apparent she had been out in the pressing heat and humidity of the early summer morning. A ball belonging to children across the street had strayed into her azaleas and she had been trying to repair the damage. She did not appear angry with the children. Inside, the furnishings were simple and functional. There was nothing to suggest the dazzling lifestyle that had been just across the river. A gentle, chunky dog with short legs and sagging middle acknowledged my presence and then ambled to a corner. A cat stretched indifferently in the dining room. The woman commented that nothing gave her “ego” quite the boost as coming home to the greetings of her two pets. I thanked her for visiting with me and she said, “Young man, I have nothing but time, but it takes time to take it.” Although she and her generation can never recover the legacies of youth, Marian von Dohlen retained a mind that brought the war years into sharp and lively focus. From time to time she apologized for her memory,

xviii

they called it the war effort

but she leaned forward in concentration and spoke instinctively, her recollections flowing with energy and confidence. The war years, when she was Mrs. Sam Smith, the belle of the Grove Dinner Club, are as distant as all half-century yesteryears, but she resurrected memories without apparent regret. Gone are the wartime festivities of “The South’s Finest Dinner Club, Famous From Coast to Coast.” Gone are the $500 dresses, the infatuations of youthful sea-bound naval officers, the lavish banquets, the launching parties, Pops the waiter, Slim the bartender, and Sam. Likewise departed are the shipyards and their furious activity, the tent cities, the boomtown vitality and fervor of war. Riverside, the site of thousands of temporary government housing units, is now a wasteland. Massive, long abandoned shipways list silently into the Sabine. No longer does the hollow booming of hammered hulls reverberate throughout the day and night, nor do thousands upon thousands of shipbuilders shoulder out of the yards. These are now but fleeting images she shares with fewer and fewer from that brief era. “Sometimes I have a lot of time to think,” she said, “and I think of [the war years]. But it’s like a montage, it just comes and goes.” She seemed tired when we concluded. Like a montage, maybe what follows is an art form, an Orange montage: narrated pictures of Orange, Texas, and the years of World War II. The different images merge and meld to form a new representation. More precisely, it is a composite portrait of people, the Orange people who were there. Ms. von Dohlen is one of those, but also included are Jewel Force, Edna Hare, S. K. Hubert, and Marion Tilley, all approaching centenarianism at the time they were interviewed. Many individuals from other life stages and other circumstances were part of the Orange war effort and they, too, contribute to the account. Personalities and perspectives are juxtaposed and superimposed one upon the other in a collective recreation of time past. These individuals provide the organization for this volume. Their recollections allow a personal glimpse into the very anatomy of a unique place and time. Themes, topics, conclusions, analyses—all are subordinated to a focus on lives. It is a story of adjustment and the remarkable transformation of a sleepy little southern town into a vigorous wartime shipbuilding center; a narrative of interrupted lives and people caught up in surviving what was to become a “maelstrom of social change.” In Life Histories and Psychobiography, William M. Runyan examined basic conceptual and methodological issues related to the study of individual lives. One of his conclusions was that “detailed studies of individual life histories” have special value for such objectives as “delineating the

Preface to the First Edition

xix

particulars of persons and their circumstances; conveying what individuals said, thought, felt, and did; representing the subjective meanings of actions and events.”1 The purpose of this book is to preserve expressions of experience in a unique place and time. It is not a detailed study of individual life spans but, rather, a cross-section of lives and time. It is an attempt to present these “particulars” of persons and their circumstances, what they said, thought, felt, and did. It is a record of the personal, the subjective—of that singular and essentially private period in a lifetime that only one who experienced it can share. In their own words and individual manner of expression, people tell their stories. The eminent biologist George Wald maintained that “every creature alive on earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet.”2 There is a “germ plasm” or line of cells that is immortal, a biological lifeline that is passed down generation through generation. Even so, traits of character span the generations, and that which we both admire and regret in human nature can be expected to endure. American novelist Paul Theroux once spoke of the “dignity of ordinary lives.”3 There is something substantial and dignified about each of the lives in this volume, and a certain reassurance can be taken in knowing that this dignity will be passed down through generations unending. It will be noted that some of the interviews include ethnic and racial epithets. The times and circumstances contributed to the prevalence of all manner of negative epithets. Dignity, however, is a quality of life that applies to all peoples and is not something dictated by race, ethnicity, economic status, lifestyle, or any other such consideration.

Acknowledgments to the Second Edition

T

he passage of nearly twenty-four years has not dimmed my gratitude to West Texas A&M University for the support I received in researching and publishing the first edition of this book. The backing was both fiscal and collegial. The interest and encouragement have not gone forgotten. WTAMU—students, faculty, staff, and campus—remains a special chapter in my life and career. I wear no brands more proudly than those of Amarillo and West Texas. Looking back, I recall the patient help I received from Amy Fairchild Carrino, daughter number one. Without her help in navigating the worlds of computer and word processing, the tape recordings of interviews would undoubtedly have remained in the unedited and unpublished state surmised by one reviewer to be “miles of rambling, disconnected remembrances of things fifty years past.” Gerard ( Jerry) E. Carrino has through the years followed Amy with more computer assistance than I can ever acknowledge. I have valued Thomas Charlton’s friendship for more than five decades and am appreciative of his willingness to make a second contribution to the book. Although they may regard their contribution as insignificant, the kind responses and assistance of Becky Shulda and Lois E. Myers of the Institute for Oral History, Baylor University, came at a time it was most needed. Ed Eakin, who died in 2002, made the first edition possible. I pay respect to his memory. The opportunity to work with Ryan Schumacher and the Texas State Historical Association Press is good fortune beyond expectation. I am indebted to John Cash Smith of Orange for his support and guidance in seeking funding for this edition. He ensured the project went forward. The Nelda C. and H. J. Lutcher Stark Foundation has once again been more than generous in providing the grant that made revision and publication possible. To the board of directors, officers, and staff of the Foundation, I express my appreciation. Stefan Zweig has written that “Destiny always knows how to find the way to a man [or, certainly, woman] whom it needs for its secret purposes.” Destiny found its way to the millions of American men and women it

xxii

they called it the war effort

needed for WWII, and many of these men and women were in Orange, Texas. The high regard I have for the people in this book cannot be overstated. That our lives intersected, though briefly in most cases, has left me with a treasure of lifetime memories.

Acknowledgments to the First Edition

I

am grateful to West Texas State University* for the opportunity to pursue this project. The people, environment, and facilities of the university helped make it possible. The Killgore Research Center on campus was a source of several research grants that supported important phases of the study. From the beginning, the Orange County Historical Society has been an enthusiastic ally. Dr. Joe Ben Welch and Lamar University–Orange provided office space and other assistance. The map of Orange during the war years is courtesy of Jim Verrett and his associates. The Orange Public Library, the Orange Leader, the Opportunity Valley News, and the Beaumont Enterprise contributed. Tom Charlton has been a constant source of support and encouragement. Janet L. Burton, academic publications coordinator, Baylor University, followed the early stages of the manuscript and made a number of helpful suggestions. Drs. John Culley, Gary Guyot, Mike Orenduff, Pete Petersen, and Fred Rathjen also assisted during this period. Dr. Hubert Oppe and Dr. Pat Sullivan of West Texas State University read the manuscript and made careful observations. Betty Howell was responsible for a number of final details, and Myrna Raffkind was always uniquely supportive. I was ever mindful of and appreciative of the interest and support of other friends and colleagues. The Nelda C. and H. J. Lutcher Stark Foundation of Orange awarded a generous grant to the West Texas State University Foundation, and it was this funding that allowed publication to go forward. Finally, to the individuals who were willing to share their memories of World War II Orange, a special thanks. * West Texas State University, a member of the Texas A&M University System, was renamed West Texas A&M University effective June 1, 1993.

Introduction

Just the Way It Was “I saw one of these freak shows one time. They had a woman in there—supposedly they called her the alligator woman or something. Her skin was like scales. Somebody asked her if she felt different from anybody else. She said, well, she’d always been that way so she didn’t see any difference. I guess that’s the way I feel about this war experience here. That’s just the way it was.” Lex Pinson

“O

nce you’ve been through a war, everything else is second best as far as excitement is concerned.”1 A native of Orange and a veteran who saw action at Normandy, his comment came toward the end of the interview, interjected almost as an afterthought. Beyond this level of personal experience, however, is the broader social impact of war. “Total war,” Francis Merrill concluded, “is the most catastrophic instigator of social change the world has ever seen, with the possible exception of violent revolution.”2 According to historian Geoffrey Perrett, World War II was the “closest thing to a real social revolution the United States has known in this century.”3 World War II affected every man, woman, and child in America. Mass migration uprooted literally millions from familiar settings and abruptly relocated them in the mobilization of the wartime economy. These wartime migrants became what another historian, William M. Tuttle Jr., calls “America’s new pioneers.”4 Patriotic and many desperate for work, they were willing to endure all manner of risks, all manner of hardships. It was a “migration of hope.”5 Never before in the history of the country had so many people been displaced in so short a time. Scarcely any community of size was spared. The

xxvi

they called it the war effort

Bureau of the Census reported that in 1945 some 15,330,000 civilians were living in a different county from the one in which they had lived in 1941.6 Interstate migration between 1940 and 1945 was a million times greater than in the previous half decade.7 Communities enlisted in the production of war materiel seemed to boom within days following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Various studies of the home front during World War II have surveyed the conditions in America’s defense-industry boomtowns.8 Certainly there were differences between these towns, and problems, no doubt, varied locally. But even more impressive were the similarities, which make possible a degree of generalization from one location to another.9 Circumstances in any one of these war-production centers were likely to be found in others. Many communities were bewildered by the en masse arrival of thousands of defense workers, while workers and their families had to adjust to the shock of dislocation as well as harsh wartime living conditions. Life in many communities was “a form of torture broken only by sleep, and sometimes not even then.”10 These same boomtowns, however, shared in the fortunes of war. All was not adversity. For many Americans it was a boon. It was a new beginning. An opportunity. There was exhilaration and excitement. Quality of life was, in fact, a “variable and highly subjective experience.”11 For countless numbers there were, indeed, discouragements and adversities, but many others escaped such misfortunes through favorable combinations of chance. Bureau of the Census estimates of ten production areas congested by the wartime population shift indicated that the largest increase in civilian population between 1940 and 1944 was 64.7 percent and occurred in Mobile County, Alabama.12 In one small East Texas community, however, the percentage of increase was dramatically greater. Located in an area first settled by the Atakapa Indians around 1600, Orange, Texas, is the state’s easternmost city. For Krista Smith, her hometown is “the first taste of Texas or the last, depending on which way you’re headed.”13 It is set in extreme southeastern Texas, bordering Louisiana on the Sabine River and approximately thirty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Legend has it that the area was once a site of activity for Jean Laffite and other privateers, later becoming landfall for pioneers from James Bowie to Sam Houston.14 The community tried out a couple of names—Green’s Bluff and Madison—before settling on the current name when it incorporated in 1858. Tradition attributes the name Orange to local citrus or orange groves as well as to the New Jersey hometown of a mid-century community

Introduction

xxvii

surveyor and organizer. In the first half of the nineteenth century Orange established itself as an agriculture, cattle, and lumber port and also developed the reputation as a rough, sometimes dangerous community tainted by frontier lawlessness. Its relative isolation and obscurity on the densely wooded lower Louisiana border made it a handy hangout for desperados slipping across the Sabine into Texas.15 Following incorporation, Orange and the surrounding area developed principal industries in shipping, shipbuilding, rice, lumber, and oil. Sawmills gorged on the abundant timberland, putting Orange in the forefront of the Texas lumbering industry and bringing riches and power to a few locals. The dredging of a deepwater harbor allowed the docking of large vessels and contributed to the city becoming a major shipbuilding center in World War I. Remembering the influx of shipbuilders and their families at that time, one leading senior citizen predicted that Orange could not imagine the crush of population that would accompany another war. In 1940 Orange was a small town with slightly more than 2,000 residences and some 7,500 inhabitants—that is “if you count all the dogs.”16 It was a beautiful, picturesque community “fringed by dark, cypress-strung bayous” and green with lofty virgin pines and canopies of ancient oaks draped in Spanish moss, the late spring and early summer mornings fragrant with magnolia blossoms.17 Green Avenue, the main drive through Orange, was lined with grand, handsome homes. Yet, it was still a sawmill town, a farming community, a bit of the Old South. Life was simple. “About the biggest executive we ever had,” Jim Pruter quipped, “was the chief of police.”18 Values and codes of conduct were traditional and exacting—at least publicly. Doug Pruter’s take: “You think about like Gone With the Wind, they said ‘damn’ [and] everybody just about fell out.”19 Orange was a familial place, and lives were an open book. Everyone knew one another. It was still much as it had been in 1935 when “Brownie” Sloan moved to Orange. On going downtown she was surprised that people knew her by name. “Everybody spoke to me, and I got back to the office and I [told] the manager, ‘It’s the funniest thing, I go down the street and everybody says, “Hello, Miss Sloan. How are you?” And I don’t know ’em from nine-dollar bills.’ He said, ‘They know you ’cause you’re the only new person in town.’”20 Relationships were valued. In fact, as one native said, “If you didn’t have any friendship there wasn’t nothing to come [to] in Orange, really.”21 The highlight of the week was Saturday afternoon and evening when people would gather downtown to walk around and visit or just sit on the curb. When prominent citizens died, downtown businesses closed in their honor. Funerals, as a rule, were well attended: “They didn’t

xxviii

they called it the war effort

have anywhere to go, and they knew everybody, so they went to funerals.”22 The “tone” of the community was one of support. In times of hardship, “We sort of scratched each other’s back and got along.”23 In more rural parts of Orange County, “If you were sick you didn’t worry about getting nobody to come do your washing. . . . If you get down sick they wouldn’t load you up and carry you to the hospital. We’d get together, sit up at night with ’em, cut their wood, and ol’ man Hobbs, two years there we made his crop.”24 Certain days would be agreed on when neighbors would gather at a grief-beset farm to work the field, “lay it by, harvest it.” The shadow of the Depression years had not lifted, and unemployment remained high throughout the area. Many people were grasping for steady work, simply “at the mercy of the world.” For Isaac Dupree, “Every job I got was always this brother-in-law deal—or cousin or nephew—to bump you out of work. It’s all a family deal. If you was the boss and you was working me and your brother or something got out of work, I’m just a stranger to you. ‘Heck ol’ boy, I’m sorry but I don’t need you no more.’”25 It was not uncommon for transients to knock on doors and ask for something to eat. Some families lived comfortably and a few enjoyed substantial wealth, but it was a poor-people town, economically “just a dead spot.” When the Work Projects Administration (WPA) paved some of the streets in the late 1930s, people joked they had never seen a cemetery covered over with so much concrete. Even though people did not have very much, there was a sense of gratitude for the little they did have. My brother worked so hard for anything he got. [He] would caddy at the country club, [and] I can remember him walking from the country club back home with a rock in his hand. He was so afraid someone was going take his money away from him, the little bit he had earned. I mean you really appreciated what you had. Like I can remember Mother making me skirts with flour sacks that she would go and buy—or feed sacks—and, gee, I was so proud of ’em. I was really proud of ’em.26 Despite hard times, the community was quiet and peaceful, sleepy and laid-back. As in the rest of the country, the American “God of Battles was still asleep.”27 The rumblings in Europe were warily “over there,” but it could hardly be conceived that in the making was a world in which evil would know no boundaries and a war “more barbaric than any civilized person might have imagined.”28 In January 1940, Weaver Shipyards, founded in 1898, and Levingston

Introduction

xxix

Shipbuilding Company, founded in 1933, were joined on the banks of the Sabine by Consolidated Steel Corporation’s steel-fabrication plant.29 The following August, Levingston was awarded a government contract to construct twenty-four small steel landing vessels at a total cost of close to $120,000. This was a welcomed boost to the economy, but informed leaders were looking beyond a few landing craft. Attention was riveted on Washington, where in September 1940 the U.S. Navy announced the awarding of a major contract to Consolidated Steel Corporation to build a vast shipyard and twelve destroyers in Orange, Texas. Work on the yard was to begin immediately, and the destroyers were to be built at a cost of $8,100,000 each.30 At the same time plans were being developed for the construction of hundreds of new houses, and in a matter of months pine trees were leveled to make room for the 500-unit Navy Addition. The Office of the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S. Navy, began preparations to quarter and mess hundreds of officers and crews who would be in town prior to the commissioning of their vessels.31 A boomtown was anticipated. The announcement created such a sense of euphoria and excitement that George Craft remembered it made “goose bumps on me.”32 Talk circulated about a “new Orange.” People seeking employment started arriving immediately, and citizens began to make “anxious inquiries” about the growth of their city. There were hints that lawlessness might return. Concerns were voiced about price increases on the necessities of life, including housing and business space. City commissioners began addressing issues such as remodeling storefronts, extending sewer lines, and building sidewalks and curbs, the last of which would in time catch the eye of British-born American journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke. Exploring the American home front by car in 1941–42, Cooke’s westward route by way of the most southern states took him through Orange. He was only passing through, but Cooke was impressed with the sidewalks that were “high and handsome,” the roads that were “smooth.”33 The building boom spurred by events in 1940 gained momentum the following year. The $5 million shipyard was completed, and on May 14, 1941, on building ways one and two, keels for the USS Aulick and USS Charles Ausburne were laid. “This event,” according to Captain H. G. Chalkley, Office of the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S.N, in Orange, “marked the laying of the keels of the first combatant ships ever to be built in the state.”34 Defense workers occupied seven hundred newly built houses, and an additional 150 houses neared completion. Barracks for hundreds of defense workers were constructed on the shipyard site, and work on minesweepers

xxx

they called it the war effort

and sub chasers was started at Weaver Shipyards. The Sea Otter, an experimental vessel destined for England, and many other craft were completed at Levingston. More adults returned to school in 1941 than any other year in the history of the city as the need for welders, shipfitters, and other skilled craftsmen became apparent. “Bundles for Britain,” primarily collections of clothing, was organized. Orange’s first citywide bus service was established. One major highway project was completed and another begun. December 7 did not find the small town idle. The attack on Pearl Harbor, according to one report, “created a profound stir” in the city. Twenty-two war vessels were already under construction, but everyone sensed that with the declaration of war this was only a beginning. On December 10 Secretary of Navy Frank Knox dispatched an urgent message to Commander E. B. Perry, Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S.N, in Orange: “The enemy has struck a savage, treacherous blow. We are at war, all of us. There is no time now for disputes or delay of any kind. We must have ships and more ships, guns and more guns, men and more men, faster and faster. There is no time to lose. The Navy must lead the way. Speed-Up, it is your Navy and your nation.”35 Secretary Knox requested that his appeal be given wide publicity, and in a speech later delivered at Levingston, a military officer echoed the imperative for ship production: “[R]emember, we have never won a war without ships.”36 Shipyards around the country responded with those ships and more ships. Historian Donald Miller notes that the most pressing initial wartime demand made on American industry was for ships, especially cargo vessels, and it was to be in shipbuilding—even more so than in aircraft production—that America’s industrial prowess would triumph.37 Commenting on this critical time, Captain Chalkley noted the role played by Orange shipyards in the country’s naval buildup: “From December 7, 1941, it became man against time—time that never stood still. There was a demand for ships never before dreamed of in this world; and Orange’s part in answer to that cry is history.”38 In 1942 the population of Orange more than tripled. Buses took teams of recruiters up through East Texas and over into Louisiana. Setting up in front of county courthouses with banners and a country western band, the call was persuasive: “Come to Orange and go to work. Come on! Come on! Come on!”39 A shuttle train began carrying workers back and forth from Beaumont, some twenty-five miles to the west. On the first run, men were sitting on the tops of the coaches. They were standing in the aisles and hanging on between the cars. For children in one neighborhood along the route, it became the “paper train.” Newspapers tossed out of windows

Introduction

xxxi

by the workers were gathered up and resold for a nickel.40 Hundreds of other workers commuted in carpools rolling along on tread-worn tires or in farm trucks converted to makeshift buses. Far away in the small West Texas town of Sundown, Delbert Morgan decided to leave the oilfield and go to a defense plant. “He flipped a coin to see if we would go to the Red River Arsenal close to Texarkana or to the shipyards in Orange. We came to Orange in early 1942.”41 Ships were launched almost weekly at the three yards, but it was a celebrated day when on March 2, 1942, Texas Independence Day, the USS Aulick broke free on the Consolidated shipway. In a shipbuilding area with a storied tradition of crafting and launching wooden vessels, it was with collective bated breath that a crowd of 6,000 watched the massive 2,000 ton destroyer—“groaning, snapping, cracking, splashing”—settle sternfirst in the Sabine.42 The Aulick was the first navy destroyer ever launched in the Gulf Coast area and the first warship from the state of Texas to enter active service in the war.43 Lula Haley never forgot the thrill of watching the ship make her dramatic trial run: “[A] beautiful, graceful, gray ship that moved smoothly and swiftly through the water to the Gulf of Mexico.”44 Newcomers were desperate for places to live. Rose Tillinghast recalled how “Charles went along one side of the street and she the other, knocking on doors and soliciting housing until someone responded Yes!”45 The worsening housing crisis was partially redressed when the government brought in 200 demountable houses and 300 trailers, completed 150 more houses, and sped up construction on 300 others. A navy barracks was completed, and approval was obtained to construct a 192-place dormitory for females working in defense industries. Nevertheless, even with all these new units it was inevitable that the need for housing would become increasingly critical.46 May 1942 marked the beginning of one of the most remarkable developments in the Orange war effort. The government approved an additional 2,000 houses for Orange, and a riverfront site of some 350 acres was selected for their construction. Upon the completion of these units 2,542 more houses were immediately built on an adjacent tract. Houses began “sprouting up from the landscape as though the ground underneath had been fertilized.”47 Overnight, “Like rows of matchboxes on a grocer’s shelf.”48 It was a mushrooming spectacular. These two projects, called Riverside and Riverside Addition, respectively, were generally referred to simply as Riverside. The houses were designed to be temporary structures. Those in Riverside had a maximum life expectancy of twenty years, those in Riverside Addition only ten years.

xxxii

they called it the war effort

Because of the nature of the riverfront location, the Riverside projects were an engineering feat. Situated on the west side of the Sabine River, the site was a wide strip of cypress swampland infested with mosquitoes, water moccasins, and an occasional alligator. Some whispered it was bottomless. Thousands of ancient cypress trees had to be removed and the entangled vines and brush burned. The marsh then had to be reclaimed by pumping in five to six feet of river bottom sand and mud onto the surface. Powerful dredges scooped up the tons and tons of sand from the river bottom, and before this fill material had a chance to dry out and settle, construction began on streets, utilities, and houses. Cecile Rogers Gordon was a child, but her father took her out to watch the filling in of the marshland. He “told me homes were going to be built right there on what looked like an impossible chore to me. But sure enough, it happened.”49 There was no steel reinforcement in the narrow, concrete streets that were designed to double as a drainage system to handle the heavy rainfalls. Although Orange was well endowed with more favorable building sites, this unlikely marsh was selected because it was within walking distance of the Consolidated and Levingston shipyards. Many workers did not have cars, and those who did had to restrict their driving due to gasoline rationing. Many observers viewed this furious pace of construction with skepticism: “My daddy used to say, ‘They won’t stand, honey. You know what they say about a house built on the sand.’”50 Some scoffed at the extravagance, saying there were far more houses than could ever be occupied. The frenzied activity of the war years crested in 1944 and 1945. Due to the lack of supervisory personnel the workweek at Consolidated went to two ten-hour shifts on Monday through Friday; two eight-hour shifts on Saturday. The demand for ships necessitated the extended workdays, but the Office of the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S.N., could not help but be grateful “that in this area the personnel was used to long work days.”51 One resident recalled, “The light at night [from the shipyards] was just unbelievable. . . . You could read a newspaper three or four blocks away. The noise never stopped. It was as though someone had a big hammer and they were always hammering on a piece of metal.”52 In addition to destroyers, landing craft, minesweepers, and sub chasers, the yards built destroyer escorts, oceangoing tugboats, barges, and rocket launchers. Most of the workers came from rural backgrounds where they had “never seen anything taller than a pine tree.”53 They were “people that had never seen water, much less know anything about a ship.”54 The long bridge spanning the river between Louisiana and Texas was for some a wonder. Many could not read or write; others were unable even to speak English.

Introduction

xxxiii

With little formal education and very limited industrial skills, some had to be taught how to read a ruler. There were workers who were physically handicapped. Boys still in high school and hundreds of other unskilled applicants would be signed on as helpers. About the only job requirement, it was joked, was the ability to breathe. “You had to be either totally non compos mentis or totally handicapped before they wouldn’t hire you,” according to C. T. MacFarlane.55 But as Russell King expressed it, “dumb bunnies” they were not.56 Many had grown up around farm equipment, Model Ts and Model As, and sawmills. They had worked with simple tools. Some had skills with potential usefulness in the yards. Weaver Shipyards, for example, had been building wooden vessels for over fifty years. Wooden ship construction, though, had in the previous couple of decades dropped off to the point that it was nearly nonexistent.57 Men experienced in working with wooden vessels were few, and those who had worked on the ships of WWI were now old. Therefore, house carpenters were recruited and trained as ship carpenters. This not only resulted in delays, but also required “very careful supervision on the part of the Navy as the practices used in house construction are far different from ship construction.”58 Complicating the task of supervisors was the fact that the vessels were being built during a period when construction requirements were in flux. Actual war conditions, for instance, might necessitate design modifications. Hard-learned skills had to be unlearned. As a consequence, the Office of the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S.N., discovered “These changes added materially to the difficulties of the contractor and the Supervisor in their training of personnel. It was rather difficult, after teaching men first to do a job to throw them into utter confusion by telling them that the job they had been trained to do was either changed or no longer required.”59 Unskilled American workers are not, however, an unknown quantity according to historian David Kennedy. America’s work force has historically been one of immigrants with minimal education and little industrial experience. Because of this, “From the dawn of the industrial revolution in the United States, the characteristics of America’s working class has placed a premium on organizing production around simple repetitive tasks that did not demand technical adeptness or extensive training.”60 It is a system of training workers embedded in American industry. No other industrialized country has been so committed to assembly line methods, and the wartime shipyards, particularly, were “notorious” for breaking production routines down into “separate and repetitive functions that required little skill and minimum training.”61 Orange shipyard workers, as Otho Haunschild emphasized repeatedly

xxxiv

they called it the war effort

in his interview, were indeed trained to do just one thing: “It was training ’em to do assembly work, do one type of work.”62 The downside, as might well be expected, was that doing the same job over and again proved unbearably frustrating to some of those workers. James Heard, a farmer before going to work at Consolidated, complained, “After it got to be repetitious with that monotony, I couldn’t take it.”63 Phyllis Roush’s father was an electrical contractor, but it seemed as though his responsibility involved little more than running a wire from point A to point B. “He wasn’t wiring the ship. He did one little ol’ thing that they could train anyone to do in thirty minutes, and he had the expertise to wire a bank building. It was bad.”64 Despite the drag of redundancy, Clarence Parkhurst underscored the advantage for the shipyards and the navy: “[We] got pretty good doing the same thing over and over again . . . it was strictly specialization and you could learn to do things pretty fast.”65 Taking these newly developed skills and then applying them repeatedly over those long workdays became the rule. At the end of the day, “All you thought about then was going to bed.”66 Workers commuting from one of the outlying communities might not see their hometowns in daylight during the entire workweek. Mary Alice Callahan’s husband worked nights “and very long hours. Sometimes my children went maybe a week without seeing him awake.”67 More than one child, no doubt, wondered aloud: “Does Daddy ever come home?”68 As a result of everyone’s efforts, Consolidated delivered 229 ships over a three-year period. At one time a ship a day was being constructed, and the rallying cry became “A ship a day in the month of May.” Emilee Stewart remembered the sign posted at Levingston: “If you work here YOU KNOW you’re good.” Deena Cox said Levingston became “one big party, and there were launchings constantly, breaking the champagne with the parties. Money was no object. Levingston was really doing well.”69 By 1945 Orange was being touted as “one of the fourteen major war shipbuilding centers of the nation.”70 The population of the greater metropolitan area soared to 60,000, a 700 percent increase over the 1940 population of the city.71 People came in from around the country but primarily from the Piney Woods of deep East Texas and the cross-river parishes of Louisiana. “When the first [ship] went down the ways,” P. H. Butler recollected, “I heard one of the people from Louisiana, a Cajun, say, ‘There she goes. Built in Texas with Louisiana labor.’”72 At one point Consolidated is reported to have employed upwards of 30,000 workers. Levingston went from 250 workers to 2,600. Sailors from Russia, soldier boys from Camp Polk, mariners from England, grandfathers from Kentucky, blacks from San Augustine, gamblers from

Introduction

xxxv

Little Rock, electricians and contractors from West Texas, farmhands from Shelby County pea patches, young women from Vermilion Parish, exconvicts and schoolteachers from everywhere—they all came to Orange. Three new elementary schools, each named in honor of one of the first three Orange men to die in World War II service, had to be constructed in the Riverside area to accommodate just the children in that development.73 The small, inundated Orange High School was forced to hold classes in the halls, out on athletic fields, and in a nearby church. Relief came in 1942 with the opening of the new Lutcher Stark Senior High School, which covered most of two city blocks. By the time the shipbuilding boom reached its peak, the government had moved in or erected some 10,000 housing units. Trailers, one room “hutments,” “demountables,” dormitories, barracks, single and multifamily dwellings—the government operated them all. In addition, there were tent cities, homemade trailers, converted chicken coops, and even a report of people living in tree houses.74 A small enclsure created by tarpaper wrapped around three or four pine trees would provide a measure of privacy but not much protection from the rain. Garages could quickly be transformed into wartime housing. A big red barn became apartments, and large, prominent homes were chopped up into efficiency units. “You know how the old-time house was. It was room enough to have built a five-room house up in [the] attic.”75 Jane Childers and her parents lived in only two rooms in order to share the rest of their six-room house with workers. They built three bedrooms in the attic and her mother bought fourteen new single beds so that their house could accommodate twenty to twenty-five persons. Around town, cots were set up in hallways and on porches. People were sleeping in vehicles and railroad boxcars. Some even inquired at the city jail about a “bed spot.” “We just had a little four-cell jail, [and] each cell had nine bunks in it,” Henry Stanfield said. “A lot of ’em would come in looking for a place to sleep and asked could they sleep in the jail if we had room, and if we did we’d accommodate ’em.”76 There were gypsies who camped out around open campfires, and shantytowns reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath, where homemade tents were discolored with mildew. Beds rented for eight-hour shifts, and the sheets were always warm—when one worker came in the other got out.77 Not all room- or bed-sharing was anticipated, however. Mallie and Loretta Boyd and Don and Joyce Shockley were living in Spearman and Perryton in the northern Texas Panhandle when the war broke out. They moved to Orange in April 1942.

xxxvi

they called it the war effort

Mallie and Don decided we should move to Orange to work in the Shipyards, and move, we did. . . . Housing accommodations were very scarce. We had to live in a motel in Beaumont for quite a while before we found a place to rent. . . . On Fridays, the manager would seem so interested in our weekend schedule, as we usually went to Galveston. The truth of the matter was that he was subrenting our rooms to partygoers, some of whom would even still be there if we returned too early. We have seen them leave through the window, leaving part of their clothes as they escaped, and dropping some on the ground as they ran. When mentioning this to the manager, he would be completely oblivious to any such happenings. Sometimes their fifths would be on our chest of drawers and drinks on our furniture. Quite an experience. We were too naïve to understand what the score really was.78 It was a stimulating time. As Kate Sparrow said, the community was “humming.”79 Some 100 ninth-grade students in three English classes composed a poem entitled “Orange 1944,” which captured the images and pulse of the town in the spring of 1944. (The poem is reproduced in its entirety in appendix 1). Excitement and exhilaration were in the air. Frenetic, hectic— everything assumed a sense of urgency. It was more and more and more, faster and faster. When Copeland Ward, living in Beaumont at the time, visited Orange the activity level reminded him of a stampede.80 “Like an ant bed alive with too many ants.”81 Although people worked long and hard, they also found time for distractions. The four “picture shows” always seemed to have a line, and then—there was “across the river.” Everything was across the river. “East Orange, Louisiana,” as the strip was popularly known. At the east end of Green Avenue, over the bridge and immediately into Louisiana, “there was a honky-tonk every hundred feet.”82 It was what one Orangeite called “forbidden land where people went and sinned a lot, as they say.”83 Some were, in fact, respectable places, famous for food, music, and dancing; others, “buckets of blood.” Brawling was common, gambling wide-open, and alcohol a matter of habit. Several of the places never closed—“never even had no doors on ’em.”84 There were thugs “with their hats over one eye and their eyebrows meet—overcoats—one shoulder higher than the other.”85 One place was known for its “greeters.” “If you got out of line they could either break your nose, break your arm, or throw you in the river.”86 For all the “boomralia,” though, there were shortages and lines and all sorts of frustrations and inconveniences. Adjustments had to be made and lifestyles altered. The dark cloud of war made life heavy with wartime

Introduction

xxxvii

emotions—grief, loneliness, apprehension, fear, foreboding. There was excitement and fanfare as completed vessels weighed anchor and set sail for war. But like those great, gray ships that moved out to sea, loved ones and friends sailed to far places, and too many ships and too many sons never returned. Many homes were left with an emptiness, a “void.” It was “a horrible thing” for a mother to watch her son, her only child, board the bus for induction into military service. Three. Four. Five. Maybe all the boys in a family would be in uniform. Rufus Jr., Brent, Conrad, Grant, and Donald—all five children of Rufus and Celestine Manley volunteered. Grant was lost in the Philippines the November before Pearl Harbor, and Donald died in the Battle of the Bulge. Concern for the surviving sons was unremitting: “All I could think of was when he could get home. I wanted him home. I wanted him out of harm’s way.”87 It was a sorrowful time, and many families subsisted on hope. Churches were a refuge for consolation. “I-regret-to-inform-you” telegrams became a plague. For Julia Bacom the dread of a yellow envelope was never to be forgotten: “To this day I hate to see a telegram come.”88 Few, indeed, hated to see war’s end.89 Helen Newman remembered “waking up in the middle of the night and they were playing—was it ‘Ave Maria’ that they played everywhere when it was announced that the war had come to an end? I think so. I know I was laying there in bed listening to that. It was so pretty.”90 Many, no doubt, received the news with solemn, prayerful gratitude, but out in the community church bells pealed celebration. Ships in dock blew their deep, mournful horns, while shipyard whistles sounded like never before. Across town drivers pressed on automobile horns. Hugging, kissing, laughing, dancing—it was a time of unrestrained happiness, a time to release long-held, tightly pent-up emotions. Homecomings were a source of particular expectancy, and as Pastor Cleon Hogan stated simply and succinctly: “The returning of the men to their homes and families brought a great joy to the hearts of the people.”91 As the yards began to scale back operations, the majority of people in Orange were forced to resume former lives or find new opportunities elsewhere. Many left even as they had arrived, in battered, overloaded cars and trucks, maybe towing a homemade trailer behind. Others remained, hoping to find work in the industrial promise of the area. For many of those who had moved in for the war work, their stay was a brief one, lasting only a matter of months, while others had been in Orange for the duration. But for virtually everyone, wartime Orange was a relatively brief episode, a temporary existence. Some had thought the conflict would be over in a matter of days—at most in a matter of months. Few expected the war to

xxxviii

they called it the war effort

be a long one and most people looked to the future. Interrupted lives were placed on hold. Perhaps for some individuals those few years were insignificant, little more than a passing detour in time, but for many it was an indelible period, one that was to predestine their lives. Certainly, the war was to make for a new community, a new Orange. And, of course, the premonition of one mother would soon prove correct: A way of life had ended. Tomorrow would be a different world.92

This Is My Town

Green Avenue. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Sabine River Bridge between Texas and Louisiana. Courtesy Marene Wardell.

xxxix

Looking east on Green Avenue toward the bridge. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Looking west down Green Avenue from the bridge. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

This Is My Town

Downtown looking south. Courtesy R. H. Voss Jr.

Downtown looking north. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

xli

xlii

they called it the war effort

Views of Riverside, bridge, and northern area of Consolidated Steel Corporation. Shipbuilding Division, and some of the clubs in Louisiana. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Closeup of Riverside. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

xliv

they called it the war effort

The Colburn School, named for Frank Monroe Colburn, a native of Orange who lost his life in the war. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Old Orange High School to left and new Lutcher Stark High School on right. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Postcard from USO in Orange. Courtesy Orange Public Library.

USO location in Orange. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

xlvi

they called it the war effort

USS Aulick under construction and at launching. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

They Called It the War Effort

xlviii

they called it the war effort

12. Curtis School 13. Frank Colburn School 14. Lutcher Stark Senior High School 15. Downtown 16. U.S.O. 17. U.S. Naval Station

3. Weaver Shipyards

4. Show Boat Club

5. Club Busters

6. DeMary’s Club

7. Flamingo Club

8. The Grove

This map of “Orange, Texas—circa 1949” was prepared by Verrett and Associates, Inc., 411 N. Third St., P.O. Box 1809, Orange, Texas, 77630 for They Called It the War Effort by Louis Fairchild. This map was prepared in January 1993 from information in the files of Verrett & Associates, Inc. and formerly Chas. P. Smith Associates, Inc. and from the recollections of the staff, former employees, and acquaintances of Verrett & Associates, Inc., Russell P. Bonnin, Jr. Draftsman, January 27, 1993.

CREDITS

11. Anderson School

2. Consolidated Shipyard

9. William Tilley School

10. Grant and Donald Manley School

1. Levingston Shipbuilding Company

LEGEND

1

This Is My Town “Of course, it was very, very overcrowded, and a lot of comment on how rundown Orange was. I found that I got very irritated with people that were condemning Orange about the way it looked, and I resented it. Of course people’s houses needed painting.1 The town needed redoing all over. Of course it had gone down. Remember, we had been in a depression. But yeah, I was kind of horsey sometimes about that. This is my town! I don’t want ’em to criticize my town.” Mrs. B. E. (Iris) Garlington

W

hen Orangeite Henry Stanfield’s travels took him around the state, he enjoyed telling people he was from “Lapland . . . Orange, Texas, where it laps into Louisiana.” Not much to distinguish a community. At best, Orange was an obscure little place that had to be searched for on the map. Once located, some reacted, “Siberia!” 2 One arriving navy seaman thought Orange was heaven compared to Norfolk, Virginia, but a shipmate was “unpleasantly shocked at the drab, dusty ‘Wild West’ appearance of Orange, and the New Holland Hotel, where my wife and I stayed. Our memorable joke was if this was the New Holland Hotel, what must the old one have been, a prairie wagon? Our hotel room had its bathtub right in the middle of the bedroom!” 3 But for someone from West Texas, Orange went beyond wild. On awakening in Orange after her long drive from San Angelo, Vera Hopkins had the impression “of being off on another planet. . . . .My God, where in the world am I at?” Locals would have been hard pressed to promote the vitality of the community. Minnie Pengelly was adamant: Before the war Orange was “just a dead spot . . . there wasn’t a thing in the world for young people to do in Orange. Not one thing! It was the deadest place you ever saw in your life! There was just nothing.” 4 Frank Mepham confirmed the sentiment: There was “no action a’tall. None a’tall. We didn’t get no action a’tall till the war.” 5 Naval personnel most certainly would have chosen an assignment in San Diego or San Francisco or Newport News. In Texas, Houston or Galveston would have been much pre-

2

they called it the war effort

ferred. It was not uncommon to encounter tearful or angry transplants. People often talked about going back home. Maybe to some Orange was little more than the habitat of “barefoot rednecks from down in the swamps.” The boondocks. A pea-picking, one-horse town trapped “in this little backwater.” At the same time it was aristocratic and proud. The heady days of the timber barons were an era of operas, calling cards placed in silver receiving trays, and a flourishing social life for those of means. In the thirties Orange basked in the reputation of having more millionaires on Green Avenue than any main street of any comparable community in the country. Not just another Texas community, it was a gateway city—the Gateway to Texas.6 Copeland Ward, whose impression was based on visiting Orange, noted that even though “it was strictly a one-main-street town, Orange was more like a true southern town I guess than any other city in Texas. You could have taken it and set it down like in Virginia or South Carolina, [and] it would have been just like it was another town there, because it had that real regional atmosphere about it, a true southern town.” 7 There were remnants of a lifestyle that reflected a certain sophistication. The Tuesday Bridge Club and the Woman’s Club were high society. For women, going downtown meant hat, purse, gloves, hose, and heels. There was a gentleness, an air of intimacy and familiarity about the place. Neighborliness was the rule between locals, and they would rally around one another in time of need. On canvas Orange would have been painted with lazy strokes of blues and greens. There were the peaceful scenes of the cypress graced bayou and the bordering riverfront. Frank Hubert moved to Orange in 1938 to head up the school district’s band and instrumental music program. He remembered a town that was “rather quiet, tranquil—pretty much influenced largely by southern living and the soft style of living identified with the southern culture. A town that was not hurried to get there. Good people.” 8 But these “good people” included many of the Old Guard who were prepared to vigorously defend community and lifestyle in the wake of tremendous wartime pressures. It was, indeed, their town.



now, i’m telling you what i know A. L. (Cowboy) Adams Jr. I found him in the corral, out behind the house. He was the real thing, from his dusty boots to his weathered face. I told him he looked like he belonged in West Texas. He smiled and said, “We have cowboys in East Texas, too.”

This Is My Town

3

[Before the war] everybody knew everybody and everybody kept everybody else in line. It wasn’t any moral problem whatsoever because everybody knew each other, and everybody took care of their own problems or the good people around here would take care of ’em for ’em. You understand what I’m talking about? When an ol’ boy got bad, well, if somebody seen him out on the street they corrected him right then. They didn’t wait for his mama or daddy or somebody to come get him—or a policeman. They made him get in line. If anybody got to doing the wrong thing, let me tell you they got ’em straight. When I was five years old I stood up on the banister to the First Baptist Church there on Green and Fifth and watched the Ku Klux bring a man right down Fifth Street. My grandma had me—it was a cold night kinda— and I was standing on that railing. We all had to stay up on the porch there until they got through marching by. There was some guy that wouldn’t take care of his family, and he’s an ol’ drunk and all that kind of stuff. So they just got him [and] started marching with him—I never will forget with those torches—took him out to the railroad. We got in our ol’ car then and watched it all from down there. And they poured tar all over him and hit him over the head with a sack of pillers and throwed him on the train. It was at night and all the lights they had was torches.9 At the time of the beginning of the Second World War Orange had just about took the sign down around here. It wasn’t hardly anything going on. This was nothing but a pea-picking town at the time that the shipbuilding come here. When [they] started building all that shipyard and those shipways and those DDs, which were destroyers for England, things went to booming terribly around here. They took these big, [vacant] buildings and put cots in ’em—just ol’ army cots—and they called ’em “hot beds.” A guy’d stay in ’em eight hours, and somebody come in and kick him out— “Hey buddy, your time’s up!” The natives called ’em all boomrats. Bunch of boomers come into Orange for the shipyard boom. They had people here that didn’t know a thing in the world about building a ship. Never had burned or welded, and then, say, [in] two-months time they had ’em doing work that was perfect. They were pea pickers and farmers and people that were just at the mercy of the world. They’d been sharecroppers and stuff from all over East Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and everywhere else, [and] they put up little schools all around the town to teach all kind of things that pertain to shipbuilding. Most of ’em, the man would come and he would get a job and live in these places like I told you about—these cots and stuff like that—until they got Riverside over there built, and then his family

4

they called it the war effort

would come down here. And a lot of families were broken up because those people never had had anything before. It was a mess around here, I’m telling you. And the ol’ natives around Orange, they didn’t know what to do about all this. It just flabbergasted ’em. You know what I mean? And money was just flying around everywhere. These bankers from up in East Texas and all around, on payday they would come down with their secretary and set up some kind of little table right there at the gate to collect money that these people owed ’em from years prior to this, trying to make a living on the farm. There’d be five or six bankers out there with their secretary. They’d cash those guys’ checks for ’em and take out a little of it every week until they paid off their loans that they owed. They had their own guard because they’d have a huge amount of money there. The crime rate really picked up. What kind of crime? It was more or less people getting beat up, and then they had thugs. They all pulled in here to this place. They would knock people in the head to get their money, and sometimes they’d kill ’em and sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’d throw ’em in the river and all kind of stuff like that. That was real common at that time. And there was so many people come in here that didn’t have no identity on ’em. Back in those days everybody wasn’t identified and fingerprinted like they are now. And nobody went to the dentist. They didn’t have no money. They couldn’t look at their mouth and tell who they were, and they didn’t know where they come from. A lot of people that would come at that time didn’t even have social security numbers or anything. When they went to that school, that’s when they would get all their identity fixed up, ordinarily. The first ship they launched down there was named the Aulick. And they said, “Let’s ‘au lick’ the Japs”—“all lick the Japs,” you know. But people was working for a cause. We was working to save our necks and save our country, and if a feller wasn’t working somebody found out why he didn’t. They checked him out. And it wasn’t none of this stuff, “I got my rights. I don’t have to work if I don’t want to.” They didn’t have no damn right around here if they didn’t work. Everybody worked. There wasn’t no drones. People had a hard time with their money? Oh, they didn’t know what money was. Nobody had anything. They were coming out of the Depression. And you talk about these recessions that we have now, [everybody that’s] out of work gets a government check. Back in those days people didn’t get these government checks and stuff. If you didn’t get out there and work for somebody that had something to eat, you didn’t eat. It wasn’t no such a thing as the government giving you food stamps and stuff. You had to work and make it, and there was some people in this county that had things that was very generous. They planted big

This Is My Town

5

fields of corn and peas and all kind of vegetables, and they would let people have it to come work for ’em and come gather it. I’ve seen these ol’ country roads in the afternoon around five o’clock—you’d see fifteen or twenty people coming down with a corn sack on their back full of peas or cantaloupes or something to eat, and they’d be coming back to town. Everybody had plenty to eat around Orange, but nobody had any money. People don’t know what it is. [Orange] was on the bottom rock, and all of a sudden this stuff all went to happening and people went berserk around here. Do you think those years changed many people? Oh, it changed a lot. It turned ’em around completely. Some of ’em was people that I’d known for years that never have went back like they were. There was some of ’em that made lots of money during that thing that forgot about how poor they were before all this happened. I’ve seen people carrying a corn sack full of corn and peas, like I told you, that after that war if you’d a-mentioned that to ’em they’d a-acted like they didn’t know what you’s talking about. And there was people in the same category like the Browns and the Starks—they helped those people.10 What were you doing for a social life? Rodeoing and calf roping. See, we had a roping and riding club down at the shipyard. They had the Consolidated Roping and Riding Club, and we had our horses and we had rodeos and everything like every other weekend.11 Most of ’em would ride their horse from home over there. There wasn’t none of this trailering business and all that stuff, ’cause those gas stamps was hard to get, fellow, I want to tell you. Were you going across the river? Oh, yeah. They was shooting dice twenty-four hours a day over there and had that dance hall going, because, see, they had the three shifts and they had it open for all the shifts. All that kind of stuff was blowing and going, I’m telling you. Once in a while you’d see a drunk get drunk, and you had the ol’ regulars that would want to fight. They’d give ’em a good whipping, and they’d be back in another day or two over there wanting to fight again. But they had plenty to accommodate ’em. I was just a big ol’ boy, and I’ve watched the sun come up over there a lots of mornings. We’d work that swing shift, and we’d go stay the rest of the night over at the Night Owl or someplace and then come home and sleep all day and go back to work that evening. What do you think those years did to family life? Well, it broke up a lot of families, and it made a lot of families closer. They had these women working right alongside of men all over that place, and they’d fall in love with one of ’em and all that kind of stuff. They’d work together for three or four months out there, and first thing you know they’d be quitting their wife or their husband and they’d get married or

6

they called it the war effort

they’d go to shacking up with somebody. That’s the first I knew about shacking up and all that stuff. People just didn’t do that around here. But during that time they worked all day together, so they’d just sleep together at night. One bed was cheaper than two, they said. There’s a lot of homes broken up that way. Now, I’m telling you what I know. I was there. I saw it all. Oh man, it was something else around here. It was just a regular threering circus around here.



it made me wish i could die Taro Kishi In 1906 Mr. Kishi, age six, came with his family to America from Japan. They settled in Orange County. Due to several bad freezes we had that destroyed our winter crops and winter gardening for vegetable shipments—together with the Depression hitting at that early period—it didn’t pay to farm. So I had an opportunity offered me to go to work for a Japanese merchant company [in New York City]. When I realized what Japan had done at Pearl Harbor it made me wish I could die. When I heard it on the radio it was shocking. It’s hard to imagine how terrible a shock that is. I was interned temporarily at Ellis Island along with Germans and Italians, and as soon as they formed a hearing board they took me [back] to New York City. There was quite a few to interrogate us. They asked me, “What do you intend to do?” I told ’em, “Well, my father has a big farm in Texas. I’d like to be productive and go [back] there and raise rice.” And you know, they let me free just like any other American citizen. Did your father talk about his internment? He commented [that] some of [the other internees] worried so that he had to give ’em massage to relax them. Of course, there were Germans and Italians there, too. They brought him back to Beaumont after the hearing board was formed. He told me that it must have been naval intelligence and army intelligence and FBI. All must have been there because they had documents piled up very high. That was due to the fact that he owned the Orange Petroleum Company until he disposed of it. While he owned the company naval officers [from Japan] would come and visit him, and I think every visit was noticed and documented. [The Japanese] wanted to know more about how to store oil and so on.

7

This Is My Town

My father told me that they gave him some rough questions at that hearing before they released him. He said one of the questions was, “If the emperor of Japan was to tell you to go blow up the Rainbow Bridge [tall bridge southwest of Orange], would you do it?” He says, “The emperor or the army has better sense than to ask someone as ignorant as me about detonation.” But he said he went on to tell ’em, “In civilian life just like in the political life of nations, just suppose my uncle and aunt adopted me and later this family started squabbling with my own mother and father’s family. I couldn’t hurt either one.” Later [the] presiding judge at that hearing says, “Your father’s answers were magnificent.” That was his words. What was it like as a child growing up in Orange? In a small town it’s quite pleasant. People get to know each other. But on the other hand, in a small town you’ll have cliques, like one rich family’s competing against another. But it was a nice town. Did you feel accepted? Oh, yes. When I graduated from high school, at the graduation when I went to accept the diploma I brought the house down, ’cause in my senior year I was a star baseball pitcher and we didn’t lose a game. I pitched all but one game. And football we didn’t lose a game.



orange had been a little class-conscious Kate C. Roach I was teaching school when the war began. I quit and went to the shipyard, ’cause I was only making ninety-five dollars a month. When the war came on it was hard to live on ninety-five dollars a month, so I got a job at Levingston’s in the cost department. My main interest, of course, even though I worked at the shipyard, was still in the area of schools, and it really changed the educational system of Orange. It changed the social life, too. Orange had been a little class-conscious. Even though it was a small town they had the people who belonged to the Tuesday Bridge Club and the Woman’s Club and those things, and you were not “in” very much unless you belonged to one of those. And this changed the attitude of people. They were not quite so careful to let people come to their social affairs as they had been in the past. [It was] not such a close social group. Where did you see this? In the churches and also in organizations like the Woman’s Club and the contact between the schools. You know, in those days we had county meets, and you could tell that there was a difference in the attitude of

8

they called it the war effort

the students at this school playing the students at another school. There seemed to be a better mixing of people than there had been. Personally, my contact with new people was a help to me because I was always withdrawn, and with different people coming in with different personalities it was good for me to associate with these people from various parts of the country. I never shall forget, I worked with [a girl] from Missouri, and she thought that we were awful for eating dried peas, especially black-eyed peas, because she said that was cow feed there. It made me more aware of peoples’ roots—their ideas, their values. The greatest effect was socially, because there were a lot of people my age here, and they were people that had been used to going on picnics and doing things like that, and I became a part of that. And that was good for me.



what god had apparently ordained Conrad Manley12 I forget how many days following Grant’s death—I had spent the weekend with my wife in Orange with my parents. Brent and Rufus were there also. I was returning to Baton Rouge, where I worked for AP, on a Sunday. I didn’t know about Pearl Harbor until late in the afternoon. It was just about sundown when I drove over the bridge to Baton Rouge, and on the far side of the bridge, over the Mississippi, there was a man selling newspapers, and he was holding up a paper that said “WAR” across the whole top half of the paper. [It was printed] in what we used to call “Second Coming” [type]. That is, type large enough to announce the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. It would be only something really extraordinary that would use type that large, but it had only the single word [WAR]. I instantly knew what had happened. I knew that we were at war with Japan. [Later] I went on down to my office, where I got the full details of Pearl Harbor. Grant had been a geologist in Venezuela and was home on leave. He decided to join what was then the Army Air Force, and they sent him to a number of schools and he became a P-40 pilot—that’s a single-seat fighter plane—and eventually he was sent to the Philippines. He was flying on night patrol out of Clark Field near Manila when sometime during the night—there [were] no witnesses—the plane crashed in the mountains north of Manila. An investigation was being carried on when Pearl Harbor occurred, and just about everything went by the boards then. There was

This Is My Town

9

Back row: Rufus Jr., Celestine, Rufus Sr., Brent, and Grant Manley. Front row: Conrad and Donald Manley, circa 1937. Courtesy Conrad Manley.

never any real inquiry or finding. There were a number of rumors, one that the Japanese were scouting the islands at night and Grant happened to encounter one; another one, that the plane had exploded in flight.13 I don’t think anyone will ever know—Pearl Harbor came so close behind. That was the twenty-seventh of November of ’41. He’s buried there. Donald went to field-artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and eventually ended up in Western Europe. The time was midwinter and it was during the Battle of the Bulge. He died on January 1, 1945. His job was as an artillery observer in a small—I think a Piper Cub—being flown by a pilot. He was observing American artillery fire on German positions. This was pretty low-level, pretty dangerous stuff to start with. It was within machine gun and rifle fire from the ground, and the Germans were very sensitive to him looking over their shoulders, as it were. On New Year’s Eve, the day before, he had been shot down but was uninjured. He found himself on foot behind German lines and he walked back to join the American forces. And on January first, he was doing the same thing when apparently a German fighter plane shot their aircraft down, and that was when he was killed. I was then in Norfolk with the fleet operational training command when

10

Grant Manley. Courtesy Conrad Manley.

they called it the war effort

This Is My Town

11

I got the telegram signed “Moms and Pops,” which were our names for our parents. It said, I think, roughly, “Army reports Donald killed in Germany. Love, Moms and Pops.” I’m going to send you a letter from my mother who described her feeling when [she was notified]. It was a Sunday, and she was going out the front porch when she saw a telegraph messenger stop out in front, get out and was approaching the house. She had the awful feeling that she knew what he was there for, but she didn’t know which of the four surviving [sons it might concern]. My father was out playing golf, and her brother lived there. She sent him Donald Manley. Courtesy Conrad out to the golf club to make sure that Manley. no one told him before he got home. [Donald is] buried in the American military cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg [see appendix 2]. How would the background of your parents have prepared them for the tragedy of these two deaths? One very important thing is that both of them came from very large families. [My father’s father] was a farmer who was homesteading in Junction City, Kansas. He had nine children, and I think two elderly sisters lived with the family. It was on a very small Kansas farm. My mother was the daughter of a banker in Pensacola, Florida, and he had thirteen children, and he also had an elderly uncle and two sisters living with them. So they came from quite different backgrounds, and she was a Catholic and he was a Unitarian, which are poles apart. People said of my mother that she was really more Catholic than the pope. When the church started allowing Catholics to eat meat on Fridays, she said that she didn’t care what the pope did, it was his business and she’d take care of her own. She’d not eaten meat on Friday all her life and she wouldn’t [start]. She hated it when they changed the Mass prayers from Latin to English. She always said [the prayers] to herself in Latin. She went to Mass every morning, even in her nineties, and I think her faith as much as anything gave her the strength to accept what God had apparently ordained. How would the large families have prepared them? Well, as I say, my mother was one of thirteen. I think two, maybe three,

12

they called it the war effort

brothers died very young, and she had some of her relatives [die]. I think death was much [less] unusual, and, of course, life expectancy wasn’t as high as it is now. I think they were accustomed to all that could happen in big families, illness and death. [My father] had much the same thing, just a few fewer siblings. [It was] rough. He was familiar with hardship. My father was a navy man all his life. He went to the Naval Academy. The first year in the academy the Spanish-American War took him out of the academy. They just closed the academy and sent all the midshipmen—they were then called naval cadets—out to the fleet, to different parts; some out to the Philippines where the Battle of Manila took place. He was sent to a navy transport, the Harvard, which carried troops to Cuba and brought wounded soldiers and Spanish prisoners back. In fact, he saw a lot of the Spanish War and a lot of wounded and that sort of thing.14 He went back into the navy in World War I and tried to go back in World War II but was unsuccessful. What would have been their feeling about having five sons in the military? I think they felt this was what we should be doing. It was the duty of a citizen to step forward and volunteer when his country and his people are endangered. I don’t know that we ever talked about it, as something that we should be doing. I was already committed through [two years] at the Naval Academy and my commission as a reserve officer. If I hadn’t volunteered they’d have volunteered me. It just never entered my head that there was anything else I could do. I don’t remember my wife and I discussing whether I should or shouldn’t. I guess the other boys just felt the same. [My father] was an unemotional man—not outgoing. He was stoic. I think he accepted that, that all of us chose to volunteer and chose to put ourselves in danger. He quite understood and accepted it. He wouldn’t expect anything else from us. That was the way we were raised. And my mother was navy. She was raised in Pensacola, which was a big naval coaling station at that time, when they met. They weren’t ignorant about the military or the war. They accepted it with their eyes open. What are your impressions about the way they handled the deaths of two sons? They both handled it the way I would have expected them to. They didn’t break down or complain. We had taken risks, and when Grant and Donald [were] lost, you accepted it. My father was a fatalist, a stoic. [When] things bad happened, well, he expected it. You couldn’t do anything about it and you accepted it. [Unitarianism] was a religion I think in which stoicism was admired. I remember his favorite—at least for me—when I did something he thought I should be severely punished for, he’d assign me one of Emerson’s essays

13

This Is My Town

to memorize within the week. I’ve forgotten what it was for, but [on one occasion it was] Emerson’s essay on self-reliance. He admired the New England writers a great deal, Emerson particularly. They didn’t [make an] outward show of grief. [Not like the] Hebrews— [who] put on sackcloth and ashes, tore their hair, went to the Wailing Wall. But they grieved. You could tell they were grieving, but they weren’t outwardly demonstrative. Both of ’em were controlled.



with his comrades Helen Marie and F. C. Brent Manley Brent: When war broke out I was thirty-one. Too old for the draft. But people felt a lot differently then than they do now, about patriotism and what their obligation is to country, and I decided regardless of the fact that I didn’t have to that I ought to go. But I had busted up a knee playing football, and in 1934 I had it operated on and never did get full recovery of the use of that knee. I was afraid that I couldn’t pass the physical. Grant had just been killed in Manila, and I went down to visit my folks for the first time after his death. It was during [that] time that the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor. We had just gotten up from dinner, and we were in the library. The news came over the radio, and it was a shock to the extent of almost being unbelievable. They didn’t have any recruiting office in Orange at that time, and I decided to go to Beaumont to the recruiting office. They didn’t even take a second look at my knee. In fact, they were taking almost anybody that was warm. There was one man that was in there trying to enlist, [and] he didn’t have any teeth. They wouldn’t take him, of course, and he said, “I don’t want to bite ’em, I want to fight ’em.” We got married on the twentieth of March [1942] and left that evening by plane going to Norfolk. I reported in to the Armed Guard School at Little Creek, Virginia, and the commanding officer said, “Do you know anything about guns?” I said, “Well, I guess I know as much as most kids learn growing up. I can handle a rifle.” He says, “Hell, I’m not talking about that kind of guns. I’m talking about antiaircraft guns.” I said, “Well, I never saw one but I can learn.” He pointed his finger at me and he said, “Good! You’re a gunnery officer.” I went out the next day with a class of 400 men and started teaching antiaircraft gunnery. I think my father didn’t believe anybody without any training or school-

14

they called it the war effort

ing could take on the job that I did. I don’t think he ever believed that I was doing what I was doing.15 Did your parents exhibit any apprehension about having five boys in uniform? Brent: None whatsoever. I think we did exactly what was expected of us. My father was always that way, and I think it was the family training that he had in a big family in Kansas, but also his training at Annapolis. You know, if you did a good job, that didn’t call for any praise. That was simply what you were expected to do. As a matter of fact, he had a male secretary at one time, and [he] was an excellent secretary and really bent over backwards to try to please my father. [He] finally quit because Pops never complimented him on doing an excellent job, and he just got discouraged. So we got used to that sort of philosophy. He finally mellowed somewhat in his later years, but he just simply didn’t understand that people needed a pat on the back for a good job, because that’s the way he was raised and that’s the way he was educated. What were your circumstances when Donald was killed? Brent: I was on the Battleship Indiana. I was assistant damage control officer, and it came to me in the form of a telegram. Because of the fact that Grant and Donald were both killed—the navy had a policy of bringing back to the States, if they were abroad, children whose families had lost more than one person. So I got orders to come back. However, I already had orders to come back and take command of another gunnery school. But I got enough points before I got back to be discharged. So I never did take command of that school. But one of my uncles was in command of the Bon Homme Richard, which was a carrier that operated with the Fifth Fleet—that’s who we were with—and I didn’t know he was there and he didn’t know I was there. But he mistakenly thought I was on the Indianapolis, the one that was carrying the atomic bomb components that blew up, and had written my folks a letter of condolence. Fortunately, I got home before the letter got there. That would have been terrible. Donald had written me about two or three weeks before and told me that he was shot down and wasn’t hurt and made his way back through the enemy lines. He hadn’t written the folks because he didn’t want to worry ’em. It was a real shock when I got the telegram. Donald was the baby, and he and Moms were very close.16 I know she grieved a lot. He was a good boy, I mean in every sense of the word. Helen Marie: I think [his parents] were quite proud of the fact that they were all in the service, and, of course, Donald [was] the youngest one. I know one time we were in New Orleans and Moms came over—Donald had already gone overseas—and she said that she didn’t think he would

15

This Is My Town

probably ever come home. I said, “Why do you feel like that?” She said, “Well, I just feel that way. I don’t think he will come home.” But they really handled their loss very well. Of course, she was very religious and she had her church, and Pops, he was proud of all the boys. We all talked about ’em a lot and that helped. You know, it wasn’t as though they were just gone. We talked about ’em and remembered things that were pleasant and things like that. It was a great loss to them but they handled it very well. I remember one day at lunchtime Pops had gotten Donald’s will, and we were all there and he read the will. None of us could eat ’cause we were all crying. It was really a very touching will. They were really very proud, and they didn’t mourn a lot. Like I said, we talked a lot about the boys. I didn’t know Grant but I knew Donald, and we talked about ’em like they were still alive and remembered things that—I know Pops said one time [that] they never had to spank Donald. All they had to do was say, “I’d rather you didn’t do that,” and he didn’t do it. I think he really was an exceptionally fine young man. Was there talk about bringing the bodies home? Helen Marie: Well, they mentioned it, and Donald had said that he did not want to be brought home, that if anything happened to him he wanted to be with his comrades. Both Moms and Pops said that they thought that Grant would feel the same way. I realize a lot of people like to have a body, but Moms and Pops wanted to do what he wanted done. And besides, Moms said it just opens the wounds all over again. She said it would be so hard to go through that again. No, they decided not to, and I think it was a wise decision.



her rosary and her prayer book Mrs. Rufus S. (Dorothy) Manley Jr. We were all shocked [when Grant was killed], and Moms, of course, wanted to get the body back. But she had worked with the Red Cross and through the Red Cross they found that it was just impossible. The commanding officer, squadron commander, called them and told them that they were trying to find out the reason for it, the explosion, and he would tell them as soon as he could. But you know that was Thanksgiving before Pearl Harbor, so he didn’t have a chance. They really were just frantic about that. And then, of course, when Pearl Harbor came along it explained the situation to us.

16

they called it the war effort

I was there with my two-month-old son and my four-year-old daughter, and when Moms got the telegram [about Donald] she handed it to me and she then went to her room. And I was in shock. I’m really not sure when she did it or how soon she did it, but she did go in there. I remember that I went to see if I could help her, and she was sitting there with her rosary and her prayer book. I thought that’s a wonderful thing that she has that to give her strength. My daughter told me that her recollection of it was that somebody rang the doorbell, and she heard all this commotion and she ran and hid under the bed. She thought the Japs were coming after us.17 [Moms and Pops were] such stoics. Both of them were. You have to realize that. They didn’t think that people should express emotional upsets. You just remained calm and [kept] it all inside you. Pops, of course, was terribly upset. They both were. You see, Donald was the baby, and they were just really crushed. And I thought, well, this is it! This was the last! The other three boys have children and they’re gonna come back from the war. Do you remember the response of the community? Oh, they were very responsive. People just came and were so good. And Moms, one day in the middle of the day she said, “Oh, I just feel so sorry for her [a condoler]. She just didn’t know what to do.” She wanted to do something and she didn’t know what to do.



we lived off of the land Dixie and Ike Peveto Dixie: We had friends that would come in here to work from way up in the country, and they’d say, “Boy, the day this war’s over we’re going back home.” Ike: Yes, we had a lot of griping back then. They griped about those houses down in Riverside, and they didn’t know what flush toilets was back up in [the woods]. They didn’t know how to draw water out of a faucet. And we had some people that come out of the city, and they didn’t know that water come out of the ground. And we had our milk cows here, and some of those people that come out of the cities didn’t know that milk come from a cow.18

This Is My Town

17

Dixie: That’s the truth. We had some kinfolks like that. Ike: They was raised in Chicago. Ike: I went to a machinist’s school, [and] through that I got employed down at Consolidated as an outside machinist. We had a flux of about 25–28,000 people come into a 5,000 [person] town. Food was hard to get because you had to line up for everything. Well, we was very fortunate. We lived out in the country and right here. We raised our cattle. We had our hogs. We had our chickens, and we had our garden. We lived cheaply off the land, and we just had to buy our coffee and our sugar. We raised our own lard and we had our own milk. We had our own vegetables. We had our own bacon. We had our own ham, and we was in pretty good shape. Dixie: We even fished out here on the canal. [We caught] bass and bluegills and white perch, and once in a while caught a catfish, didn’t we? Ike: You could go out there and see the size of the fish you wanted to catch, the water was so clear. And we got our meat out of the woods. We got our squirrels. We got our rabbits, and we also got our armadillos. And they were pretty good eating, too. So we had our meat. Dixie: If we decided to have a rabbit stew or something he’d go out in the woods right here. Ike: I’d get my headlight on at night and go down there and kill me a rabbit and come on back in. Dixie: His mother and daddy lived on this place before we were married, and I lived right through the woods over there. So we’ve been here in this neighborhood, gosh, how many years? About fifty-five or fifty-six years we’ve lived right here in this neighborhood. Ike: We lived off of the land just as much as we could. I farmed this whole piece in here and raised my corn. I raised my peas and raised my tomatoes and my watermelon and my squash and cucumbers, and everything that we ate we raised. Dixie: We had ducks and chickens that we were raising, and we had the duck eggs. We had the chicken eggs. Ike: But the wartimes made it rough, because we had all kinds of people come in here, and of all the work that was in progress around here we still had bums on the street that wouldn’t work. The women was down in the yard and everything, and it was a lot of families that was broken up from this situation. Dixie: Tell him about the experience we had with the gypsies at the tent city. Ike: Yes, we had some gypsies [who] lived over here in a trailer park.

18

they called it the war effort

There were probably thirty camps. They had ’em in a circle. Campfire in the middle. They had all their recreations in that circle. I had a fine bunch of little pigs here, just the size that they wanted. They come over here and wanted those pigs, and I told ’em I couldn’t sell those pigs ’cause I had to have them pigs to eat. They said, “Well, we’re going to have a big wedding and a celebration over there, so we need those pigs ’cause we want to roast ’em whole. They’re just right to put ’em over the fire and roast whole.” And I says, “No, you can’t have those pigs.” They’d beg me. They’d give me a good price for ’em. But for what I could get out of them pigs in eating was worth more than the money I’d get, ’cause I had the money but I couldn’t eat the money. It was hard to buy stuff like that. Dixie: Yeah, but finish it. Finish your tale. We talked it over, and we decided that if we didn’t sell ’em some of those pigs anyway they might decide to take ’em. And they had their celebration and they had their roasted pigs. We sold ’em some of our pigs. I think three is all. They were lucky to get those. They had big celebrations. They’d barbecue or roast those pigs, and they’d have big feasts and dances. They danced out on the grounds. All the neighbors were a little leery of ’em because we’d always heard stories about how gypsies stole things, and it really kept us on our toes watching, trying to protect what little bit of things we had around here. What did you do for recreation? Dixie: Swam. We used to swim right across our road right here. In that ol’ canal was a swimming hole, and all the young people in the whole community come down here to swim. Ike: That was a public bathtub. [We’d swim] every day—every day. And furthermore, I was baptized in this ol’ canal right out here. I’d get home about three o’clock in the morning when I’s working the evening shift, and when you come in we had to have a place to go take a bath. We didn’t get no inside bathroom till after ’45, [so] you’d go around there and take you a bath. It didn’t make any difference [even if it was three o’clock in the morning]. The snakes’ll get out of your way. You mentioned a lot of families broke up. Ike: Well, that was because some of the fellows that was working with the women down in the yard fell in love with them women. Some of the fellows that I knew real well, that I worked with, they had as many as seven kids and quit their wives and take up with them other women. Dixie: And the sailors, oh boy, the sailors here really split up a lot of homes. Ike: It was terrible on the moral issue, [but there was] nothing you could do about it because that’s what they wanted to do. That’s their desires.

This Is My Town

19

People that we knew broke up over it—just like that. And then every time you’d go into the yard they’d check your thermos bottle to see if you had any alcohol in it so you wasn’t drinking on the job. They’d take that cap off and smell of it. We had a lot of people that was stealing stuff, and they had to check their lunch buckets. We had one fellow walking out there, and he wanted some electric extension wire. He went and wrapped a bunch of that wire around him so nobody wouldn’t know it—put it under his clothes. And on the way out in that crowd of people—just people walking out there a thousand at a time—and he fell out. They went and checked him, and they found this coil of wire wrapped around him. Cut his circulation off. But all you could see was a mass of hard hats going in that yard and coming out. Dixie: They looked like a bunch of blackbirds. After we got a car and I went down there to pick him up when that whistle blowed, man, you’d see men a-running getting out of that gate—and dirty. It just reminded you of a big bunch of blackbirds coming out of there. Ike: All colored [hard] hats. Every craft had a different color of hat. Mine was red—outside machinist’s red. The electricians had a yellow hat with a streak of lightning onto it. Pipefitters, they had their hats blue. We had to have a special color hat to show what craft we was in—and by that way, if I was out fiddling around on a job I wasn’t supposed to, they knew it wasn’t machinist work there. Of course, we had our quarter leaders down there and they’d spot those kind of people and watch ’em, ’cause some of them fellows went down there and they wouldn’t do nothing all day long. A lot of ’em wanted to get the job done right, and some of ’em didn’t care whether the job was done at all. Therefore, those that would work had to carry those that didn’t work, and, man, it was terrible. We’d get onto ’em and threaten to run ’em off and everything else, but you couldn’t run nobody off. Did those years change you? Ike: Yeah. It made us appreciate that we knew the Lord, because we didn’t take after the things of the world. Dixie: Well, we had a fear of what could happen to us during the war. We didn’t know if we was going to get bombed here or what. And then we had so many boys that went to war. That’s why the churches was filled up every Sunday. People, boy, they was very mindful of the Lord. We belonged to McDonald Baptist Church over in West Orange, and our first children were twins—girls. We didn’t have a car, and every Sunday he’d put them two babies on the bicycle and go clear to West Orange to church [about four miles]. And we had some neighbors that went to another church in West Orange over there, and they had a truck. I’d go down and get in the

20

they called it the war effort

back of that truck and we’d go to church. But he’d take the two girls, the twins, on a bicycle. You had some strong convictions. When things were going on in the shipyard, did you talk to people about it? Ike: We’d talk to ’em and tell ’em that they were doing wrong. But you know what, they’d do just like in the ol’ Bible days—they’d laugh at you. Says, “Man, I’m having the best time I ever had in my life.” And they would keep on. They’d come on the job drunk. They’d say, “Why, I don’t care nothing about that woman at home. She’s got a bunch of ’em kids, but, man, I love this woman here.” So that’s as far as it’d go. They didn’t care. Dixie: But you always have tried to talk to people, though, Ike. Ike: Yeah, I tried to get ’em to do right, and I wasn’t a fanatic about Christianity, you see. I did it in a mild way, not telling them what they’re doing wrong but telling them what the Lord can do for ’em, ’cause when you start condemning somebody you turn ’em away.



you’re not talking to someone who appreciated the influx Josephine J. Sims I was in Houston teaching, so I was just here in the summertime. I lived down on the corner of Eighth and Front—my parents’ home. Been there since 1902, and we had never seen anything like that before. I didn’t get a very good impression [of the people who] came in, because they set up a trailer park next door to us to take care of the influx. Also, there was a trailer home [park] across the street. I thought they were terrible. We finally just had to speak to the man next door. I went and talked to the owner, so he cleaned it up to some extent. My mother got dengue fever, and I know good and well it was from the rats next door.19 So you see, you’re not talking to someone who appreciated the influx of people. Now, this day and time an awful lot of nice people live in trailer homes—you know that. Some of my best friends have lived in trailer homes. [But those people back then] left trash, and I could look out my upstairs window and see rats roaming around the grounds. They even came over in my yard to relieve themselves, so you can imagine my impression. The residents or the rats were relieving themselves?

21

This Is My Town

The residents—and the rats, too. [Laughs] Both! Both kinds of rats! So I just didn’t care much for them. I could look out my back windows and hear when the women come over in the backyard spreading out their blankets and taking care of their kids, combing their hair—just taking over. Now, I felt sorry for ’em because they didn’t have any place of their own to relax, ’cause they were crowded in there and there was [only] a path between ’em. [But we] were never the fussing kind. We were never the kind that would go to the police or somebody and complain. I happened to be living on the wrong side of the tracks, I guess.



too many strangers Audrey Bockmon Everyone flocked into [the shipyards] in order to get jobs—high-paying jobs. [My husband’s] home was in Daingerfield, straight north of here. We would drive up that way and see beautiful homes boarded up—one by one. They’d come down here to live.20 Then after the war, one by one we’d see these homes reopened and orchards planted when [they] began to relive [there] after the war. But the people who came in had no place to live— absolutely no place—and it was terrible on them. People would come every day, “Can’t you find me someplace to live? Don’t you know of any place where we could live?” They’d come by Mama’s house—it was a big twostory house—“Can’t you let us have a room or anything?”21 They were all strangers. Once we knew everyone, then all of a sudden we didn’t know anyone much. It was a difference. It wasn’t the same after the war. Little by little they’d go back home, but it changed Orange. Even though a lot of people went back, there was a lot that stayed. It was just a new Orange. Lots of people didn’t like it. “We liked it like it was,” they would say. “Too many strangers here. Too many strangers.” [The war] drew the old-timers closer together. They knew they were kind of being pushed aside, and they didn’t like that. They just didn’t like all this, these new people coming in, because it just changed Orange forever. It was excitement, and yet it was horrible to know that the war was going on and the next year or so your son would go. And every once in a while we’d get a message that so-and-so had been killed, so it was sadness. [My son] had never been away from home, and that was a horrible thing

22

they called it the war effort

to see him—a busload—all of ’em get on there.22 I’ll never forget that. [He] wasn’t married, but there were other young couples married. One little girl and the baby stood there with tears in their eyes watching their daddy leave. Just such as that all the time—all the time. It wasn’t a pretty sight at all.



the world turned upside down Emma Jane and Herman Nies Emma Jane: [Morals] loosened up a whole lot—obviously. You know, it was during the war and everybody was “Hurrah for today. You don’t know whether tomorrow’s going to come.” Sort of that attitude. Not really bad, but you have to understand that in a small town like we lived in, before [this] everything just about was prohibited. Herman and I had a date one time, and I had to be home at nine-thirty, but he was supposed to be home at ten o’clock. I get tickled every time I think about it. Herman brought me home, and we were parked out there in the front of the house sitting there just talking like kids will do. God knows what else we were doing! Herman: I was trying to hug her neck. Emma Jane: About that time we heard something hit on the side of that car—BOOM!—and it was his daddy come after him. Now, that is how strict things were in Orange. And, of course, when I went in and told my parents, well, they were infuriated to think that he would dare to come out and think that something was wrong when he was with their daughter. But that’s an example of how strict things were. Herman: I went to work for [Consolidated] six months prior to Pearl Harbor. I worked for them some couple of years, and then in ’45 I entered the navy. When did you notice the war had come to Orange? Herman: Oh, Lord! Of course, when you’re raised in a small community such as this was, somewhere within 6,500 people, and then practically overnight you’re talking about somewhere around 40,000, why it was incomprehensible to us. Emma Jane: It was just like the world turned upside down.

This Is My Town

23

Herman: At the time we were [in] high school and going up and down the streets of Orange doing whatever we were doing at the time. Why, everybody knew everybody. And then here all of a sudden this influx of people comes in and you don’t know anyone. Emma Jane: You’d get in your car, if you were lucky enough to have one, and you’d go down to the end of Green Avenue, which was where the bridge originally was that went over the Sabine, and there was a little place there called the Log Cabin. That was our big treat. We would go down there and we’d make a “U” and we’d pull in there and we’d get an olive Coke or an olive Dr Pepper, and we knew the carhops and they knew us. When we’d drive in they’d know what we were going to get. We didn’t even have to order. What did we call that carhop? “Intellectual?” She was just, you know, way out of it. Herman: I never will forget, we had a big ol’ boy that lived here—a big fellow. Well, the local hangout of all of the younger crowd was a place that was called The Sweet Shop. One night we was kidding around—’cause George was a big eater. Hamburgers were ten cents apiece, hot dogs was a nickel, and there was a bet made as to how many hamburgers George could eat. He says, “Well, I can eat twelve.” Well, of course, they were good hamburgers in them days, so we said, “Nah, he can’t eat twelve.” Well, anyway, between the six or eight or ten of us waiting around there we gathered up a dollar and twenty cents for twelve hamburgers—$1.20—and we went down to the Log Cabin and ordered a dozen hamburgers. Well, as best I remember he ate ten. That was in about ’39. But, you know, in a small community like that everybody knows what everybody else does. Emma Jane: And if you did something wrong at school, before you got home your mother and daddy knew about it. Do you remember how all of this change affected you? Herman: Well, we married in ’42. Of course, that changed both of our lives. Emma Jane: [Laughs] Really! Herman: I was making plenty of money then and buying a bond. Emma Jane: And also bought a new Plymouth. Herman: Yeah, we bought a new automobile, and it changed my and her lives. Just flopped it over because we were on our own. But if it hadn’t been for the war I doubt if we’d of ever gotten married. Emma Jane: We first lived in this little place that we called the Black Hole of Calcutta. Herman: That was a good name for it, too. Emma Jane: This was our honeymoon apartment, and that’s all we could find. People took their homes and they chopped ’em up to make

24

they called it the war effort

apartments. This was an elderly lady, and she had taken her home and she had divided it up. I think there were three apartments in that one house. What she had done, she had taken her living room and her dining room— that’s what we got—and we called it the Black Hole of Calcutta because it never had any light. In the middle of the day with the sun shining we had to burn all the lights in there. What are your impressions about the shipyard? Herman: They put me to work as an apprentice anglesmith when I first went to work; then when they saw that I could do the work, well, I was promoted right away. I wanted to volunteer for the service but they wouldn’t let me. Every time I would try to volunteer they would say, “No, we need you too bad here.” Well, in ’42 we got married. Why, I wasn’t near as hepped on going off to service as I was at the beginning, but it began to eat on me and I began to feel funny about everybody going and me staying behind. I just kept trying to volunteer and volunteered until finally—she was working on the draft board, and she’s the one that drafted me. [Laughs] She drafted me and quit. Of course, we had plenty of money. [They] had a place down on Green Avenue called Jackson Motor Company, and I went by there one day and they had a brand new Plymouth sitting in the window. And I looked at that thing—I never had had a new car.23 I was driving a Model A at the time, and I went in there and asked that fellow, “How much do y’all want for that car?” And he said, “Well, that car is a four-door deluxe sedan. List price on that thing is $995.” Four-door sedan. Nine hundred ninety-five dollars. Man, I thought, I’d like to have that car. I think I went back the next day and it was still sitting there in that showroom. I drove up there in that Model A, and I asked that fellow, “How much you give me for that Model A on that car?” He said, “I’ll give you $75.” I said, “Well, what will my notes be if I buy that thing—for three years?” He said, “Well, your notes will be $37.37 a month.” So I said, “Well, let me think about it.” The next day I went and bought that durn car. I was so scared when I signed the paper for that thing, I was so nervous I could hardly write my name, because that was more money than I’d ever spent, of course. I can tell you a real strange thing that happened to me that was Orange related. I was stationed on a battleship in the Pacific—and the first contract that we had was for twelve destroyers. Of course, I knew their numbers. They were from 564 to 581. I believe that was the number on the destroyers—you know they’re numbered. One time when we were at sea in a battle zone—of course, the way they worked battleships—they’re called capital ships—the battleship’s in the center. Then the cruisers are out there. Then

25

This Is My Town

the destroyers are way outside. Then the little boats are out far. The capital ships—they protect them. In other words, everybody shoots over everybody. This one shoots over that one, and this one shoots over them two, then the battleship—we shoot over the whole bunch. Emma Jane: Supposedly. [Laughs] Herman: Anyway, one time we were out there and we picked up a fleet of destroyers. I looked at the number of one, and I saw one of the ships that we had built here. It was in the same [convoy]. Well, we came under attack by a group of kamikazes, and I saw the ship that I built sunk. I saw that sucker hit. A plane come in low. It was a medium-size Jap bomber. They come in right on top of the water. Their landing gears was almost in the water to get underneath the radar so you couldn’t detect ’em. Well, one of ’em got through all this maze of ships that were firing and firing, but the thing about it is, no anti-aircraft gun would depress that low for obvious reasons—you’d kill one another. So anyway, this sucker got through, and he hit this ship that I had helped work on right at the water line. That thing was just a ball of fire, and it turned it over and it sunk. Well, as it was going down in the water I was watching it, and the last thing that went under, of course, was the nose of the destroyer—went in stern first. Kinda sunk down like you’ve seen pictures in movies of the thing going down. Well, the nose—what we called a bow plate, [the] shipyard term is bow plate—is the round piece of metal that makes the nose. Well, I was instrumental in making these bow plates, because it was anglesmith work. The last thing I saw was that dadgum bow plate going under that water—that I had helped build. I thought that was a real strange thing. That was an emotional experience. Herman: Oh, Lord! You can’t imagine. I kept a diary, and I think it’s noted in the diary. I did have the date. I felt real strange about it, and I think I wrote a letter back here about it. But yeah, it was kind of a spooky thing.



don’t you know there’s a war going on? Julia and Frances Brown Julia: Mother was ill one time in the hospital, and her nurse was telling us—she lived in Riverside—she was laughing about her next-door neighbor who came over and said, “Is your refrig-

26

they called it the war effort erator working all right?” And this woman said, “Yes.” And [she] said, “Well, mine doesn’t make any ice.” So the woman went over to see about it, and the woman hadn’t put water in the little trays. She’d never had one before, so she didn’t know why hers wasn’t making any ice.

Frances: When I got out of [college] I went to work for Consolidated Steel in the cost distribution section, and the first day I thought everybody had lost their mind. They must have just had it that day, because what they were doing was swatting flies. We didn’t have any [window] screen, and they each had a little jar and they were counting their flies. Julia: They decided in 1940 to start building these ships, and I think all of East Texas invaded Orange to get a job. What was the reaction of Orange to this invasion? Frances: LOVED IT! Julia: Loved it! Oh, they loved it, because things were getting hard here and we were a small town. Frances: Oh, we loved it. We were at the age, too, when this was a great adventure. Don’t misunderstand me, it was horrible that the war was going on, [and] I’m sure that with the older people, all these people coming in must have been sort of traumatic. But it sure made the town more interesting when you’re twenty years old—twenty-two years old. THERE WERE A LOT OF MEN! Sailors all over town! There was a navy officer every time you turned around. Being a wham-brained kid, I had a great time during the war years. We were always aware there was a war on. We were always aware that it was a terrible thing, but when you’re that age you can still have a good time being aware that there’s something terrible going on. Julia: We had lots of people come and want us to let them rent part of our yard to put their trailer on to live in, and Mother said, “No way!” What was the reaction? Julia: “Well, don’t you know there’s a war going on?” And certain things like ammunition, all kinds of things like that was scarce. Like at the [hardware] store, Dad got in some ammunition, and listen, there was almost a fight down there over it—people trying to grab it away from other people, and so they had to stop it. Frances: The most interesting thing was the items that the foreign navies loved. The Russian—it was the funniest navy we had here—they loved thermos bottles. They could not understand the thermos bottle. If it keeps it hot, how can it keep it cold? And when we’d get in a shipment of thermos bottles they would go almost as fast as the ammunition.

27

This Is My Town

Julia: When the war was over and everybody left—the shipyard workers all left—it was the most interesting thing to read [in the classified ads] the things for sale. Wedding dresses. Fur coats. Encyclopaedia Britannicas, and things that these people had bought that they had no more use for and never would use. Frances: We used to read it every day. And they’d be at very poor addresses where you’d know it was people that— Julia: The shipyard people would get paid every Wednesday afternoon, and they’d stop by. They’d buy wristwatches. They’d buy just anything, things they didn’t need.24 And on Wednesday afternoons the poor police went in full force, because they’d all get drunk on their way home. Frances: Yeah, they’d stop by Cherry’s on their way home. There was a little hole in the wall there called Cherry’s Bar, or something like that— Cherry’s Club. What kinds of stresses were people under? Julia: I don’t know because we weren’t. Frances: I would say the people that lived here already and had a home didn’t feel the stress like the people that moved in and lived in Riverside and were displaced—not displaced because they came here because they wanted to. But they were away from home—like the people that lived in East Texas. They came down here to get a job, and it was great and they were glad. But even so, there’s a certain amount of stress. You’ve pulled up all your roots and you’re living here in a different place. I’m sure a lot of what we were talking about a while ago—I’m not a psychologist—but a lot of that buying of the wristwatches and the fur coats and the things they didn’t need but always dreamed of having [was maybe an indication of stress]. On the whole, I don’t think people knew they were under stress like they do now. We talk about it a lot now and they didn’t then. It was just a rough time and you made do. Did those years make some kind of unique contribution to you as an individual? Frances: There is one way that I might have changed for the better, in that it certainly did away with the little isolation that you have in a small town growing up. You met a lot of different people with different backgrounds, and you expanded. You learned not to be intolerant of other people’s views on everything—religion, politics. Everything.



28

they called it the war effort

he squashed it right quick Ken Nagai [Pearl Harbor] was a horrible experience. And, of course, we were quite concerned at what the future would [hold]. We didn’t know just what would happen. I was working for the state highway department in Orange running a survey party, I believe—field crew. I was living at home, in this vicinity [Orange County], and commuted every day. We built a number of streets—improvement of streets—around the shipyard. Orange was just beginning to put in a lot of paved streets in the earlier forties even before the war broke out, but they didn’t cover the area around the shipyard. What was the status of the Japanese American community? [The war] didn’t affect me one way or the other. People were all real nice to me. It had no effect on me. I continued to work there until I went into the service in late ’44. I was never bothered one way or the other. I carried on my daily activities. I worked for the state there just like nothing happened. I led just a everyday life. There were a few radicals that came to Orange but very, very few. Radical in what sense? Well, it’s hard to describe—prejudice. But there were very, very few that I personally encountered. Did you encounter any of this? Not personally. Not personally. I think somebody one time said something to my supervisor, but he squashed it right quick. Why do you think Japanese Americans fared so well? Wasn’t enough of us. As far as I know, there wasn’t anybody else in Orange. Of course, the Kishis lived here. We lived close to ’em. I can’t say that there was any real prejudice. Were you familiar with the building of Riverside? Oh, yes! Oh, yes. That marsh is pretty deep right in through that area, and they didn’t attempt to do anything to stabilize the marshy area underneath. They just pumped sand in there and hoped that enough subsiding had taken place to firm up the foundation. The houses themself were relatively light. It didn’t affect them, but the streets with the traffic on it, it went all to pieces. It was not a heavy design. In fact, they didn’t have time to build a heavy design. I think it was just more or less about a four-inch concrete pavement, curb and gutter, with the drainage right in the middle of the street. That’s where it carried the drainage. See, it eliminated the need for storm sewers. They had a lot of problems with the sewer system because [of ] the sewer lines subsiding. The same thing with the water

29

This Is My Town

lines. But that was quite a project they built in a matter of a very, very short period of time.25



people in the united states had too much Leatha and Harold Herrington Leatha: There were a lot of young girls in Orange that got jobs. They were just working at anything they could find to do. I don’t think anybody really thought much about it. I didn’t. Did you, Harold? You know, it was the war effort. Harold: Her mother had what—two or three girls that stayed down at her house? Roomed and boarded there. Roomed there anyway. I never will forget one [of them] talking about—she was working in the personnel department down there at Consolidated—and she was telling about this girl that was filling out this application. When it came to “Sex,” she said, “Occasionally.” Harold: I was living in Alexandria, Louisiana, working for a freight company, [and] I moved back here and went to work down at Levingston Shipyard. I moved back ’cause I wasn’t making enough money, and I thought, oh boy, it looks like we’re going to get into a war. I’s born in 1910, and even in World War I Orange went from, oh, about 1,000 population up to 15–20,000 people. And I said, I can remember during World War I there were men that came into Orange and made some good money and had steady jobs all during the war. So I came on back down here. My mother had a big ol’ house, and they had real big rooms—several of ’em. Some of the men from up in East Texas weren’t used to having anything elaborate, and she’d take ’em in there and they’d say, “Well, can we get my friend to come in? Can you put another bed in here?” She had as many as three beds in a big room, and three men stayed in that one room. She even had ’em in a little place in the hall out there she partitioned off. Had people living like that. Leatha: And then at one time there were some Russian sailors that came in. Harold: Levingston Shipyard was building a bunch of either tugboats or some sort of small ship for the Russians, and they kept a crew over here, officers and some of their enlisted men, I guess, that manned those ships. Leatha: I had one sister that just nearly drove one of ’em crazy. [Laughs]

30

they called it the war effort

Harold: She was kind of a flirt or a teaser. But he couldn’t get to first base with her. Leatha: Mama would feed him. He’d eat there at the house. We had a big house and big family. Harold: He had a funny thing that was kind of a Russian attitude. He’d see what just poor, ordinary working people had—electric refrigerators and good stove and new equipment and a house full of good furniture—and he said in kind of broken English [that] people in the United States had too much.



some blues and greens—and then some happy colors, too Dorothy McGrory My husband volunteered for the navy, and when he left and went out to San Diego I was here with our little two-and-a-half-year-old boy. I went to work, and the little boy was put in a nursery school here in Orange. He was real concerned about his dad. At the nursery school some of the children were going there whose fathers were working here, and they had their fathers at home. He would sometimes at night be real concerned and want to know why he didn’t have his daddy home. So we’d have to talk about it a little bit and comfort him a little bit. I painted all my life until then, but then I didn’t paint for a while during the war. There was too much other stuff to do. I just didn’t have much time. How would you have painted Orange before the war? I guess it would be just sort of a peaceful scene—of friends meeting friends. It was not a busy place at all. I would have used some blues and greens—and then some happy colors, too. It was a happy time. How would you have painted it in 1943, 1944? With more direction and more, I guess—louder colors. Confusion. There was a lot of confusion in the war years. More direction? A lot more angles—and the paint you use. The others would be much softer. Where would you have gone to paint? The riverfront, for one thing, because it was nice—and the bayous. I liked the bayous with all the cypress trees. What would you have seen on the riverfront?

31

This Is My Town

Well, of course, during the war years there was all the activity of the cranes—the shipbuildings and people working. You could see all that activity. I don’t think it was a peaceful time as far as the waterfront [was concerned]. What were the sounds? It was noisy. Horns. I would say anything clashing, because everything was just at [a] high key—fast. Noise from the shipyards—bangs and sounds during the night. It wasn’t quiet. Before the war years, and I guess earlier during the war years, people just made deals by shaking hands. They wouldn’t have to write everything down and have a contract. They would just make a deal. They were honest. And I think since then things have really changed. You had to get everything down in writing because you weren’t sure whether the people would leave, move out, so you had to have it, but before that they were all here. [They became] more cautious about their dealings with other people. Just found out you had to be a little more cautious. No, growing up in Orange was altogether different from the war years, of course. It was such a quiet place. You knew everyone before the war, and it really changed because there were strangers—nice people but just strangers.



separated to the four winds J. S. (Rudy) Rougeau Some of [the newcomers] were very, very fine people. They were just trying to improve their own standard of living, I think, and a lot of ’em were just almost positive that their roots wouldn’t take here. As soon as the emergency was over, why, they’d be moving somewheres else—or back home. I heard the expression a lot of times, “I’m going to see that my children get what I never had.” And it appears that a lot of ’em thought that one of the things that they’d never had was leisure time, to loaf and do those kind of things.    So you think a change was more leisure time? Well, permissiveness. I was working for Gulf States Utilities Company and had just started my career in 1938. There wasn’t too much going on as far as work, and

32

they called it the war effort

usually when a person got a job they kind of stuck to it. With the developments of the shipyard and the navy yard here and influx of people, it has a tendency to change the whole outlook for the community. We actually lost all of the real close community touch that we had with all the people. Before the war it was just a normal thing for, I would say, ninety percent of the people in Orange County to just assemble in what we call downtown Orange. People would just come to town a lot of times on Saturday afternoon and evening just to walk around and visit with everybody else. Consequently, you got to know just about everybody, and you looked forward to meeting those people almost weekly. If there was someone in the community that was ill or had some other type of problem, almost the entire community would rally to their help. If a father of a family lost his life or something like that—and was a farmer—the rest of the people in that community would all get together and work his crop, lay it by, harvest it, and they’d select certain days that they’d all assemble at that farm and do this work. It was a lot different in those days than it is now. When did you notice this changing? It was right at the beginning of the war. People appeared to be preoccupied, and most of ’em were working long hours, and we didn’t have the people congregating uptown and getting together like they had been in the past. Even visiting in the homes slowed down a lot because everybody was busy, and it just gradually became less and less and less and less. Family life in Orange up until those years was a very closely knit thing. Then after the war there was people that just scattered all over the country. Family life just became separated to the four winds, because people just went all over the world. I think the conflicts in the families started during those years when people as a whole—don’t misunderstand this because there were still a lot of good Christian people that went to church every Sunday—but there was also a lot of people because of the change in locations and so forth that didn’t seem to have those deep-seated values that they had before. They were taught from a very early age that the foundation of this nation was based on Christianity, that any time a community or a nation loses just a part of that it’s going to change ’em a little bit. What were the stresses of the day? Getting that war over with. I think that’s one reason why most of the people—unfortunately I had to say “most of the people”—were concerned with getting the war over with. There were some that had gotten into different types of businesses and things, [and] you could hear the expression every now and then, “You know, I’ve never had it any better.” Well, we didn’t think that was true. Even though we had worked for just very

33

This Is My Town

minimum wages at times, we felt like that we could go back to those hard, hard times if we could just get the war over with. And the biggest part of the people in the community that I knew felt the same way. That was the number-one priority then.



so many, many people needed somebody to talk to Enola and R. H. (Bubba) Voss Jr. Enola: When all of these people just started moving in, it was exciting. But it was strange also, because I can remember at one time I had heard somebody say that they had lived in a larger city and that they didn’t even know their neighbors, their next-door neighbors. And I thought, this cannot be true. I just could not imagine not knowing your neighbors. Well, I found out after this happened that this is what it does. Having lived here all my life—and I’m sure there were a lot of other people like me—I had traveled very short distances out of Orange and, therefore, had not come in contact with too many people from any distance at all.26 So to me it was exciting. Enola: This really was a sleepy, quiet little town, and most of our excitement was going to the political rallies and to the election returns at the Orange County Courthouse or to a band concert out in Stark Park.27 I can vividly remember when they announced that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. It seems as though it was just a short time till we started having this surge of people because of the shipyard—and not only the surge in population but there was also a rise in salaries. I can remember that before the war a lot of men’s salaries were like sixteen dollars a week, and you lived on that. Money was really scarce, and you could buy a whole bill of groceries for several people in a family for eight dollars—I mean like five or six people. And after this the salaries really started going up. I was a beauty operator, [and] when I first went to work we got fifty cents for a plain shampoo and set and seventy-five cents for an oil. Our permanents were from three-fifty to, say, like about ten dollars, and if you gave a seven-fifty or ten-dollar permanent you really had done something. After the war, of course, prices started going up, and eventually your permanents, you were getting twenty and twenty-five dollars for ’em during

34

they called it the war effort

that time. The prices of the shampoos and the sets went up to three-fifty and four and prices like that, and I noticed that people were beginning to spend their money. So people didn’t look back. I think they were thinking we’re here now, we don’t know where we’ll be tomorrow, and they were spending. They were really spending their money freely. Seemed like there was a—I don’t know whether you could say a frenzy. I don’t know what word I’m searching for—but an anxiety or something. What were the women in the beauty shop talking about? Enola: I think the chief concern was about their loved ones that were in the service and whether or not they were going to be shipped overseas, and, of course, prayerfully hoping they would come home safely. That was the main topic of conversation most of the time. Every time anyone would come in you would ask about their family, and then, of course, a lot of trading of stamps and this type of thing. I think housing possibly was one of the hardest things for people moving in. [Bubba’s] grandmother rented rooms, and they would rent in shifts. When one shift would get up to go to work the other shift coming in would go to bed. Bubba: Mostly brothers. It was just brothers, though. I remember we had one man that wanted to sleep in his car out on the street but just use the bathroom. Do you think the appearance of women started changing? Enola: Yes. I think probably they did start fixing themselves up or having a better appearance, because there was more money. They were able to spend a little more money on themselves. They could buy more clothes for themselves; go to the beauty shop more, because some of them were not able to before that. So I think, generally, the appearance of the ladies did improve a great deal.28 Did you notice any changes in people you knew? Bubba: I think some of ’em got big-headed ’cause they got a job. [They] never had a job before and they got big-headed. I’ve always said that. Got where they didn’t know you. [Laughs]29 What about family life? Enola: I would think that some families were actually broken up during that time. Of course, others it drew them closer together. People really do have a tendency to talk to their beauty operators, and a lot of them would come in and seem as though it was a relief to them to just have someone to talk to. And I would listen. I always would listen, and, of course, I really and truly always tried to practice not to repeat or divulge what anybody told me, because I don’t know why it is but when they’re with their beauty

35

This Is My Town

operator a lot of people have the tendency to just—almost like a confession. During that time, especially, so many, many people needed somebody to talk to. That was the thing. They needed somebody to talk to, and so often we would be the ones and so we listened. What were your work hours like? Enola: Ahh, they were terrific! When we really started getting so busy there were some days I would work twelve and thirteen hours a day and not even take time off—a lunch hour—like maybe ten minutes to eat a sandwich and a Coke real fast. It was tiring. But I was young then, and I could go home and take a hot bath and eat a good meal and I’d be ready to go dancing or something. What were the best aspects of those days? Enola: I think the closeness of the families. The love that was felt and shown at that time. I think people—I know we did—let each other know more about how much we loved them at that time than we had before. We always knew we loved ’em, but we wouldn’t tell them, you know. The realization and the thought of them leaving and maybe not returning, what war really means and the reality of war, must make a person stop and think and make you feel like you want to let them know that you love them and how much they mean to you.



a feeling of satisfaction Mrs. Glen Nelson Some of the students that I had had at school lost their lives in [the war], and that was really an emotional crisis for me. I remember that to this good day. I had this speech class when I first started, [and] I used to have trouble getting the kids to volunteer—who’s going to be first—when we would start off with our little five-minute speeches. I had one fellow who would always raise his hand when I called on volunteers, and I said, “Leon, I hope that if your country ever needs you that you’ll be that quick to volunteer”—jokingly. And do you know, before the year was out—of course, it was when Pearl Harbor happened— he came running up to me the next morning. It was a Monday morning, and he said, “I’m ready.”30 That just killed me. He came through it, and I kept in touch with him. Just draws you a little closer to the kids.

36

they called it the war effort

I was teaching speech—Orange High School—[but] I retired to do my effort someplace else. I had a large lot [and] we turned it into a trailer court. Had fifteen trailers. There was so much for me to do at home, and I couldn’t do that and teach school, too. I tried it for a few months, but then I got too involved when we had that many people living in trailers. There were too many demands there. Things would go wrong. In fact, I learned how to thread pipes. People would run over the faucets, and I got a pipe threader because my husband was so busy at the drugstore. I was young then and I liked to do that sort of work, so I got out and took care of the housing. There was a feeling of satisfaction knowing that I was contributing a little bit to the war effort, helping people find places to stay. I [took] a motor corps course during the war and worked with the Red Cross then. They had a course for ladies. There was a call for anyone who would volunteer to come down and work and learn, and I was sort of mechanically minded anyhow and it just appealed to me. I thought that would be my little bit. There were several mechanics in Orange who were very good in a lot of areas, and they would teach these courses to the women and volunteers. We learned the mechanics of repairing cars, cleaning out the carburetors and the gas line and things like that that might need to be done. Then we would chauffeur the Red Cross workers anyplace that they needed to go in the county. We had certain days that we were on call. That information was just real good for me to have, because one time I was going over the high [Rainbow] bridge, and I got almost to the top and my car went dead. Something had happened to my gas line. There was a car that pushed me over, and going down the other side it cleared, so I knew there was something in the carburetor. We’d just been studying that, and I could hardly wait to find me a place to park over there and get out and clean my carburetor. It made you more self-sufficient? Oh, yes! Oh, yes. It surely did. I branched out into areas I hadn’t been in before. I had a scooter, and I’d drive all the way across town to get my groceries and put ’em on this little motor scooter in the back. I remember getting my Christmas tree over there one year, bringing it back on a scooter. I surely did. Oh, I used the scooter a lot. Of course, after I had my course with the motor corps I felt like I could do anything with a [motor]. It gave me a lot of self-confidence. Did those years leave any lasting changes in Orange? Well, I think that maybe people received outsiders a little bit better. They were a little more hospitable. Up to that time there were a lot of clans in Orange, just little groups that stayed together, and it let down some of those barriers. To me, that’s one of the things I noticed. When I came here

37

This Is My Town

[in 1927] it was hard for me to be accepted, I felt like. I was a teenager, and I felt like I wasn’t accepted because I was the new girl in town. And that was not true during the war and since then. We accept new people much more readily than we did before.



stake to stake Mrs. Urty J. (Doris) Colburn Urty and I got in the car and drove out and saw what the people were talking about. Tents were going up all over North Orange—Brownwood Addition. It was mainly in the northern part because there was a lot of space out there. It was just disastrous. I said, “These poor people! You know they’re fine, respectable people, and look what they’re having to live in.” But, on the other hand, it brought in the bad element along with [it], and, of course, it was an area where there was no playgrounds. The children were straying here and yonder, and it was pathetic in more than one way. Until the Riverside houses were built it was deplorable. They were just so congested. The tents were almost stake to stake. It was just an unbelievable sight. We wondered about the sanitation, and, of course, that did create a problem out there. I don’t suppose the people were without enough food or anything else to want to steal. Honestly, we left our houses wide open. No locks. You know, during the war they asked that we do the patriotic thing by opening our homes for renters. I rented to the contractor of the MacArthur Bridge out here. [He] said, “Now, I may not come in till late. I’d like to have a key.” And I said, “Well, Mr. Dewberry, if I can find one.” I didn’t even know where a key was. People’d go off on vacations, they’d go off for a week or more, and they’d never lock their homes. You never thought anything about it. It was just astounding to us that were [natives] how we grew so rapidly until it was affecting our lives in so many ways. You’d stand in line [at the grocery store] because the ration stamps slowed down everything. That was disgusting [because] we were used to going ahead and getting attention right away. Listen, you know what was pathetic? I do believe that a lot of women went to smoking just because cigarettes were scarce. I know of ones that started smoking during that time just because they were scarce, but yet they could get those along with their groceries. I strictly was a homemaker, housewife. I cared for the children. We had

38

they called it the war effort

gone over to Sulphur [Louisiana] where we’d found out that there was playground equipment—about three weeks before [Pearl Harbor]—and ordered to our own specifications what we wanted in a swing set. So the day after Pearl Harbor I had the man to come to the door, and he had the swing set in his truck. I said, “I know that this was purposely made by our specifications, but I’m sorry. With Pearl Harbor, my husband’ll be going in the service, and I don’t see how that I can take it.” He looked at me so sternly, and he said, “Lady, have you ever thought about the fact that children still have to play?” And so, boy, I said, “Put it in the backyard!” Did the war years affect children? Well, they didn’t know it. It was just like when we grew up. We never knew we’s poor. I don’t know that it affected my children particularly at all. I think it was like it was during the Depression. We accepted things, more or less. If we had one good garment to wear to church, two good garments to wear to school, or whatever, you know—we didn’t suffer from it.31 So I think that, all told, the children that I knew of didn’t really feel any hurt. What did you do for a social life? Well, it was very little, I’m telling you. There wasn’t a great deal for young couples to do. Of course, we had our church. When Riverside people came in we had a regular [church] visitation, and we’d have to take a map. The Orangeites knew every little street or alley, [but] when they came in here we didn’t know where to go without that map. They had a map on the wall down there in the hall across from the church office for years, but some of us had to have a little map sketch of where the different courts were to be able to visit. Were these people welcomed into the church? Yes. Wholeheartedly. They were. But it sure did make it difficult for ones of us like me that do not put names with faces too well. I had a way about me ever since I’s a kid—Dad taught us to speak to the older people and to make people welcome in church as we’s growing up. Well, I continued being friendly with people, and I introduced myself to someone that’d been a member several months. And it was really embarrassing. But it was difficult for me to remember all the names that were coming into our class, much less members elsewhere in the church.



39

This Is My Town

iron bars and everything Mrs. Len Savignano I’ll never forget the laundry, and I’ll never forget all those tenants that we had, and I will never forget just before the war started how those people were starving. They were really hungry. I’m not making this up about ’em being hungry. They didn’t fight. They didn’t steal. They didn’t do anything. They came and asked you to the door for something to eat. And when we had that grocery store nobody ever tried to break in and steal what they wanted. They came in the store and we weren’t afraid to let ’em in, and we gave ’em food and everything. To me, those are memories that we don’t have today. I told you about the iron bars and everything we have [on the house]. We used to keep the doors wide open. I had a beautiful life, though, all during that time afterwards. [In 1941] I was single, and all we were thinking about was the Depression and how hard times were at that time. We couldn’t rent our houses [which included over a hundred units], and we had a lot of vacancies and people didn’t pay their rent. The tenants didn’t even try ’cause they really couldn’t afford to pay rent. They didn’t have any work, and in those days they didn’t have HUD [Housing and Urban Development] and all this help that they’re giving these tenants now. I don’t remember such things as food stamps and helping people. All I can remember [is] people going from one house to another begging for food. When we’d go collect the rent, instead of paying the rent we always felt so sorry for ’em we gave ’em a little money so they’d have something to eat. The shipyard opened up and hundreds and hundreds of people would come to Orange and work. It was unbelievable how people came to Orange, and it was so exciting. I must have been around twenty-nine or thirty, but life was so beautiful then. Everything was so exciting, and then they opened the naval base. We’d go to these dances and all. I think everybody had a wonderful time with all those new people coming into Orange. Oh, they had so many eligible bachelors you couldn’t believe it, and all the women in Orange were so excited, and so many young girls from out of town would come over and meet these navy men. In 1942 I got married, and my job was to take care of the rent houses, and then we opened up a help-yourself laundry. They didn’t even know what a help-yourself laundry was in those days. We named it “Len’s Help Yourself Laundry,” and that was a shock for Orange because it had never

40

they called it the war effort

heard of that. We had hundreds of people day and night going in. We had a trailer court, too. People would bring their trailers in the parking lot on our land. They were grateful to us for trying to help them out, [and] we were grateful to them because we thought they were helping us out. Was your husband from Orange? No, he lived in Savignano, Italy. They named this town after his grandfather Savignano. He landed in Mexico and then he came to Houston, and then he heard about the shipyard coming to Orange. He said he [saw] big headlines: “Big Shipyard Coming in Orange.” When he read about the shipyard and all he got excited. He said, “Now, that’s the place for me.” [I met him] through the clubs [across the river]. We used to go dancing and all, and I met him over there. I forgot about all those good times, and every time I’d go there and they’d have those bingos and things I’d win money.32 I’d win a car. I’d win cash. I don’t know, seemed like in those days everything was so much fun. When I go now I don’t win money. I don’t win cars. I don’t win anything. Did you win a car? Yes, and won a thousand dollars one time. I was so excited you would have thought I won a million dollars. We had just bought a brand new car that week and then that weekend I won this car. I said, “Isn’t that strange? I don’t need a car and I won a car, and the person that really needed a car didn’t win it.” But, anyway, I was so excited and thrilled I didn’t know what to do. I think because they were making money [people] were happy, and they were doing things right. I don’t know—you see like now. We got a burglar alarm. We got a panic alarm. We got iron bars. We got security men living back there. In those days we’d leave the doors wide open, and even when the people were begging we’d let ’em come in the house and give ’em food. I wouldn’t have the nerve to let ’em even walk in the house now. I remember we lived on Main Street and there was a railroad. The freight trains passed. Every time those freight trains would stop there a bunch of those men, poor things—we had a little store on the corner—they’d come in there and ask for something to eat. And my mother was a poor, illiterate woman from Italy. Couldn’t read a word or write. Couldn’t speak English or anything, and she said, “As long as we have something to eat let’s share it with them.” They remembered when they were in Italy. They were poor, too, and they couldn’t go to ask somebody to give them something ’cause they were just as poor as they were. I remember that anytime somebody would come and beg for something to eat we’d give it to ’em. Did you feel comfortable in Orange, being Italian? Oh, yes, because you see I was born and reared in Orange. I don’t know

41

This Is My Town

if they accepted me or not, but I was born and reared here and we knew everybody. [My parents] accumulated a lot and they amounted to something and they had a nice home.



my father was proud of us W. J. Butler My youngest brother was killed in the war and my other brother was wounded in the war, and it was tough on my mother. My youngest brother was one of the ones that they put into the Battle of the Bulge. They hadn’t really had sufficient training, but [he] was killed on January 6, 1945. My next brother was wounded on January 13, 1945, and my ship, the USS Ticonderoga, was hit by two suicide planes on January 21, 1945. So in a period of three weeks there, they got my brother and almost got the other two of [us]. I had just finished Texas A&M University in May of 1939 and was working for the university as a manager of dining halls. I decided to get into the service, and I went to Houston and enlisted in the navy and went to boot camp in San Diego. From boot camp I had a choice of two or three places I could go, and one of ’em was to radio operator’s school. When I graduated from that school as a radioman I had the choice of duties that I could select. One of ’em was to be attached to a destroyer that was being built in the shipyard in Orange, Texas, and the name of the destroyer was William D. Porter. It was DD-579, one of the two or three dozen destroyers that was built here during the war. What were you hearing about Orange? Oh, my dad, being the tax assessor-collector, certainly knew a lot about what was happening to it. He knew that the community was changing, and he knew that they were gearing up for ship production and war materiel, and, of course, he knew the people that came in. All of them were interested when they moved their industries in here in what they were going to have to pay in taxes, so the county tax assessor-collector was one of the first people they met. I know that housing was scarce, and I even heard that during the war that people had tree houses that they lived in—the shipyard workers. Tree houses?

42

they called it the war effort

I mean houses like kids that built houses in the trees! I literally mean that. A place to sleep is all they needed, and in some of the places they got lumber and actually built it in the trees. What was the view from naval headquarters here in Orange? They liked the ships that were being built here. The destroyers that they built in Orange were fine ships. They did a good job. That was a good ship [the Porter], but it had an unfortunate experience. One suicide plane hit it between the stacks and it was sunk. Of course, [with] as many ships as they were building they had a lot of naval personnel here, and the naval personnel who came in here would rather have been in San Diego or in Houston or Galveston or some larger place, because the recreation facilities were just not here for several thousand naval people. The way navy people look at a place is, “What is there for me to do when I’m not on duty?” And there wasn’t that much for ’em to do in Orange. I think that they thought that Orange had some nice people. They were friendly and they were nice, but the main thing was “I’d rather go back to San Diego or San Francisco or Newport News or some of the places that are bigger.”33 Was there a sense of pride that Orange was building this destroyer? Very much so. Very much so. From the time I enlisted in the navy—I didn’t have to go in the navy. I had a permanent deferment at Texas A&M because I was manager of the dining halls up there. In fact, I had to get permission from the chairman of the draft board [in Bryan] to enlist in the navy. But both of my brothers were in the service, and I said, I got to get in this war. And so when I went in the navy I wanted to get sea duty to start with, and so all the time when I got to Orange—well, I was ready. How did your family handle the stress of three boys in the military? My father was proud of us. My dad tried to get into the service in World War I, and my dad was hard of hearing. My dad lost his hearing when he was a young man, a teenager really, and he didn’t get into World War I, but he would have gone had he been in my place. And he expected us to be in the service. And I wanted to be in it. I felt like that anybody that wasn’t in it was missing something.



just home-cooked meals Mrs. H. P. ( Jewel) Force I came to Orange in 1918. I had two babies [and] we couldn’t find a place in this town to live. So, had all our furniture—we

This Is My Town

43

had cattle, we had everything in the world—chartered a boxcar and moved everything we had from DeRidder, Louisiana. Came to Orange. Had all that stuff down there and Mr. Force thought he had a house. Come to find out the people had a chance to sell the place, so they sold it and we didn’t have a place. And we stored our furniture and everything we had—we had some beautiful stuff—in a barn and it came a flood. I mean a flood! And we lost so much of our things. Oh, my! And all the livestock—he penned them up. We had cows and chickens. We had some hogs. All of our canned goods, everything, was put in a barn, and we lived in a little one-room—well, it wasn’t as large as this room. It was a barber shop at one time. But we stayed there until a house became available, which was about six months. And the mosquitoes—oh, I thought that we would just die! They said it was the worst siege of mosquitoes that had ever been known to be here. We had to stay in that place all the time. Everybody wearing screens over ’em, tied around ’em. It was real bad.34 They soon learned they had to make preparation for the people they knew were coming in here to work, so everybody got busy. The first thing we wanted to do was to find how many homes would be available—rooms and homes—for people to stay in when they got here. And they started making preparations immediately, because with the shipyard they knew that the town would really be overflowing—which it was in no time at all. I was appointed to oversee a survey of the town to find out what we had here. I appointed several in sections—divided the town—and had a person to each section to go out [and ask] what their accommodations could be to the people who were coming in town here. We had a pretty good size house, and the Chamber of Commerce asked me if I’d take some girls. There were so many girls, ladies coming in here. So I did. I had eight of ’em at one time. We enlarged our house and had eight more in the house. And then we built an apartment house in the back, in the yard, an efficiency apartment besides [the] two bedrooms [in the house], and we filled them up right now. Well, the poor things couldn’t walk to town to get food. They all didn’t have cars, and so I thought, “Well, I’ll feed the girls anyway. I’ll serve their meals.” Well, the boys wouldn’t stand for that, the menfolks that came in. They didn’t like that. They wanted to eat there, too. So I just had to get a cook and a maid and a yardman and went in business. Of course, it was working us night and day. They’d get up and they’d have to have lunches to take with them.

44

they called it the war effort

Well, Mr. Force and I’d get up at three o’clock a morning to fix all of those lunches—twenty-five or thirty lunches. We would get that all done [and] get them all a breakfast in time to get them off. And then at lunch—oh, that was something else. People wanted to come in and eat that didn’t live there. And it makes you feel sorry for ’em, ’cause they were pitiful, and the restaurants were just taking advantage of ’em ’cause they knew they were going to get their business anyway. It was a lot of work, but I had three people hired to work in the house. What did they like to eat? Just home-cooked meals. You had to have a balanced meal, and at breakfast there was bacon and eggs and hot biscuits and jams of all kinds. And at noon, usually I had to have ham all the time and vegetables and desserts. Just a balanced meal. Anyway, it was a lot of it. We served ’em about a year I guess, and then the teachers at high school had no place to eat, so they were coming over for their noon meals. See, I didn’t have the boarders at noon. I just had them morning and night. So we fixed a noon meal for the teachers from the high school, and I don’t know how many would come—all the way from twelve to eighteen.35 The ones that couldn’t get around the dining room served their plate and sat in the living room or wherever they could get and hurry back to school. Mr. Force said, “Boy, we sure made the money, but we sure did spend it back on ’em.” Gave it right back to ’em. We didn’t make a nickel. We just simply didn’t make anything out of ’em by the time you paid all your help and everything. Now, they were selected people—from the Chamber of Commerce. They had to go through them to get to my house. I did not have any drinking. I didn’t have any carousing or anything like that. I had to draw a line there. I never had any trouble collecting what they owed me except with one person, and he was a Russian. A Russian ship came in here about that time, so they needed a place. Well, I happened to have a vacancy, so I let him and his wife have the apartment that we built in the yard. When they got ready to leave they hadn’t paid me. Well, I cautioned him. I said, “I have to have my money.” And he said, “I’ll get your money to you.” I found out the ship was just about ready to pull out, so I called the captain. I told him the man’s name and how much he owed me and I wanted my money. And I mean to tell you he had that money out there in nothing flat. Every nickel of it.



45

This Is My Town

rough, working people Opal Furlong People were more cautious about going out at night. They didn’t feel as free as they did, because there were people everywhere. There were over 2,000 working right there at Levingston where I worked. We just didn’t want to be out at night. We wanted to stay in groups when we left in the wintertime when it was dark. I felt good about [going to work] for the simple reason that, as everybody knew, I wasn’t good at math. They couldn’t understand how I got the job. [I worked] in the payroll department at Levingston. I felt good about it, because I had always taught music and that’s the only thing I had ever done. But I wasn’t teaching at the time, and I decided I wanted to do something to help the country. A lot of my friends, so many of the teachers, quit and went to work in the shipyard. [A friend] went there one summer and worked in the office, and she taught music all of her life. So I really felt good about it. The people were nice to work with, but it was amazing. When you got out of work you wanted to get home and get away from the people that were coming from those shipyards, because they were from every walk of life and it wasn’t the type of people that you were used to being around. How would you describe them? Rough, working people. Like you would think in the coal mines and that were—lumberjacks. You know, rough. One of the most tragic things that the war caused—and the influx of people—when the war really did end and the people had to leave, it was sad because they had no way to leave. They had no money. They had spent everything they had. They didn’t have money enough to move, and it was tragic because there were hundreds and hundreds of people that made fabulous salaries, but they spent every bit of it. What did they spend it on? Well, I imagine partying and buying things that they couldn’t buy [before], I guess—that they weren’t used to. But I remember them talking about that, that so many of ’em—they didn’t even have money enough to leave town.



46

they called it the war effort

you’re rude and you’re ugly Mrs. Paul Gasow We had the good fortune of having lived here and [knowing] all the older families. I don’t think I was in town a week till four or five of ’em called on me, and that was in the days when the ladies brought their calling cards and wore their gloves, and you had to have the little silver tray out for them to present it. We had a lot of things that were distressful to us. We had a lot of people here, too, from California, and this used to just kill us. We were trying to be real nice to these people wherever they were from out there in California. What did they care about we Texas folks? We tried to have coffees and parties, and we’d invite ’em all, you know, and I will never forget this. There was this big coffee one morning, and they were just low rating Orange about the garbage. Garbage men didn’t do this the way it had been done out in L.A., in California, and they couldn’t find the food that they wanted in the store. They weren’t satisfied where they were living. They were just low rating everything. And this very well-to-do lady here [who] had lived here for many, many years—she was a perfect lady—and she said, “You know something,”— there were three or four and they were all from out in California—“I am so tired of you Californians low rating our little town when you knew that it was a small place when you came here. How in the world could you expect it to be like L.A., especially during the war? I am sick and tired of your griping.” Texas women dress. The majority of ’em know what to wear, and Orange has always been kind of famous for that. And she said, “You came here with old worn-out clothes and an old beat-up car that was five or six, seven years old, and you sit here and run [down] our little town.” And she said, “I want you to know that every doggone one of you’ve ruined this little town as far as I’m concerned.” And, honey, that shut ’em up. They sat there and she said, “I hate to say this to you all, but I think you’re rude and you’re ugly, and I think you just have your nerve, and the quicker you all just get your little bags packed and get back to California, we will love it.”36 And that ended that. They never said a word because we were right about it.



47

This Is My Town

seven different ways that you can leave orange Margie and A. F. Burns A. F.: I’ve seen during the war the telegraph office, right behind Abe’s store on Fifth [Street]—[that was] the way that the people get the news that their boys had been killed. [They] had to come there, and a lot of people would walk out there a-screaming and a-crying. I saw a man come out, throw his hat down, sit down and cry. Margie: I’ll tell you what it did to us. We were here—he worked for Piggly Wiggly [grocery store]—and they sent us to Lake Charles. We had to move over there, and every weekend we came to Orange. And the morning—we had just driven in the driveway when they said Pearl Harbor had been bombed. It was over the radio in the car, so I just thought it was going to last a few days. I think I turned to A. F. and I said, “Well, it won’t be over a couple of days that they’ll have that over with, won’t they?” Didn’t know it would last for years. A. F.: You didn’t take it—that it was true. You thought it was maybe a play or something like that. You couldn’t believe it. You thought it was a — Margie: A joke. A. F.: You couldn’t believe it, something like that. So out of place. People here got out some pamphlets. Typed up above was, “Orange, You Stink!” Well, Daddy [a reporter for the Orange Leader] got back at ’em, because he loved Orange. And if you could have read the article—he said, “You are not sent for. We were very happy when you weren’t here.” And said, “There’s so many ways you can leave.” And he started—airplane, the bus, and ended up with the word “sewer.” And it was something to read. Who got out the pamphlet? Margie: The people that moved in. Transients I guess you’d call ’em— shipyard followers. Housing was so short and you had to stand in lines to get everything, and so they had this little pamphlet printed about how Orange stunk. And so Granddaddy got it and [wrote] a piece in the paper about there’s seven different ways that you can leave Orange. He listed ’em, and the last was the sewer. What did the pamphlet say? Margie: Oh, how there was not anyplace to live, and they were having to sleep in their cars. See, it just boomed overnight, and they were running Orange down even though they were making big money and all. A. F.: You had to stand in line for everything. Whenever you saw a line

48

they called it the war effort

you’d get in it. And some of these people, like older people, couldn’t get in that line. [They] would do without. I’ll tell you another thing. A lot of pilfering [was] going on. Hard to make money. I had to train all my people—if here came someone—look up and say, “Hello.” That meant, “I’m glad you came in, and I do know you’re here, and I am going to keep my eye on you.” What would people steal? A. F.: Just anything. Something they could hide on their body. Lot of times, take long underwear and they’d tie it real tight. Cut a hole in your pocket, then a lot of ’em that had little stuff would put it in there and it’d drop on down. We caught one woman one time—had four pounds of lard between her legs. Margie: See, it came in cartons. A. F.: She dropped that lard, though. What happened, we had a boy here that was my assistant manager that would hide. And he saw that woman put that lard in there, and he come around there and said, “All right, squat and drop it!” Margie: She was walking real funny, I imagine. [Laughs] A.F.: A woman came in there one time and she got a basketful of groceries, and this boy saw her [leave without paying]. [I] went and got her and brought her back, and she got sassy. I said, “Wait a minute. We don’t have to take this sass. I can go to the phone and call the law and let them handle it.” “Oh, no! No! No! I’ll pay for it.” So he rang it up and I said, “Now, double it.” And we doubled it. “Oh, no! I won’t pay for it!” I said, “All right, better get the law.” She paid for it. Why did you want to double it? A. F.: Cause she’d been stealing before, and that helped pay for it. I didn’t feel bad about it at all. A lot of ’em got away with it. Did these years change you? Margie: Well, I guess it did. It seemed like you wasn’t as neighborly, I guess, as you would have been. And, of course, you feared everything, I think. Did you fear people more? Margie: Yeah. Definitely. A. F.: You just didn’t know ’em. We were used to calling everybody by their name. Margie: You didn’t have the friendly, family-type [relationships]. And I guess you miss the noise and all of the shipyards, the big air hammers and all. Well, even I miss that now. A. F.: I can remember there were a lot of whistles then, too. Margie: There was a lots of whistles. That’s one of the biggest things;

49

This Is My Town

you miss all of that noise. And see, that went on all night, too—and day.37 I think one of the things that we miss [worst] is the downtown. Orange is gone, the hustle bustle of the downtown. Like on Front Street, it would be just bumper-to-bumper with cars. Well, there’s not anything there now.



a transitional type family Susan I. Bailey [When the war broke out] I was gestating. [Laughs] I had been married the summer before that and I was expecting our first child, and I wasn’t doing much of anything. It was wintertime and [my husband] was trapping, but, of course, everybody had been kind of expecting war. There were already a lot of things going on—crowds and lines to stand in. I don’t know about lines before Pearl Harbor but very soon thereafter. I don’t like crowds or to be milled about by crowds. Maybe I’m impatient, but it sounded better when a doctor said you’re independent—is why you don’t want a crowd. That sounds better than saying you’re too impatient. I just don’t like big crowds and to be crowded on the sidewalk and in the town. I lived kind of an outdoor life and kind of out, and I didn’t really do that much in town. Another reason I didn’t go to Orange as much, because all my life when I went to Orange I knew everybody in the stores and in the courthouse and on the street, and then it got to where you didn’t know anybody and everybody was strangers. One of my brothers was shipped overseas, and he was killed in the service. He left a family, a wife and three little children. How did your family handle that? Well, you accepted it. It was not totally unexpected with what he was doing, island-hopping and fighting the Japanese. It was a shocking thing to happen, but my mother was always a strong person. We’re kind of a transitional type family, from the old pioneer people to the modern generation of people that kind of crossed the centuries. She was born in 1892, and you lived a hard life in those days and those things happened. Now, I don’t know that they lost any children in their family, but back then the family expected to lose half of their children to one thing and another, disease and whatever—in East Texas, anyway. If you go through some of the cemeteries in East Texas you’re—I don’t guess “shocked” is the word—but you’re appalled by all the little children in different families that are buried there from one to three years old. It hurt them I’m sure [when he was killed].

50

they called it the war effort



What was happening to women during that time? Well, the first thing, they started wearing pants. I guess we did wear pants some for outdoor activities and so forth, but the thing that sticks in my mind about that was [when] this woman was taken into court, and [the judge] read her the riot act about coming in there with pants on. I think she probably worked in the shipyards. He told her to go home and come back dressed suitable to the dignity of the court, and he thought pants were not dignified. And I guess they were having more freedom than they had before, too. When you have more responsibility you do have more freedom. They were having to work more and they were having to do more in the family—you know, take on the dual role of mother and father. I guess this is one thing that led to so much divorce—found out they could get along without ’em. They were going out and socializing more without their husbands and going to places by themselves. During that time you marked the happenings by either when the children were born or what was happening in the war. We have always been news junkies, I guess you’d say. We’ve always had a big curiosity, and it was important to know what was going on. During that time it was specifically important because my brother was overseas some of that time. You’d worry about it to some extent, and so you want to know what’s going on.



Most Orangeites responded to events in the early 1940s with ambivalence. Everyone, of course, was ecstatic about the community’s new and prominent shipbuilding role and the revitalized economy. Who could be unhappy about a multi-million dollar “glory train” that would speed the struggling town out of those gaunt depression years? But it was a rare citizen who welcomed war, and concern was expressed from the beginning about the downside of sudden and rampant growth. As the boom gathered momentum, the positive and negative consequences were soon visibly taking shape. The lingering effects of the Depression were certainly broken, and at both individual and community levels there was an infusion of new life. But there was a price to be paid. Limited resources were soon overwhelmed, and the natives found their simple lifestyle was gone— “gone with the wind,” as one local put it. Some, for sure, thought Orange was little more than comatose, anyway, so there was not that much to lose. But few could anticipate the turmoil and upheaval of the next few years. On the one hand there were all the physical and logistical problems associated with funneling large numbers of people into a restricted area: an acute housing crisis, impatient crowds, long lines, restless waiting, traffic, noise, shortages,

This Is My Town

51

as well as structural and landscape changes that marred the historic features of the city. Conflicts resulted from the sudden mix of unaccustomed attitudes and behaviors. And even though all of the changes were not necessarily perceived as bad, they were, nevertheless, different. There was also a psychological effect. Because Orange had traditionally been a rather closed society, there was a sense of proprietorship. It was the residents’ town—“my town.” Many old-timers, therefore, felt displaced as they became increasingly outnumbered in the swollen population. They were being pushed aside and newcomers were aggressively taking over what was perceived to be rightfully theirs, acting as though their presence in Orange granted them some special entitlement. As a consequence, resentment and defensiveness were not uncommon reactions to this intrusion on their status and control. Circumstances made many less trusting and more cautious, some even fearful. Not to be overlooked was the emotional impact of the war itself. Because Orange was so small, most natives had a more than passing acquaintance with area men and women overseas. All the activity and excitement could not mask the incessant dread that was never far from the surface. War was the ever-present shadow, and the shock of death resounded unsparingly through all old-town families. In Riverside and other new sections of town, grief was no less intense; it did not, however, take on the communal response found among the natives. To keep harmony between the old and the new was a delicate balancing act, and some maintain the distinction exists even today, many years later. But during the war, bitter invectives were not unknown in both camps: snobbery and clannishness versus “trash” and “scum.” Newcomers could be angry and critical, natives cold-shouldered and aloof. Nevertheless, there seemed to emerge common grounds of empathy, and many Orangeites recognized the plight of the newcomers who, in turn, could acknowledge the demise of a little corner of the Old South.

2

Coming to Orange “The most people that we saw . . . were all coming to Orange to try to get a job. What little bit they had was on that Model A or Chevrolet, or maybe it was in a homemade trailer.” A. P. ( Jack) Fuller “I didn’t want to come to Orange. No sir! . . . I’d made arrangements to stay in Nacogdoches, [but] I’s a twelve-year-ol’ boy talking. Daddy came in and said, ‘No, you’re not staying!’ We had a big fuss, but I come to Orange.” C. W. Waggoner “December 1941, I first came to Orange, shortly after Pearl Harbor day. I came down job-hunting. . . . The first morning I came to town, at four o’clock in the morning, we hit the Strand Restaurant, and the jukebox was playing ‘Milk Cow Blues.’ It was cold outside, but it was so warm inside the restaurant.” Russell L. King

T

hey were everywhere, these newcomers: in the schools, out in the yards, among the blacks, downtown. They were even slipping into the churches. And although naval officers and the managerial, supervisory types seem to have been welcomed, at least initially, without serious reservation, some of the working class encountered rather harsh receptions. “Orange was a little bit different than any other town I’d been in in East Texas,” Copeland Ward concluded, “and it was pretty much of a closed-society town. The old-timers in Orange had nothing to do with the war people. I mean, if you weren’t part of the ol’ bunch of Orange, don’t tread over in our area because you weren’t wanted in that area. So you were kind of looked down on.” 1 Newcomers could sense the chill. Expressions like “poor white trash,” “scum of the earth,” and “shipyard trash” were not unknown. What could a bunch of “country hicks” and “barefoot rednecks”

53

Coming to Orange

possibly know about building ships? Of course, there were also the “sophisticates,” those from urban parts of the country with their L.A.-bloated phone books and lifestyle a bit too liberated for the staid traditions of a southern community. The boomers, or “boomrats” as some called them, were there to get their share of the prosperity and then go back home or be off to other postwar parts as soon as possible. What did they care about this small town? Most workers were seen as temporary, so “drifters” was a popular tag—sometimes “suitcase guys.” New arrivals who chose to put down roots in the community might have sensed difficulty in establishing permanence. Even after being in Orange for several years, they were still transients: “To these old folks, we’re [still] just passing through.” Depending on who was using them, these epithets may or may not have been derogatory, but they did underscore the rural, deep East Texas-southwestern Louisiana origins of so many of the newcomers. They were “pea pickers,” “farm boys,” and “country boys.” Recruiters, Vernon Peveto noted with humor, “went up there [Shelby County] and advertised for 10,000 pea pickers to build ships. Then after the war was over they advertised for 10,000 shipbuilders to pick peas.” 2 George Craft had a cousin come down looking for a job, “a hayseed from way back. Papa said, ‘Boy, go get a haircut and some clean clothes and come back and I’ll give you a job.’” 3 After all was said and done, many, if not most, Orangeites would probably have agreed that the majority of these people were ordinary citizens—“just good country people.” Maybe some of them did need a haircut and clean clothes and decent shoes. But as one qualified observer remarked, “They’s pretty good, I thought. They got ships out.”4 And after all, that’s what it was all about.



i just thought it was the bright lights Laquata and Ellis Landry Laquata: We lived on a farm about twelve miles out in the country from Timpson [Texas]. We were real poor—poor-poor. I’ve eaten flour and water gravy with water biscuit for breakfast— or either fried potatoes. We didn’t have a icebox. Didn’t have a toilet. Just nothing. And trying to go to school and didn’t have a penny. Really, you wouldn’t believe this and you’ll probably think I’m lying, but didn’t even hardly have a penny to buy a pencil and a Big Chief book. I chopped cotton for twenty-five cents a day, and I wanted me a pair of high-heel shoes. I was about eleven, twelve, or

54

they called it the war effort thirteen I guess. I had to work all week, five days, to buy those ninety-eight cent shoes—which I did. I started high school, and I had one pair of drawers—well, two or three pair of flour-sack drawers—Light Crust or [Beulah’s] Best—with a drawstring. I’d bought one pair of panties that cost a dime, and I’d wear ’em and wash ’em out and wear ’em the next day. I had one pair of socks. I didn’t have a brassiere. Mother had made a band that would hold the breasts down—not hold ’em up—and we pinned it with two big pins and then had straps on it. We thought it served the purpose. I played basketball when I was going to high school. [Since] we didn’t have brassieres, the breasts were bopping up and down and would rub [and] make our breasts sore. And you wouldn’t believe it, the nipples would be raw. We’d have to put Vick salve or something on ’em, ’cause the basketball uniforms were gabardine. Finally, I think about the ninth or tenth grade they did come out with some brassieres. I think they was about fifteen cents. Maybe a quarter. I did manage around to clean [a house], and she paid me a dollar a week. And I did get me a bra, but that wasn’t up till about the ninth grade. Well, we didn’t have any shampoo and no makeup. We’d use [moistened red] crepe paper, and we’d use flour for face powder. Now, this was like in the eighth grade. And I had to wear overalls. No deodorant. We just scrubbed with lye soap. We could put vanilla extract on, but mostly it was lye soap. We’d take vanilla extract and we’d put it under our arms—or either alcohol. We washed our hair with that lye soap, or maybe we might accidentally in Timpson—in the showers—wash it with bar soap that the school furnished. We would take a pencil and roll [our hair]—or either we would take a big spike nail. We had lamps burnt with coal oil, and we’d put this nail up on top of this lamp and let it get hot. Then we’d have us an ol’ rag holding it, and we’d roll our hair and that nail will curl and frizz that hair. So that made our curls around our face. And then the pencil, we rolled it and we had bobby pins. I don’t know how we got the bobby pins. Evidently, they must not have been over two or three cents a pack. Now, the first perm that I ever got I guess I must have been about fifteen or sixteen, and it was a Shirley Temple when she came out with a Shirley Temple perm. It was the whole amount of fifty-nine cents. Fifty-nine cents, and I got one. My God, I

Coming to Orange

55

don’t know how I got fifty-nine cents. I guess maybe that was one of the dollars I’d worked for. We never got bread. We had canned food, but we didn’t have any meat or anything to go with it. Then we had the ol’ homecooked lard which nowadays would be [high] cholesterol. I don’t know why they all didn’t die back in them days. A hot dog was a nickel and a cold drink was a nickel, and we couldn’t even afford a dime for us to eat, so I’d have to do without dinner. Well, we’d eat breakfast, catch the bus, and we wouldn’t get anything to eat till we got back that afternoon. Now, that’s not just me. It was everybody out in that community. A lot of ’em carried biscuit and scrambled egg or a biscuit and syrup, but now I didn’t. I had too much pride. Ellis: I was security guard at Consolidated [when the war broke out]. During my professional life I was a boxer. Laquata: Daddy, I believe you went to work in 1942. Really, he worked driving [a] truck and then worked in the shipyard. Then he decided that he’d enlist. I was just a young girl chopping cotton, picking cotton, and going to school. We’s just listening to the radio [when] the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. My uncle was sitting on the floor when they attacked it, and he hollered, “Oh, my God, the Japanese just attacked Pearl Harbor!” Then everybody just went hysterics, and my dad went up to Mount Enterprise to school for about six weeks. He had a choice to come to Orange or go to Houston, so he chose Orange. He came to Orange in April of 1942, and then we moved down May 18, 1942. I was seventeen and a half. I thought we was going to where they had to pick oranges.5 [Laughs] Pick oranges! Oh, my gosh! We didn’t know what in the world was going on. [When we got here], oh, my God, I just thought it was the bright lights. It was just amazing because it was just people all over the place—and it was money. We’d had the Great Depression. My God, we got down here and went to work [and] got something to eat. Well—oh, God, it was just something. I mean it was just fantastic. Daddy went to work in the shipyard. My brother wouldn’t go to school. He was about thirteen or fourteen, and at that time they had a welding school. So [he] went to school there [and] went to work in the shipyard when he was sixteen. I worked in a restaurant and then I went to work in the shipyard. When Mother [first] came down she had to stay for a week right there at the Fourth Street docks, and she had to stay in the car. She had to live in the car ’cause they couldn’t find a place to stay. My sister was five. They’d

56

they called it the war effort

just walk around town and all [and] go to the bathroom there in town. Mother would go to some of the restaurants and clean my sister up and all this bit, and they’d eat. Then when Dad would get off they’d go try to hunt a place to live. Finally, on Friday they found two rooms. Two rooms, and we all bunked up in that room. There was five of us in two rooms. Had an outdoor toilet. We stayed back at our home up in Timpson until they came back. They got the house and came back on Sunday, and then we packed up on Monday and brought our little [possessions] in a bag back in a pickup truck. They had a restaurant in Timpson, and we wouldn’t even go in the restaurant because we were so dumb and ignorant. We didn’t know what to do and how to act. If a boy offered to buy us a cold drink, well, we were so shy and timid we wouldn’t even drink. We really didn’t know how to sit down in a restaurant, so we always just evaded the restaurant part. And then when we moved to Orange we stopped in Jasper, and we had to have something to eat because it’d been a long drive. And we didn’t know how to act—not even my mom. All she could say [was], “Well, I guess you can just give us some hamburgers.” We didn’t know to order with mayonnaise or mustard. You were excited about coming, weren’t you? Laquata: Oh, yes sir! Yes sir! No place to go. We didn’t know anything and hadn’t been to a picture show. “Ohh,” [Mother] said, “Laquata, you’re gonna enjoy it. We’re gonna have something to eat. We’re gonna have some clothes and won’t have to go barefooted.” Said, “I’ll have some shoes to wear,” ’cause I’d give her my shoes. When they’d buy me a pair of shoes, well, she’d have to take mine. Well heck, we didn’t have shoes until we was grown. Oh, she was just so happy and said, “Maybe you kids can have something. Maybe you can go to school. Maybe we can have good beds to sleep on. Won’t have to pick cotton, chop cotton, and milk cows.” We’d just get off the farm. Just get away. So they found a two-room apartment. Laquata: One room and one little old bitty room. It was one room that had two beds in it and a chest of drawers and a mirror. Then in the other room it had a bed and a coal-oil stove. [We] washed dishes in a dishpan and had a dining table with two or three chairs. Had the outdoor toilet, and we had to get a tub, fill it up with water and put hot water in it and take a bath. So we had to do that even after we came to Orange. Well, we’d done that prior. My God, we had to draw water out of the well and put it in the outside tub to take a bath out in the country. So that wasn’t anything unusual. Then Daddy was one of the first that got a house in Riverside in 1943, and my GOD have mercy, we’d moved up like Mrs. Stark! We had a

Coming to Orange

57

bathroom and shower and had a stove and an icebox and three bedrooms, and, ohh, Lord, it was just something. You could just find a job anywhere you wanted, but we didn’t know what to do. I went to work in a restaurant for the whole amount of two dollars per day, and when I got my first check, my God, it must have been about fourteen, fifteen dollars. I’d get a quarter or a tip—it was a nickel for the jukebox. Well, Lord, we’d never seen jukeboxes. I took my tip money and I’d put it in there and listen to that music, ’cause we was all music lovers. I began to buy me some clothes. I didn’t really know how to go into a store and buy clothes, because they was hanging on racks and all this bit. Mother had always made ours. We would window-shop, because we’d never seen the articles. Like the jewelry store, you looked at the watches and the rings, and you’d just drool. Or you looked in the windows at the shoes and dresses and lingerie, and you just drooled and drooled. But then in daytime we felt embarrassed to go in because we didn’t know what to ask for or what size. We didn’t know what [size] our shoes were ’cause we just wore shoes that was handed down from somebody. I’ve seen times that I didn’t have a pair of shoes—and I was about fifteen years old. One time I made my mind up I was going to buy me a watch, and I think it was about fourteen dollars. I went in and got so excited [I] went off and left it. They had to holler at me to come back and get my watch. What did you do with your first paycheck? Laquata: I think it was mostly what I did for the personal hygiene. I think I spent that whole check for toothpaste, toothbrushes, deodorant— now, we had gotten deodorant but I wanted my own—and a little makeup. I think I got me a little face powder and maybe some rouge and lipstick and shampoo. And then my second one was spent on my lingerie. Oh, I know one time, about my second or third payday, I went and bought me two bras where I could have a change, and then I bought about three pairs of panties that first time. And then the next time I bought three more, and that gave me six pair. Were you dating? Laquata: I met Landry before he went in the service. We met about ’43. I was waitressing. He came in to get coffee and all this kind of bit. Ellis: Every time I’d go to eat she’d fool with my plate. She’d take my plate and push it and I’d pull it back. Laquata: The only way we had to go was in [an] old dump truck. One time he was driving, [and] he pulled the wrong lever and the bed flew up. Scared the hell out of me. I said, “Ohh, my God!” [But] he was a little firecracker. He was just real feisty, and, well, he was pretty durn good-looking. And being a coonass—I never had seen a coonass or heard of a coonass.

58

they called it the war effort

So really, I didn’t know how to take him, ’cause I knew he didn’t talk like I did. And I knew he ate rice and gravy, and I didn’t eat rice and gravy. We had rice for breakfast, for cereal, you know. And that was one of our things with coming to Orange, our eating habits [changed]. We wasn’t used to eating like they did, and you wouldn’t believe 150 miles made that much difference either. Lord have mercy—rice! Mother cooked it real mushy and we’d have it for breakfast with sugar and cream on it—and make rice puddings and all this bit. We didn’t have rice all that often, and down here, well, there was rice every day. Rice and beans and gravy. Well, we had beans and corn bread. We didn’t have rice and beans. We had fried chicken. We didn’t know nothin’ about no gumbo and sauce piquant and Creole and all this business. Sure hadn’t seen no shrimp or crab. I didn’t know what in the world a crab was. So we had to cultivate a taste for the food. He went on over to the South Pacific and got wounded. The Japs kept him for nine months, and I didn’t hear from him. All the time I worked. And one day he walked in. He weighed about eighty-nine pounds and he was on crutches. He’d been in prison camp, and they beat him up and broke him all up. So he got the discharge September 21, 1945, and we got married November 24, 1945. How were you handling this separation? Laquata: Well, I just worked. We went to work in the shipyard. [I was a] material expediter. We checked out materials for all the ways. So we all worked and all, and I had just quit the shipyard and went to work at the Bengal [Cafe] when he came back. Now, it was mostly women that were working in the shipyard, because most of the men were gone. They had elderly women that was old—I mean forty- or fifty-year-[olds] that was working in the shipyard. Did you have any problems with the men? Laquata: No. No no. No no. No no. It was none or no hassle. No, none of that bit, because everybody had somebody that was in the service. Everybody worked to get the ships and all built and for the war to be over and all the loved ones to come home, because, boy, it was really rough. You tried to sleep and rest, and back then we had one little ol’ fan. Poor Daddy, we’d steal the fan from Daddy, and he’d get up and raise hell and steal it back.6 You’d just burn up. It was so hot, and the humidity—you were just drained. Well, you didn’t go nowhere. You didn’t have no way to go. And so really, it was just work and go home and try to sleep. Like I say, it was a big change. To have food and to have clothes—it just changed everything. It’s just like [from] rags to riches. We thought we had just as much as Mr. Brown and Stark had. It made a different change in all of our lives.

59

Coming to Orange



they never felt the need of psychoanalysis Mrs. G. P. (Lorena) Padgett It was really, really a pretty thing. It was just as pretty as could be, and way ahead of its time. The walls were paneled in light birch and had a real nice finish. In one end there was a couch that made a bed, and there were two closets that the doors opened up and made two rooms. The closets had mirrored doors so that you got the effect of twice the size of your living area. The other end of the trailer had the cooking facilities with the typical two small couches that dropped down and made another bed, which was my children’s bed. My husband worked a great deal then on the night shift. That was kind of bad because that trailer was so little, and no luxury of an air conditioner—not even a fan. I stayed outside a great deal of the time in order to be able to tolerate it. And if he was asleep in there I had nowhere to go—period! So I stayed outside. I had a big awning on the trailer and my yard was always full of children. They thought the trailer was a plaything and they congregated there. They hollered and hooped. In the early part of 1941 I was living in Liberty, Texas. I came here in 1943. We were operating a neighborhood grocery store and practically starving to death. I had two boys—preschoolers. What brought you to Orange? Employment and to live during the war years, but we didn’t expect to be here more than about six months. We thought the war would be over. We didn’t dream that it would go on as long as it did. My husband was an outside machinist, and he went to work at the old Consolidated shipbuilding yard. Housing was null and void, really. There was nothing here. He had an injury to his head that necessitated his being off work for a few days, and he went into Houston and bought a travel trailer—we’d call it that now—and that’s what we moved to Orange in. Living accommodations here—they just were not. He had come ahead of me. [We] bought the trailer because we could not see anyway to live here otherwise, and he couldn’t abide the way he was living. He lived in a dormitory and a rooming house, and I believe that he said that when one shift left another shift took that bed. He just didn’t like

60

they called it the war effort

the idea of crawling in the bed right behind someone else. So we stayed three and a half years in a little tiny trailer and were so glad to have it. Had you been down to look for housing? Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho. [Laughs] I had been here. I cried and I cried. For some reason he had to go to the Consolidated office while he was off with this injured head, and he brought me over here to see what I could find. He parked up near the entrance, and there were two or three ladies with abbreviated costumes out there. I sat and looked, and they were brazenly on the street. I thought, “God, I’m going to bring my children to this?” And I sat there in the car and cried. I didn’t let him see me, and I put the kids out and let them play. They didn’t see me, but I surely was disappointed. But it wasn’t like that at all. The people that were here, that had lived here all their lives, were by nature just a real friendly type of people. Those that were like me—that were brought in here—they were lost and hunting people to know. And they were friendly. I just had never lived around people like this. I just thought they were marvelous. Oh, I loved it! I absolutely loved it. I could have lived down on the river bottom and still had a good time, but the people in this part of the country are much more friendly than they are anywhere else. I have always been a person that—I would stand and talk to a fence post if it’ll stand there long enough. By the time we had the trailer I was trying to find a place to park it without taking it into a trailer court. I wanted my family with a little more privacy than that. I met the family that owned a little grocery store and service station. I’d gone in there to ask if they knew anyone that had any vacant property that they would allow a trailer to park on. This lady said yes, and she let me talk to her daughter-in-law. I traded them an adding machine for six months’ rent. You can’t believe the unusual things that happened. My husband parked his car with the car going west, and when he came out of the shipyard around midnight the car was in the exact same spot and turned around and headed east.7 The parking lots were free and we parked hodgepodge. However you could. If you went to a movie or if you parked your car and went shopping, when you returned it was penned in, and you were there with two or three squalling kids. Naturally, when you went to town you took two or three other neighbors with you, and so we learned very quickly to grab those cars just like those men did and start bouncing ’em, and we could bounce ’em till we could get an inch or two and we could get ’em out. Did your husband talk about his work? Yes he did. But that, I’m afraid, is an off subject. [Laughs] He came in every night and told me some of the funniest things. There were some really, some really funny things that happened down there. That was where

Coming to Orange

61

he met up and worked with his first women—that was Rosie the Riveter and all that. That was our first time to ever have any dealings with anything in that line. I suppose that it might have been the beginning of this women’s liberation thing. They saw that they could get out and do those things. I still really and truly don’t think that women should work in some areas. I don’t think I thought anything at all about women working in there during the war. I don’t think that I felt that way about those women, but in today’s world I do. There are certain areas that women don’t belong. I don’t think God made us as men and women [without a reason]. I think there’s a difference in us and we should allow for those things. What about stresses? We never even knew about it. I don’t think that anyone felt that they were under extreme stress here during the war. We didn’t know that we were privileged enough to have stress and all that stuff then. Really and truly, the people that came in here were a hearty group of people. They were off of the farms. They were even construction workers who were not used to the luxuries. They were used to hard work, and they never felt the need of psychoanalysis. They just puddled right on through and made it. I was visiting a house out on Highway 90 when either Germany or Japan—it must have been Japan that fell. The traffic on old Highway 90 was going by. They were riding bumper to bumper with all their worldly possessions tied on and dragging behind. They were going back to those hills where they [had come from]. And I still visit two or three of those families that lived up around Tyler. I met them during the war, and they said then they couldn’t go home often enough. They just simply had to touch base back up there. Did those years influence you as a person? Well, if anything, the people that I met here taught me a little better way of life I think—I really and truly do. I think the people that were natives of Orange had a nice, sophisticated way of living, and I liked that, too. You learn from everyone. Even the people that were transplanted in here were people of all walks of life. We had a little breakfast club. Some of us didn’t have the opportunity to meet as many people as others did, and one day someone had invited me to a breakfast club. There was a lady from somewhere in one of the northern states, and her husband worked at Consolidated. She told me he came in and told her that he hoped before this damn war was over that he found out where “over yonder” was. He said, “If you ask one of these people where something is he’ll say, ‘It’s right over yonder.’ Well, it may be three feet. You can ask another one and [he’ll say], ‘Oh, it’s over yonder.’ It may be four hundred feet.”

62

they called it the war effort

I’ll tell you this, my age people were used to the Depression, and when we came here it was almost like we were back in the Depression—other than having some money that we couldn’t spend. We had been used to doing without when we were young—and not just me. I think everyone felt this way, and I think that a great deal of the condition of the world today is due to the Depression children who had to do without. They said if they ever got a dime they would see that their children didn’t have to do without, and they have seen that their children didn’t do without. And now those children are expecting the moon. I really and truly believe that. I think that we were so destitute for anything that was nice or luxurious. We didn’t have it.



cut their hair and dodge their mother Tom Cockrell Back there when I was a boy I’d go with ’em from church at Christmas times to different places and help deliver packages to needy families. I’d see little boys sticking their head around behind a door a-needing a haircut. I’d say to myself, “I never cut any hair in my life but I could make that look better.” Then, when I was twelve years old I got me some hand clippers, comb, shears, and duster from Sears and Roebuck, and I’d take little boys out behind the smokehouse and behind the barn. I’d clip their heads and cut their hair and dodge their mother. It was right funny. Used to I’d give little boys fifteen cents or a dime or a nigger-shooter or something to let me clip their heads all off—all of it off! That was in 1925, before the barber law was ever passed in Texas. I went in the thirties to the barber school over in Fort Worth. I wrote the state barber board and got the approved schools and addresses of all of ’em in Texas, and I finally decided on one in Fort Worth. You paid $125 for a course. That included tools, textbook, and you draw half commission when you got in the pay department—but it didn’t include no electric clippers. So I saved up money, and I left at a highway to my hometown to go out there. I highwayed it out there. Now, there’s buses and trains that went out there, but I knew I couldn’t pay that and come out with paying the other. Money was scarce, and my wife and two children stayed back there. I got out to Fort Worth [and] I paid for my course and paid a dollar to be examined by a doctor. Then I paid five dollars for a week’s room and board in a nice brick home—three meals a day. I had three dollars left. That’s all

Coming to Orange

63

I had left. There wasn’t a-going to be any more a-sent to me next week or nothing. You started in the free department. You know, the instructor’ll first teach you the principles of honing and stropping a razor. A customer’ll come and he’ll work on him, then he turns it over to you. They’d come in, and some of ’em that’s been sleeping in them alleys and drinking bay rum and stuff hadn’t had a haircut and a shave and a bath in maybe six months. I lost fifteen pounds of weight the first week I was in the school. I’d work on them in that free department, and I just couldn’t eat when it’d come time to eat. You think about losing fifteen pounds of weight—me strong and healthy, in my early twenties. But before I came to Orange I had a barbershop there in Joaquin [Texas]. Haircuts was twenty-five cents and shaves twenty. I had planned to run for sheriff up in Shelby County, and I had already announced when we went in war December 7, 1941. I offered my service, but they wouldn’t a-taken a man like me with a wife and two children. But there was three of us in that race. One of ’em was forty-two and the other’n was my age. I was twenty-eight. This other’n had to go for services, and it just left the [older] fellow and I. And lots of homes I’d go to when I’d be campaigning, there’d be some of ’em start crying, saying, “I had a big boy like you that got killed in the service,” or “I had a big boy like you that got wounded in service,” and I lacked only thirty something votes of beating it. Lots of ’em wanted me to go back to the barbershop after I’d lost my race, but I’d prayed about it and I had my head set to come to Orange. I had some friends that had come down here and gone to work. I came here in 1942. I worked long hours and went to school. I was studying all that about how to operate and run them ships and things. I’d go on at eleven at night with my navy job, and I’d go till seven in the morning. Then I’d come in and clean up and take a nap and go to the hotel barbershop and barber till closing time. [Once] when I worked my twelve hours they didn’t have no one to relieve me. Then I went over twelve more hours, and then it was my shift and they didn’t have no one to relieve me. I went thirty-six hours one time out there a-working during World War II. What was the mood of people who came in for haircuts? Some of ’em were [happy], and some of ’em was down-and-out or be telling some pretty bad news. Some of ’em would have drinking habits, and some of ’em would have trouble with their wives leaving ’em. Some of ’em was on the payroll and doing everything they could to get by without working. I’ve had foremens to tell me that he had some a-working for them that didn’t do enough work to pay for the salt that went in their bread. I told ’em, “I’s brought up on a farm and we used to hire ’em to pick cotton,

64

they called it the war effort

and if they didn’t pick any cotton they didn’t get any pay. If they didn’t chop any cotton they didn’t get any pay.” When I had a barbershop there in Joaquin, I’ve had ’em to come by there that didn’t have the money. I couldn’t turn ’em down. They used to want to swap me beans, peas, and potaters for a haircut, and I had that at the house. Well, I’d go ahead and swap with ’em. Then another friend’d come along that didn’t have nothing like that, and I’d say, “Well, take it with you.” And I’ve seen ’em come by a-selling cantaloupes. A bushel of ’em for fifty cents. A bushel of peaches fifty cents. One time one came along one day a-selling watermelons, great big watermelons, a dozen of ’em for a dollar, and if you wasn’t a-looking close they’d put in some more to get rid of ’em. Sometimes when they’d be going to take one of them ships out on a trial run, some of them boys that I worked with would come by my room there at the barracks, and a lot of times I’d say, “Well, we better have a little prayer ’fore we go out like that.” A lot of times when we’d take a ship out it’d be rough and bad—do everything look like but maybe turn it over. They’d run by the fire room or engine room where I was working and say, “Did you think to pray for us ’fore we went out?” I said, “I sure did.” I knew it was dangerous and everything, [but] I’d always talk to the Lord about it. You know where it says; “I’ll go with you always, even unto the end. I’ll never leave you and I’ll never forsake you.” And then I’d think about where it says, “I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.” I worked with a fellow back during World War II that was bad to drink and gamble, and he’d go across the river—and some of ’em went over there and didn’t come back. I told him one day, I says, “You’re going over there sometime and you’re not a-gonna come back.” We got off from work one Saturday morning—we got off at seven then—and about the time we got off we found out that this fellow got killed over there across the river. Then I was a pallbearer at his funeral. There was more that I told, “You’re going to get in trouble going over there.” Ohh, I tell you, some of ’em would get their paydays, and sometimes their wife would go down and get their paydays, ’cause if [the men] got it they knew they wouldn’t [bring it home].8 One feller was bad to drink and gamble and got out one night, and I forget how much he told me he lost. Said his wife found out about how much he lost, and the next morning she fixed him the nicest breakfast. Then he up and told what he’d lost. She says, “Oh, that’s all right. We couldn’t a’used that money for nothing else.” He said he bet they could a’used it for a hundred things or more, and you know, he said that broke him right there. Do you think those war years caused people to have more problems than normal?

65

Coming to Orange

Well, it might have with some of ’em, but now some of ’em’s gonna have problems no matter what comes and goes. I remember when I was in the barber school and this lady came in for a haircut. The instructor wasn’t around very close, and this student there said, “Yeah, he could cut her hair.” She got in his chair, and he says, “How do you want it cut?” She said, “About to the tips of my ears.” She meant the bottom part, tips of the ears. Well, he went ahead and made a mistake and cut it at the top part of her ears. That was the funniest looking woman, I tell you right now. There was a lady that came in that was a-drinking in the hotel barbershop one day and got her hair cut. She got up and looked in the mirror— the other barber’s the one that cut her hair—and she looked in the mirror and went out there and jumped in the river. One of the navy boys saved her life, and he was a-wanting a medal for saving her. He said that he thought he was entitled to a medal for saving her life. Did those years change you? No, I just kept a-going to church and kept a-living close to the Lord.



people at the trailer court Mary Martell We did not come to Orange until May of 1943. [Bob] was the first man on a certain project in Riverside. We were living in a house trailer at that time and we could not find a place to park our trailer. There were two trailer courts in Orange, and one would not take anybody that had children and another one didn’t have room. We were driving around and stopped at the Monroe Colburn home. They had a nice backyard with a tree, and Bob explained the situation to ’em. They were just lovely to us, and they let us park there. We had stopped at two or three other places and they were not interested, but I guess [the Colburns] felt sorry for us. I was expecting a child, and we had two little children and then the trailer. And I think they probably had a great community spirit because Mr. Colburn had been mayor of Orange. So they let us park there, which was certainly not convenient for them because we had to go in their house to use the bathroom facilities. At that time the trailers were not equipped with bathrooms. There were about twelve of the key [construction] personnel that traveled in the trailers, and he knew he had to find a spot [for them, too]. So he found a vacant lot out behind the ABC Store. He talked to [the owner]

66

they called it the war effort

and he agreed to rent the space. [Bob] was doing the foundation work for the job out in Riverside, and then he would come in and bring the crew. Each night they would work. So we stayed in the Coburns’ yard about three weeks, and by that time he had the bathhouse and some lines run. By the time the other trailers came in we were ready for them. But just overnight that thing filled up, and there were sixty-five trailers there—just overnight almost. Somebody’d come in—of course, Bob was at work—and I’d say, well, park so-and-so, and that night he’d come in and run the electric line to their trailer. I can’t say that people were ugly to us at all. I just thought the people were always wonderful. We were real fortunate. We would see the trucks come in at the ABC Store with the sugar and the Cokes, and so we were never without. We put sixty-five trailers right in their backyard like in a three-weeks’ time. Of course, they didn’t need the business ’cause they had all they needed, but it was very convenient and they were really nice to us. They didn’t treat us like outsiders. I can’t say that anybody ever did. How did people seem to get along in the trailer court? Real well. Real well. I don’t ever remember having to call the police. It was just like a big family. The people kind of banded together and helped each other. I think as a whole everybody was very conscious of the need to band together and stick together. I think we all felt that we were sort of strangers in town and needed to be friends with each other because we were living close, and it was like you would want to be with a close neighbor. We had a real good spirit out at the trailer court. There was one family that had about eight children that was living in a trailer there. How they lived in it I’ll never know, and [she] took charge of the washhouse. She would love to help people wash. You’d go sign up for your washing hours at the washhouse, and it was like fifty cents an hour. And those kids would baby-sit and didn’t think of charging people. It was just kind of like commune living, I guess. Somebody’d come back from the ABC Store and they’d say the sugar’s in, and everybody’d run get sugar—or the Crisco’s in. It just happened that we didn’t get any bad people. Did you screen people? No, we just didn’t have the heart to turn ’em down. There was no way you could screen ’em anyway, because they were all strangers. But most people that were living in a trailer with children we felt would be decent people, because we felt like if the man wanted to bring his family that he was pretty decent. I never remember us having any arguments. You would’ve thought that there might have been some disagreement about the washhouse, because you can imagine sixty-five families needing to wash

67

Coming to Orange

and signing up. We had another woman who was good about gathering up the children and then taking ’em to Sunday school. And she would ask you your preference. I mean she was willing to just cart ’em to their different Sunday schools. Were you aware of any kind of class structure? I had heard about it and they talked about it a lot at the ABC Store, but now, really and truly, I don’t have any feeling that I never was accepted or anything like that. I really don’t. The grocery people that had lived in Orange always said that they were accused of that. I heard ’em say it many a time. Now, they treated, I thought, all of our people at the trailer court with—they never turned ’em down to wait on ’em or things like that. I’ve heard people say that you’d go in the store and you wouldn’t get waited on. We only had the one telephone there in the office, and if they’d get sick—and bless Dr. Pearce’s heart, that was when they made house calls. And as busy as he was I don’t know how he did [it], but I’d call Dr. Pearce and he never said can they pay or I don’t know these people. He never refused. He would come. He would always say, “I don’t know what time I’ll get there, but I’ll be there.”—That’s in case they thought the children were too sick to take ’em. Of course, if they could they’d go sit in the office maybe for half a day. He was worked to death, but he never refused to come. That’s why I can’t see how anybody could say that the people were mistreated. I thought it was real nice that most of the people felt a need to let people come into their homes and rent ’em a room. I know that was not convenient for the homeowners. So I think that showed that the Orange people truly had a good spirit about ’em to share their home, to be willing to let strangers that they didn’t even know come in and share their home. That’s the way I felt about the Colburns. I’ll always be grateful for them. They didn’t share their home, but we had to use their bathroom facilities and that certainly invaded on their privacy.



does that tell you anything? Inez and Joe Runnels Joe: The [Texas] Department of Public Safety sent me up here because everybody was going in the army, and I moved my family here so they’d be with my folks. I went to the army from Orange. I was in Orange about a year in between—just eight months. My dad had a store here for several

68

they called it the war effort

years. It was just a little, small store like these drive-ins now except it was even smaller than that. But it was the busiest place you ever saw. Inez: People would line up for hours to buy milk. Joe: I remember when he got cigarettes or Cokes or something, well, they’d just tear his store down to get to buy it. Inez: When we came here people were sleeping in their cars, families living in their automobiles, and there were no houses. Really, I was just real, real young. Joe: Well, tell him how old you was. Inez: [Laughs] About nineteen. I had three babies by that time. We ran off and got married when I was fifteen and he was twenty. How did you deal with the apprehension of his leaving? Inez: You stayed worried all the time. I mean you’re worried because you don’t know if your husband’s all right or not. You’re worried because most the time you don’t even know where he is. When you get the mail from him it’s been censored until part of it’s there and part of it isn’t. This upsets you very much. I had one four and one fourteen months and a newborn baby, and he left when she was eight days old. Joe: It wasn’t no worse on us than it was everybody else. Inez: I was very young, and I could cope with things better at that age than I probably could now. How did you handle the separation? Inez: [Sighs] Lonely. I had an apartment that was built next to his parents’ store, and I spent a lot of time helping them in the store. And you stay pretty busy with three babies. I tried to write [him] every week—sometimes more. I should have written him every day, but I at least got from one to two letters a week off. I know that I’ve talked to women that said every night before they’d go to bed they’d sit down and write their husband a letter. I said, “How many children did you have?” They said, “None.” What were you doing for a social life? Inez: We didn’t have any—literally! Read. I did handwork and I would read when I had time. Well, I’ll tell you, I guess you could say I pray a lot and I read my Bible and I study, and this helped tremendously. After he left I spent most of my time there at the store or in taking care of the babies. We had a washing machine, but it was one of those that had tubs sitting around it. I had two babies in diapers and many, many times I hung out a hundred diapers. Does that tell you anything? We hung ’em on the clothesline in the back, and there was many rows of ’em. Life wasn’t as easy then for women as it is now. We didn’t have the convenience that people have, [but] I was sure glad to have that Maytag washing machine

69

Coming to Orange

with that wringer on it that you run those diapers through. It’s better than a rubboard.



Tension in Orange between new arrivals and settled residents was widely acknowledged. It was something experienced by children as well as adults, and in all situations: in the neighborhoods, in social gatherings, in the schools, in places of business, in the shipyards, in the churches. It could even exist at the family level between established families and incoming relations. Strained relations, of course, were not unknown within established families or between long-time neighbors well before the war, but clashes between old and new were common in wartime boomtowns. The newcomers represented a diversity of backgrounds and types, but two groups among them left a lasting impression. The shipyard officials and ranking naval officers from urban areas were among the first to arrive. They were the individuals who were comfortable attending the big downtown churches, enjoying sherry parties, and pleased to get their names in the paper. They were also the ones appointed to various regulatory boards. For many of these individuals Orange was country and backward, and they had to adjust to a lifestyle without finer restaurants and shops, convenient public transportation, and modern garbage disposal. They were a class of people that might include Phi Beta Kappas having a worldview unfamiliar to most Orangeites. It was not unusual for some of these individuals to be unhappy about their stay in Orange and to be outspoken in their criticism of the city. Nor did they seem to know when to cork their complaining. The majority of new arrivals, however, came from rural, working-class backgrounds. Many looked and acted rough, but some were sensitive as to how they were perceived by the community. They knew that their education was limited and that many of their ways were country. Their children did not wear argyle knee socks. Until they could get into one of the projects, they were prepared to use a tablecloth for a tent, sleep in the most unlikely of spots, or endure just about any discomfort. To these workers and their families, Orange was big time—New York City. One approach to understanding how a person adjusts in life is to look at the number of life changes, both positive and negative, that person has experienced in a given period of time. These changes might be expressed in terms of “life-change units,” but the basic idea is that a larger number of changes (or units) will be associated with an increased likelihood of adjustment difficulties.9

70

they called it the war effort

Although both groups of arrivals experienced change and readjustment, it was those from the working class who attracted more public and official attention. This was due in large measure, no doubt, to their numbers. Close living conditions, lack of privacy, unfamiliarity with modern conveniences, separation from family, money management concerns, worldly enticements, conflicting lifestyles, new relationships, the nature of the work—individually and cumulatively these changes placed great pressure on a person’s ability to adjust. But most of these newcomers had known hard times. And even though it might be a source of some dissatisfaction and risk to health, the work and the money it generated made them persevere. It should be noted that native Orangeites also experienced significant change, but they benefited from certain stabilizers not available to the new arrivals. They continued to live in their homes and often carried on traditional roles surrounded by networks of family, friends, and familiar institutions. Natives had established niches and contacts, whether it was at the grocery store, draft board, or ice plant, and they enjoyed more of a sense of permanency. Despite their differences, however, old and new shared much in common. Their backgrounds and roots, in many respects, were not that dissimilar. They were patriotic. They worked hard and were proud of their contribution to the war effort. Both groups respected basic, time-honored values, and these included a concern for and a commitment to their children.

3

Children at a Unique Time “To this day that’s where I want to retire—in that area. I loved the river, and I love that ol’ smell down there. There’s a gentleness down there and friendliness. Maybe that’s because I was a child and lived at a unique time.” Phyllis Duke Roush

“O

ld man Lonigan, his feet planted on the back porch railing, sat tilted back in his chair enjoying his stogy. . . . He gazed, with reverielost eyes, over the gravel spread of Carter Playground, which was a few doors south of his own building. . . . His attention wandered to a boy . . . who, with the intent and dreamy seriousness of childhood, played on the ladders and slides which paralleled his own back fence. He watched the youngster scramble up, slide down, scramble up, slide down. It stirred in him a vague series of impulses, wishes and nostalgias. He puffed his stogy and watched. He said to himself: Golly, it would be great to be a kid again!. . . Yes, sir, it would be great to be a kid! . . . Golly, them were the days!” 1 But, were those the days for kids in wartime Orange? Biological forces at either pole of the lifespan uniquely influence human development. Nature rules the very young and the very old with a heavy hand. Childhood, however, is a period during which the social conditions of nurture become of greater consequence, and wartime conditions in Orange were turbulent. Oldtown children saw their quiet little community transformed into a “bumping and grinding” boomtown, bumping and grinding to the sights and sounds of “Orange 1944.” Thousands of others were uprooted from familiar settings around the state and country to follow parents to the untold opportunities in this burgeoning shipyard town, suddenly on the map. Children seemed to be falling into Orange from everywhere, “And I mean falling!” 2 It was reported to be the largest increase in school population ever experienced by a Texas city. Students could be sitting two to a desk or on the floor in

72

they called it the war effort

the back of the room. Many children were transient, so the register for one class could list 150–180 names. The hallways and staircases were crawling with students. Discipline problems? “No! No! No! The discipline problems came on in the later years. . . . And they did not sass. Not in the war years. No. No no. . . . They were very obedient . . . no, the discipline was under control.” 3 “Enormous” teacher turnover might make for eight, nine teachers passing through a classroom over the course of a year.4 Many female teachers, wives of workers and servicemen, followed their husbands into Orange. Then when their husbands were drafted or deployed, they left. Other teachers would leave the profession for patriotic, economic, or personal reasons. For many children the Orange war years were a profound change in lifestyle. Some felt like outsiders in what they sensed was an insider town. Some were unsettled, but others thrived. There was excitement and adventure, misery and unhappiness. For so many of these children, though, the discomforting fact remained—it simply “wasn’t home.” 5 There was a certain innocence in their revelations about home life, their “children’s tales.” They would come to school and talk. They’d tell, and some “parents,” so the accounts went, “would be involved in bad things—turmoil and bad actions.” 6 Lillian Hellman was of the opinion that the “tales of former children are seldom to be trusted.”7 Nonetheless, these “former children” spoke with the self-assurance of an Albert Adams: “Now, we’re telling you what we know. We were there.”



a twilight zone time Phyllis Duke Roush Those kids in Orange, Texas, were, for lack of a better word, earthy little kids. They were not nasty little kids. I don’t mean it like that, but they were just earthy. If a kid said a bad word on the playground we thought nothing of it, and one of the things that they did down there is they flipped the ol’ sign. Everybody did that and we didn’t even know what it meant. We thought it meant “yenh.” We did that constantly. We knew it was bad enough that we didn’t do it in front of our parents, and I came to Amarillo and these little kids up here—if you said “darn” were just shocked. There was a world of difference, and I don’t know whether it was the difference in southern culture and the north-

Children at a Unique Time

73

ern culture or whether it was the difference in wartime Orange and Amarillo. Oh, I heard some wonderful jokes on the playground. [In 1941] we were living in Lubbock, Texas. Daddy was an electrical contractor, and we just thought we would live there forever. You couldn’t get strategic material because that was diverted to the war effort. Daddy couldn’t get wire or any kind of material for building, and so he went into construction. [We] moved into Orange sometime in October of ’43 for Daddy to go to work in the shipyards. I was in the sixth grade. It was an exciting town. We were absolutely overrun with sailors, and I thought they were darling. There was just a sense of excitement in that town that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. I was so excited to get there because my cousin and her parents had also come flooding in with the defense effort, and they had a house [in] the “elite” part of Riverside. I loved that! We lived with them for maybe six weeks. It was prim-i-tive! Six people, one bathroom. But we finally moved to [a house] which was in the worst part of Riverside. I was talking to Mother and Daddy about it, and they argue whether it had one thickness or two thicknesses of Sheetrock—and that was it. That was the outside of the house. The inside was not finished at all. You could just see nails where they had just nailed it up. We had a front room, a living room, whatever you would call it, but it had to have a bed in it, because at that point a person with one child only could not get a two-bedroom war unit. So we had a small bedroom for me, and it was so small that it was literally a half-bed—like a cot almost. Then Mother and Daddy put up a bed in the living room, and then there was a kitchen, and that was it. And we were thrilled to death to get it. There was no place to live! There were two areas of Riverside, and one of ’em was made with that slate, asbestos, and they were not bad. But where we lived, I mean they were literally not much better than cardboard houses. My mother was talking today that she could hear the man in the next unit sneeze—cough. If we made too much noise in our side of the duplex we could hear them gripe about it in the next. It was bad but it was fun. What were your impressions of the people in Riverside? Oh, friendly and from a jillion different cultures. A little boy in my homeroom was French. His parents still spoke French. They came out of those swamps, and he told me that when he was bad that his parents made him roll up his pant legs—I’ve never forgotten it I was so horrified—and he knelt in a box of rocks. That was his punishment—to kneel in those

74

they called it the war effort

rocks. I had never been around people who were that dumb, and I’d just never lived where it was that primitive. My dad would come home and tell us stories of conversations he’d heard at the shipyard that we just couldn’t believe. I remember one story in particular that he was telling. One of the guys he [worked] with was so proud of his son because in arithmetic they used numbers and letters and it was called algebra. Daddy was telling me that some of those people that came out of the swamps were so proud of the whole set-up that they would wear their welding helmets home—to work—with the [lens, protective shield flipped up]. They were so proud. They’d never had a decent job before. Were you aware of conflicts in Riverside? There was none that I knew of. It was unbelievable the spirit of adventure—and there was a spirit of adventure. All conversation started with, “Where are you from? What will you do after the war?” It was a temporary thing, and with this sense of temporariness, even as a child I could sense that we had no responsibilities. When you don’t have any choices you don’t have any responsibilities either. Daddy had to work shift work, and so we accepted it. We had to live in that cracker-box house, and so you didn’t worry about getting ahead. There was no way to get ahead. It really was probably the only time in my life that I felt this total lack of competitiveness. Daddy wasn’t trying to make the business go because there was no business. He worked eight hours and came home because that’s all he could work. When we first got there, there was only this one school, Manley, and you either went to school in the morning or in the afternoon. I went from one to five, as I recall, and then there was another crew of kids that went in the morning. [School] was just a complete rip for me. The first thing they tried to do was get Mother to put me into the seventh grade because I was so advanced to the kids that I was going to school with. But I was real small physically. I was a little, little girl, and Mother didn’t want me to do that. As a consequence, at one point I can remember going to town for the teacher in the middle of the day. She sent me to the dime store to get her something because I was so bored. Some of the kids obviously got there from real poor school systems, but for me it was just great. One of my lasting impressions, though, of going to school there was [that] Riverside was built on sand. They came in and literally dumped jillions and jillions of tons of sand in there, and that was it. There was no yard. And so when we went out to play for recess we played in a sandpile. That’s all there was. So the first thing we did was take off our shoes and socks, because if you tried to run all we were doing was trying to get sand out of our shoes. So Mother would send me to school in the morning with

Children at a Unique Time

75

shoes and socks on, and I would come home in the afternoon carrying my shoes and socks. Finally, none of us wore shoes to school to begin with, and that just drove my mother crazy that I would start off to school barefooted. I’d wear a real pretty little dress and bows in my hair—and barefooted. How long were you in Orange? Not quite a year. I was there during D-Day, and my most vivid memory of Orange is D-Day. I had spent the night with my cousin, and, of course, we had been expecting it. I want to tell this, too: The children—or certainly it was in my case—we knew more about the war effort, or the progress of the war, than most children did that lived in other parts of the United States. We worried about those servicemen. When we would see those cute little sailors take off we hoped that that ship didn’t sink. It gave you a different feel to be where it was such a concentrated war effort, and so we had known that D-Day was going to happen. I was awakened by whistles and bells. And I can remember—early in the morning, early in the morning—I remember sitting right straight up in bed and saying, “Oh, Eleanor, they’ve invaded Europe.” And all that day they were urging us on the radio to go to churches and pray. It was sort of a twilight zone day. I’ll never forget it, and I worried about it, and I would just pray that some way that God would help ’em. Were you in a church? No, not at all. Not at all. But my grandparents had given me enough of a background to know that when you were in trouble you prayed. That much I knew. No, we didn’t go to church there, and I don’t know of anybody that went to church. That was one thing we also suspended. Even people who normally went to church didn’t go. See, there weren’t any new churches built, and you had all these 50,000 people come in, and so they just didn’t go to church. Why this knowledge about the war? Because of the sailors and activity going on around the shipyard? I think so. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Definitely. And Camp Polk, Louisiana, was not far from there. If you went to Lake Charles and went up north, that part of the country was just saturated with military. You saw ’em, and when you’re eleven you’re old enough to know—if you have an IQ of over forty—that they’re getting those guys trained for something very serious. And I probably followed the war more closely than anyone I’ve ever known, and it permanently left me with what I’ve always thought was a fairly unfeminine interest in World War II. I’ve probably read more books on it than any woman you’ll ever meet—just a consuming interest of mine to this day. My parents always took magazines and newspapers and they were news

76

they called it the war effort

addicts, and, therefore, I was, too. We used to listen to the news constantly. And then we wanted the war to be over so badly. Daddy despised working in the shipyards, and he despised the working conditions. It was so hot that you simply would not believe it—and then [have to] get down in the bottom of a ship. The working conditions were horrible. The men they worked with were different people than we’d ever been around in our lives, and it was terrible work for him. He could take the wire from A to B, you know. He wasn’t wiring the ship. He did one little ol’ thing that they could train anyone to do in thirty minutes, and he had the expertise to wire a bank building. It was bad. Were you aware of activity across the river? No, as a child we didn’t see it. What we did see was clean—squeaky clean. They built something called recreation halls in Riverside. See, Riverside was a complete town, but the big change that came into Riverside that made it really exciting was this recreation hall. They had dances every Friday night and every Saturday night, but I don’t even remember any drinking. Of course, you were not supposed to drink in there, and I guess they went outside and drank. But I never saw any drunkenness. It seemed to me like it was an awfully clean, moral time. Daddy went across the river a time or two when there would be a going-away party for somebody leaving the shipyards going into the service. Mother and I would worry when they did that, but that happened maybe twice. What was the mood of people? A sense of adventure. Yeah. People didn’t seem to be unhappy. I think we all knew it was temporary, that even when it was bad it’d be over soon. Mother and I were talking about clotheslines. She did all of mine and [Daddy’s] and her laundry in a big ol’ sink. She did all of our clothes by hand. There wasn’t even a helpy-selfy laundry where you could go. She did every bit of that, and I don’t remember her griping. You know, she just laughed because we knew that was going to be over. Did this affect people’s behavior—the fact that life was temporary? Oh, definitely. Definitely. For the first time in my life Mother didn’t bother to fix up a house. You know, we made the bed. She didn’t wax the floors because we couldn’t keep the sand out, and if you got a chance to do anything you did it. It’s just that the opportunities were so rare. We just couldn’t go much because we couldn’t get a hold of gasoline. But there wasn’t a lot of envy. You didn’t compare your daddy’s job with somebody else’s daddy’s job. You didn’t compare your cars ’cause nobody could get a car, and, really, it was a good feeling. We were practically the elite because we had this good car when the war started. But the others who didn’t [have cars] didn’t feel bad, because they’d say, “Well, we’d buy a new car if we

Children at a Unique Time

77

could get ’em.” Whether they could or not—who knew. It almost did away with the class distinction, and for a child it was heaven on earth because nobody got their feelings hurt. None of our clothes looked too good. We all had to wear ropy shoes. What would you do for a social life? Nothing. Just nothing. The shift work sort of precludes a social life, anyway. And Daddy and Mother were very serious people, and so he just went to work and came home—and they read. There was nothing to do, and you weren’t there long enough to make friends. It made the closest sense of family that you could ever imagine in your whole life. And my mother never neighbored. See, we lived in these courtyard affairs, [and] she had a horror of people running in and out the door constantly. So Mother was friendly but Mother was aloof. And then part of every month Daddy was asleep in the main room where you would visit. We had to tiptoe. I would come in from school real quietly when Daddy was sleeping days, so we had absolutely no social life. We were there over a Christmas, and, you know, to save my soul I cannot remember that Christmas. I know we didn’t put up a Christmas tree. We didn’t have any decorations. It was really a twilight zone time. I asked Daddy, “I have no memory of us eating out—ever.” And they both agreed. We never ate out. You simply couldn’t get in the restaurants. They went to the movies very seldom, because when you would walk out of the movie they were lined up two blocks to get in for the next show. Everything was just so difficult that you didn’t do it. Were you aware of the implications of the war? Yes I was—keenly. In fact, every night I would pray just fervently before I would go to sleep that we would win the war and we’d get the guys home. I was very aware of it. The movies had a tremendous effect on us during World War II, and particularly on children, I would think, because we were not sophisticated enough to catch the implications of pure, unadulterated propaganda. As I look back, of course, it was there, and so all the movies had some sort of a war slant, it seems to me. That had a tremendous influence on us, and I went to the show constantly. My parents didn’t, but my cousin and I went every time the movies changed. I’d never lived around water. I’d always lived in West Texas, and the Sabine River was just a source of no end of fascination for me. To this day I love to go down on the Sabine. One night Eleanor and I and our mothers—our daddies were both working night shifts—had gone to the Royal to see some sort of a movie, and when we got out it was foggy, foggy. We were walking home—and I’ve thought, with all of the people who were there we never felt a sense of danger at night. [Our parents] would let me

78

they called it the war effort

and Eleanor go to the recreation hall by ourselves—I was eleven and she had to be fifteen—and there wasn’t even any thought of us ever being in danger. We ran all over Riverside and no one was frightened. And even in this fog—no sense of danger at all. But that night I can remember the fog horns were blowing on the river, and when we got to my cousin’s house— you could see the Sabine from her house, they were that close to the river— and we figured out that they were dragging the river for someone. Curiosity killed us both and we ran over, and they were dragging the river for a little boy that was in my homeroom that had drowned. All night we could hear ’em over there working, and I would get up and look out the window and I could see the lights. And they finally found him. I’ve thought of him a lot of times. I don’t know what kind of a background they were from, but they brought that little boy’s body back to Riverside. Naturally, my cousin and I would go to see, and they had him on a table. He was dressed, I’m sure, in his very best clothes, but he was not in a coffin. They just had him lying there, and I’ve thought of him a hundred times. How many things have happened to me since he played around the river, and we were told over and over and over and over: “Don’t play around the river!” And we all played around the river. Couldn’t keep us from it. I found [a library] over in Navy Addition.8 I would walk over there, and Mother would tell me to ask the librarian to choose a book for her. She’d say, “Just tell her to choose anything for me.” And so the first time I went I said, “My mother would also like for you to choose a book for her.” And the librarian said, “What kind of a book would your mother like?” And I said, “Just a good adultery book.” I came home so proudly and reported that to my mother, and Mother just laughed right in my face. So I knew I had made a mistake, but for a long time I didn’t know what kind of a mistake I had made. I loved walking down Green Avenue and looking at those beautiful homes, because it seemed like another world from Riverside. I did feel—and there were times when I had occasional contact with native Orangeites—that they resented us very much and thought that we were all like the man [who] said that numbers and letters together was called algebra. And that was very difficult for me, you know. I wanted to say, “Listen, there are all kinds of us living out there.”9 It left me with somewhat [of ] a nonjudgmental spirit that I’m delighted that I have. You simply cannot judge people by where they are living. You said that when you left, your parents sold everything? And what we didn’t sell we just gave away. We didn’t have anything nice because we’d left our furniture in storage in Lubbock, and as I recall, Mother even just gave away pots and pans. When we started to leave

79

Children at a Unique Time

Orange and come back to West Texas, we left in the evening. When we started to leave, the little girl, the best friend that I had made in Orange, came over. She came over in the evening as we were packing the car. It was around five o’clock as I recall—or six. She watched us pack the car, and we had cried. I just couldn’t hardly stand to go off and leave her, but when we were actually almost ready to get in the car she came running out with a sack, and she said, “This is for you.” So we hugged again and got in the car, and I couldn’t imagine what was in there. When we got down the road a little ways I opened it up, and it was a sandwich, and there wasn’t any meat or any cheese. It was just two pieces of bread and mayonnaise. Kids will eat anything, so I ate it, and about halfway through I bit down on a quarter. A quarter was big money for children, and I realized what a precious gesture it was, and I just cried and cried. Broke my heart, and I’ve always wondered what happened to her. She was a bright little girl and her parents worked. As my mother used to say, “You can tell that they have known better times than this.” Other people we knew had not. You had sad experiences with leaving people that were quality people, and you always wondered what happened to ’em. Did you feel like, when you were leaving, that was the end of a chapter? Yes! Oh, yes! And I had to come back to West Texas with no trees, and I can still get melancholy out here because the sunsets, the twilights, can make me blue.



a simple kind of life Robert M. Clough During the war we had great respect for the president of the United States—not just for the man FDR, but for his office. When the president came on the radio we were reminded to be quiet and listen—to have respect. This is the president speaking. And it’s saddening in later years to see that, number one, few people have this respect any more and, two, that children aren’t taught that same respect for the office of the president of the United States. I was in Anderson School in the third grade. Our principal [called] us to listen to the address by Winston Churchill to the joint session of the United States Congress in 1940. She assembled us in the auditorium, and

80

they called it the war effort

there was a radio there. She announced that today we would hear one of the finest examples of the spoken English language that we would ever hear, and she wanted us all to remember that. We were made aware that there were things going on in Europe. I think our social life centered around the church in those years. We were members of the First Baptist Church, and there was a simple kind of life I think that became more and more complicated. There was no air conditioning, and the church had slide-up-and-down windows. The windows were always open on Sunday, and people were given hand fans, and the sounds that came through the windows would sometimes disrupt the services—heavy traffic, ambulances, what have you. You might as well have tried to hold church service in the middle of the street, because you’re on a major intersection in the downtown part of the town. I think the pastor would occasionally show annoyance that he would have to pause in what he was saying until some commotion outside subsided and he could continue. We take for granted now that we can close out the rest of the world, but in those days that just wasn’t true. There was a boardinghouse across the street from the church, and at noon on Sunday the boardinghouse owner would come out on the front porch and ring a large hand dinner bell to call people to have the noon meal. If the minister was not through with the service there was an exodus—small exodus—from the church to the boardinghouse. That was just one example of the kind of simple life that I think we had then, and it would prompt the minister to not extend the service past noon. How were the new people received by the church? I never heard of anyone talking about them in any kind of a negative way. There were occasional stories about Yankees, people from the north that came down here who these people thought were impolite. But on the whole there was no general prejudice that I ever saw. I think there was some prejudice, occasionally, against some of the navy people that came here, because they were possibly very temporary and they knew that they were. I think their conduct might have been affected, because they knew that they were not here for a long time and it was not important for them to make a good, favorable impression. But that was only occasional kinds of comments that one heard. Were kids talking much about the war? I think we wondered what would happen if you didn’t have war. I remember asking my mom what kind of newspaper stories they had when there wasn’t a war going on—or what the magazines had to say when there wasn’t any war—what kind of news did they have during peace. It must be hard to dream up something to write about, because all we ever read were war headlines.

Children at a Unique Time



81

Do you remember any apprehensions in those days? Yeah, I remember some dread that my dad would have to be called. He was too old, for one thing, and he had a physical problem for another. But I still worried about it to some extent, as to how we would survive if he were to have to go to war. I had these dreams of being trapped in Europe and not able to get out, and I think there was a sense of pity for the poor people over there that got captured by the Nazis and couldn’t escape. My father opened a business in Orange, and I believe it was in 1941— perhaps in 1942. Well, we were pretty much without him for a lot of time during the war years. He was not at home an awful lot, because he even slept down at the company [on the drafting tables]. And I think one of the few things, if not the only thing, that we did for entertainment during the war was go to the movies. My mother and I would meet him down at the office to go to a movie, and then after the movie was over my mom and I would come home. But he’d go back to work. So we got together very infrequently to be together as a family. We went to church together quite a lot, but for just entertainment we went to the movies possibly once a week. Other than that, we had no time that we could just sit down and put your feet up, so to speak, and just be home together. Were you missing that? Oh, yeah. Sure. Because there was such a large amount of time that Dad was having to spend at his work. Oh, sure. I remember that I couldn’t understand how anybody could get by on such a little amount of sleep. He would come home for just a few hours sometimes and then have to turn around and go back, and I remember feeling that was a pretty tough way to have to exist. They were making blueprints for building ships, and some of these blueprints were like thirty feet long. There was a lot of manual labor involved. And, presumably, when production at the shipyards increased, the requirements for these blueprints, drawings to build the ships, increased. And to my knowledge there were only two people in Orange that could do that, and they were rather small operations—both of them were. And when you think about them building a ship a day in the month of May in 1944 or ’45, there were thirty ships made in a thirty-day month. That’s a lot of drawings. In those days the drawings were made by people humped over drafting tables, and the drawings were real size. There [was] no reduction or enlargement of the drawings. So if you had a ship that was 100 feet long you had to eventually have 100 feet of drawings. I recall that during the war we had a number of young teachers, and they were obviously nice looking. The sailors from the naval base would come by in their jeeps when we were out at recess and would harass them and talk to them—or attempt to talk to them. And I also recall that one of these young teachers was very emotionally upset and was crying out in

82

they called it the war effort

the hallway. We were told that her boyfriend had been killed in the war. Did you empathize with her? Oh, yes. Absolutely. We were taken down to her depths, as it were. It was traumatic for a child at that time to see an adult emotionally upset.



moving into hog heaven Alpha and Carlis Burdine Alpha: The schools were crowded. I don’t know how the teachers taught anything, and I think some of the teachers resented such an influx coming in. And it was not stable. I mean every day there was someone new showing up. You never had a classroom that knew what was really being taught. On one occasion we were out playing at recess, and I said, “Aw, heck!” And I can remember being sent to the teacher and to the principal’s office for using— they didn’t call it a curse word. I forget what they called it. But, anyhow, if you knew my parents, we were not allowed to say anything, and “heck” was the one thing we could say. Carlis: We moved down here in January of ’43 [from Atlanta, Arkansas], and they moved down here in April of ’43 [from Marshall, Texas]. Alpha: Even after we moved down here, when we went shopping in Beaumont you wore your hat and gloves. The Second World War put an end to hats and gloves, I think. What brought your parents to Orange? Carlis: The shipyard. My granddaddy’s first cousin had lived here for a long time. He wrote [my father] and told him if he needed a job, come on down; he could go to work immediately. Alpha: [We were the first family to move into Riverside.] Of course, it didn’t have any impact on us at that time. We were just glad to get out of the little [tent-trailer combination] out in Pine Grove. It was just a tent community with community showers, which frightened my mother to death. [So] Mother insisted that we go ahead and move into [Riverside]. She wanted out! They said, “Well, we can’t turn anything on until Monday.” She said, “That’s all right.” We didn’t have very much, because it seems as though the trailer was furnished. And when we moved into [Riverside] we rode the bus back to Marshall and moved the possessions that we had. Mother bought a new living room suite and a new dining room suite, [and] we rode back in the moving van with the driver. The moving

Children at a Unique Time

83

van wasn’t supposed to haul passengers, and Mother said, “There is no way I’m paying you to haul my furniture and me not ride with it.” So my mother and my sister and I rode back in the moving van with the furniture. How long had you been in the tent community? Alpha: Only since April. Dad got us [the tent-trailer] there. Mother wanted to move down here and be with Dad, and then she got down here and found out what it was and she started looking for some other place to live. They were building [Riverside] at that time, and when we moved in it was still a big construction site. Carlis: There wasn’t a sprig of grass in Riverside. It was white river sand. The entire area—white river sand. They hired people to come in there and to plant these little sprigs of Saint Augustine grass. I didn’t see how it would ever make a yard. You know, I was from a farm in Arkansas, and they was planting grass in white river sand. I said, “It’ll never grow.” Of course, I was eleven years old. When we [first] moved here we [were] in a tent behind a grocery store at the foot of the river bridge. What was life like in the tents? Alpha: It was crowded. I didn’t like the tent. It was my first contact with Cajuns. There were a lot of them in the area, and Mother said within two weeks I was talking just like them. I loved the accent. But the tent was crowded. The kitchen was small and [had a] kerosene stove. It seems as though we had to eat in shifts. It was my mother and father, my two brothers and my sister and I, and we all lived in this. I don’t remember how we slept. It seemed like there were two bedrooms and the kitchen part was in the center. I guess there was running water in the kitchen. I can’t remember that. I do remember the community bathrooms and the showers. My mother was very modest, and it was very hard for her to go to that shower and take a shower; because the people were there from everywhere, and lots of the women weren’t bothered with the same modesty. Women paraded around, and Mother watched like a hawk for my sister and I to go take our shower. She went with us and stayed with us. Carlis: One of y’all had to stand at the door. Alpha: Yes. We had to stand at the door to make certain that no one pulled that curtain back while Mother was in there. To kids everything’s normal, but I remember that bothering my mother quite a bit. Carlis: Our tent was much the same. We did have a water faucet run into the building. They had a little sink there, and the water ran underneath the house. The tents were barely far enough apart that you could walk between. And, of course, you could hear the conversation of everybody on all sides of you.

84



they called it the war effort

Was there much conflict? Alpha: None. I was too young to personally observe, and there might have been a lot of hanky-panky going on, but people didn’t bother other people’s property. It was a war spirit, and you were doing something for your country. Your morale was up and you knew you were getting by with less, but it was for a purpose. Carlis: I think in the trailers that we lived in the biggest conflict was if children got into squabbles, and maybe the mothers would get involved in that. Some few of ’em would. But very, very little conflict of any kind with the children or their parents. Of course, most of the mothers worked, anyway. Mine did. Alpha: Everything was crowded, and I don’t remember anyone complaining. Even in the showers, I don’t think anyone complained because they had to take turns or wait. Maybe they’d left some soap, and if anyone left a bar of soap there, it was there. No one else picked it up or touched it. Tell me about moving into Riverside. Alpha: We lived within the city limits of Marshall, but it was on the outskirts. We still had an outhouse. It was still a rural area. We had cows. We had fruit trees. We had vegetables. It was still free, but you just conformed. And Marshall—it’s an old Civil War [town]. It’s a college town. It’s very conservative. It’s very class-conscious. It’s a cultured community, and ladies were ladies. You kept your home immaculate. You went to church. You dressed. You kept your children dressed just as they were supposed to be, and Mother was a conformist. She did as everyone else did. We moved to Orange, [and] you couldn’t get stockings. She didn’t have to wear stockings.10 She could put on her dress and she could go anywhere. No one knew her and didn’t care. They didn’t care how she looked or how she behaved, and Mother really loved the freedom. And she said, up until her mind was clear, living in Orange and in Riverside was the happiest days of her life. We moved to Riverside—everything was new. The walls were paneled. Hardwood, polished flooring. A new refrigerator. A new cookstove. A double sink. A shower and a lavatory. And it smelled so good. It was pretty and we loved it. Carlis: And you see, they had electricity [in Marshall]. Wait till you get to my part. We lived there in Arkansas down in the woods, and when you got to our house you was at the end of the road. You was either going a-hunting, fishing, or a-visiting us. The main part of the house was built out of regular lumber. They started out with one room. Then we added another room on to it, behind it, and then we added a kitchen on to that. The kitchen was rough lumber with the boards going up and down, and the seals and the rafters and the floor

Children at a Unique Time

85

joists was pealed pine poles. The blocks were pealed oak blocks. The shingles on the roof was hand-split wood shingles, and you could lay there and see the moon and the stars through those little cracks in there. If the sun was shining, the sun would shine down—you know, just spots all over the room. But you would think if you walked in there—now, if it rains somebody’s going to get wet. But you didn’t get wet. But when it snowed, watch it, ’cause the snow would float and the wind would just drift it around, and it would go through those little cracks and fall down in there on the floor and on your bed. And we had so many quilts on the bed till you couldn’t sleep flat of your back. I can’t sleep flat on my back today. The weight of the cover would bend your toes down and make your feet sore. So you had to lay on your side. And when you got up in the morning there would be frost on the floor, and whenever you stepped on the floor—you know, your feet would be damp from the warmth inside the bed—well, your feet would stick to the floor. Alpha: Well, you did think Riverside was nice then. Carlis: Oh, I’ll tell you, that was like moving into hog heaven. Alpha: And we were not alone. The biggest majority — Carlis: The majority of the people were that way and came from homes like that. Alpha: And it was nice. They were proud of those homes and they took care of them. Carlis: And that nice heater in there—you didn’t have to get up and get splinters and build a fire every morning. You just can’t believe how nice it was. And electricity! You didn’t have to light a lamp, and you could read your lessons at night. We went down here to Conn’s furniture store and bought three rooms of furniture for three hundred dollars. We had a couch, and that was the first couch we’d ever owned. Alpha: That was the first couch we had ever owned. Carlis: Had a couch and a covered chair to match it—and a rocking chair. You know, a new one, and it wasn’t homemade. And a bedroom suite instead of an iron bedstead. You know, we never had a bedroom suite. We kept our clothes, what few we had, in a pasteboard box or a wooden box. Got down there and I had a chest of drawers and four or five drawers to keep my clothes in, and had more clothes than I’d ever had in my life. Man, it was great. It was really great! A lot of people right here in this town, later on in years, would go to any extreme to make you believe that they never lived in Riverside. They wouldn’t admit it. I’m proud of the fact that I lived in Riverside, and I was proud of that house. That was the best place I’d ever lived in my life, and I’m still not ashamed that I lived in Riverside. We would save up our [gasoline] stamps and take a trip to Arkansas—

86

they called it the war effort

go back and see Grandmother and Grandpa—and when we left we never locked our doors. Whenever you rented the house they gave you the keys. Oh, man, that’s nice! We’d try the keys in there—why, we lost those keys. We never locked that house, and Mother and Daddy both worked and the kids in school. Nobody in that house all day long. My mother went to work in the shipyard. She was an outside machinist, and they sent her to school down there. You know, since I’ve been grown I’ve heard welders talk about what a skill their craft is and brag about how you got to know something to be a welder, and I said, “Yeah, yeah, you have really got a skill, fellow.” I said, “You know, they taught women how to weld at the shipyard in two weeks. Made first-class welders out of ’em. They welded ships together that would go across that ocean out there [in] the biggest storm that ever was, and not a one of ’em ever broke in two.” And I said, “Today you’ve got first-class, certified welders welding on ships, and they go out in the Gulf out there and they break up.” I said, “Don’t tell me what a craft you’ve got. You can make a welder out of a woman in two weeks.” [Laughs] Alpha: Well, Dad never would let Mother go to work in the shipyard. Carlis: See, we were living in the tent. We walked from this tent out there down to Curtis School, and my mother walked with us. We’d go in the school—it’s before daylight—and they would keep children in there. More of a babysitting service, you might say. They wouldn’t feed you anything. They didn’t have any lunch program, but there would be a teacher there or a lady that’d take care of you until school started. And my mother would turn around and walk [back] to the shipyard and go to work and work all day. After school was out we could walk home by ourselves, and we would already be at home when they got off from work. And when my mother got in she would have to cook supper. Now, [Alpha’s family] had a coal-oil stove, and we had a little gas hot plate—had two burners—and she did her cooking on that little [hot plate] while we was in the tent. Alpha: Grocery trips—we walked. If you had paper bags you brought your own, because they didn’t have bags. There would be young boys with wagons out in front of the grocery store, and it cost you a dime, I think—or fifteen cents—but, anyhow, after you bought your groceries the boys would pull your groceries back to Riverside in a wagon. I can remember one time it rained. Back then it seemed like it rained every day during the summer, but people paid it no attention. If it started raining when you were walking to town you just got wet. There was no drain. Everything flooded, [so] you just pulled your shoes off and walked barefooted until the water ran off, and then you put your shoes back on.11

Children at a Unique Time

87

Your clothes dried. The only paper bags that we’d had had been used and used, and they just dissolved. The wagon, of course, wouldn’t hold all the groceries. I can remember my sister and I had some, and my mother had some, and she was trying to protect the ones that were in paper to keep the flour and the sugar from getting wet. But you coped and you didn’t think anything about it. I can remember while we were still out there in the tent there was a small, little grocery store, and the word got around they had gotten in a box of chocolate Hershey bars. We mobbed that place to get a Hershey bar. We got one Hershey bar, and my sister and my mother and I shared it. What did you think about your mother going to work? Carlis: Patriotic! Lot of people talked about it—not in the form of women’s lib—but it was being patriotic. It was just a necessity for the women to work, and if a woman would go down there and go to work she was just being patriotic. Alpha: I think Mother resented not going to work, [but] her health during the war was bad. I remember more at the end of the war when they had to give up the jobs—the resentment. A lot of the women did not want to give up those jobs at the end of the war. I can remember several of them talking in the neighborhood. Carlis: Mother was thrilled to death. I guess just as soon as they announced that Japan had surrendered they blowed the shipyards, and every ship in the river out there blowed their horns for an hour. Everybody in the shipyard quit to come home. They shut her down right then and there. Of course, everybody went back to work the next day, but as soon as they announced that the women could leave, they come out of there by the droves. Do you think there was much stress on people? Alpha: Well, this is just a personal, family viewpoint—it was the easiest time for us. My father had been out of work. He couldn’t get work. He had been WPA. My mother worked because a woman could find a job working for other families or doing piecework or something to make a little money, and Dad came down here—he was working full time. It was the first time in my life that we actually had money to spend. My dad would not turn any of it loose, however. He lived in deathly fear that he would be back in the situation he had been before, and he saved his money. But it was a marvelous thing—nobody was without work. Everybody had a job.12 Carlis: There was always the stress that the United States might lose the war. I had two brothers in service, and there was always the stress on my mother and daddy both. They listened to the news on the radio every night

88

they called it the war effort

and read the papers to see what was going on, and they tried every way that we could to keep up with ’em—where they were and what was going on. There was the stress of that, fear that they was going to get killed in war. Alpha: But it was a separate fear. It was on two different levels. You were living on one level. The war was very real, and every movie, every newsreel we paid attention. I was a child and I read the paper. We’d come in from school, and we turned the radio on and listened to Jack Armstrong and the serials in the afternoon; but the moment it was time for the news we listened to the news, and I don’t know any family that didn’t, that didn’t keep up daily. Carlis: You didn’t play and make noise during the news. You sat down and shut up. Alpha: And I can remember at that time Mother keeping the radio on all day in case something did come on. You didn’t want to miss anything. You kept up with the news. But it was still on a different level. Your country was in trouble but you were safe. You had food on the table. [Before], I guess, [people] had more trouble and more shortages in food than anything. My dad couldn’t find work, [but] he had had a dairy in Marshall and he had been a nurseryman for years. We had fruit trees. We had chickens. We had milk. We had meat. We had plenty to eat. We had no money and no way to get any money. Carlis: We were like they were. We had everything. We lived down in the creek bottom, and we’d hunt and fish and had fresh meat all year round—and we raised hogs. We smoked our own meat and we salted our meat down, and we had dried peas and we’d ground our own corn. Alpha: When we were living in Marshall we lived not too far from the railroad tracks, and that’s where the old T&P [Texas and Pacific] Railroad had their shops. There were a lot of hoboes and men out of work through our area. There was someone at our house eating all the time. Some would stay a few weeks. Some would stay a month. There was one man that stayed, Mother said, for two years. They slept in the barn. And then when we moved to Orange everybody had a job. Everybody had a job! You could go to the grocery. You could buy food. It was a busy time [during the war]. I think everyone felt busy. I think they felt needed. I think they felt like there was a place for them and there was a use to their life.



89

Children at a Unique Time

a real sorrowful type thing Riley L. LeBlanc Sr. Of course, everybody wanted to be the Americans. Nobody wanted to be the Germans. But we played Americans and Germans every day. Every day! We couldn’t wait to get home. And where I lived there was a vacant lot, and it had just ol’ tall grass in it. We’d stop on the way home sometime behind the furniture stores, and we’d get these big ol’ cardboard boxes. We’d play like it was a house or something, and, of course, there was a few coloreds, too. Back then the coloreds and whites got along real good—or we did. They’d be the bad guys, I’d be the good guys, and we’d shoot at each other and get in the boxes and fight. Our knuckles stayed skinned up all the time from hitting the boxes. We moved here when I was five. We came from Louisiana. My dad worked at the shipyard, and the only thing that I can remember was there was just so many people here. I thought it was like New York or something—some big, big city. I thought this was the biggest city in the world. We had two trailers, and I stayed in one by myself. They was two homemade trailers that my dad made. They faced one another and there was a little awning. You walked out of one door and over the porch right in another door. The biggest one had a kitchen and table and the little icebox that had the ice in it, and the one I had was just a bed and chest of drawers. It wasn’t very big—about eight by ten, probably. We had a neighbor that had several children, which was some of our buddies—the ones we played in the field with. The man was real poor. He didn’t have a real steady job, and it was real tough for him to try to make a living for his family. I can remember several times when Mom offered ’em food and stuff and they took it. They didn’t say, “Nah, it’s all right.” They would take it. I can remember they dug a hole in the ground. He’d kill, like, rabbits and stuff in the wintertime, and these people dug a hole in the ground and put meat in it. I don’t know how they done it. I think they got ol’ burlap sacks, lined it with some kind of tin foil and then a white sheet off of the bed. Washed it real good, and it was real snow white—put a lot of Clorox on it. Then they’d put the meat on the clean sheet part and then wrap it up and then cover it up. When you wanted some meat you just went and dug it up and pulled it out, and it was good. My dad smoked and my mom smoked. My dad got in line early one morning, and it took him all day to walk in this line to get behind an eighteen-wheeler where they were distributing and selling cigarettes, and

90

they called it the war effort

he’d get up there to get his and they’d just sold out. He’d stay in line all day with a coffee jug waiting to get his carton. The regular, ready-rolled cigarettes then—man, that was it. There was like maybe 1,500 sailors here in the navy—approximately that many. There were several of us kids—we helped one another—we made shine boxes. Of course, my dad helped me make mine, and went down to the store and got two or three cans of polish, the liquid and the paste and some ol’ rags and brush and stuff, and we started shining shoes to make us a little money. And, of course, you take some of these sailors, we got in good with a couple of ’em. They let us go on the navy base. They wrote us out a pass, and we could go in on the ships and shine their shoes and stuff. Boy, they’d feed us a big ol’ meal and stuff. Shoot, we really enjoyed it. It was all right. What was happening on the streets? There was a lot of mingling going on. A lot of fights and stuff amongst the sailors and the regular people that lived here. We didn’t go into too many of the beer joints as kids to shine shoes because it was too rough in there. My mom and dad, they wouldn’t let me stay out too late at night either. They were pretty strict. I’d made pretty good friends with one of the sailors. His name was Hartley and he’s a pretty big guy. And right on the very dead end of Green Avenue the Sabine River Bridge used to go over the [river] there. Well, just before you go over the bridge there was a large bar there, a large beer joint. But it was late one afternoon. It was on a payday, because, boy, payday these people hit them beer joints and it was something else. But I’d just shined this guy’s shoes, this Hartley, and he’d always give me a dollar. And they went in this beer joint. Me and the kids—there was three of us, I think— we went and put our shine boxes up, and we went to playing in this field. It was getting close to dark and we heard the sirens and saw the police cars and stuff over by the beer joint, and, of course, being kids and real curious we went over there to see what was going on. There was a large crowd of people, and one of the shipyard workers and two or three of those sailors had gotten into a fight at the beer joint over some ol’ woman that was there. But anyhow, this sailor, this Hartley, he got killed. He got stabbed to death, and he had been stabbed several times all over, on the front and back and side. So it was real bad. A respectable person—woman, man, or a child—you couldn’t get on a street by yourself with that many people here. You had to be real careful. It was getting bad. What kind of impact did that have on you? Well, being young as I was, it really bothered me for a long time. Today I look back on it kinda like a dream, really. But being young like I was, I

91

Children at a Unique Time

don’t guess it affected me like it would now. We had four boys, now that I’m a grown man, and two years ago we lost our oldest son in a car wreck, and it’s very bothering. It still bothers me and my wife real bad, but back then it wasn’t—I don’t know how to explain it other than saying it wasn’t a lingering type thing. Of course, we were friends. We weren’t lifelong friends, but we were real close friends, and I thought of him because he got me on the navy base. Real good guys. I’d never heard so much horn-blowing—this is when the war was over, now—’cause I was right here. I was about eight years old, I guess. There were several ships here [and] they blowed horns. I never heard so many horns and sirens and whistles. All the shipyard was blowing horns and, in fact, I had gotten scared. I didn’t know what was happening. Everybody was hugging and hollering and kissing, and just everybody was so glad the war was over. There was a lot of discussion about the families missing their people, and it was just a real sorrowful type thing. But when all the hornblowing and stuff [ended]—when the day came it was over, it was a real happy, joyful time.



a great void and a loss David J. Broussard [You heard] machinery, hammers, large hammers going at the shipyards. You could hear ’em across town. You could hear the whistles. You could hear this working steel booming. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! In 1941 I was in grade school at St. Mary’s Catholic School. There was seven children in the family. The Depression era had been pretty hard on our family, typical poor Orange County working people that [had] a lot of labor to give but not very many jobs at the time. So being from a large family everything was pretty close and pretty tight. You learned to share a lot of things. I was like most other kids that age, already listening to the older boys, really anticipating some type of a paper route or any type of thing that would generate a little bit of coins in the pocket—because the pockets, they were pretty holey as well as everything else. Along about that time my very best friend was Kiki Susuki. He was a Japanese boy, and Kiki Susuki, I thought, had everything in the world that a boy could ask for or want. If it was in the toy market or in the game mar-

92

they called it the war effort

ket, he had it. The first official birthday party that I remember attending in my life was his birthday party held at the country club, and I thought that was the greatest thing that ever happened in the history of Orange. We were about seven years old when we got acquainted, and along about the time that we were ten years old his family was deported from the United States for being spies. They had found a radio system in the attic of the family home. Did you get a chance to tell Kiki goodbye? No. I did not. I’ve always regretted that. I couldn’t believe it. It was almost as bad as a friend dying. You just felt a great void and a loss, because we played together every day—I mean even after school. If I got home at suppertime things were fine. We’d play around the schoolyard, play ball or skates or something like that until that time, which gave us two or three hours every afternoon. And that seemed a whole lot more palatable to me than doing homework. How did you handle that kind of loss? Well, for a long time you didn’t forget it.13 You kept on wondering, “Why?” ’Cause you didn’t understand everything. Even at nine years old we knew the war had started, but the war seemed so far away. Shoot, it wasn’t nothing until some of my older cousins started going off to war. I guess it was sometime in ’42 or ’43, traveling around with an uncle of mine, I discovered that they had a German prison camp west of Orange on old Highway 90, and then that really opened the eyes, like a kid seeing something for the first time that is almost awesome. Hey, lookie here. But it was still hard to relate [to] because I knew those were German prisoners, but my best friend happened to be a little Japanese boy. And I couldn’t relate how the Japanese was in the war, other than the news stories on the radio or the newspaper or the theater newsreels. Was there any discrimination against Kiki and his family? There was more from the kids down at the Anderson School, the public school, because they were not used to having a different person around. To us he was just another kid. We grew with that idea. But down at Anderson School—well, he wouldn’t go down there. The ABC Store was down there, and it had a sweet shop in it, a little ice cream stand—the only one on this end of town. So if you wanted an ice cream cone, or you could afford one, you had to go to the ABC Store. Well, Kiki always had the price of an ice cream, and very few other children did. But as my memory serves me, he would not go down there unless one or two of the other kids would go with him—even as a second-grader. The boys down there were a whole lot harder on him. There was a lot of talk about the Japanese at that time, and there was a lot of name-calling, as children will do. [They’d] stand

This Is My Town

Susuki family Christmas card, 1938.

93

94

they called it the war effort

across the street and call “slant eye,” “Jap,” “yellow belly”—these type of little names that they’d picked up. But from one seven- or eight-year-old to another, he was a pretty fine individual. I’ll tell you one of the great impacts [the war] had on me. I was not an accomplished reader to complete the first reader, which is, I think, a requirement of passing the first grade. I failed the first grade. I repeated it. The second grade I passed, and I thought I was on a pretty good start. Then all of this began to hit by the middle of the second grade. The greatest injustice I think that it did to me as a child is I skipped the third grade, because there were so many kids coming in the public school system was loaded. The Catholic school—all rooms were two to a desk and sometimes children sitting on the floor in the back of the room. These regular desks was a little bit big for a first- or second-grader, so they put two to a desk. And then because of the overload of the entire system, those kids that was there was moved up a grade. Consequently, I skipped the third grade, and you can see from my beginning in the first grade I didn’t need to skip anything. And I think there’s probably a lot of basics in English and some of the other subjects that started around the third grade that I did not need to miss. There was a lot of change and it was fast. Along at that same period of time I obtained one of those prized paper routes from the Orange Leader— route number four. We got about $2.50 or $3.00 a week for delivering papers. It was a town route—delivered to the department stores, and at that time all the streets were chocked full of little shops and stores. But Orange had swelled to thirty, forty, fifty thousand people, and the facilities here I think were probably basically for seven or eight thousand. So everything was crowded. Kids even knew about it. You heard rumors of people renting the same room—two or three of ’em renting the same room. I know from a first-hand view of the tent cities that sprung up. There was a large one [that] was just pup tents and any kind of makeshift sheds, anything people could live in and call a habitat—to survive in. [It] was just anything. Cardboard, screen, tin—a lot of tin—all this kind of stuff. They just throwed up anything that would keep the bugs and mosquitoes off and give you a place [to live]. The east end of town, real close to the shipyards, the vacant lots developed into tent cities. From tent cities they grew into screen huts. The mosquitoes, I think, had something to do with that. There may be six or eight feet between ’em—just dirt walkways. Well, they’d gradually put boards there, these one-by and two-by boards. I can remember those ol’ boards. They’d get dry in the heat and the ends’d turn up. People were cooking out in the open. They were cooking in open pots like campfires. It was like a scouting jamboree. The sanitation conditions

Children at a Unique Time

95

would grab your nose when you walked in there, because I’m sure during the night nobody looked for the proper facilities to use. Papers was selling good. Boy, you could sell them papers good. You was only allotted so many if you had a route, and then you were allotted a few extra to sell for a nickel apiece. I can well remember going with my older brother—he had [a Beaumont] Enterprise route. He’d run it at three o’clock in the morning, and we’d go down and meet those workers that was getting off some shifts in the middle of the night. We’d meet ’em inside the plant gate—selling newspapers to ’em. In fact, the patrolmen at the shipyards would put us out we’d get so far in. We’d get two or three hundred yards inside the gate. When the shift would relieve there were so many thousands of people that the kids would be just like little hoppers. They’d be moving upstream all the time to catch those new prospects, you see, to get rid of what papers you had in your arm as quick as you could. Something I hadn’t seen since that period of time was the Extra. The newspaper would print their daily papers, but then any news from Washington or any major development in the war was an Extra edition, and they’d run eight or ten thousand copies of the Extra. They’d give ’em to the kids to sell, and we’d walk up and down the street hollering, “Extra! Extra! Read all about the news! Extra! Extra!” Circulars was a big thing—handbill circulars to pass out. They came on strong. They’d print ’em up by the thousands and go door-to-door and stick ’em in the screen doors or in the mailboxes. And they’d pay something like fifty cents a day for delivering circulars. I was getting to be about eleven years old and a pretty good little trader and hawker out on the streets. By the time I was twelve I had earned enough money to buy myself my own horse with newspaper money. It was a pinto horse, and I gave the man $50. So I had earned and saved a considerable sum of money by twelve years old. And I kept on saving, because I knew that horse wasn’t going to last. By the time I was fourteen, which was right at the end of the war, I bought my first motorbike. There was only three of those in Orange, so I’d come a long ways economically. The family had prospered. Dad had went to work in the shipyard, and by then he had bought a little piece of property and built the family a home. Mother was in a little mom-and-pop convenience store on the corner, and, oh, I didn’t think it’d get so good or could get any better. [My parents] really came from a very poor background—French descendants. I guess my only regret from then up until now is that Mother and Daddy always spoke Cajun French at home but never taught any of the children, because he always found it a handicap obtaining work to have an accent like that. He didn’t want his children to grow up with the accent.

96



they called it the war effort

Were there any stresses kids were experiencing? Yes. Yes, there was. Work was not—here it is and it’s steady. There was times there was work in the family and there was times there was nothing, and when there was nothing you had to walk with your mother down to the basement of the old courthouse and get commodities and clothing. And we went to school in welfare clothing, and you knew it, because if you didn’t know it the other kids in the school that had something would let you know that you knew it. This occurred in ’39 or ’40. So having nothing didn’t bother you too much—it was only when your peers on the school grounds let you know that you didn’t have nothing. That’s why you was wearing those blue denim clothes. Now, Mother was very fair to us about our money. It was always kept separate, and we could spend it almost any way we wanted to. But then, a child at that point in time, he’s had so little. He’s never had more than two pairs of pants, one in the wash and one on his back. So you’d be surprised how you’d spend your money on your own personal items that normally a family would provide—clothes, a little shirt, or a pair of socks. I can remember going to town and just being thrilled to spend my paper route money on a pair of socks, ’cause, heck, I’d been barefooted for three or four years. My younger brother, I’d kick his little fanny catching him in my sock drawer or in my pants drawer. There’s one other thing. During the very early part of the war a USO was built, and it became the most active spot in the community. There was literally thousands of servicemen, but this didn’t bother us little ol’ shaggy-headed kids because there was always a good time around there. They never throwed the kids out unless they got to be too many. We’re talking about kids that’s eight and nine and ten years old—really, little hustlers. And the sailors who was hustling girls and was making an impression on ’em, we found out early was always good for a nickel or a dime, a Coca-Cola or some cookies or a doughnut. You always see a bunch of little ragtag kids hanging around where there’s a group of people, so the kids’d always hang around with their skates and what have you. When the servicemen was off duty, hey man, things started happening, because they’s going to have dances there just about every night. It was a haven for little kids. I don’t know, you was just kind of a novelty for the sailors. You could always pick up a nickel off of any of ’em. Doing what? Anything. Just being there. “Say, hey, buy me a pack of gum.” They’d buy you a pack of gum. Well man, it was easy pickings. It was subsidizing my paper route. There was three or four of us that hung together, and it was unbelievable all the activities that took place around that USO. They’d

Children at a Unique Time

97

have a kind of a carnival day ever so often. They’d have the greased pole to climb with a five-dollar [bill] tucked on top of it, and all the older boys was trying to do it. They had marble-shooting contests with official rules and referees and everything. They had tug of wars. They had pole-throwing contests. They had a greased pig-catching contest. So you see, it was a real boomtown in every sense of the word. Here we were, eight, nine, ten, and eleven years old, and these things were happening, boy, everywhere, all around us. Your mind couldn’t conceive of everything. There was definitely no time for lessons or study unless mama just sat on your neck. Here we’re talking about sailors that’s seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old—thousands of ’em. And the young girls, they were beside theirself because there was so much attention paid to ’em. But they were still outnumbered maybe twenty to one, so that’s where all that attention was coming from. Just everyone thought they was a beauty, and they were with the absence of competition. I can well remember how we would play on these things. If a guy was courting a girl, hey, I know he’s good for a dime because he ain’t going to turn you down. All you had to do was have the nerve to ask him. He ain’t going to turn you down in front of that girl. There ain’t no way. Uh-uh. So you’d get a glass of lemonade out of it or a root beer; maybe get a dime and get one of them sixteen-ounce RC Colas. Boy, that bottle of wash would go all day long with a kid. You walk around with a big ol’ RC Cola in your hand and your buddies that didn’t have one would envy you. These activities was bumping and grinding seven days a week at that USO. You didn’t have to worry about going home and [missing] a meal on a Saturday. No. You’re going to eat cookies or doughnuts and soda pop up there at the USO because there was just so much of it. What impression did the working women make on the community? We always looked at ’em, when we was selling newspapers down there, that they were just a roughhouse type of woman—like you’d portray in the saloons of the early days. I’m sure a lot of ’em were very decent, moral-type citizens—don’t get me wrong. It’s just that with the sweat gear on, the hard hats, and the heavy gloves [they looked rough]. The workers didn’t have lockers. There was too many of ’em. Those personal things, you carried to and from work just like a kid would carry his books to and from school. So it was nothing to see hundreds of people downtown with a welding helmet under their arm and their leather gloves and their goggles and two or three items like that shopping. They were either going home or going to work. They was just—hey, if she’ll buy a newspaper she’s just as good as the guy behind her.

98

they called it the war effort



he called me shanty kid F. D. (Bill) Bergeron I was still shining shoes. We lived down by the river, and I was going home one night to ask my mama if I could go spend the night with this one boy. I had to go down this alley. Somebody come down the alley, and I seen him and it was Hill. He was a sailor. Well, he was my buddy. He was my regular shine customer. He fell down, and I said, “Hill, are you drunk?” I reached down there—I thought he fell in the river with that oil—and I looked up. The moon was bright and he was bleeding. He said, “They got me.” He had been stabbed. Come to find out he’d gotten in a fight with this ol’ boy at the foot of the bridge down there over a woman. So I run up to the cafe and there’s a bunch of sailors in there. I asked them if they knew Richard Hill off of ITV-734—it was a tug he was on. They said, “Yeah.” “Well, he’s cut—in the alley.” And they took off. Well, I rode with him to the old Frances Ann Hospital, and before they could ever get him on the emergency table, well, he looked at me and he kinda smiled and waved at me. I wasn’t but about twelve or thirteen years old then. I believe that was about ’48.14 In 1941 I was six years old. I must have been about seven [when we moved to Orange]. It was rough. You could see anything, anytime, in any hour of the night. It didn’t make no difference. You walk down the street, there’s always something going. I was about seven or eight years old, and I was shining shoes around the shipyards and around the ol’ river bridge. I was really more or less raised over there. I was a shine boy from ’42, ’43 till, oh, about ’49 or ’50. On the weekends there really wasn’t nothing for a shine boy making fifteen cents a shine to, on a Saturday, [make] twentyfive, thirty dollars—one day. You had navy men. You had civilians. But a tip—they’d give you a dollar and didn’t think nothing about it. Fifty cents, a dollar—“Keep the change.” We’d get on the streets early in the mornings and stay till twelve o’clock at night, and then you just more or less had to make yourself go home. But if you want to shine all night you could, ’cause at the foot of the bridge you could catch people coming in. [They] had cafes open all night long. You catch people coming from across the river all hours of the night. About three of us hung around together. We all grew

Children at a Unique Time

99

up on this end down here, on East Green we called it. You had to hold your own pretty good. What were you seeing at the foot of the bridge? You see just any and everything you want to see. You see women come back drunk—walking, hollering. Men and women. Sailors and women. Most of the time in the summertime they’d walk instead of take a cab ’cause it wasn’t but just the length of the bridge. The ol’ log cabin service station [was right there and] used to stay open all night. I used to stay there a lot. I knew the people that run it and I’d shine around there at night. In the summer nights when I wasn’t in school I’d stay up a little later, and you’d see ’em coming back from across the river arguing, fighting, laughing, joking. Who was in your family? It was me and my mother and my sister and my father. The family situation wasn’t good. Daddy come off a farm in Orangefield and then he drove a truck. Then he come to Orange and went to work in the shipyard. Well, that was the first money I believe he’d ever known since the Depression. They were apart more than they were together. It was just a rugged life, really. I mean it wasn’t a happy life. Was there much conflict? Yes sir. Very much. Very much. At times I’d rather see ’em apart than I would together, ’cause there was just too much [fighting]. It was just something you don’t forget. We lived in a little old shotgun house. I remember in the summertime I’d make a pallet on the floor and leave the wooden door open, and I’d watch the shift changes at night. About thirty or forty feet from my front door they was changing shifts—going to work, getting off. You could hear the clanging and the banging going on there twentyfour hours a day. We lived on Mill Street. It went right into Levingston Shipbuilding Company’s machine shop. You could walk out on the street and look right into the machine shop at Levingston. I was pretty well streetwise by the time I’s twelve, thirteen years old. We had regular customers, and we didn’t ever fool with nobody else’s customers and didn’t want nobody fooling with ours. There’s other boys coming into our end of town from another part of town, ’cause the money was down on this end where all your beer joints and everything was. That’s where we lived and grew up, so they would come from West Orange, Cove, Riverside, and time to time we had little fights. It wasn’t nothing serious, but they’d want to come in and cut our prices. We was charging fifteen cents. Well, they’d come in and charge a dime, and we couldn’t go that. We had our little thing set up, and we done good work for shine kids. We were good, and a lot of ’em wouldn’t let nobody else touch their shoes—espe-

100

they called it the war effort

cially the navy. They didn’t want no black on their white socks. No, they were particular, and they’d say, “I’ll take him. He don’t ever mess my socks up.” You done the best you could, and that’s where your tips come in. On payday you never looked for fifteen cents. It was a quarter and up. I’d get out of school at Curtis at three o’clock, and I’d be on the street by four, four-thirty, and by eight o’clock I had maybe five dollars already made. I’d go home. Had my lunch money for the next day, my sister’s lunch money, so if I wanted to buy me a pair of blue jeans or something [I could]. That was every day. I come from this end of Green, and the school—maybe I looked at ’em wrong, but seemed like they wouldn’t accept you. See, you’re from the other end of town and everybody knew it, you know. I didn’t try to hide it. They knew I was more or less poor—and I was. Lived in a tent and a trailer and shacks. How did you get along with kids in school? We got along all right. Of course, some of ’em—to me—they thought they were a little better. They really wouldn’t accept you. They had a certain group—at lunch they’d be by theirself, and they didn’t really invite you over. Then me and my friends from the other side of town, well, we stayed by ourselves. Oh, we’d talk, but I mean they wouldn’t say, “Well, y’all come on over tonight,” or something like that. I’d go to school—most of the time my fingernails still had the polish under ’em and all. My hands was still stained. I didn’t have time to wash ’em. I studied, but my mind wasn’t on it. I couldn’t comprehend what I was studying. Like math, I was poor. Now, I was real good in spelling and reading. I just took a liking to it. But the rest of it, I couldn’t bide it. The rest of the kids—boom, boom, boom—pick it up. But me, I was standing there treading water. What about the teachers? We got along real good. I believe they understood my situation [and] tried to help me—real good. Just ’cause I was raised up like that they never held it against me. I was treated, I believe, as well in the classes as kids from up the street. The schoolteachers were taking census, and I believe I was in about the second or third grade. I went home that afternoon, and my teacher was talking to my mother. She couldn’t go in the tent. Mama didn’t want her in there. There was just two beds, an ol’ burner, and a oil stove. Mother taken a chair and sat outside, and they were sitting out there in the ol’ broken-back chair. Miss Reynolds was real nice dressed, and Mama just had what she had on—taking these census. And I felt—I could’ve went through some cracks in the board down there. I had no idea she was gonna come in that part of town taking census. I thought, “Oh, my.” I didn’t try

Children at a Unique Time

101

to put on no air, but it hurt, you know. And that stuff like that, it stays with you. And like I say, they knew in school where I was brought up here, but they never let it go one way or another with them. They just treated me like they did anybody else. What was it like living in a tent? It was infestated by rats. It was sand, and you rolled up the flaps at night so you’d get some air, and then you put the flaps down when it rained. And especially you put the flap down in the morning when you was changing clothes and all, but at night rolled ’em up. And it had [a] screen and air would come through. All your facilities were outside. You had your shower and your restroom—all of that was outside. Everybody used it. That was another complication. In your heart you knew that the rest of them kids had good, hot showers at home, and here you were—you had to wait till you-don’t-know-who got through with the shower. Some of ’em would leave it clean and some of ’em would leave it messy, and the shower and the restroom were just right [together]. It really wasn’t sanitary, and that stayed on my mind a lot. Now, I was pretty well clean but not as clean as I wanted to be. I’d see the rest of ’em kids walk around there with starched and ironed clothes every day, where I had to wear mine two or three times in one week. The same clothes you were working in? No. Uh-uh. I’d take my school clothes off when I got home. I’d put some cut-offs on if it was summertime. If it wasn’t, well, I had some older ones, long ones [for] wintertime. It got plumb cold and you had to walk from place to place where I made my shines, and on a cold, rainy night it got pretty chilly. You’d go from one [stop] to another and find a heater. They was pretty good about letting you in if you didn’t pester the customers. You go around there and ask for a shine one time, and that was it. They didn’t want you to stand there tugging on ’em. These were beer joints on Green Avenue and Second Street—and cafes. Was the tent cramped? It was. No privacy. That’s another thing that stayed a lot on my mind. You go to school with that on your mind, and you say, “Well, I know they know how I live.” To me they [were] looking down on me. Maybe they wasn’t, but I thought so at the time. That kinda kept me on my toes a lot. Do you think you were pretty sensitive? I was, ’cause it didn’t take much to set me off for a fight, and I done quite a bit of that in school and on the streets, too. Like I say, three of us hung around together, but it wouldn’t take much to set one of us off. We was all brought up in the same atmosphere. Sometimes kids’d—well, one ol’ boy—later he told me he didn’t mean it—he called me shanty kid. I

102

they called it the war effort

didn’t know what it meant at the time, but I got to looking it up and I didn’t like it. But he really didn’t mean nothing by it, I believe. On the streets at night, what did you see? There wasn’t a night I wouldn’t go to town that I wouldn’t see a fight somewhere amongst sailors and civilians, civilians and civilians, and sailors and sailors. But that was on the other end of Green, like I say, in the beer joints and on Second Street down there. What do you think was behind that violence? I believe a lot of it—being away from home in the service. And then, I believe a lot—Orange resented the navy there.15 Not all the navy was bad, but some of ’em got pretty rowdy. People didn’t go for that, you know. [Sailors would] go into a cafe, and maybe one or two of ’em would get rowdy—the rest of ’em maybe not. But they’d start throwing stuff around and cursing and hollering and yelling at the waitress and making passes at the waitress, and naturally there’d be civilians that would take it up. During the week, now, if you caught ’em before they got in the beer joints they were nice—before they got to drinking and all. I had three or four of ’em that was buddies of mine. Would they ever abuse you? Oh, no. Uh-uh. One time right after the war I was shining an ol’ boy, and he was a civilian. He poured a beer on my head. I believe a couple of sailors wanted to jump on him. But he was drunk and just took it and turned it up. I guess he thought it was a joke or something. I got mad enough I cried, and he apologized and wiped my head and offered me money. I told him I didn’t want his money. I didn’t think the man really meant it, you know. It hurt my feelings, really. But he was drunk. It must have been stressful in those days. It was. It had a lot to do with my school work. I never could really make it in school. I had too much going on at home, familywise, and then when I wasn’t at the house, well, I was on the streets. I really didn’t get along too well gradewise. It really worked on my mind and my nerves. Sometimes my folks would fight, [and] I’d get so upset I’d vomit. I believe I had a ulcer back then. I later on had one cut out, and the doctor couldn’t understand how long I had it. He said, “Boy, you must’ve had that for years.” A lot of stress. You had tension. You didn’t know what to expect. You knew nothing really was going to happen, but you didn’t know. How were you trying to handle that tension? I looked forward to Saturday morning going to [the] kiddie show. In the mornings it wasn’t too good, but that night was when the money was coming in. They didn’t get to moving till about noon. I got out of the show

Children at a Unique Time

103

about ten o’clock, and I had the rest of the day, till twelve o’clock at night. I went to church a lot on Sunday morning. You just do the best you can, but I really wanted to get away. I’d a-went to the service then. I really wanted to get away from it all. Sometime I even hated going home at night ’cause I know what was going to come up. It wasn’t going to happen right away, but [at] two or three o’clock in the morning it was going to break loose, and I knew this. It stayed on your mind a lot, and it stays on your mind for years, too. What did the church mean to you? I went to Mass every Sunday morning. I always did believe there was a good Lord. Going to Mass, I guess, helped me in believing in my religion, that it was going to be all right later on. I had it in my mind that I was going to get out of there. Sooner or later I was going to make it out. I was going to just keep on going until I was going to get out of that marsh. And I made it. It gave you hope? Yeah. Right. That and me wanting to be a marine. Oh, yeah. That was my dream. When I turned seventeen I went. What kind of impression did those years leave on you? They helped me make it through the service pretty easy, and they helped me better myself. I raised six children way better than they raised me and my sister. [My kids] never did see what you’d call a poor day. They had their teeth fixed and they had clothes. They didn’t have to wash dishes or sweep hallways for their meal tickets. You see one of ’em with a toothache, and you stop and remember—hey, I’ve laid up a many a night with an ol’ abscessed jaw, and all they’d do was just take a straight pin or something and pick it and wash my mouth out with salt water, and that was it. But I still had an abscess. My grandma was an ol’ French woman, [and she was living with us]. She said, “You take this money and you go get your tooth pulled.” Three dollar and fifty cents. My sister pumped me on the bicycle down there. It leaves a lot of bad scars what you learned back then, what you see. Some good times. Some real bad times. What were the good times? The good times, like I say, Saturday when you go to the picture show— and maybe a week straight when they wouldn’t fuss and fight. I was the happiest kid in the world. No knock down. No drag out. “Look, man, supper on the table.” You ain’t getting throwed out the door. Sometime we’d go to the show together—me and Mama and Daddy and my sister. I was happy, but that wouldn’t last long. Something else would go wrong,

104

they called it the war effort

and, blip, here we go again. That’s the kind of scar it left. It’s pretty deep. It takes a lot of time for them to—if they ever—heal up. A lot of it still stays on my mind. Did they stay together? I believe they went to the courthouse twice to get a divorce, and they’d reconcile right there and walked out. They were together forty something years when he died. She loved him through it all. I guess they both loved one another in their own way.



they called us drifters C. W. Waggoner They had a race riot one time in Beaumont, and that was probably in ’44.16 They kept the niggers inside the yard down there [in Orange] that afternoon and all night long. They wouldn’t let them out because there was a bunch of white people gathered up outside. There would have been some killing if they’d let ’em out. I saw it. I was there the evening they did that. There’s so many people and so few of the law they couldn’t break it up. People finally just got disgusted and left when they found out they wasn’t going to let ’em out. I know you looked at me when I used the word “nigger.” I was raised with that, and it wasn’t a bad word when I was young. It was not a bad word. Those people called themselves that. I don’t know whoever looked it up in the dictionary, but once they did, well, it got to be a bad word. In 1941 I was in Nacogdoches, Texas. I’d a-been about in the third or fourth grade. We moved to Orange in 1943. Daddy came down here in 1942—got a job at a shipyard—and housing was so scarce that it was on in ’43 before he could get a place to bring us. He got a bed to sleep in at the ol’ Heartfield Motor Company. That ol’ man had put up some beds [in there], and he was working nights so he used the bed in the daytime, and my uncle was working days and used the bed at night. Of course, Daddy was lucky. A lot of times those people had to share a bed with total strangers. What was he telling you when he came home? Oh, first off, we were ol’ East Texas people, and we didn’t know any-

Children at a Unique Time

105

thing about shell roads.17 We didn’t know anything about a lot of people jammed up together, and he’d come in and he’d tell about the shell roads and about the water all over the place. Talk about the potholes getting in the shell roads and it holding water just like it was concrete, and every time you hit it it went all over the car. Talk about how many people there was out here. Gripe about the food in the ol’ mess hall in the shipyard. He couldn’t come home but once every two weeks. They worked seven days one week and six days the next week. On the week that they worked six days, he’d have enough time him and several more people from Nacogdoches would come home. He’d spend one night and then they’d have to turn around and come back. Naturally, he didn’t like to be away from the family. For the first time I guess in Daddy and Mama’s life they had enough money to really meet their human needs. This is the first time a lot of people had any money at all, people who had been farmers [or] had small [seasonal] jobs as Daddy did up in East Texas. They say the Great Depression was over in 1931 or ’32, but we didn’t get the word of it in East Texas till the war broke out. Things were still pretty rough. He [had been] a night superintendent of a cottonseed oil mill in Nacogdoches, and that was a seasonal job. They would start ginning cotton along in late September and early October. When they built up enough seed in the seed house they’d start running this mill. They’d run out of seed about the next March or April, and then he just had to get what he could get. I was around twelve years old [when we moved]. I didn’t want to come to Orange. No sir! I got my first paper route when I was nine years old, and I’d worked up in Nacogdoches until I had a big, long paper route. I’d made arrangements to stay in Nacogdoches, [but] I’s a twelve-year-ol’ boy talking. Daddy came in and said, “No, you’re not staying.” We had a big fuss, but I come to Orange. He won out, and I didn’t like it at all. We moved to Riverside. No trees.18 New people. All kinds of people jammed together. School wasn’t worth nothing, and I didn’t like it at all. No, I really resented it. Didn’t even like the weather. It rained too much down here for me. When it rains every other day and you can’t get out of the house, a twelve-year-old’s more sensitive to it than a grown person. I remember the streets in Riverside being knee-deep in water. There were some places in the streets where there was water all the time.19 I hated that dad-blamed place. Like I say, there were no trees. They filled in a marsh to build it, and they pumped the sand out of the river. Still had a lot of salt in it. In those days a boy my age went barefooted in warm weather. Boy, that ol’ salt just tore my feet up. I didn’t like it one bit. How did you handle that?

106

they called it the war effort

I just got by, I guess is all I can tell you. I did, naturally, pick up a few friends. I guess, thinking back on it, they were all East Texas kids from Lufkin. We survived. I lived for the day when I got old enough to be on my own and go back to East Texas. That was my feeling as a child. And I’m going back to East Texas. I’m supposed to retire at the end of ’88, ’cause we have us a house built in Sabine County and we’re supposed to move back up there then. The thing has never left me. I’m still going to get back up there. [Laughs] I’ve been halfway around the world and back. I was in the air force, so I saw a whole lot of the world. For living purposes I still like East Texas the best. I like the Piney Woods. What about the house in Riverside? Best house, really, we ever lived in up until that point. It had inside plumbing. Had a shower. It was really a pretty doggone good house. It was tight and warm. At that time inside plumbing wasn’t the rule. It was more the exception. We liked that part of it, especially the hot and cold shower. I can remember I appreciated that. Yes sir. That’s a whole lot better’n setting a washtub outside in the sun and letting it get warm and then taking a bath after dark. Were you aware of problems in Riverside? You know, that was kind of amazing. I don’t ever remember a whole lot of trouble between people—even with people of different lifestyles. I remember several families of Yankees living out there close to us, but I guess maybe it was the war and the people felt different then than they do now, ’cause the people unified. We were figuring on whipping them people, the Axis, you know, and maybe that had something to do with it. I don’t know. I’m not no psychologist, for sure. But people got along. It didn’t make any difference if you was a preacher or a farmer, or maybe a businessman that had decided to go to work—or whatever. So I guess people just took it on themselves to get along. I don’t know why. How did your mom react to coming to Orange? Well, my mother was probably unique. [She] was the kind of person that never met a stranger—and I guess kind of nosey. [She] knew what was going on with everybody everywhere around us. She really liked it. She loved Orange. She liked Riverside. She liked living close. She liked having a lot of people around her. In fact, when the war was over and Daddy had a chance to go back to East Texas, he didn’t really want to go, and Mama sure didn’t want to go. You’re talking about people that had money in their pocket that had never had money before in their life. You’re talking about farmers that they grossed $200, maybe $250 a year, and coming down here

Children at a Unique Time

107

and making thirty dollars and forty dollars and fifty dollars a week. That’s the kind of people you’re talking about. How did they handle this money? Well, Daddy tried to save it and Mama tried to spend it is the best I can say. [They] saved enough to buy ’em a home—which they had never owned property before in their life. They’d always rented, sharecropped, or something of that nature. [But] Mother wanted to use the money as she got it, to buy things she’d never had in her life. Daddy wanted to save the money. He didn’t need them things, you know. What did she want? Sheets. Towels. What you couldn’t buy. You know, you could buy one every once in a while. I think I can explain that to you. Daddy figured you needed two sheets for each bed, and when they got dirty you’d take ’em off and wash ’em and put ’em back on. Mama would liked to a-had ’em stacked up in them closets. Towels the same way. Daddy figured maybe a half a dozen towels was enough, and Mama would have liked to seen a closet full. Such stuff as that. Little whatnot stuff. Junk. And Mama, she had a heart this big around. If somebody was in need, Mama couldn’t stand it. She’d help ’em out. Bless her heart, that’s just the way she was. Did you get in a church? That’s the first thing when we got here, Mama and Daddy got to looking for a church. So we wound up over in the North Orange Baptist Church. We had a good church. You didn’t feel like farmers coming into the— No. The churches wasn’t thataway. That was more in the school. I’m glad you mentioned that, ’cause there was a lot of resentment by the ol’ residents to the drifters, as they called us. There was quite a bit of resentment to the people that came in. They called us drifters. Really, the only contact I had with ’em was either in one of the stores downtown or in school. Other than that we might as well have been in Egypt, as far as those people were concerned. There was discrimination in the schools. In school the drifters didn’t get to participate like the [old-liners]. In fact, the school was pitiful. Real overcrowded classrooms. Teachers that weren’t really qualified teachers. You see, anybody they could get to hold a class they had it—there were so many people. How would a kid be aware of this discrimination? Well, you couldn’t help but be aware of it. These old-liners kept their little groups together—even in the children. In other words, they had their little groups and they excluded everybody else. In electing your student

108

they called it the war effort

body [officers] and what have [you], they all stuck together. There wasn’t many of ’em, but it was very, very obvious that they were running things. Did anybody ever call you a drifter? Oh, yeah. All the time. Schoolteachers and everybody else. It actually happened in school. Yes. Oh, yeah. Do you remember a particular circumstance? Not any particular circumstance. It’d just be one of the older teachers. One of ’em that had been at the school for a long time would address the class, and they would talk about when all the drifters come to Orange things changed. By the way, this particular attitude still exists forty something years later. If you’re looking for it and if you know what you’re looking for, you can still see it now. It does still exist. How were you handling that? We kept our own group and just more or less stayed segregated. That’s all. That’s the only way we could handle it. Stuff like that I guess kind of washes off a kid’s back like water off a duck’s back. Pretty soon you learn this is our group and that’s their group and what have you. As soon as I got here and we got settled, I went to work for the Orange Leader. I got a big paper route here. One thing I remember, I would get all the extras I could at the paper office, and there’d always be a stack of yesterday’s papers. I’d grab a handful of those, and I’d take off down to Front Street where the shuttle train loaded. I’d sell my extra papers to those workers coming out of the shipyard, and I’d sell yesterday’s papers just like today’s. I guess that’s criminal, but I did it. I’d get down to when the people was coming out of the shipyards—man, just droves. Seemed to me at that time [like] millions. Of course, there were thousands. And they’d come by me and throw a quarter down and grab a paper or not even worry about change. Papers were a nickel. And if some guy stopped for his change I’d fumble, try to outfumble him, and if I fumbled too long he’d take off. “Aw, just keep it.” I was hooking people, too. Probably—if Mother had knowed I was doing that she’d a-beat the dickens out of me. I got caught with an ol’ paper one time. A guy come out and he grabbed up a paper, and he happened to look at the date. He turned around and he said, “Hey, this is yesterday’s paper.” I said, “Aw, I must have got it mixed up.” “Aw, that’s all right. I just want something to read on the way to Beaumont.” If a fellow throwed fifty cents he usually waited on his change. I couldn’t outfumble him. Some of my best customers were commuters. They weren’t commuters to me in them days. There were train people. They had what we call vendors. We called ’em peddlers in them days. [They] would go down there and set up outside that yard with junk. They knew they could sell it. I remember one guy in particular had some lit-

Children at a Unique Time

109

tle Bull Durham Tobacco sacks full of sand. He just went up to Newton County and sacked that sand up, and had some little flat rocks. He’d set there, and he’d take a knife and sharpen it on that rock and that sand, and it wasn’t nothing but just pure sand. You could go out and get a bucketful anywhere you wanted. He’s selling that for like four bits to sharpen knives with. People just buying it just like that [snaps fingers several times]. But they had that money and they had to spend it. What are your recollections about women working in the yards? I personally thought it was odd. Of course, Mama said they was a bunch of sluts. She was really an old-timer. Women just didn’t do those sort of things. Daddy’d try to tell her they just had to have that work done and that’s all the people they could get to do it, just ol’ men like him—and women. As a kid, it didn’t even dawn on me. I didn’t even think nothing about it. Just everybody coming out of the shipyard had overalls [on], and I wanted to sell ’em all a paper. Nah, that didn’t impress me at all as a child. Do you think those years left an impression on you? Yeah, I think it did. I really do. I don’t think I got the education that I would have gotten otherwise.20 We didn’t have capable teachers. The schools were too crowded. I really believe I’d a’got a better education had it not a-been for that break in my education. After the war the schools lined out and become good schools. I’m not knocking ’em. I’m saying it was because of the lack of qualified teachers and the lack of space. How did a twelve-year-old know he didn’t have a qualified teacher? Oh, the rowdiness of the classrooms. Of course, I didn’t know I wasn’t getting a proper education at the time. I probably didn’t even care. I think this has come from later years of me thinking back of why I wasn’t better educated than what I was. But thinking back, I remember the crowded classrooms. Really, no discipline in the classroom. The real qualified teachers, if they asked a question they asked it of these old-line Orangeites. They wouldn’t ask the drifters. That’s the biggest thing, I think. This probably is in the ninth grade—eighth or ninth—but I had to write this short story for the English class. And I’m telling you the truth, the honest truth. All this stuff come out of my head. It was my imagination, and I wrote this story and turned it in. Well, the teacher graded the papers. She told me to stay in after class, so I stayed and she started badgering me, “Who wrote this story for you?” I said, “I wrote it.” “No, you can’t write it. You couldn’t a-wrote this. Who wrote it for you?” She kept on badgering me and keeping me in after school until I just told her that it was an ol’ story that went around in East Texas. And she give me a failing grade. But honest, I wrote the story myself. I told her an East Texas tale just to get out of trouble. She just didn’t figure I was capable of doing what I did.

110

they called it the war effort



for the duration Lynda Sticker It was a easygoing time. The people that were coming down were in the same situation. They were all free. Even though there was a war going on, I did not feel the impact of there’s a war going on, and very, very few times did I ever worry about it. I lived in Port Arthur, but my grandmother and grandfather came down from Kentucky to work in the shipyards. I must have gone over there several times, because I can remember ’em living in different places and the impact of that on me. At the end of Green Avenue there used to be a bridge that went over into Louisiana, and tied up to that bridge right there in Orange was a houseboat. It must have been like a little floating hotel or motel, because my grandmother and grandfather lived in a room there. Instead of having a bathroom in their room, they had a bathroom at the end of the hall that several people shared. I remember she lived on the first floor. You walked in and her room was the first room on the right, and it was just a bed and chest of drawers. They must have had to go out and eat because there was nothing but a bedroom right there. Another time I recollect there was like a tourist court, a little row of two-room tourist courts, and they rented one of those for a period of time. I remember a family lived in this little bitty, small camping trailer, and that was the first one I had ever seen. The kids were all real friendly. The children just all grouped together and played together, and I don’t remember us getting into any kind of mischief. Even though sugar was rationed Grandmother gave us some sugar one time and some lemons and we made some lemonade, and we set up a little lemonade stand. We got the idea that we could get some money if we sold some little items, so different one of the mothers gave us some little pictures or maybe some little costume jewelry, and we stretched it out on a board there. Some of the men were getting off of work, and they came by there and they paid us for it. So we were able to buy some more lemons, and then we made some more lemonade. I remember one cute little boy in particular, and I asked him, “How long are you going to be here?” He said, “For the duration.” And as I think back over it now, that was probably a word his family had used, because I doubt that he even knew the meaning of “duration.” There were people from just everywhere living in Orange at that time. And right around that same period of time they had a shantytown, I would call it today, but we did

Children at a Unique Time

111

not look down on the people by any means. But they built little cardboard houses, and they lived in tents and just scrap wood and packing boxes and just anything that they could use to get out of the weather. They built the Riverside projects, and Grandmother lived upstairs. As soon as we finished cooking, everybody in the whole project, it seems like, went downstairs and [sat] around outdoors so that it wouldn’t be so hot on ’em. And they wouldn’t go back upstairs until it was time to go to bed. Like I said, the children were so free but yet they didn’t get into trouble. They were so acceptive of everybody. They didn’t exclude anybody because they were newcomers or because they were fat or skinny or anything like that. Just everybody was so acceptive of each other. I don’t remember [my grandparents] having any friends among the Orange families. I don’t remember ’em visiting with anybody around in town or anything like that. They kinda was clannish with the people that were in the same situation that they were. I was trying to remember even going into town, and I do remember one day Grandma took me to a picture show. I don’t remember the picture show we saw, but the funny thing I remember is the advertisement that was there. They had invented or perfected, or whatever you want to call it, frozen-food dinners, and they were showing how you could get a frozen-food dinner from the grocery store and just pop it into your oven and in thirty minutes you’d have a complete meal. That made a big impact on me. What impressions did you have of your grandfather’s work? It was real hot work. I remember that he had heat real bad. He was a real hairy man. He was big and he was real hairy, and I remember him taking his shirt off when he’d come home and just be all full of heat and Grandma putting Mexsana heat powder on him and rubbing it in and everything. But I don’t remember him ever complaining about his lot or anything like that. I know that he built ships, and that was my impression of it. Were you aware of stresses people experienced? Life was very free and easy. Even though the adults must have felt some, I didn’t feel it seep over into the children. They just took life free and easy. I don’t remember ever hearing any fusses or anything like that. I don’t even remember hearing anybody arguing in those days. I remember the whistle from Consolidated, because we were right there underneath it. I remember the men. I mean, when it was knockoff time there’d be a stream of men. They were walking out of the plant and they were all sweaty and grimy. But they were friendly, just the same as I told you about the men stopping and buying our little old knickknacks or trinkets or buying our lemonade.

112

they called it the war effort



three blue stars hanging in our window Grover Halliburton Now, this was one of those rare things. We were from a good Baptist family, and I wasn’t allowed to go the movies on Sunday. But for some reason or another I think I had gone to a movie that Sunday afternoon, and came back and my parents [an aunt and uncle who reared me] were huddled around the radio. They were almost tearful—my mother was—telling me that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. And had one of those ol’ roundtop radios that sat on a table, and we would stare at it. No need to stare at it, [but we] would stare at it like a television set. You had this tremendous influx of people coming to town. The first children would have been high navy officials’ kids, and we referred to them as boomrats. They were outsiders to us, and they weren’t readily accepted throughout our growing up and our little group. Now, we were friends of theirs, but they were always, of a nature, outsiders. As we grew older they had a tremendous amount of lack of discipline. Where we had to mind— there were certain times we had to be in and we didn’t drink and we didn’t smoke as we grew older in our teen years—their parents just seemed to let them go. Mothers and dads were both working shift work in the shipyards, so the kids were just allowed to run wild, and we were marveling at that. They were allowed to do this. Of course, we couldn’t do that sort of thing. Another thing, they used to get their cars, families’ cars, even if they stole one while they were working. Those kids living in Riverside and what have you had access to vehicles. We had no access to vehicles. They were out on car dates long before we were. They just grew up faster, and they saw more—very much more mature than we were. I think Harden and Lawler [a building-materials firm], one of their former employees, told me for $125 they’d sell you all the material, and you would build one great big four-foot-high wall, and they would have a stove in the center and you would have bunks around it. The government would furnish you with a tarp to go over it. The entire family lived in there, and they bathed and showered and shaved and what have you in a communal thing. They had these little slippers that they walked on from the tent house to the bathroom, to the showers and so forth. And, of course, we lived in homes.

Children at a Unique Time



113

Was there much talk among the kids about what was happening? Probably not. I guess we were just busy being kids. I know all playing or recreation took place, for all practical purposes, outdoors. Anderson School [was] across the street. It was a gathering spot, [and] whatever sport was in season we participated. I can remember we threw and threw and threw. It’s a wonder our arms aren’t a foot longer than they are now. And I can remember everything involved running. We ran. We threw—year around. Also, the ABC Store was right across the street from it, and I guess that was the first supermarket. You had the soda fountain, and he also had the magazines. Right in front of the magazine rack was the marble top table, four chairs, and we’d go in and get a soda or get fountain drinks, sit there and read all his funny books—free. All our entertainment centered in that locale. And my friends, who didn’t live that far away from me, four-block maximum, would gather there, either at the old ABC Store or out in the school yard. I can remember that we cut another door to our bathroom, and we rented out our front bedroom to couples. Invariably, all of ’em were in the navy, young married couples. The husband would go off and do his thing, whatever it was, during the day. That would leave the wife, who didn’t really know anybody around town, there, and I would talk to ’em and they would play games with me. These young women would be like eighteen to twenty-two in all likelihood, and they were just bored stiff with nothing to do while husband was working during the day. I read, read, read—particularly Reader’s Digest. I loved to read about all the goings-on and what the Nazis were doing. I don’t recall reading the newspaper—I’m sure I did—and each day they would have a map on the front page, drawing lines on it where we were and what have you. But the Reader’s Digest used to constantly have stories pertaining to the war, atrocities and so forth, and I can recall reading that. A close friend of ours, in our block, [had a son that] was killed, and I remember they hung a gold star in their window. I had two brothers who were older than I—much older. They were in the service, and then this uncle had a son by a former marriage who was in the service. We had three blue stars hanging in our window for my two brothers and his son. Did you think there were many stresses on people? I don’t remember, but I know damn good and well that there were terrific stressful situations—in other words, the young wives whose husbands had gone in the service. I can remember hearing the adults talk about, “She is a good woman,” meaning she doesn’t go out on her husband, and “She’s a bad woman,” meaning she does go out on her husband. I can remember the teachers entertaining at the USO, dancing with the sailors, and we

114

they called it the war effort

heard about what all they did in bushes with the sailors and what have you. I think the morals of the community, as I look back on it, dropped dramatically, and young people with all this freedom were running wild, particularly in the Riverside area. When mama and daddy were working the graveyard shift they would have girls and what have you in the house, and we never got to partake of that. We lived over in old town, but we heard about it from them. Having been county judge and county judge at law I was a juvenile judge, and I’ve looked back at some of the old juvenile records. It was rare, very rare, for a black kid to be involved in any kind of trouble. I guess it’d be one out of twenty black children involved in any kind of juvenile crime back in those days. Were you aware of racial prejudice at that age? Yes. It was just accepted. That was just something that I grew up perceiving, seeing, accepting. I can remember my mother telling me that I should call nice—I don’t know if she called ’em Negroes—but I should refer to them as “colored people.” Shouldn’t call the nice ones “niggers.” Should call them colored, and then the bad ones you could call “niggers.” And I can remember that there must have been some type of racial tension—race riots was a term I recall—[with] my mother, father, and me sitting in the back. [My father] deliberately went through the black community—deliberately because [he] wanted to let ’em know he wasn’t scared to come down. But there was some kind of racial tension. What brought it on I don’t know, but I can remember that incident and my mother worried to death about him deliberately going down there with all this tension— deliberately flaunting it. “We’ll drive where we want to.” And, of course, I assume I was looking on it with excitement, anticipation. “Let’s get something going,” not knowing what the “something” would be. Did those years have any lasting impact on you? I’m sure it did, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it is. If I had been down in the boomralia I’m sure it would have had a great impact on me. I was divorced from it, being in old town. My mother didn’t work in those days. My father worked days and was home, say, at five o’clock every afternoon. Those kids’ parents both worked in all likelihood, and they worked shift work all hours of the night and day, so that meant more freedom of growing up—which I didn’t have that sort of thing.21 Well, we just weren’t like them. We had not been uprooted out of our community and put in a brand new community down here. We just stayed put. We were here when it all happened.



Children at a Unique Time

115

To say, according to one report, that children in prewar Orange were supervised was not quite the complete story. Children were cared for, “cared for very greatly.” There was something almost communal or familial about the town’s attentiveness. Children were a community responsibility. People knew whose children belonged to whom, and it was not unusual to see young people and adults socializing with one another on the street. Downtown Saturday afternoons and evenings included the children. Incoming parents also cared for their children. The teachers did not find them indifferent. Parent-teacher conferences and home visits spoke to their concern. Shipyard workers came from family-oriented backgrounds where, like in Orange, neglect of children was the exception. Something of their commitment is captured in the predawn scene of a recently arrived mother walking her youngsters to an extended-day school program, then turning around and walking to the shipyard to work all day as an outside machinist. The war years, however, had an impact on children as they did on everyone else. Children seemed to acquire a new freedom. There was talk of permissiveness. Young people were seen straying, sometimes being on the streets till midnight. In the projects there was a problem with children running away. Because so many mothers had gone to work, young children might be left unattended during the day, the young often responsible for the even younger.22 Some thought their parents had changed since coming to Orange. It seemed they were not quite as attentive. Although some observers did not think the war affected children to any significant degree, others sensed a sadness, an unhappiness. They might not be as “bouncy.” Some were tired, and others needed extra attention from teachers. An easy adjustment to moving to Orange or to mothers going to work was not automatic. For most youngsters it was a free and easy time. They flocked to the Saturday morning kiddie shows. There was all the running and throwing, listening to Jack Armstrong, and reading funny books, but the topic of war was never far removed. It was on the radio, to which they listened some fourteen hours a week.23 The constant coverage prompted one home front girl to ask: “Mom, what was on the radio before the war started?” 24 It was in the movies and in adult conversations. They heard about it at school, read the war headlines and articles in Reader’s Digest, and saw the pictures in Life magazine. While their days were not preoccupied with thoughts of the war, it was, nevertheless, acted out in their play. Lula Haley recalled “‘Heil Hitler’ as they saluted stiffly, ‘jawohl,’ ‘nein,’ or ‘dummkopf,’ over the rat-a-tat-tat of stick machine guns or the buzz of ‘dive bombers.’” 25 It was a subject of their prayers, and they saw wartime emotions and anxiety. At nighttime a child might need reassurance before going to sleep, and they, too, might have unsettling dreams about war. The

116

they called it the war effort

mock air drills and blackouts that blanketed the town were reminders of an insecure world. They worried about the sailors and knew the significance of D-Day. For adolescents and young people, it was, undoubtedly, a stimulating, exciting era, and the war did not prevent them from enjoying the good times of youth. But for this age group the war was beginning to become more personal, and the initial hints of apprehension were soon to follow.

4

Teenagers Live Forever “It was our first experience that life was finite, because when you’re a teenager you’re going to live forever.” Eleanor Kershner

T

he high school scene included “football games, band, [and] Bengal Guards.” 1 The Guard, a 144-member girls’ drum and bugle corps, was the town’s pride and joy: “We were the thing of Orange—and all the nation as far as that [goes],” Iris Bowler recalled proudly, and her pride was not without justification.2 A 1940 Life magazine article concluded there was no band “more wonderful than the one in Orange, Texas.” 3 Making their debut in the depressed mid-1930s, they were the Cinderella girls.4 Organized and funded by H. J. Lutcher Stark, the girls practiced eleven months of the year. Members were expected to be well behaved and studious, and in turn, no expense was spared on the organization. Expensive uniforms and instruments, a fifty-dollar college scholarship, and even medical care (vitamins included) were provided. To perfect the skills of the twenty flag swingers, a Swiss flag-twirling expert was imported to teach the girls. The corps seemed to symbolize values important in the community: youth, commitment, discipline. The high school curriculum leaned more toward the “solids”—math and the sciences. Classes in homemaking and agriculture seemed less relevant. In English they were writing patriotic poetry and in speech trying to comprehend the quotation on the blackboard: “We think our fathers fools, so wise we’ll grow. Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.” 5 Several of the teachers were moving into war effort jobs or into one of the military branches.6 For some of the boys, school was over when football season ended; some only made a pretense of being there. Everyone seemed aware of the sudden throng of people in town and the new students in classes, especially the new girls—the new competition. For once there was “some new stuff to talk about.” Shipyard recruiters offered female seniors half-day employment while they finished out the school year. Some of the senior boys were already working days in the yards and completing their coursework in

118

they called it the war effort

There was no marching band “more wonderful than the one in Orange, Texas,” according to Life magazine. Used by permission of Getty Images.

the evenings. Studying? “We didn’t concern ourselves with studying.” 7 Saving? “Wasn’t no point in me saving any money. Didn’t need to save any money.” 8 Teenagers found time to drink olive Cokes and olive Dr Peppers, eat ten-cent hamburgers, romance between classes, and “dance a thousand and two miles.” The Sweet Shop and the Log Cabin Sandwich Shoppe were favorite hangouts. Taboos were smoking and girls wearing eye makeup. Some were already talking marriage, others enlistment. They were “normal kids that were doing what all kids do even though there was a war going on.”  9 For after all, it was a popular war, a big deal, and “everybody’s in the newspaper—get their picture in the paper.” 10 Also, the war was “way off—over there. It wasn’t here,” in Orange,

119

Teenagers Live Forever

Texas.11 Wars, certainly wars with a dark side, only “happened in picture shows and history books—and to somebody else.” 12 With time, however, the reality of the war came home. Young people learned of black-bordered telegrams and saw the blue and gold stars hanging in windows. They sensed the urgency and apprehension. Gold stars in small plaques were displayed in the band hall for members of the musical organizations who had entered the service. Those killed or missing in action were in particular noted. Some of the students became, if only fleetingly, sober and introspective. There were good times and young people enjoyed themselves—maybe even had the best years of their lives. But they grew up in a hurry and discovered a whole new world, both within and beyond their small town. They matured, and, along with the rest of the country, they took responsibility.



redneck, east texas, and small town C. T. MacFarlane I had it in my mind that I was going to join the air force [and] I went down prior to my eighteenth birthday so I could get a running start. I walked in with my spectacles in my pocket and said, “I’d like to volunteer for the air force.” He said, “What have you got in your pocket?” I said, “Spectacles.” That’s as much conversation as I had with the man. “Can’t use you.” I went across the street and [the Marine Corps] did the same thing. “If they won’t take you over there we won’t take you over here.” I immediately made the assumption, well, if I can’t get in the air force and the marines then I can’t get in the army either. I went home in a kind of a sulk because everybody was going. I went down for my pre-induction physical after I was eighteen, and I told ’em, “Well, I’ve got bad eyes. I’m not going to be able to do you any good.” He said, “Can you see them fingers?” [Held up two fingers.] I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You’re in.” But that made me mad in a way ’cause I felt like I kinda had the cards stacked against me arbitrarily, and I went into a kind of funk. I said, “Well, what the heck, the only thing I can do then is just get a nickel-and-dime job and wait for ’em to draft me.” I couldn’t think of anything I could do to thwart going in the army. But I ran into a friend downtown, and he was the same age as I was. I said, “What branch of the service are you going

120

they called it the war effort in?” He said, “I’m not going in the service.” I said, “How are you going to beat that rap?” He said, “I’m going to take a job in the merchant marines.” I said, “Will they defer you for that?” “Yes sir!” I said, “How do you get in?” May of ’42 was the peak month for sinkings of Allied shipping, and they were desperately short of seamen. So I went down and told ’em that I was ready to go to sea. They immediately deferred me and took me down to Florida for four months for a training course and put me on a Liberty ship. It was early ’43.

The first thing I really noticed, of course, was people moving into town. There was some new stuff to talk about. [The mood of students was one of ] exhilaration, I think. Something current happening here. There was something going on all [of ] a sudden. It’s not a sleepy little ol’ one-horse town. There’s a big war going on, and we’re all going to be part of it. It’s a big deal, and everybody’s in the newspaper—get their picture in the paper. I don’t think we were able to contemplate that there was a dark side to it. It was all new and exciting and something happening. They played down the dark side of it. The newspapers and the periodicals and the newsreels all played [up] the victories. There was a little bit of this business of photographs of GIs laying on the beach dead, but it was almost unnoticeable. It was a popular war. High school students and the future draftees, they were all in favor of it. They’re ready to go. They were honking their glory horns, making a big deal [of ] it. All the propaganda was in support of the war. All the movies that we saw were some glorious hero with a machine gun. Early Rambo. The [newcomers] I met, of course, were my peer group, and they were friends of mine. They became friends easily, and I noticed that they were on an income basis more or less in my family’s bracket, but they all lived in such shoddy housing. At first I didn’t understand it, but then it came to my attention these people had moved and had to take what they could get. The job came first and the housing was secondary. In my own personal case, we were living in a house that we’d been renting since I was born, and in 1941 they came around and told my daddy they were going to raise the rent. He said, “I’m paying too much for rent already. I’m not going to raise the rent.” They said, “Well, if you don’t pay the increased rent we’ll have to evict you.” He said, “Why, you can’t rent that house for more than I’m paying now.” So they came down one day, and without any prior warning they evicted us and took the house and divided it into two apartments and rented each one for more than we were paying in the first place, and we moved in with my grandparents.

Teenagers Live Forever



121

What was the mood of these new friends? Well, it was difficult for them. They were glad to see anybody that would give ’em a welcome and hello. They showed up in town, they were strangers, they were dressed funny, and it took awhile for them to assimilate. I don’t know whether I was ahead of the rest of the group or not, but it seemed to me that when there was a new arrival at school we were big chum buddies for a while until he found a group, and then he disappeared and another new one showed up. I didn’t appoint myself a welcoming committee or anything, but I didn’t have quite the chauvinistic attitude of a whole lot of those kids at the school. See, we had a bunch of rednecks that had been born and raised in Orange, and the whole student body was a group. They knew one another, and these strangers come to town—why if their shoes didn’t match or their socks didn’t match or their haircut didn’t match they shunned them for a while. Any number of ’em were buddies of mine and palled around with me until they met somebody that would accept them as part of their peer group, and then they just kinda slowly drifted away. I didn’t even notice it at first, but after thinking about it later on I realized I was kind of a way station, a halfway house. Of course, there were others like me, but the majority of those kids were rather chauvinistic about Orange. [And] you didn’t have to be from out of town. If [you were] from across the tracks it took you awhile to get assimilated. I know one girl that came to town and came to school in knee socks, argyle knee socks, and everybody stopped in the schoolyard slack jaw with amazement. Socks were [supposed to be] this high [to the ankle]. That’s all there was to it. And two weeks later every girl in school had on knee socks. They had decided that this was in and they bought the picture, so to speak. But when she arrived she was a freak because of the socks. It just didn’t fit. She was wearing a style that came from up East, and these people down here were wearing cowboy outfits, I guess you’d say. Of course, Helen Carr [high school principal] would not permit a girl to come on the school grounds in jeans or shorts or any kind of trousers. She said ladies wear dresses. You wear a skirt or a dress. One of the girls complained, “Well, it gets cold.” She said, “All right, put on a pair of trousers and put a dress on over it.” I wasn’t exactly one of the herd myself. I was kind of a maverick, misfit, and my father’s family had had a fair amount of money up until the Depression. When I went to school with shoes on, I was like that girl that came in with the knee socks. “Hey, it’s summertime. You’re still wearing shoes.” You wore shoes when it was cold weather, and when it got to be the first of April you took them shoes off if you were going to school down there. And I was the only kid in school for a while—in elementary school—[whose]

122

they called it the war effort

mother sent him to school in short pants. When you were old enough to stand up, you put on khakis or jeans if you were a boy. I had some insight into the fact that if you’re a little bit different—it’s like brood chickens. They’ll peck one another to death if you’ve got a different spot on you than the rest of ’em, and it was about that bad down at school. You put a bunch of ten-day-old chicks in a brooder, and if one of ’em accidentally gets a spot that the blood either shows through the vein or actually gets out on him, the rest of ’em will really attack him. That’s the similar situation to those elementary grade school kids down there. They were a bunch of barefoot rednecks from down in the swamps. And, boy, if you didn’t adopt protective coloration they’d peck you to death. I know one occasion the teacher was trying to teach us about hygiene and health and all that, and she said, “What did you have for breakfast this morning?” One kid held up his hand and said, “Bread and coffee.” Another one said, “I didn’t have any breakfast,” and so on. And she came down to me, “Now, what did you have for breakfast?” I said, “Bread and coffee.” She said, “I know better than that. I know your mother, and you didn’t have bread and coffee for breakfast. You had eggs and cereal and the whole bit.” I said, “Well, yeah, but what am I going to be if everybody else has bread and coffee and I’m the one that has [something] different.” Better doesn’t occur to ’em. Different is the thing that occurs to ’em. Matter of fact, the principal at the elementary school had a relative that had been going to school someplace else. She went and hunted me up the first day, and she said this is so-and-so and he’s just transferred over here, and [she asked me to] kind of show him around. [She wanted] somebody that would talk to him for the first few days. It took about a week or ten days before he got to where he was acknowledged by anybody else in the classroom, ’cause he was different. He was from out of the district. The only people that were completely accepted were the ones that had been here since grade one. [Orange was] very chauvinistic. It was redneck, East Texas, and small town. It was strictly stratified. You had the Starks and the Browns and their money, and then you had [a] small middle class of people who were in business or who had been in business. Then you had the rest of the crowd, which were suddenly unemployed dockworkers and mill workers and people like that, that lost their place of employment when the Depression hit. The thirties was bad news around here. I remember on one occasion—my father had inherited a foundry, which later failed, and one of his black workers came to him and said, “Man, we’re going to starve to death. There is no work anywhere.” Dad said, “Well, we got a two-room shack out behind the house. It’s not much, but if you want to, come and stay there. I won’t charge you any rent and I ain’t going to be

Teenagers Live Forever

123

able to pay you anything, but if we’ve got anything in the house to eat you can eat out of the same skillet.” And I can remember that woman and my mother standing in the kitchen, and one of ’em had fifteen cents and the other one had a dime. They gave me the quarter and sent me down to the supermarket—which went for a supermarket in those days—to buy some soup meat and a soup bunch. I came home with a couple of turnips and carrots and potatoes in a sack and a piece of meat. I don’t know what quality it was, but it was a piece of meat about the size of two fists, and they made a big pot of soup, and that’s what we had that day. The black woman took part of it out in the shack for her and her husband, and we ate the rest of it. I was never actually hungry, but I distinctly remember eating oatmeal three times in a row. The Depression was bad news. It was exhilarating when there began to be businesses and things to do. I guess I was a sophomore in high school before I had fifteen cents worth of spending money in my pocket. There just wasn’t that much slack money around until about 1940–41. Did your dad lose most of his money during the Depression? Lost the whole schmear. There’s a whole lot to that. His father made the mistakes, actually. He lost his business about 1932 or ’33, and he did a little bit of catch-as-catch-can sales work for a while and then took a position—at least took a job—with the new shipyard down there. They would hire anybody they could get. Now, they had youngsters and old-timers there and everybody. If you wanted a job, the shipyard would give you one. You had to be either totally non compos mentis or totally handicapped before they wouldn’t hire you. He was an inside machinist down there for a number of years, and I’m confident what killed him was frustration over losing the family business like that. What was the impact of those years on your family? I didn’t notice it at the time, but there was a considerable additional strain put on my mother when we moved in with her parents for two or three years there. The kids were fifteen and sixteen and seventeen years old, and you dump three teenagers into a family that normally consisted of two sixty- to sixty-five-year-old adults and it got to be a pretty tight squeeze for a while. I later felt kind of bad about it, because I didn’t take any consideration of the fact that it was wartime and things were tough and you had to kind of give people extra allowance or space, and I got into contentions with my grandmother that I shouldn’t have. I was a regular teenager, I guess. I didn’t go out of my way to make it easy to live in a house, and we couldn’t move out—there’s no place to move to. There was quite a bit of back and forth between me and my grandmother. Of course, my grandfather did his best to smooth things out and keep things on a level keel, but

124

they called it the war effort

my grandmother had a kind of a short fuse, and I did, too. Latterly I began to see, when I matured a little bit, that I could have been easier to get along with when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. Was that a time of much stress for other people? Oh, yeah. I’m sure. I’m sure that there were a lot of people that were permanently changed in some way by the fact that the situation that they were accustomed to had not only changed but no longer existed. You couldn’t go back. You couldn’t say, “Well, to hell with this. I don’t want any part of this. I’m going to go back where I was five years ago.” It was gone. The movie Gone with the Wind—prewar East Texas, gone with the wind. There was a new crowd of people moved in with different values and different attitudes and different accents, and people felt like the things they’d held onto their entire life had been washed away. Was there much change in the moral standards? Possibly on the surface, but not really that [much], because having lived here during the Depression years and having the ear to the keyhole, so to say, I knew what was going on to some measure. There was a lot of it that I didn’t pay any attention to, but I got the gossip that drifted around. And there was just a whole lot of hanky-panky going on—both commercial and industrial and personal. And when the new crowd hit town it became a little bit more open, because everybody was living jam-packed like six people in a telephone booth. Anything that goes on, a bunch of people are going to know about it. We were practically living at one another’s elbow, and you heard about these things. Like for instance, getting drunk. We didn’t have drunks on the street. We had plenty of drunks before the war, but they stayed home and got drunk, or they got out of sight somewhere and got drunk. But when the new crowd came to town, they didn’t have anyplace else to get drunk. They got drunk in the streets. Those bars did a tremendous business. It was a wild boomtown atmosphere, and, of course, kids loved it. But they didn’t see the dark side of it. Was the draft a cloud over their shoulder? I didn’t worry about it. I don’t know whether they did or not. I’m sure their parents did. But I wasn’t concerned. I felt like, “Well, everybody’s doing it. When it comes my turn I’m going to get in it, too.” As a matter of fact, I can remember several kids saying to me, “Well, we’re only juniors in high school, and the war’ll be over before I have a chance to get in it.” Everybody wanted to go. It was where the action was, and they didn’t think about the hazards and stuff. They all felt like they were going to go to Europe and get a medal and come home and show it to everybody. It was an entirely different mental attitude amongst people of that age than the older people.

Teenagers Live Forever

125

I suppose that if you talked to people that were mature when the war came along, they could probably tell you chapter and verse about the drudgery and the tragedy and the dark side of it. But when you’re eighteen and nineteen, you can’t tell ’em about the dark side. I remember a discussion with a friend of mine right after the war. Remember when the Cold War erupted about 1951 with Russia and they reinstituted the draft? I made a remark to a friend of mine that had been in the infantry. I said, “I don’t see why they’re going to rush out here and draft a whole army corps of nineteen-year-old draftees that don’t know diddly when they’d just decommissioned six million men with battle experience. If there’s going to be a war, why don’t they round them up again?” He said, “I’ll tell you why. I went the first time, but I ain’t going again. They can’t get me out there by sending two big men down here to get me.” So that’s the difference between the attitude of a nineteen-year-old and men four or five years older. What were you doing for a social life? We all regretted the gasoline and the rubber situation more than anything else. We couldn’t have the use of the car that we had thought we were going to have and had just begun to be eligible to have. I took a girl to a formal dance on a bicycle one time. There wasn’t any car, there wasn’t any gas, and it was too far to walk. So I got all dressed up in my suit and she put on her long gown, and we went on my bicycle—went to a dance. We had a car that had old slick tires on it that belonged to one of my friends. We used to love basketball season. We didn’t go to the games, but we would wait till everybody got in the gymnasium, and we had what they called a “coonass credit card.” It was about a two-foot length of rubber hose and a quart bottle, and we were very democratic about it. We didn’t take too much out of anyone’s tank, but we’d make the parking lot and get about a pint of gas out of each of a dozen cars, put [it] in our car, and set sail. We all had this chapped place around our mouth from siphoning that gasoline. And the tires—of course, this was a full-time operation for people in their spare time, locating a tire that could be patched so it would hold air. There were lots more organized activities when the war started than there was previously. Before, if you didn’t join the Boy Scouts or some other group you were left to your own devices in your spare time. The war came along, and all of a sudden there was this committee and that committee. There was first aid and there was blackout and all that, and willy-nilly you had more to take care of than you had time for. A lot of people’s grades suffered. I suppose maybe mine did. I wasn’t interested in school. There were other things to be interested in, and school was second and third echelon back there somewhere. Social work with the girls came first, and hunting

126

they called it the war effort

spare tires was another thing—scrounging a little gasoline. We wanted the tires so we could get the girls in the car. Did those years have any kind of impact on you? Yes, they must have, but it wasn’t apparent to me at the time. I thought it was all just a part of the development you go through whether there’s a war or not. I slowly, I guess, came into maturity pretty much after I left town. That was in 1943. I left home and went to sea, and I did a whole lot of growing up in a hurry when I went down there and got on that Liberty ship with a bunch of highbinders and scofflaws and people whose ethics and deportment was different from mine. I found out that there were people in the world who had a legitimate perspective that was not my perspective but, nevertheless, could be defended in an argument. That, I suppose, is one of the biggest effects that it had on me. I learned that the world wasn’t composed of a bunch of people all cut out of a cookie cutter, and the fact that a man had a dirty neck and a long beard didn’t necessarily mean he was an ignoramus. What was the reaction to the naval personnel coming in? Anywhere between antipathy and outrage. The idea of sailors in a port, that’s fine. But to have those particular sailors walking our particular street and trying to date our particular daughters—we don’t like that too much, because we don’t know who these people are. Gosh, in a navy uniform we can’t tell whether he’s educated and got a reasonable background of church and family, or whether he’s just some scofflaw off the streets that they dragged up in a dragnet. If you wore civilian clothes you could look at a man, [and] if he was barefooted you made an immediate conclusion, see. If he had patches on his pants or if he wore short hair or long hair you could draw your conclusions as to whether he fit or not. But sailors all looked alike. If you had an antipathy toward sailors you had an antipathy toward all of ’em. My sister met and subsequently married a coastguardsman that was here for a while. Somebody said something to my mother about, “Oh, so your daughter married a sailor.” She said, “No, my daughter married Thomas S. Hargest, and he just happened to be a sailor.” My sister was a hostess at the USO and met this guy. His father was a professor of law [in] Pennsylvania and his grandfather was chief justice of the Supreme Court in Pennsylvania, but down here he was one of them sailors. Were you aware of anything happening to the status of women? Yeah. I distinctly remember being dismayed and shocked the first time I heard a woman curse in public. They didn’t do that kind of thing when I was ten or twelve years old. If they did, they did it where I couldn’t see it—maybe in a bar. It may be that I just went down to those bars about

Teenagers Live Forever

127

that time and ran into that type of woman, but I think that their conduct became less and less cloistered. It was almost like purdah—or whatever they call it—around here. Where you would wear the cloth over your face. Women stayed home or they got a bad name in the early forties. Then 60,000 people moved in here and there was no place for them to stay home, and they were all downtown running around. They were marked down in the eyes of the people locally, not so much because of what they did or what they were [but] what they appeared to do. It was a loosening of a social stricture. There was not any substantial amount of females actually out in a bluecollar job with gloves on when I left town. I saw it when I came back. I’d go downtown and ride in that shuttle train to Beaumont, and there’d be women climbing on board in coveralls and a hard hat. At first it was a little bit unsettling, but you got used to it rapidly like you got used to everything else rapidly. Those changes came through so thick and fast on the economic and social and political level that if you couldn’t get used to it in a hurry it’d be just too dad-blamed bad, because they’re going to run over you. I recall one incident in my own behalf [when] they sent me down to the first Liberty ship. I shipped out of New Orleans, and I’d never been on a cockeyed ship before. When I got to the head of the gangplank with my sea bag over my shoulder, a man stopped me and says, “You been assigned to this ship?” I said, “Yes sir.” He said, “Well, I’m so-and-so and I am the union representative and this is a desegregated crew. You will eat and sleep and share the room with and share the job with black people, and you’re from East Texas. Can you handle that?” I said, “Well, I guess I can. I’m going to have to.” He said, “All right, if you can’t handle it go back down the plank right now and save yourself and all of us a lot of grief.” Well, this was the situation that I was totally unprepared for, and it took some considerable accommodation. I was raised in a segregated community. Segregation was all I knew, and that’s one of the first things that I had dumped on me—that there are legitimate points of view that are at variance with your own. How would you summarize those years? Probably it was not much different from any other occasion where a new or a different culture was dumped into the same pot with an existing culture. The parallel I might draw is when they opened up Japan. What was that admiral that opened up Japan? It was a closed society, and somebody went over there with a gunboat and opened it up and put them in a position where they were forced to say, “Well, okay, we will deal with Western culture.” And it must have been very traumatic to them, because

128

they called it the war effort

it was traumatic to the people here who had an East Texas culture, almost of a medieval [character]—baron in the castle and the serfs on the outside of the wall. Suddenly, why, Hannibal came over the Alps and there was a bunch of odd-looking people here that obviously were not us, but they seemed to be increasingly in control. It was a turmoil, but, as I say, the kids that were of an age to cope with changes were exhilarated by it. The older people were just dismayed, but they learned. Finally, they had to just back into their little enclaves and get their little tight social groups together and try to live in this maelstrom of social change.



i’ll work till it’s over, unless i die first Mrs. Lance (Florence) Wingate I tell you, there were a lot of goodbyes and some hard times. We were married on the twelfth of December, and he left Christmas Eve night. That May following I got the wire saying he was missing, but I just decided he wasn’t dead—and he wasn’t. You had to do that. You had to do it to stand it. You just couldn’t give up hope. Hope was important in those days? It was. It was. It was. You had to. After Pearl Harbor, I was always a little uneasy wondering where this was going to end. But hope was everything. You just had to believe that we’d win. The spring of ’41, I was almost nineteen. I moved from Beaumont to Orange to live with my sister and her husband, Jimmy Quigley, and to work at the Orange Leader. Jimmy owned the newspaper here. People were coming in, definitely, even by the time I came in May, [but] I think what really jarred me was Pearl Harbor. It affected every single person alive in many ways. My feeling was just shock, that things were going to be different, and they were; and that they would never be the same, and they never have been. Never will be. But after Pearl Harbor, it was just like a flood coming in. I was impressed by the number of people I saw—just the humanity of it. You could see people sleeping in abandoned boxcars and abandoned cars, different places, and nobody particularly thought anything about it. Oh, housing was just a desperate situation. I would think that 50–75 percent of the men in the shipyard left their families back in East

Teenagers Live Forever

129

Texas or Louisiana—just didn’t even try to get home very often, because most of ’em worked, I imagine, seven days a week. It got to that. I know my father in Beaumont worked six or seven days a week, and he was an old man [close to sixty], retired from his business, and he worked twelve hours a day. People like my father said that—I get overcome thinking about it. [Pause] My father said, “I’ll work till it’s over, unless I die first.” So when the Japanese surrendered, he gave his notice and left two weeks later, but it nearly killed him. He worked there three or four years, and there were so many like that. I mean the old people, too. I guess you could see the strain. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They didn’t always work seven days a week, but they always worked at least six days a week, and it really pulled him down. He had a bad heart, but that was people’s attitude—I’m going to do what it takes. It’s just amazing. People who didn’t live then really cannot imagine the feeling that there was. It was almost total—not blind loyalty, I don’t mean that. But there was a real patriotism, and we really felt that we were right. I had worked at the Leader, I forget how long now, but I decided I wanted to go up north with a friend. So we went up to Philadelphia for about six weeks, and New York State. I came home and then I went to work for the navy at Weaver Shipyards. I enlisted in the WAVES in 1944. From the time of Pearl Harbor on I never felt the same. I always had this—not foreboding, I don’t mean that. But it was like everything was unfinished. No one really knew how long this was going to take. We all said we were going to win, but there’s always that little bitty place where you’re wondering, “What if?” And I think that was in the back of everybody’s mind. Even when you volunteered you enlisted for the duration of the emergency, so you didn’t know when you were going to get out, even when the war ended. There was this feeling, When is this going to be over? When can I go on with life? When is it going to be normal? Well, what’s normal? And I don’t think it was ever normal again. What was the source of confidence that we would win the war? Well, we just never had been licked. It was that ol’ American—We can do it. Nobody can stop us. We’re going to do it. It was just there. I’ll tell you another thing. We weren’t far, a good many of us, from immigrant parents and grandparents. My father was an immigrant and my mother’s people were immigrants, and there was so instilled in us this appreciation for this country. And it was my country, right or wrong. It was we owe this country something, if nothing else. It’s been good to us, and now we’ve got to work to keep it safe. Those who weren’t more immigrant-close, you might

130

they called it the war effort

say, they had this America’s never been beaten. My granddaddy fought at Shiloh, or [my great-grandparents in Concord]—or whatever. We can do it. But, as I say, maybe just once in a while you’d think, gosh, suppose that England falls. France fell, Belgium and all that. And I tell you, the Japanese were pretty powerful. What made you want to enlist? Well, the war had been going on for about two and a half years then, and I felt a certain restlessness or something, I guess. See, I’d wanted to enlist when I was about twenty and my mother and father wouldn’t give their consent, so I kind of put it out of my thoughts for a while and went on about my business. I kept thinking about it, and I thought, well no, I want to go, because they were really pushing it that a WAVE released a man to go to sea—and they needed ’em. They really did. So that was it, mainly. I felt like, well, this is something I can do. Somebody else can do this work at Weaver’s. So I went [to Houston] and got sworn in and then—I never will forget—came back home and told my mother over there in Beaumont. She was, needless to say, shocked. Then when my father came home from the shipyard and went out in the yard, I just couldn’t wait to tell him. When I told my father he just put out his hand and he said, “Congratulations.” I knew he was proud of me. It was an interesting time. I wouldn’t give anything for having lived through it. There was suffering, people dying I loved and thought a lot of—in the war. Maybe the war kind of heightened feelings. There was some suffering, mental suffering and physical discomfort and everything, but we just showed what we could stand, what we could live through. I think it made better people of us. I think some of [the women] might not have [gone to work] if there hadn’t been a war. They wouldn’t have stirred themselves that much. I don’t mean it ugly. They’d a-just kept on with their little bitty church work, maybe playing bridge once a week or something like that. But they got out and rolled bandages and took first-aid courses and worked down at the USO. That’s another good thing from the war. That was part of the transition, for women to be recognized for their worth as people, not being thought of just as a woman with only certain womanly things that she was capable of doing. I think this gave women a chance to show what they could do and for men to realize it. So that was a good thing that came out of the war. People appreciated each other, not only man and woman, but I think people from all parts of the country met each other and that brought this country together. We quit being so regional.



Teenagers Live Forever

131

you boys ought to be putting that money in the bank Betty and William (Red) Moore Red: All us guys hated those sailors coming into Orange. Betty: And the families really thought, boy, these are rough people coming in here. My mother and daddy said, “No, don’t you dare. You can’t date those sailors.” Red: Bunch of wild sailors coming into town wanting to date our girls. I think it was generally thought that any girl that would date a sailor wasn’t worth us worrying about dating her anymore, because she wasn’t any moral character after that. Did you have any contact with sailors? Red: Yeah, I had some friends that were sailors. What were your impressions? Red: Mostly good. Betty: Come to find out they were just like the hometown boys, really. Red: Yeah, they really were fine. Betty: They had families. They’d go to church. It was real amazing to find out that they were just like the boys here in Orange. They were hometown boys and— Red: Even if they were sailors? Betty: Even though they were sailors. They were lonesome when they were away from home, and they missed their families, and they had sisters and brothers. Once my mother and daddy met a couple of ’em, then they didn’t mind me dating ’em. You know, they’d come to the house and they got to know them. In fact, there was one group here that Mother and Daddy had to the house every Sunday afternoon. They would come over, and my daddy fried chicken for about ten navy guys and just a whole bunch of girls. They brought big record players and big pots from off the ships so Daddy would have something to cook in, and we could dance in the backyard. Disturbed all the neighbors, and they didn’t care. Didn’t bother ’em at all. Red: Those we were running around with we thought were the good guys. The rest of ’em were the bad guys. We didn’t want nothing to do with the rest of them ol’ bad boys. Really, we just didn’t take the time to know the other guys. That’s what it all boiled down to.

132

they called it the war effort

Red: The schools started getting new people in ’em, and I noticed the new girls coming. Boy, we was getting new girls every day in there. All the girls were prettier than the girls we had here because they were new, really. We thought they were, ’cause they were new and different. They had a different outlook. The navy came in here and brought a bunch of people in. They had a different lifestyle than we did. Some of ’em were a little more mature, a little more sophisticated than we were. Betty: I think so, too—I think the girls seemed to be. They looked older. They were more mature, I think, than the girls here in Orange. And like he said, they were prettier. I think it was because they had a different way of dressing than what we did. Red: They came from evidently larger cities. I really don’t remember a whole lot about the guys. Betty: You know, I can’t either. I can only remember one or two that you could say were the new guys that came in. It was mostly the girls that I can remember coming in here. I don’t know why that is. Red: You remember the competition you was going through, probably. Betty: I guess. That’s probably true. Red: The city swelled with people—suddenly. Just got bigger and bigger, and the shipyard started working and that [lent] to the opportunity for the kids in school to work after school or during school down in the shipyard. For instance, I worked in the shipyard my whole senior year and went to school at night. I finished my schooling at night rather than go to school in the daytime, ’cause I could make money by working down there in the shipyard in the daytime. There was a lot of us that did that—worked in the shipyard in the daytime and went to school at night. We had special tutors that taught us and gave us tests. We went to school every night and finished our senior year that way and graduated with the class. Did that make for a long day? Red: Well, when you were that young it didn’t matter. It wasn’t very long. Betty: Especially when he was getting that money. That was a lot of money for him. Did you feel much like studying? Red: We didn’t concern ourselves with studying. We didn’t have to. Just made the appearance of being there. What did you do at the shipyard? Red: I was what you called a shipfitter’s helper. I drug his cables around, his torch hoses, and I went after his tools—all those little ol’ things that he didn’t want to do. I was just there more as a body than anything. I think that was a cost-plus operation down there, and the more people they

Teenagers Live Forever

133

had the more money they made. They really wasn’t concerned whether I was doing a whole lot of work or not. I remember there were dangers. I remember people were getting hurt all the time—some seriously. In fact, one friend of mine got hurt very seriously down there. Crippled him up. There was no safety at all—no regard for safety. People were on top of people, and you just bumped into each other all the time, but there was an awful lot of work going on. Built an awful lot of boats down there—ships or whatever. Were people productive? Red: No. I don’t think they were. I think just sheer numbers of people doing something at one time is the only thing that got those ships built. I don’t think they were really all that productive. Not like people are productive today. Masses of individuals contributing a little bit. By the end of the day you’ve accomplished something. What were people talking about in the yard? Red: Well, I was seventeen years old, and all I was thinking about and talking about was getting off and going to school that night, and getting out of there and go out on a date somewhere. That’s all I was talking about. Now, I don’t know what the rest of ’em were talking about. At seventeen years old I wasn’t much interested in what their thoughts were. I don’t even recall what their thoughts were. I don’t know that my mother ever did make any comments about what was going on. Were you aware of women going to work? Red: Yeah, we heard about those. You don’t want to go into that. That was the moral issue taking place down there. All I know is hearsay. I don’t want to talk about that. What was the moral issue? Red: The kind of things that went on between men and women. That was the talk. That was probably the beginning of the change in the role of women, during that period of time. But it was slow escalating—very slow escalating. It was really something unheard of, I guess, as far as women in hard hats or women welders or women burners or shipfitters. That was unheard of in our small community. Now, it may have been going on up in the East in your larger shipyards, but we didn’t know anything about it. Were morals and values changing? Red: Well, Orange was a laid-back little community, and there wasn’t anything going on that your neighbor didn’t know about. We all knew each other and we knew what they were doing. When you suddenly have an influx of all of these people, a lot of changes developed. They had a different set of morals. They were interested in different things that we didn’t know anything about. They were more sexually liberated, I suppose, if you

134

they called it the war effort

want to use that term. And then when you constantly had a lot of people together, there was animosity developed between people, and then there’d be a lot of brawls and fights. We didn’t do those things before we had all that influx of people. Oh, there was brawls, of course, in the schools, but nothing like that. Betty: They had more money to party with, probably. Like, Red is a good example. He was getting this nice paycheck every week. Well, he spent it, but he partied. Red: Played! Elmer Newman [a bank official] used to tell me and Travis, “You boys ought to be putting that money in the bank.” Save that money. Were you saving any? Red: No, we weren’t saving any money. I didn’t need to save it, because I had another paycheck that was going to come that next week. I was fixing to go off to the war. Age was catching up with me where I was going to have to sign up for the draft, and I didn’t need any bank account in Orange. Wasn’t no point in me saving any money. Didn’t need to save any money. How did you feel about going off to war? Red: I was glad. A lot of my friends had already gone. They’d been drafted, and I was just sitting back waiting to be drafted. Finally, they called me and I was glad, ’cause I guess I felt like I’d grown up then and was a man and was ready to go off to war. Any apprehensions? Red: Nah. Well, I was going to leave Orange and go out into the broad world. I guess I was anxious about that. My first experience was to go to San Antonio, and I’d never been to San Antonio in my life. So that was a good experience, going off to see a big ol’ town like San Antonio. What were you doing for a social life? Red: Go across the river. Just about every night we’d go over there, ’cause that’s where all the action was. That’s where the fun was. We’d go over there and drink, dance, shoot craps. Hell, at seventeen years old I could go over there and shoot dice, play the slot machines, do anything I wanted to do—bet on the horse races. On a Saturday afternoon we’d go over there and play with horses. Didn’t know anything about it, but we was having a good time. We had the money. What else was we going to do with the money? Three or four guys’d go over there. Somebody’d get the car and we’d all load up. We’d stay out till two or three o’clock in the morning, then go to work the next day. Suffer all day long and swear, boy, when five o’clock got there we’d go home and go to bed. When five o’clock got there we’d go back across the river. Did those years leave an impression on you? Red: I’m sure it did. Had it not been for that war I would have prob-

135

Teenagers Live Forever

ably still been in a little ol’ laid-back community of 7,500 people right here in Orange. Probably never done a thing. It gave me an opportunity to get out into the world, to really grow up. I think going into the service was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I wouldn’t want to do it again, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Betty: I just don’t really remember it changing our lifestyle. I’m sure my mother and daddy would say it did, but I don’t remember how it changed my lifestyle at all. Red: I was so young that none of this stuff really impressed me a whole lot. I still lived in my little ol’ world—my own little friends right there in the school. That didn’t broaden out a whole lot. We may have taken in a few of those newcomers. In fact, I know we did.



work, duty, responsibility Roy Wingate You got this feeling of urgency about you. The most memorable impression I have was the day after Pearl Harbor. I remember vividly listening to the radio, my four brothers and I, trying to decide—I wonder which one of us will wind up going? Four of us wound up going. And then the next day they brought in the National Guard to guard the shipyards. They were apparently worrying about sabotage. [They] set up in a parking lot directly across the street from the store where I worked—in a vacant lot. It was December eight. It was a Monday morning. It was raining. It was cold. It was wet. And I remember vividly them moving in, setting up their pup tents, climbing in those pup tents on that wet ground and going to sleep. And I swore I could never do that. There’s no way. It was cold. I couldn’t do that in December; sleep on the ground in the rain, the wet. I found out later on I could. We began to see the navy personnel come in, and [their] children started coming to our high school around 1940. Business began to pick up. Orange was in extremely bad shape during the Depression, and then this began to boom until in July [1941] the A&P store moved from Fifth and Main down to Third and Main. It was the first, what we called a supermarket at that time, in Orange. Had three cash registers. I was seeing so many new people

136

they called it the war effort

in the store. I was assistant manager, and the manager gave me the job of meeting all the new people who came in. Meet ’em at the door, get their names, and remember their names the next time they came in the store. That was part of my job, and that way I began to notice how many people were coming in. And it was a terrible influx. Now, we lived at what was the [city limits] of Orange. We had about a five-acre pasture for our milk cow, and I remember some people coming in there with flatbed trucks with frames built on the back, and they would park these trucks out there in our pasture. My dad ran extension cords out there to them, and they lived out there while they worked in the shipyard. I don’t remember if we ran water lines or water hoses to get water to them. I know they had no bath facilities. They paid my dad something like three or four dollars a month for the electricity and the water, and that’s all he ever charged them. And this was typical all over Orange. There was very few people that were idle at this period in life. You didn’t see many people just hanging around doing nothing. As a matter of fact, I think there was more loafing and carousing around prior to the war than there was during the war. Now, during the war, after the impact of the people came in, two or three things happened. Now there was more money for them to spend and do with their leisure time. I think that boys and girls were going out dating each other that wouldn’t have done it before. They were going out because they had the money and the ability to go out and do things. They had the money to go to the movies, whereas prior to the war we didn’t. We could see a double feature for a nickel during the thirties, but we didn’t have the nickel. We could go down and get two hamburgers and a cold drink for fifteen cents, but you didn’t have the fifteen cents. You had things in reach for these young people that had not been in reach before. And I don’t know that a lot of ’em abused it. They just spent their money and had fun. Everything was across the river. See, you couldn’t legally buy a mixed drink in Orange and you couldn’t legally gamble. But across the river on the Louisiana side of the bridge you had these places over there that allowed that, and they were wide open. And it was wild, and, yes, there [was] a lot of fighting over there, people getting into knife fights and fist fights. For a while there, there was one person killed a month, or something like that— over across the river. I’d slip over there ever’ now and then to see what was going on. If you wanted any action, that’s where you’d go. In that respect, that part of the community had a mining boom mentality. I didn’t go over there too much before I came back from the service, but my reflection was, “Boy, this is wild!”

Teenagers Live Forever



137

What were your thoughts about being drafted? There was no doubt in my mind I was going. I wanted to go on December eight, but my parents would not sign for me. I was only seventeen, and they said, “You’re going to take more time and think about this. It’ll be time enough to get in. You’ll be getting into it. Don’t worry about that.” So they made me wait, and I had just turned nineteen when I went in. Two of my older brothers went first. Then I went and my younger brother went last. My mother was quite concerned about us, but she never let us see her visibly upset. My father wouldn’t talk to us too much about it, but I finally figured out it was upsetting him that my two brothers were already gone and he knew that the other two would be going shortly. And it was along about this time my oldest brother turned up missing in action. For several months the family didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. There was a lot of apprehension. And we would get these telegrams that so-and-so had been killed, someone we knew real well. What was happening at the shipyard? We had men working in the shipyard who were not familiar with heavy equipment, not familiar with steel, not familiar with construction. Most of the workers came out of the rice fields, out of the woods, pulp and paper mills, out of filling stations, what have you, and they had to be trained and taught. We had schools going on around the clock, trying to prepare people to get ’em ready to take a job, and that’s how I got my job. I went down and took a shipfitter’s course. They found out that I’d had mechanical drawing in high school and they put me as a layout man. You had many men working in the shipyard who couldn’t even read a ruler, starting off. The accident rate at Levingston Shipbuilding Company was at one time 5 percent. There was such a rush, such a hustle, everybody climbing all over and [in] each other’s way, you had people injured quite frequently. The injury rate was extremely high. Did this bother you? I didn’t have sense enough. I didn’t have sense enough until I was working with a man one day and we were putting in a refrigerator in a tugboat. I went inside and marked where the door was going to go, and the burner came in after me and was burning the hole out for the door. The lunch whistle blew and we had a thirty-minute lunch. But he had forgot that his torch was leaking. When we went back after lunch he got in and ignited his torch, and it exploded. He came out [and] it was obvious he was really burned—but he was able to walk. He was in shock, and I remember my foreman hollering at me, “Do something! Don’t just stand there! Help

138

they called it the war effort

him!” Well, I didn’t know what to do, but we helped him get down the gangplank, got him into a car and sent him to the hospital. He died two days later. Yes, I became concerned. [But] I think that I was guilty then of what most teenagers are today. You give a teenager a car with a lot of horsepower and speed and he thinks he’s indestructible. Nothing can happen to him. I’m afraid I was the same. It never occurred to me that I might be in danger. I just didn’t think in those terms. Did those years have an impact on you? I believe so. I believe it’s an intangible thing and hard to define, but in this respect—in my formative years I was put in a situation where I had only wholesome things that I was being exposed to. The work ethic was being built into me. We weren’t thinking in terms of going down to the beach and spending the weekend and going to Colorado and ski for a week or anything like this. It was work, work, work. Duty, duty, duty. Responsibility, responsibility. And in that regard, yes, I believe it did have an impact on me. Cause see, if [in] those same years I had grown up with the freedom and the money to spend, and no responsibility and not have to worry about a job that my children have gone through—I don’t think I would have been the same person. What were the best aspects of those years? The best aspect was the work, the income. The job security. You had something to do. We had just come through a long period of time where there was no work in Orange. I have never seen any official statistics, but I would estimate that the unemployment in Orange had to be 60–70 percent. The commissioner of precinct number two had a road, street foreman—his maintenance foreman. He would work a man one day every other week so that the man got one day’s work every other week to buy groceries. That’s how they maintained the roads in Orange many years during the Depression in precinct two—divided the work up among the men that were unemployed. That went on until [early 1940]. Into [1940] is when it began to get better and the thing that made it better was the influx of the money from the war effort. The worst aspect was the disruption of family life. You couldn’t have family life as you knew it before the war. The nice, peaceful, easygoing get-together on Sunday afternoon—you didn’t have any of that anymore. [There was the] worry for those who were gone. I was overseas when my brother was missing, but I remember my mother talking very much about how upset the family was and wondering whether he was alive or not. And this wasn’t just with our family. That was with a lot of families—wondering how the war was going.

139

Teenagers Live Forever



i’d charge my battery up and be ready to go again Harley B. Bass I was not there, and I was sorry that I missed it. I guess it was my day off or something. Anyway, some fellow came in there, and he’d been sitting around and been a-hanging around Bill’s station. Bill [Stringer] didn’t like people just hanging around there. If they had business there, okay; otherwise they were in his way. Finally, the ol’ boy got up and said, “Orange, asshole of the South.”13 And they said when he did say that that Bill hit him and knocked him from the doorway of his station out to that little island out there where his gas pumps were. The ol’ boy was laying there and he told him, “Look, if you don’t like this place here get up and get out. People like you are the source of our problems. This is where I’m going to raise my family, and I think highly of Orange.” And so he went on and gave him a good sermon. The ol’ boy jumped up and left. We were going to this little Orange High School that was built for approximately 300–350 people. We eventually wound up where they had classes on the third floor in the halls. You sat in chairs in the hall. Your chemistry class—they’d bring out a Bunsen burner and a few little things like that. They had a little German Lutheran Church right across the street from my mother’s house, and they even had some choral classes down there—two-and-a-half, three blocks away. They had some out in the old baseball diamond—the football practice field. They’d go out there for some classes.14 I quit in December of ’42. I already had plenty of credits. Football season was over and I went to work in the shipyard. I went down [to Levingston’s] December the eighth. They’d gone on daylight saving time and it was dark. Delbert [Nantz] took me and showed me all around out there in the dark, and then finally said, “Now, Harley, are you sure this is the kind of work you want to do?” I said, “Yes sir!” I didn’t have the faintest idea what kind of work I was going to do. Whatever work they had at sixty-three cents an hour is what I wanted to do. One thing that I thought [was] kind of unique, you could have your thermos bottle to drink your coffee, [but] coffee breaks as such had not

140

they called it the war effort

originated yet. I didn’t see that until after the war here. You’d take your thermos bottle along and be working, and you’d stop and just get you a quick sip, but you didn’t take ten or fifteen minutes to drink your coffee. You could gulp down a sandwich sometimes, and the ones that wanted to, at twelve o’clock when the whistle blew they’d all head out. And I’ve seen thirty, forty, fifty people in a big crap game right out and in the middle. I was always surprised that they’d let something like that go on like that— right out in the open. Our regular day was a ten-hour day. Of course, I was young [and] trying to stay up all night and fight it, too, and it would reach a point where after three or four weeks of working seven days a week and running around— and I’m sure I was a lot wilder then than I would have [been] in normal times—I’d just come in on a Friday night, and I’d tell Mother I’m just going to stay home. I’d just get in my pajamas and sleep, read a book, eat, listen to the radio and everything the whole weekend, and I’d charge my battery up and be ready to go again. I’d hear people talking about [money]—“You’d better be putting it away for after the war.” Well, the way the war was going it was really hard for a young person like me to be able to see that there was going to be an end to the war. You knew there was, but you didn’t know whether it was going to be a year or two years or ten, and kind of the ol’ feeling of live-it-up-today-because-tomorrow-we-may-die. What was the impact on your family? Mother’s health was not good, but she started renting out rooms just like so many of the women did. The fact is, she moved her bed back on the back-screened porch there. She was a heavyset woman and she could take cold weather, and she just moved back there. Whenever she didn’t have a room for somebody and they’d come by, well, then [she’d] call one of the others to see if they had a room. I think about this one young boy that worked down at Consolidated. Mother just thought the world of him. Finally his time came, though, when he had to go into service. He came back on leave and he got here late at night. Well, we couldn’t lock any of our doors then. Had an ol’ screen door on the front, and you just kinda slapped it and the hook would jump out. So she got up the next morning, and there he was on the couch, sound asleep. He felt comfortable enough to come on in, and she was tickled to see him. [But], in general, Daddy’s work just literally nearly drove him crazy. My father was a policeman here. It kept him busy, busy, busy. He was a night policeman until ’42, and because of some political moves the police chief resigned and they appointed Daddy. He had it during really four tough, tough years. He had real problems with the type people they had here—

141

Teenagers Live Forever

and I’m saying there was a lot of good people. You know, I’m sure I’ve done things when I was off in the merchant marines that I wouldn’t do in my own hometown, and I wonder if that wasn’t true of a lot of these people that came down here. I guess it’s just all kind of the total war, and you lower your morals and self-discipline and everything. Any number of times people would call Daddy and tell him about things that were going on just across the river that he’d need to come see about. They called him one time and said, “There’s a man over there floating in the water—dead. Can you come see about him?” He said, “Well, no, I’ve got no authority or jurisdiction over there.” And they said, “Well, we’ve called and we can’t get the sheriff to come see about it.” And he said, “Well, I’ll see what I can do.” So he called and said, “I think you ought to come on over here.” They went on over and they pulled him up out of the water. The crabs had been eating on him and everything, and [the Louisiana official] said, “He probably got drunk there at the Show Boat or someplace and fell in and drowned.” And that’s as much as [he] was really interested in seeing. Daddy said he turned him over, and he had two holes in there you could stick your fingers in where somebody’d shot him and killed him. Another time they called him over there, and the water had cleared up just real, real clear. It just didn’t get clear like that very often. The Show Boat had a little ol’ narrow walkway from the boat itself back to land, and everybody went on and off there. He said he looked down in the water and said, “I bet you there were”—and I don’t remember how many he said now—“two or three hundred billfolds in the water.” They’d catch these drunks coming out, knock ’em in the head, take the money out and pitch the billfold. But he just couldn’t get people in Lake Charles too interested in all that over there, really. It was a lot of pressure on him. It really was. I think it really took its toll. It just wore him out.



a different time and a different lifestyle Anna J. Caffey I had a P.E. teacher, and she and [the principal] influenced my life much during those years, because when I’d get out of line for some reason, they kept up with me. They knew I did not have a very happy family life. [The principal would] call me in his office just like I’m talking to you, and he’d talk to me and settle me down, and I’d get back with studying like I should—attend-

142

they called it the war effort ing class like I should. I was very happy and very mischievous, and I could get away with a lot of things. Every child needs somebody. If it can’t be your parents it should be somebody else, and it happened to be those two people with me.

I didn’t come to Orange until 1943. I lived in Odessa [Texas], and then the war came and we all got in a Model T and came to Orange. We had a little bitty trailer house. [There] was a big white home [rooming house], and she rented [about six] trailer spaces. So Mother and Daddy somewhere got a trailer, and we parked in that trailer park. I remember there was one bathroom on the backside of the house, a lean-to or add-on as best back then you could add on something. Of course, I was young and into everything at Stark High, and so I always wanted to bathe and get ready to go, and I had to wait my turn. I’ve laughed about that—how inconvenient it was to have a bathroom for that many people. Then behind our trailer park there was a bunch of weeds, and I had a trail, because I had so many friends who lived in Gilmer Homes, which was the good homes—that and Riverside—because the government built ’em. I’d just sort of come and go. In our [trailer] there was a back window, and after I thought everybody was asleep I’d just climb out and go to Riverside Assembly Hall, where everyone went to dance till twelve, one o’clock. I’d just cut through the grass. [It was] very crowded, [and] I did the cooking. My mother worked at Consolidated and my daddy worked at Levingston, and I was the cook, at least my fourteenth year. So when I came in from school it was my job to prepare something for the night meal. I didn’t like it. I’m not going to tell you that was fun time, because I did want to do other things. I cooked on a little coal-oil burner with two burners. I was scared to death of it. You had to turn up a valve, and I know that frightened me, but I did it because that was my job. Those years in my home was not happy for me. I stayed away from home much of the time because it was unhappy time. [My parents] left in ’45, which was my senior year in high school, and I just stayed with friends. I told her, “William’s coming home from service in October, and I’m going to marry him, so I’m going to stay.” And you know, they left me. William and I, we have laughed about that, because our girls at seventeen were still babies. You see, it was a different time and a different lifestyle than we provided for our children. I had loved my William since I was fourteen and a half years old. I married him at seventeen. We lived [together] thirty-eight and a half years when he died. So we had a very, very good life. Children. All the good things.

143

Teenagers Live Forever

[School] was happy time. We moved into the new high school. Those little alcoves where the lockers were to be, that was metal and there was no metal. Anyhow, that’s where William and I courted in between classes. All of my teachers basically were young—probably didn’t have a degree— because I know a lot of the high school boys dated like the P.E. teacher and this type of thing. How was that accepted? Well, they slipped around. Whether [the principal] even knew about it or shut his eyes—he was such a grand guy. I’d a-loved to have stayed in high school all of my years. I have to tell you, because of the way I was raised, those years had a great effect on my life. It [would have been] very easy for me to have been bad— whatever you want to say—like go with this one, that one, and do anything you wanted to do, because I had so little parental supervision. But you see, I was a Christian—I became a Christian when I was twelve—so all of that didn’t entice me. Now, I certainly went across the river, and I’ve danced a thousand and two miles. I’m not trying to make you think I’m a saint, but I’m saying it would have been so easy for me to have gone this way rather than the right way. [William] and I laughed a many a time about how easy it would have been for me to have gone to work in a bar across the river. And I’m not saying that’s wrong of anybody, but it would have been very easy because I had so very little supervision.



this duty to do Iris and Herndon Bowler Iris: Stress—this is a new word. What it used to be—oh, lonesome, or maybe depressed. That came out of the astronauts, [on] the way to the moon—stress. Iris: I was sitting in the study hall when Miss Carr brought in a radio and set it up there on the stage. I suppose it was a Monday morning, and President Roosevelt made a speech saying that he had declared war. We had a lot of young men in the school at that time, but then after January, well, they started leaving, and I guess they were being drafted. I graduated in ’42 and I know we had very few boys in our class. See, the boys had all gone then. Just one or two was left. They had this pride about ’em. They wanted to go, and, too, I think they had to go. And a lot of the girls, when

144

they called it the war effort

they got out of school wanted to join. I went to work at the shipyard in the payroll office, and then I decided I wanted to go, be a nurse, and they wouldn’t give me a release. They said, “You’re doing a good [job]. A lot of you think you’re not doing a good job here, but we need you here.” We felt like we had this duty to do, and even though we missed the guys we wanted them to go. We admired ’em. We had some new people come in ’39, sophomore-junior years, because I can remember the girls would cry. We thought they were foreigners ’cause they’d had to leave their homes, [and] they were upset ’cause they had to leave. You know, new kids—and we didn’t like ’em particular. But one day a little girl was talking to me about her family and having to leave her home, and it just brought home to me—what if I was in her shoes? No one hardly spoke to her, and I did try to feel that for her. Since then, anytime these young people came in I’d try to be more friendly to them, and I did try. They had to leave their friends and [were] uprooted just before graduating and just at the time they [were] making good friends in their own town. Now, children today are moved around a lot, and I don’t think it’s as hard as it was at that time on them. I realized that they did have a hard time of getting acquainted, and, really, if you didn’t have any friendship there wasn’t nothing to come [to] in Orange, really. Herndon: I was working at the shipyard [and] went in the service in ’42. They were just begging for people to come to the shipyard. You could see ’em coming from just all directions—people that had never seen water, much less know anything about a ship. And people never talked at the beginning [about] the money, coming down here to make the money. They came down to help out in the war, and later on they talked about the big money. Later on, the middle of the war or at the end of it, they were down here to make all the money they could get, and 90 percent of ’em says that just as soon as they got all they could make they was going back home. Most of ’em had never been off of the farm. They had never seen another part of the world, and just a hundred miles was so much a different type of living than they were used to. It wasn’t the size of the town but just getting to a town. You talked to a lot of ’em that had never done anything. Raised on a farm and they just stayed on a farm. When they got grown they just went next door and started farming. They didn’t know any other life.



145

Teenagers Live Forever

a little corner of the old south Peggy Garrett The things that children now put their values in—a lot of ’em, let’s say—not all of ’em—but a lot of ’em put their values in things that are so transient, and in those days you had to put it into something permanent, like living for the rest of your life. They were fighting for their lives overseas, and we were fighting for their lives over here. Most people were just real happy about [the work], because, as you know, they were still recovering from a depression. There were a lot of poor people here and they got work, steady work—some of ’em for the first time in their life—and they were very happy. Then there were others that resented the change. Actually, they talked about it among themselves— let’s put it that way. They didn’t show their resentments openly particularly, but Orange has been and still is to a certain degree a little corner of the Old South. There were certain social mores, and they rather resented some people coming in that some people looked down their noses at. And these people would join the clubs around town that had always been very clannish and cliquish. Now, that’s what I meant by resentments. And until those people died, they stayed that way. This was their town! I was born and raised right down here on the corner. My grandparents lived in the two-story house on the corner, and I was born in that house. When I was ten months old my parents built next door and I lived there. There was a big two-story house across the street, and it had always been a private home. Someone bought that, and they made a number of apartments—I’m sure one out of every room—and they ended up setting little trailer houses all over. They were all over the place, and it was scary to us. There was another large house just right behind us there, and the lady that bought that divided it into small apartments and built little shacks, literally chicken-house-looking things, in the backyard. The sanitary conditions must have been terrible in these places. They built a little bathroom out there [across the street], and they all used the same thing. I remember them going to a faucet outside and filling up pots and pans and buckets and things. Of course, there were two bathrooms in the house, I think, but there were I don’t know how many apartments. I guess they shared. And those were just two out of many places around town that had fifty or sixty people living on a small lot. What were the scary aspects?

146

they called it the war effort

You could hear screaming and carrying-on like they were having a big fight at nights, and that’s the sort of thing that was frightening. And I know one time we had raised some chickens, and we found out those chickens were disappearing. It was someone sneaking across at night from over there and taking those chickens. [There] was a need, a real need [for housing]. [But] I feel that people that cut big, beautiful houses up and made little, tiny apartments and put these things all through the yard and everything, that’s greed along with fulfilling the need. Do you think values changed? Yes, very much so, because we were a sleepy little town, and the important thing was to just get along. Tomorrow will be a new day. It had never occurred to me to go to work. I had lived and enjoyed life. But then I realized that there’s something important, and I think people felt this same way. They could better themselves. Their children could have a better life. Their values had been keeping food on the table and the rent paid. But then they wanted to have a little more and do a little better, and they did. [They went] beyond hand-to-mouth existence. We still did not lock a door. Despite what was going on next to you? That’s right. We sure didn’t. We’d keep the front door latched, that kind of thing, and I guess we locked our doors at night, but during the daytime it was just a matter of form that everything was safe. Did those years affect you? I learned to take care of myself. My family had always had maids. We still had one that still took care of me most of the time anyway, but I did learn to do things for myself that I never did before. I learned to take responsibilities that I’d never taken. When I went to work I learned to take responsibilities for my actions, for what I was doing each day. Now, that’s the one big impact. I’m sure that something else would have done this to my life, too, at some time, but I grew up. I guess that’s what you’d say. I had always just taken life in stride. I knew someone else was there picking up the tab, so to speak. I obeyed when they said do or don’t do, and all of a sudden I was my own person. I think a lot of people matured fast. It was a very maturing situation, I think, for the whole country. We grew up and took responsibility.



147

Teenagers Live Forever

you didn’t know whether to climb a tree or jump a fence Juanita and Walter Toronjo Jr. Juanita: The first people to come in were the big shots’ children that were transferred here. I remember one girl came and brought a telephone book from Los Angeles, and we had never seen anything that large in our lives. And we were all fascinated. She brought it to school. Walter: There weren’t that many people here to start with. They had a parade in 1937 down there. We got a picture of it, and there’s more people in the parade than there are on the street to watch ’em. They just weren’t there. Walter: Volunteering was permitted up until a certain point, and then they froze it and you had to wait and go through the draft. Since I missed my chance to volunteer—because I wasn’t really that anxious to get into it—I worked at [Consolidated] until April of ’43, and then I did receive my notice. Juanita: I lived in the country, and we did have electricity even though we didn’t have an indoor bathroom. But my aunt lived way back in the woods, and she did not have electricity. She had two families that came to her house. One of them insisted and begged her to rent the back part of her house, and she rented it to them. Then they, in turn, brought a friend out there that had a little bitty travel trailer. They pulled it up under her trees and lived there. You can imagine people had to be desperate or they would not have gone and lived under those conditions. Walter: Well, it was at the end of a muddy road, too. I don’t know how they got in and out. Forty something years later, it’s still a hog wallow. Out in the country out here there were people living under every tree. If they could get a tablecloth to put up for a tent they were living under it. And getting to work was the biggest problem—and getting home—because of the tires, the gasoline. And the roads were so bad. In 1942 it rained continually, and the roads were so flooded that she had to go to work in a wagon and team one time. All those years were like that. There was no drainage and there was no roads, and it was pretty, pretty bad. What was the mood in high school? Juanita: Well, it was very patriotic. I remember that there was a musical put on that year, and we used all of these patriotic ol’ songs of “Over There.” Of course, things were so different from what they are today. The

148

they called it the war effort

bad things were if you smoked. That was terrible. And if the girls wore eye makeup that was another very bad sign. Walter: Everyone was just waiting their time. I mean to me, among the young men, it was kind of a fatalistic thing. There was no end in sight, and the casualty lists were growing. Everyone just felt like, well, there’s nothing really to prepare for in the future because there won’t be any future—that was among the young men of my age. Was he talking about his concerns for the future? Juanita: Oh, he’s always been pessimistic. [Laughs] Walter: Well, there wasn’t any of them coming home, except once in a while one would come home in a box. There just wasn’t any really safe way to serve your country, because you couldn’t sign up to spend the war at Ellington Air Force Base [Houston] or something like that. Juanita: [Well], I was not necessarily an optimist completely, but I always insisted that we’d just have to put our trust in the Lord for the outcome. So I prayed daily. Walter: Well, the people that knew, the people that [first] came here with the navy, told us how really weak we were. The general public—I don’t know if [they] knew this or not—but they said all we got is a few overage battleships and old aircraft carriers and nothing else. And they told us then to be accurate and be speedy. They told us, “We need these ships.” This was unofficially, but they told us, “You guys need to get the lead out and do the best you can, because we need these ships badly.” Juanita: My daddy had worked in Orange oil [fields] all of his life, and he left and came into the shipyard. When I went to work at the bank, I brought my daddy and our neighbor that rode with him to work at six o’clock in the morning at the shipyard. Most of the time when my daddy got off it took him thirty minutes to get out of the yard and [walk] to town, where I had the car parked. It was just about six o’clock. The first day I worked there he had to wait on me, so he told me that I had to quit if I couldn’t get off by six o’clock, because he had a cow to milk when he got home. And he didn’t much want me working, because in those days he had the feeling that it looked like he couldn’t support his daughters if they worked. So I went to work the next morning and I told Mr. Campbell. He said, “That’s perfectly all right. We understand. When he gets up here at six o’clock, if we’re not through you can go anyway.” Some of the girls resented it, but I had that agreement. After I went to work there at the bank, Mr. Newman taught me to be a teller. He always told me, “Don’t ever try to see the end of your line. You just wait on one customer at the time.” And we couldn’t, because on Satur-

Teenagers Live Forever

149

day morning you could not see where the lines actually went. They would go out the door—literally. Was there very much stress in those days? Walter: We probably didn’t know it was stress. At the end of the Depression there couldn’t of been anything much worse except getting blown apart. From beginning about 1932 through 1940 it was just solid years of nothing but poverty and problems, so really the war stress I don’t believe entered into many of the people. One thing that I remember was that the able-bodied, dedicated nonworkers that liked to loll around town and talk, they had to start hiding out because the labor recruiters were trying to sign people up. They sent buses up into the counties north of us with loudspeakers and music, and they’d gather a bunch of farmers around there and talk ’em into coming down here. They’d come to work every Monday morning—a new group of them. You could tell they’s fresh off the farm ’cause they’d never seen anything taller than a pine tree. So the dedicated loafers really had a hard time staying out of work here. Then the draft board really provides some incentive. I remember a man at Orangefield who was thirty-six years old and never gone to work yet. He sat around at his house reading, oh [what] we used to call Wild West stories, the paperbacks in that day. The draft board told him, “Go to work or go to the army.” So he chose to go to the army. He never did go to work. He got through all his life without it. There wasn’t any place to hide. You either had to work or fight. But as far as stress, I don’t think they knew what it was. What were you doing for a social life? Walter: Well, we dated one night a week and usually— Juanita: Motion picture. Walter: I worked ten hours a day, and she worked, and you had to get up early the next morning. So there wasn’t really much time left for a social life. Juanita: And we went to church, and that was the social life for us. How were you able to develop a relationship on once a week— Walter: Really, it was physically impossible to do very much courting or anything like this, because the roads were terrible. My car was in bad shape. It had a radiator leak right on the generator, which put the lights out. Juanita: Well, the first date we ever had he had to take me home in a taxi, out in the country. Walter: That was the safest way to go. It was a lot safer than my car, ’cause many times the road would be so deep in water that you either drowned out, or—I remember one time my floorboard started floating up.

150

they called it the war effort

The cars in those days used to have the floorboard made out of plywood. Usually it’d have the battery under there and you had to have access to it. This was an ol’ ’33 Chevrolet. I’m down into this corner and the water is flowing pretty fast across there, and the first thing I know my car stops and the floorboard comes floating up ’cause the water’s that high. It’s hard for anybody to realize how bad the roads were, because there wasn’t any money to fix ’em with. It wasn’t as convenient as it was in the horse-and-buggy days, because they were not bothered so much by the roads as we were. A horse wouldn’t drown out. He might splash some mud up. Juanita: We could write letters. You see, he lived in Orangefield and I got my mail in Orange, and we could write letters. That was the contacts. Walter: It wasn’t at a high pitch. [Laughs] I never did understand why she bothered with me, because I was from the country and really ignorant, and I never really owned more than two pairs of shoes till I went in the army and they gave me a third pair. Juanita: Well, I was always a little bit self-conscious. I dated almost no boys in Orange because I was a country girl, and I just didn’t think that they would want to come to the country. I was always very self-conscious after I came into Orange. Walter: Well, most of the time when I lived in Orange County, Orange was as remote as New York City. We lived in the western part of the county and rarely ever came to Orange because there were too many miles of bad road between Duncan’s Woods and Orange [about fifteen miles]. And really, I knew very little about Orange except when I came I’d hear fire trucks running all the time, and to a country boy to hear a fire engine screaming down the street you didn’t know whether to climb a tree or jump a fence. Juanita: Well, we had neighbors that came to town every Saturday night, and I envied them because my daddy didn’t believe in that. He just didn’t go to town on Saturday night. Walter: Frivolous. Waste of time. He wasn’t going to buy anything. Juanita: He only went to town on Saturday night for the election return, which was every two years. I was very envious of the kids that did get to go to town on Saturday night, but we didn’t. Actually, Daddy worked in Orangefield and he bought his groceries out there, and he had nothing to come to town for. If he needed to come to town to buy clothes he came during the day. He had a cow to milk at night, and my mother didn’t care to come on Saturday night because she believed in the Saturday night bath and getting ready for Sunday. Walter: Kill the chicken for Sunday. Juanita: If they needed to come to town for anything they came on

151

Teenagers Live Forever

Saturday morning, but not Saturday evening, and that’s when all the young folks got to come to town. And like I say, your church was your center. I was at the church practicing the Christmas play when we got the word of Pearl Harbor. Did those years leave an impression on you? Walter: I think, really, the feeling was just a relief [after the war], and everybody relaxed. We began to notice that the other kids were not as polite to their elders and that the young parents were not as strict with their children as ours were with us, and we began to find a lot of fault with people that looked like they just relaxed too quick from the tension of the war. The schools seemed to relax. It didn’t seem like they were as businesslike and as strict as they were when we were going to school. Discipline seemed to be relaxed. We did things as young men that we shouldn’t have done even back during the thirties, but it seemed like during the war years everybody had their eye on you. If you were a slacker they knew it, and if you were a draft dodger they would know it. And everybody seemed to me to walk a chalk line whether you was in the service or not. But as soon as the war was over, it looked like society started downhill.



fifty cents a foot Jack Couvillion I was going to Anderson School, [and] our principal—oh, my goodness, she was terrified of Hitler. Sometimes when Hitler was going to make a speech in Germany she would get the whole school to go in the auditorium and listen to that screaming [maniac]—you know he screamed at the top of his voice. Of course, it didn’t seem to make any sense to us, and we weren’t paying any attention to it ’cause we were what—six, eight or nine or ten or eleven years old? But she was terrified that he was going to conquer the world, ’cause that’s what he said he was going to do. We had a great time during the war, actually. Of course, it was my teenage years, [and] I really had a good time. I bought an old Model A Ford when I was fourteen years old. I bought it from a fellow—$120—and I got nineteen tires with it, ’cause I’d have a flat every day, and you couldn’t buy a tire. It’s probably sinful to say this, but the war years here in Orange for me were the best years of my life. I enjoyed ’em. I hate to think that other people got killed on the front lines when here I was having a ball. The greatest time of my life was in those years.

152



they called it the war effort

What was the mood of teenagers? We didn’t worry too much about the war. We didn’t have any idea that we might lose the war. There was just no question about that. I can tell you when I heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s just like it happened yesterday. My birthday is December 31, okay? So [my dad] couldn’t wait to give me a present, and he gave me a new Shelby Flyer bicycle before December. One of the reasons he gave it to me was because it had a radio on it—in those days the first one I’d ever seen on a bicycle. I was riding down Sixth Street, and it seems like it was right after lunch. It was a Sunday because I always listened to the same programs. If they had ’em I’d still be listening to the same programs. I was riding along listening to the radio, and they interrupted the music on the radio and said that the United States Navy station at Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. Well, I just wheeled my bicycle around and rode home as fast as I could, and ran in the house and told my parents that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States was at war. I don’t remember [their reaction], but they knew I was excited and I was scared. Were you scared? Of course I was scared, ’cause I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor [was]. Well, I knew that it was in Hawaii. They said so. But that didn’t mean that they didn’t have planes and stuff—and aircraft carriers and stuff—in the Gulf. Do you think families were under stress at that time? I never got an allowance when I was a kid. I did little jobs like mowing the lawn and shoveling sawdust and stuff like that. But I used to make a dollar a day—which in those days was a lot of money—by rubbing my dad’s feet every night, ’cause he’d stood up all day long on ’em.15 He had his bed elevated in two coffee cans full of sand or something so that the blood would run out of ’em after doing that. His feet were so calloused that I used to rub his feet every night—fifty cents a foot—and it’d take me thirty minutes to do this every night during those hectic times. I would rub his feet with Absorbine Junior until they were soft. I would rub ’em so long that I’m probably one of the best masseurs in the world for feet, because I can really work that. See, he would go to the hospital and work with Dr. L. O. Thompson for fractured jaws, and sometimes Dr. Thompson would call him for other emergencies. Since the other doctors were doing other things, he would call my dad to go the hospital and help him with appendectomies and other surgeries. He was gone a lots of times at night. They would call him from the hospital to go down to the hospital, and he’d stay there, come in and just die. [He was] on his feet almost all the time. So many emergen-

153

Teenagers Live Forever

cies. I would answer the phone. I figured it was just a call for me. You know how teenagers are, and I would answer the phone and it would be Dr. Thompson wanting my dad to meet him at the hospital in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. It was very difficult for him. As a matter of fact, we got to worry about him, because he was so tired he couldn’t sleep. He was working so hard he was really having problems.



all of a sudden we were new york Carlton Harmon I guess this is our first experience with women welders, women workers. I remember before this my grandfather and grandmother sitting on the porch talking about a lady who took a job as a teacher in school and took a man’s job. They wanted to run her out of town. Unheard of—a woman having a job that took a man’s job. There must have been something wrong with this woman, ’cause they knew of two or three families that were out of work—the husbands didn’t work. It was really a sin for this woman to be teaching school and taking a man’s job and putting a family out of a job. That was their attitude. Then when the war came about. all that was forgotten. These women were good welders. Just before [the war] I remember the WPA paved the streets and put in the storm sewers and sidewalks—which was unheard of—and that was about the only work people had. I went out one evening and this guy was pouring these sidewalks, and he was saying how nice it was to have a job. He hadn’t worked in several years, and tonight he was going home and his wife would have some pork chops—bought some pork chops. And he said, “You know, I’m making more money than I’ve ever made in my life working on this WPA job.” Then right after that the war broke out. But [before that] there wasn’t any work, and people would take any job. Then all of it changed. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, everything changed. All of a sudden we’re in a war, and the shipyards here started to [booming] full blast. And they hired people from all over the country. They come off the farms and they didn’t have money. Wasn’t using money. The money they had was what they got for their cotton crop, and maybe that’s what they

154

they called it the war effort

used all year. They traded. They didn’t use money. There’s no way a guy’d have a hundred dollars to his name. If he had it he didn’t put it in the bank. He kept it at home. Some of these guys would take these checks, and they’d cash the first one—send a little money home. Some of these guys, Consolidated would call ’em up and ask them to cash their checks. They’d had their checks three or four months and they’d never cashed ’em. And they would say, “I don’t need the money. I’ve got a hundred dollars in the can at home.” These guys would stick their money in these coffee cans in their barracks, or they’d wait till they went home to cash it. How did it change things? Well, one thing I can say, a lot of people that lived here back then were all kin to each other. They married their friends. And just a lot of new people came in, and people started to marrying Yankees. [Laughs] And you never saw a black and a white together, but all of a sudden you saw some of those. That happened. Integration was unheard of. We didn’t know what integration was. If you asked us what it meant you’d have to get the Webster’s Dictionary down and explain it to us. I was going to school, and I would make three and four hundred dollars a [month] selling newspapers. That’s more than the schoolteachers made, and they didn’t like it. I did real good in arithmetic. The teacher used to get so mad at me when I made out the bills for my newspaper route while I was studying arithmetic. Money was easy to make, [and] these people never had money. To them this was extra. They weren’t used to the niceties. They worked on their own cars. They sewed their own clothes up. These were people that were raised in the Depression. One guy I worked with was seventy-something years old, and he knew what the Depression was. You worked with him where? In the shipyard. I was sixteen. I worked three months during the school break at the Consolidated Steel as a blacksmith helper. At sixteen? Uh-huh. They didn’t care. If you could breathe—they’d hire anybody. They didn’t worry about how old you were. It was hard, hot work, and you did the same thing when you started as when you went out the back gate and retired. They worked long hours. You couldn’t do what they did today. They breathed the fumes of what they were welding. No ventilation. Things were different. You didn’t have environmentalists. What’s an environmentalist? That’s another word you’d look up in the dictionary. That made me know real quick that I didn’t want that type of work. Most of my friends that worked there are not with us anymore. They didn’t live that long. It was a tough job. Had to hurt their health. It was a type of a job that sure didn’t lengthen your life. Noisy! God, I imagine that most of the

Teenagers Live Forever

155

people that worked down there finally lost their hearing. Very noisy. Very close working conditions. Very close. What were your impressions about all the people? It was unreal. See, this was a real slow-going country town. All of a sudden we were New York. You got to remember it was a country town. Wasn’t any industry here. It was a farming community—rice farmers, a little retailing, shingle makers, sawmills—and basically the people went to bed early. They went to bed at dark, six or seven o’clock, and they didn’t change their ways overnight. The war was almost over with before they woke up and realized that people don’t go to bed at seven o’clock. They missed part of what was going on. Here’s all these older people. People back then never left the town. Wasn’t any work anywhere, so why leave? These people just stayed around, so you knew everybody, and here’s all of a sudden outsiders. For a long time you didn’t trust ’em. The older people that was here all of their life said, “God damn! Where’s all these people coming from?” It would take the people out of these small towns in East Texas. They dried up to nothing. All the men were working on defense jobs on the coast and all the young men got drafted, so it left the little towns up there vacant. Wasn’t many people up there. There were all kind of people here. There were people that followed boomtowns. You know, there were people that followed the oil booms that they had back then. They were gamblers. They were con people. There were a lot of con people here. And you got streetwise in a hurry. You sure did. There were a lot of carnival-type people came in. One guy came in— because the last chrome they put on cars wasn’t real good and bumpers would rust—he came in and he would sell you a quart jar of rust remover. And you know what it was? River sand with water in it. He put something in it to make it stink, and he’d sell it for a dollar a bottle. People would buy this stuff and thought they’d found something that was just invented. You could sell anything. People had money. If they didn’t drink and raise hell they couldn’t find a lot of things to spend their money for. A guy came in and he’d sell solutions to pour in batteries to rejuvenate it. It didn’t do anything but make ’em bubble a little bit. You could literally sell anything during the war. Just name it. There were guys that when they got a little time off would go up to East Texas on their farm and bring truckloads of watermelons back. Or they would bring bacon back. They would bring corn back. Sugar. Honey. White lightnin’. You name it, and they would bring it back. There were people that would go up to the knit mills up in Tennessee and Georgia and Alabama. They would buy irregular or second-grade

156

they called it the war effort

socks and ball ’em up and sell ’em for a dollar or two a bundle. These guys would buy ’em and unroll ’em, and one foot would be a foot and a half long—the foot size—and the next foot would be six inches. And they didn’t care. They’d just take that ol’ sock and cut the end off and sew it up or fold it up under their foot, because there weren’t any to be had. They would literally buy anything. They could bring a shirt that was knitted and one arm would be longer than the other. They were irregulars, and they would absolutely buy it. Today you would call it a second. I guess if you had that same product today it would be called a fifth. I don’t even think you’d see ’em. They were that bad. They would work out of their truck or the trunk of their car. A lot of flimflam people. They were drifters. They went from town to town, and if they came back this way next time it was six months to a year and they cut their hair different. Towns like Orange drew a lot of people like this.



delivering death messages Louis Dugas Jr. In ’41 there were people still coming to the bank with rifles. There was a fellow who had a feud, and he brought his rifle to the bank in case the other fellow showed up. I feel certain that had the other fellow shown up there would have been a fight, a shooting. I think there was a lot of, I guess you’d say, frontiertype justice more than anything else. I think what happened is that the influx of people from all over brought a different perspective to the people in Orange. The people in Orange in the early years were like, for want of a better word, like out of the Old West. There were a lot of new kids in school from everywhere, mostly from East Texas but some from the Northeast. Some of them came with the idea that we were real country—backwards. Others came with the idea we were a big town. I think probably that [period] was the beginning of families spreading out. When I was a little kid, you know, we all lived right in the vicinity of where grandma and grandpa lived, and then when this all happened everybody moved here, there, and everywhere. People were moving away

157

Teenagers Live Forever

and not having anyone that they could call upon for advice and counseling if they ran into problems. My mother’s family was in Beaumont, which is only twenty-five miles away, but when you don’t have a telephone in those days there’s no way to get any advice as you could today. I’m sure there were occasions where my mother would have welcomed some of that—my father, too. I think there were times when she would probably have not have been as short-tempered if she’d had someone she could have said, “How do I do this?” or “How do I get by this?” or things of that nature. What were the most undesirable aspects of those years? Well, when I was a telegraph messenger boy for Western Union delivering death messages to people. They were bordered in black, and usually someone locally, a Red Cross [worker] or someone else, was supposed to read ’em. On one occasion I specifically recall I had to read the telegram to these people. I [was] right at sixteen, and they had a yard full of dogs and I brought the telegram. They could not read. They were Cajun people, and I opened the telegram and began to read, and as I did it seemed that the dogs started howling and the woman started crying and the man started screaming about his son. It seemed an eternity, but it was actually not very long before I was able to finish reading the telegram and just get the heck out of there as fast as my bicycle would go down the road. That to me was, you know, a very traumatic experience. It’s always bothered me that they sent a kid out to read a telegram. I still remember that incident and that’s been close to forty years ago. One of the things you haven’t asked me about that made an impact is that veterans began coming back.16 You know, when they would get out they’d come back to school, and they were very, very interested in getting their high school diploma in those days. They were older than we were, [and] I guess the kids always looked up to them, that they had gone and paid their dues and here they were going back to high school getting degrees. I guess it depended on their experience, but some of them were very serious, some of them were very jovial, and some of them would freak out every now and then. And amazingly enough, nobody got real upset about that. They didn’t do anything totally bizarre, but then again, their mind would go off and then they’d come back. Some of those guys, I guess they’re still doing that. They’re still around. It’s like you and I are talking about today and the time, and then they’d lapse into talking about something else that related to their service duty. They’d just flip over into that.



158

they called it the war effort

we’re going to be something after all Eleanor B. Kershner I guess when you’re fourteen and fifteen your world revolves around yourself so much you’re not that aware [of what’s happening] in the community, except that when I was growing up there were 10,000 eyes watching everything you did. Everybody knew exactly whose child belonged to whom, and before you got home your parents knew where you’d been and what you’d done. And then when the town grew, there was a certain amount of anonymity. So you felt supervised. Oh, cared for, you might say. Cared for. [Laughs] We were cared for very greatly. We graduated in May of ’42, and I left at the end of that summer and went to college. Orange had already begun to grow because we had a lot of new people in high school. We had a lot of girls who were our rivals who had just come [laughs]—but a lot of new boys, too. We had new teachers because there had been teachers here for years who had taught my older brother and older sister, and all of a sudden we started getting an influx of new faces. And they weren’t all good teachers. Up until that time we had thought every teacher was just perfect. What impressed you about them? Their lack of patience and temper tantrums and things we had never experienced in a teacher. They were younger, I think. I came back briefly in the fall of ’44, and there was a definite shortage of teachers by that time. They had built new schools, and they were frame structures out in Riverside. They were having a hard time even getting substitute teachers. The superintendent of schools, or the principal of that particular school, knew that I was in town and I had had some education, and they asked me if I would be interested in being a substitute teacher. I didn’t have a degree, but I filled in for two months—not every day—in one of the schools in Riverside. My father was president of the school board, and he and the members of the school board were having a terrible time making ends meet. So many of the families who came in were in government housing that was beginning to be built, and they were not able to collect property taxes to help pay for the additional schools that were needed. As I remember, my father was in Washington the day that Pearl Harbor occurred. [He was] trying to seek federal funds, and this went against the grain of every member on that

159

Teenagers Live Forever

school board. They didn’t believe in federal funding for schools, so they were on the horns of a dilemma. It was exciting for Orange to grow. It had been so poor and so sleepy, and people had tried so hard to make a living. Maybe two or three new families a year would come into town, and I don’t have any idea how many would leave. This was exciting to teenagers. It felt—oooh—we’re going to be something after all. But Orange had been a beautiful little town. [There were] big oak trees over the main street that met in the center of the street, and then there were several large mansions along the street. There were trees all the way through Orange. Tourists who came through on Highway 90—and it was the main highway then—would often write back and say what a beautiful city Orange was. And that was about the only thing we had going for us. The beauty began to disappear, and very little of it remains. The trees were cut down to make room for houses, and the wooded areas disappeared. Lots of telephone lines and concrete and square cinder block buildings, little one-story buildings [appeared]. Lots of signs—ugly signs. It’s just another city now. Were there stresses associated with those days? I’m sure there were. I wouldn’t have been aware of them, probably. When war was declared, our civics class sat and listened to the declaration of war, and it was a sobering experience. A lot of the boys immediately wanted to join the forces after they graduated, and a lot did and a lot of ’em never came back. Some of our family’s closest friends had a son who was killed. It was our first experience that life was finite, because when you’re a teenager you’re going to live forever. But it didn’t hang over us like a pall. You know, at the time we were talking about it. We thought about it, [but] I have no idea how many people thought about it when they lay down to go to sleep at night—or walking back and forth to school when you were alone. But when you were together it wasn’t the main topic of conversation. You had to examine your values, because it was a matter of life and death when so many people you knew were not coming back—or they were coming back and they’d never be the same.



just like a dream Jane Childers We lived in the home I was born in in 1924. The house was a six-room home, and my mother and father and myself lived in two rooms of the

160

they called it the war effort

house in order to share the rest of the house with the people that had come to work in the shipyard. Mr. J. K. Conn had just opened a furniture store here, and my mother was his first customer. She bought fourteen single beds from him, and she put three beds in each room, and then they took an attic and made three bedrooms up there and put [in] a bath. She had one buzz fan in each room, and, oh, it was hot in the summertime. I can remember ’em coming in from work and running to see who can get to the bathtub first it was so hot, and our house turned into a place for about twenty to twenty-five people when really there was just the three of us. They were working around the clock, and at times it got so bad the men would share one bed. I mean some of them would work in the daytime and some of ’em at night. This was a quiet, lazy town. I can remember Mother and all of her little sisters and the ladies from her Sunday school class would sit out under the trees in the daytime and sew and visit, and people didn’t do that anymore. I mean just overnight it became just a hub of activity. It was just like a dream. My father had the Orange Ice Company. You must remember then there was very little refrigeration, like ice machines and things like this, and my dad sold tons and tons of ice to the shipyards. He would sell so much that he couldn’t produce enough, and he had big trucks that he’d send into Beaumont and even Houston to pick up ice and bring back here to sell. He had men that had regular routes, like out in Brownwood and the north part of town, ’cause so many people then didn’t have refrigeration. They had iceboxes still. Was that a crisis when there wasn’t enough ice? Oh, yes! Oh, yes it was—especially in the summertime. And I know I’ve seen people call him—you know with sick people in their homes—to see if they couldn’t be preferred over other people to get ice. Of course, we always remember the shipyards. I mean in the middle of the night you could wake up and hear all this hammering and the sirens going—the bells ringing. At twelve o’clock at night and maybe at five o’clock in the morning you would hear all these whistles blowing, and that was time a new shift would change. And you could hear that all over the town. Then when we had a fire in town—[every area] had a number. I think this area was number thirteen, and you could hear thirteen whistles blowing. You’d know what area the fire was [in]. You heard more ambulances running then I think than you do now. We really had a lot of things that sprung up. Like in the beginning there was no nightclubs. There was no beer joints and things, and those did spring up along the way. I think a lot of people’s morals went down—and

161

Teenagers Live Forever

a lot of them might have went higher—but I think if there was anybody to be led astray, that was a good time to do it.



Youth was at a premium. Those moving in were primarily young people and those in early adulthood, and it was the young who were shipping out. With so many young men away in one of the military branches, teenagers now comprised a larger segment of the hometown population. Anyone in their forties or fifties was labeled “old.” Many saw their youth as one of their resources for coping with events of the day, and looking back, almost with disbelief—“Man, we was young then.” They were energetic and to some extent invulnerable. But with revelations about the adversity of war, exhilaration became tempered by the dawning reality. Before the war, options in Orange for young people upon completing high school were limited, especially for females. There were service stations, grocery stores, and other local businesses and offices—maybe something in agriculture. For many of the youth coming of age in more rural counties up through East Texas and across into Louisiana, there were even fewer opportunities. Several generations, for example, might remain in the same area working the same crops. The opening of the defense industries brought not only more kinds of work from which to choose, but also the training. It was possible to develop skills and learn a trade that might continue through a lifetime. There was also the incidental or experiential learning associated with the work, such as how to be responsible, how to get along with people from different backgrounds, or how to adapt in a more complex industrial work world. Many were able to start work even before they graduated. Some required a minor’s release.17 They were exposed to a wider range of role models, and rather than having to conform to more narrow, traditional expectations, they had the chance to experiment with new behaviors and personality styles. There were identities available that were heretofore unknown. More money made possible a more active social life, and with all of the young people who were arriving there were more companions with whom to socialize. Spending more time in school than had been true of their parents, peer influence shaped their behavior as never before.18 And as was true with many children, teens had more unsupervised free time due to working parents. In a larger, more anonymous population they were able to move about and test their surroundings without worrying about the adult monitoring of the past. They were increasingly found in places and activities associated with adulthood, and for boys, with “manhood”—at work, in the military, across the river—or they might look more adult because of the way they dressed. With all the new men, expanded opportunities for dating, and increasingly

162

they called it the war effort

close working relationships between men and women, females were certainly conscious of their appearance. The money made it possible for them to invest more in their looks, whether this money came from a father or husband. And for the first time women were in larger numbers finding employment and having their own money to spend. Women were more visible in public than ever before.

5

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong “I suppose if one would look back on it we grew up very quickly. The men did too. They left as boys and came back as men, I would presume. It was an awful lot of growing up to do rather quickly, an awful lot of responsibility to assume. In fact, the women I think were very good, very strong.” Lillian Robison

A

merican women were no strangers to paid employment, according to historian D’Ann Campbell, and this included the Depression years.1 Out of school, they generally wanted work, and they eventually landed a job. But to hear Albert Adams, “Orange had just about took the sign down around here. It wasn’t hardly anything going on.” A poor-people town, unemployment was very high. What few jobs were available mostly went to men, the traditional breadwinners, and those women who worked outside the home had limited options, like teaching, nursing, retailing, and office work. If she married it was not unusual for a woman to have to forfeit her employment, and old-timers were incensed at the thought of a single woman taking a job away from an unemployed man and his family.2 The war, however, signaled the end of the Depression, and anybody who wanted work found a ready market. Government and industry joined ranks to lure women from their homes and enlist them in war production centers around the country. Patriotic recruitment posters, ads, and radio spots from coast to coast were directed at women, and they all “stressed the red, white, and blue of the work issue.” 3 Demand for war goods was overwhelming, and male pickings were slim for those trying to fill production lines. Plant managers were quick to realize that if contracts were to be fulfilled on time, women in vast numbers would have to be hired.

164

they called it the war effort

The majority of women retained their homemaker roles, primarily because of family responsibilities. Their “flexibility, creativity, and general competence,” though, won them Campbell’s recognition as “heroines of the homefront.” 4 It is the housewife who is her WWII “modal woman,” not Rosie the Riveter or the WAC.5 However, millions of other women also responded to the call, shrugging off stereotypes and stepping into newly opened positions as well as those vacated by draftees and volunteers. The Orange shipyards, especially Consolidated, placed untold numbers of women in traditional and nontraditional slots.6 Many filled clerical positions, and while these positions did not receive the media attention given Rosie, Campbell reminds us “World War II was fought with typewriters and telephones as much as bombers and bazookas.” 7 Hundreds of other females streamed through the gates in hard hats, coveralls, and Li’l Abner boots. Women were ready to work, to prove themselves and to begin the reach for levels of independence and responsibility previously unknown. It was the beginning of a new era. At the same time, it was the continuance of an old refrain: the anguish of women at home in wartime. War leaves few victimless. Legions of men, and increasingly women, know firsthand the horrors of the battlefield, and countless fathers, brothers, and comrades have felt grief. But a special kind of suffering has historically seemed reserved for the women left behind. Maybe it is because, as a group, so often they had to wait. But unlike many women of an earlier era and conflict, “sad-faced and waiting,” these women did not sit passively, hands folded in laps.8 Activity was an anodyne for dread, so they wrote letters and rolled bandages and tirelessly committed themselves to the war effort. They confided and they shared. To a person, they prayed. But there was always the separation, the loneliness, and that nagging sense of helplessness. As Mrs. Tilley commented somewhat wistfully, “I often wish I could have seen him, could have done something for him.” These are some of the women, the women who worked and waited.



we were like on parade when we went in there Aileen Noguess I think they more or less was going to be forced to hire the women, you know, because of so many men being drafted. [Some of the officials] wanted to just take them in and pay ’em a minimal sum just to get ’em on the job. The unions got in there and

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

165

said, “Well, if those women are going to be doing the men’s work they’re going to be drawing men’s pay.” So we did. We started out at the same as a man, and we went right on up the ladder. When I reached the scale they said here’s your helper, the blueprints are down here in this office, and your materials are on the dock, and you’re going to do the aft end of the ship. And that’s what I did. [In 1941] I was working for the Equitable Bag Company operating a machine where they made bags. Whenever it was opened up for the women to go into the shipyard, well, I quit and went to classes [for a few weeks] to learn a trade. I hired in on November 11, 1942. They had a trade school down here in Orange [and] had electrical and sheet metal and welding. It was on-the-job training, is what it was. I was number thirteen [in the class]. It was just women. I was in the ventilation department, [and] they taught us how to put pipe together—aluminum pipe—and how to weld and solder. Just anything that went on. I really did like it. The opportunities where I was working was just practically nothing, and the money wasn’t very good, and whenever this opportunity came up, well gosh, it seemed like a gold mine. I loved the work. I really loved the work. I liked being around the people and working with the people. I can do that type of work real easily, so I just took in there after it. We had the aft end of the ship. That’s where the men slept, you know, and they had some other rooms down in there. We would run the overhead ventilation in these ships. It had to pass inspection, [and] I wasn’t called back to do anything over. We tried to do our work real well, and I think we did. Whenever our work got short on the ships and [we] didn’t have any work to do, we were sent down to another crew. I think that speaks for itself. If we hadn’t been qualified to do the work down there, they wouldn’t have sent us. Towards the end of the war we didn’t have so many ships to work on, [and] they sent us up on another ship to run the ventilation in the galley. Well, it was all perfectly new to us, but we had our blueprint and our materials, so we just took right in after it. We finished the job in three days. [One] of the men that had worked in there before said, “I can’t understand it. Here you’ve got it finished in three days. The first time we did this it took us six weeks.” But we had to work. I was a female. I had to work! Now, these good ol’ boys that stood around the coffee and the water fountain all day with their feet propped up out there, they didn’t ever say anything to ’em. But now, you just let a woman try to goof off a little bit—well, they got after her right away. We were working on a piece of ventilation duct, and it [was]

166

they called it the war effort

real tiny—about three inches. It was an elbow. So we were both down on the deck with this little tiny elbow that we were trying to rivet, and somebody saw us there and told our leaderman, “You’ve got two women over there sitting on the deck. You’d better go over there and see about them.” So we were down there on our hands and knees struggling to get these rivets in when he came up. He looked, just turned around, and walked on back off. But we weren’t sitting down. We were down there struggling to do what we needed to do. You know, little petty things like that. When you went into the yard, were you apprehensive? Well, a little bit. Going into something so entirely new and different, I would have to be just a little bit apprehensive and tense. My sister and I went in at the same time. They took us over to two fine gentlemen and said, “Here’s your helpers.” And so they treated us just real nice, and they taught us everything they knew. We were like on parade when we went in there. [Laughs] You kinda felt like you’d like to run and hide from the way everybody stared at you. Because being the first women going in—well, from the shop where I worked we had almost a mile to walk, and men up in the gantries whistled down at the women going by and things like that. What was your reaction? Not anything. Just kind of ignore it all. We had to have on coveralls and have our hair tied up, and we had to wear a hard hat and work shoes—not any kind of light shoe but a good, heavy, sturdy work shoe. Seems like in that three years I never did get a pair of dress shoes, because I always had to end up using my shoe stamps for work shoes. Were there different kinds of women that went in? Oh, yes! Oh, yes. Some of the nicest people I’ve ever met were there in that shipyard, and some of the raunchiest ones I’ve ever run across—men and women. There was a lady that worked out there that was just about my size, and people would get us mixed up. They’d call me by her name, and I’ll tell you she was a character! Ohh! Goodness! And I was always having to kinda defend myself, because I was not Helen! [Laughs] Yes, there was all kinds of people down there. Was sexual harassment much of a problem for women? I don’t think so—well, I never encountered it myself. I think that everybody that got around me knew that I was a lady, and everybody treated me like one, and I’ve never had any problems. There was lots of things that would circulate about what went on down there in this ship at a certain dock or something like that—these people getting fired. Just general talk. But I never had any problems. I was with [my] little gang or crew. I didn’t

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

167

see too much of anybody else, because if we were down there in the bottom of a ship working—well, you didn’t get out and go to lunch. You just had your little sack lunch with you, and you sat down there for thirty minutes and ate. Did women seem to be able to handle that kind of work as well as the men? Yeah, I think they did. I sure do. They had a few tragedies down there where some woman would get killed and fall in the river and things like that. We were working on one of these return vessels, these landing ships that they had in D-Day and things like that when they made their invasion. Well, we got a bunch of these ships back in to clean ’em up and rework ’em, and this woman came in and they were working on some heavy electrical wiring. She took a hold of it to start to work, and she was electrocuted immediately. Well, I don’t know if the rest of the shipyard would know it as much as we would on this little ship that we were working on. Then I saw one fall in the river one time. She was going up the ramp to get on the ship, and it tipped a little bit and she fell in the river, but she was rescued. It’s traumatic when this happens to male or female. Was there more emotion— I don’t think so. I don’t think so. It’s just a shock to everyone when somebody gets killed like that. I was really lucky. I got just one tiny little nick on a finger when I was using a drill. I got my finger in the way, but that was it. I think I was careful, and I think I was lucky, too, because I wasn’t exposed to more hazardous things that other people had to do. How was it when you went home? I didn’t have much time to do anything after I got home, because we would work ten hours a day and it took me three hours to get to and from work every day. They ran these government buses for the workers, and I would have to leave [home], start walking, at five-thirty in the morning to get down to where I would catch the bus. Time we got down there it was just about time to go to work. Then I would walk way down to the south end of the yard, where the sheet metal building was, and we would start to work at seven o’clock. Well, that was an hour and a half right there. Then the same thing in the afternoon. Time I would get home in the summertime I would relax a little bit, and when I would relax, well, the muscle spasms would hit me from the heat and the fatigue. My mother would grab the bottle of alcohol and she’d start rubbing. I’d get over that—well, there wasn’t very much time left after you had thirteen hours of work and going to and from work. When I think about it now it seems like there was just three years just cut out of my life, because I wasn’t doing anything. I was going to work and coming back, eating and sleeping—and get up and go back to work

168

they called it the war effort

again the next day. You did the best you could. It was bad times and it was good times. What were some of the bad times? Well, the shortages, for one thing. There wasn’t anything to buy. You had money, but you couldn’t buy anything because there wasn’t anything to buy. At one time I think we went about two months—didn’t even see a piece of fresh meat. I remember we were working on a ship one time, and one of the inspectors came along. They’d put out some Cokes where they’d sell sandwiches and cigarettes—they got in some Cokes. Well, he brought me a Coke, and there must have been six of us around there working, some welders and sheet-metal [workers] and electricians and everything. So everybody took a sip out of that bottle of Coke, ’cause you just never got one, you know. So that’s the way we did. Somebody’d get a package of gum, and they’d take a piece and break it up in several little pieces and give everybody a little taste of it. What were the good times? I guess the camaraderie with the people. You get to be like a big family with your certain gang that you worked with. You get very close to ’em. When I left I felt like I was leaving my family. Was your mother working? Oh, no. No. She wasn’t able to work. She did her part, I’ll tell you right now. My mother was in her sixties. She had chickens, and she would save up her eggs every week. On Friday afternoon she would take a water bucket full of eggs down to the shipyard and just get there by the gate, just stand there, and people would come out and they would take a dozen eggs and pay her, and then she would come home. She didn’t make anything off of it, but at least she was doing something for the war effort. I guess she’d have ten dozen in there. Do you feel like you lost a part of yourself when you left the shipyard? Yes, because [as I said] I felt like I was leaving my friends and family behind. Other than that, I didn’t have any regrets—let’s put it like that. It was work, work, and work—which was all right. I did my part and I was proud of it. But then you kinda have to live a little sometimes. It was tough years, ’cause I liked to spend money and make money and spend money. I wanted everything I could see. You had things in the Depression, and you couldn’t buy ’em ’cause you didn’t have any money. And then it was just the reverse. You had money and you couldn’t buy anything. It was hard years, but then I think I profited from it real well. I’m sure I did a lot of growing up, even at twenty-six. I had a lot of responsibility, and I think that helped me a lot, too, ’cause I found out I can take over a job and do a good job of it.

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

169



our way of life is ended right now Julia Wingate Bacom When the Western Union boy came to the door everything drained out of you. I remember one time that I just got weak in the knees when we got a telegram, and it was from Cecil saying he had a leave and he’d be home. But for the most part, if you saw that Western Union boy you stopped and watched to see which house he went in. And it got to where it was just like the plague. That uniform or that delivery or that yellow envelope was catastrophe. That’s all it meant. Everybody was scared to death to get one. Somebody was either injured or missing or killed. And then if you saw him go to somebody’s house, your first reaction was to go to that person, and I think to this day I hate to see a telegram come. I think that’s one of the things that stayed with a lot of people, that fear of a telegram. That stayed. In 1941 I had my twentieth birthday. I had been working for a while before the war started. I was really too young to be working the way I was. I lied about my age. They had started schools here for people to train for the defense work, [and] I was registering people in the school. Some you thought had walked fifty miles to get there. They were doing everything they could to come up with some qualifications for a job of any kind. A lot of ’em had been farmers and had never done anything else, but they kept stressing they were willing to work. They were willing to learn. Some of these people weren’t able to do anything. They didn’t have the mentality, but the idea was there was work and there had to be something they could do. If they were offered a job as a janitor, as a clean-up person—common laborer—they grabbed it. Anything to put food on the table. Pearl Harbor day was my sister’s birthday and we’d been to a movie. Now, we didn’t go to movies very often ’cause it cost fifteen cents. We were out celebrating, and we came in and Mother and Pop were listening to the radio, to the Pearl Harbor news. Mother said, “Well, our way of life is ended right now. Tomorrow it will be a different world. It will never go back.” And we thought, “Oh, Ma.” But she was right. She knew by the next day we would be in war. Here she was with five sons, all [of an] age to go in the military. One was a divinity student so he wouldn’t go, but the other four would. She knew it would affect the girls’ lives, too, because the

170

they called it the war effort

girls would have to start doing what the boys had been doing. She sat there and she told us that. We had some friends with us, and by the time she got through talking to us we were a very serious bunch of young ladies. I changed jobs. I went to work first at the mess hall out in the yard there at Consolidated Steel. It was one great big building. There was never any paint on it or nothing. It was thrown together. It was a temporary thing. It wasn’t meant for anything else. The food was set on big, long tables, almost like a circus mess tent—set out family style in bowls along those tables. The waitresses came in, and as soon as a bowl was empty they refilled it. When one man got through eating they jerked his plate away, set another one down, and there was another man ready to sit down to eat. It was really a boomtown. We had people setting up tents on our land. We had one family come in—nine kids and one little trailer. Kids stayed outside unless it was pouring down rain. They never went in. They were undesirable and we had to get them out. Anything that wasn’t nailed down they felt was theirs. The gardens that we’d planted, they thought it was theirs to pick. But for the most part, you got some very good people moved in down here. I went to work for Consolidated Steel, and I was the first girl to work out in the yard. No girls had ever worked out in the yard before. They worked in the administration building. They decided they needed secretarial skills out in the warehouse, where all of the materials were coming in for building and equipping the ships. I was a little leery about it, and it was to start on the night shift and I was leery about that. I went out there for the interview and talked to the superintendent on the night shift. I was very hesitant about it, and then I saw a cousin of mine working there. I thought, “Well, if Johnny’s here it’ll be okay.” I had somebody who’d look after me. Johnny had warned me that these men liked to play jokes, and being the only girl out there they were going to play jokes on me, like don’t type up a report for left-handed monkey wrenches or a skyhook or anything. So sometime later we got a report turned in on a bunch of steam strainers. Well, I knew you didn’t strain steam, so I just set it back. I didn’t pay any attention to it, and about three days later everybody was looking for steam strainers. They came and asked me for them, and I said, “Oh, you can’t fool me. You don’t strain steam.” The top guy over the warehouse division said, “You take her out there and show her some steam strainers.” I came in and I typed ’em up and sent the report through. As young as I was, my job was to see that every ship that left here had every spare part it needed. We had to list every spare part they would need, and I had to see that when those ships were commissioned those spare

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

171

parts were on there. It was a tremendous responsibility. One time on those spare parts I typed an order for a dozen winches to put aboard the Newell, and I spelled it “wenches.” That was a typographical error. I knew better. The next morning I had a dictionary on my desk, and I had complaints from the crew of the ship—they liked it the way I had it. We used to laugh, because during [the] Depression things were so hard we did without everything under the sun, and now we were working and had money and everything was rationed. You couldn’t buy anything. Girls who had this deal about shoes—we always had one pair of shoes. White in summer. Black in winter. And you wore them till they wore out and you got another pair. Now we could go out and we could buy shoes. Well, shoes were rationed and they started making these synthetic shoes, and if you got caught in the rain the soles came off. And then too, you couldn’t get elastic, and on your underwear that was a major problem. [They used] drawstrings, and it’s a delicate subject, but there’s been more than one girl whose drawstring came loose downtown, and she just stepped out of her panties and walked off and left them. She wasn’t about to pick them up. Fabric was hard to come by, and the styles changed to the straight skirts and just below the knee. Those wide lapels and all that stuff—that went. And another thing—and this is funny and this is a psychological thing— when there’s a war on, girls’ hair starts getting longer. They curl it more. They wear it longer. There is something psychological about men in the service and their image of a woman. I think because men are alone and by themselves they dream more of the ideal, and the short, cropped hair isn’t it. And the makeup was a little bit different. Girls were wearing more makeup then. Before that the proper woman wore Tangee lipstick. It was kind of a very pale lipstick, and it changed color according to the person who was wearing it. It looks orange, but it changes to pink. But it was considered cheap for anybody to wear the loud color makeup. Then, with the war, they started wearing the very bright makeup and lots of it. Mascara was still considered cheap, and proper women did not wear anything else. You talked about the mess hall being temporary. Was there a temporary mentality at that time? There was. You had Riverside. That was temporary housing. You had the permanent people and the temporary ones. And you know, I do believe there was a kind of a snobbishness about the permanent. We were here and this was our town. Things [were] hard to find in the stores. There were storekeepers who didn’t put them out. When we went in we could get a certain amount of them. The temporary people never heard about them. Toilet paper was a very difficult item to buy. We had an aunt, who had a small store, and this is a little thing, but she’d buy the crates of apples to

172

they called it the war effort

sell that had tissue paper around every apple, and we got the tissue paper. But the temporary people didn’t have this. Looking back, there was a kind of a clannishness about it. You had a lot of people that we considered undesirable, but we just had to put up with them. There were things happening here we didn’t like. Orange had been a small town. Now, back in its early years it was a rough town, but we thought we had got it down to law-abiding and pretty good, and then things started happening. Hoarding was another thing. A hoarder was just as bad as a draft dodger. How would you know about a hoarder? They always had it! If you went to somebody’s house and they offered you a cup of coffee, you said, “No, thank you.” Cause if you said yes, maybe they wouldn’t have any for breakfast the next day. If you offered a cup of coffee to a whole bunch of people, people were aware—“Uh-oh, they’ve got coffee.” And if somebody made fudge you knew they had sugar and lots of it, ’cause I don’t think we made fudge for four years. Things like that. It was one of those things where you were aware of it, and that person went down in your estimation, but you never talked about it. Another thing, when we were growing up we had our sodality meetings at St. Mary’s. We’d walk home together at nine o’clock at night—[a] whole bunch of girls. See, we knew everybody along the way. It became impossible for us to go out at night alone. And even going downtown, a girl before that could go downtown, do her shopping, visit, and just walk up and down—window-shop. You couldn’t do that anymore. You had men here that were whistling and ogling and making passes at girls until that type of life ceased right there. It just wasn’t safe. You went downtown then if you had to or only in big groups. You didn’t go downtown alone anymore. [Females were] very sheltered—very sheltered. We were very protected and innocent. And then all of a sudden there were places we didn’t go into. There had always been the Domino Club, but girls never went in there, and they always looked the other way when they walked passed it. But nobody had ever had any trouble there. But now the men were hanging around there, and girls walking down the sidewalk were insulted. A lot of times things were said [that] I think was an insult. I wasn’t sure. And then you had the sailors coming in. Some of ’em were rough and some of ’em were just like the boy next door. You started inviting sailors home for dinner—for special things. I remember Christmas we had this one little sailor there. His name was Jimmy. This one little boy didn’t want to leave that night. The Sunday before Christmas we always went out in the pasture and cut down a tree and brought it in and trimmed it, and this boy just had a glorious time trimming that tree, and he didn’t want to leave.

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

173

He said he knew he was going to die when he left, and sure enough his ship went down right away. All of us felt a loss because we’d got to know these boys, and those that had had ’em in our homes had become friends and almost—not exactly—like family, but close. We felt we had an interest in these boys just because they came through here to pick up our ship. And then, too, our ship was down. You had a responsible position at the shipyard at a young age. How did that affect you? We were forever being told about the responsibility of what we were doing, what effect it would have on these men when they got out to sea. I think it brought out a seriousness in us. I laughed about the winches, but I was upset that I had made a typographical error. Another typographical error like that could have hurt somebody. And then, too, I got letters from my brothers, [and] we would realize the importance of them having what they needed. I was aware that when that list [of spare parts] went down there, they needed everything on that list. It was a very serious thing. Was sexual harassment something you experienced? One thing that I ran into there that I did not like was telling dirty jokes. As other girls came out into the yard they found some girls who laughed at their jokes. I didn’t. I didn’t think they were funny. I resented being told them, because I felt they had no respect for me if they were telling me offcolored jokes, and some of them were pretty raunchy. And to tell the truth, a lot of them I didn’t really understand, but I wasn’t about to say [so]. [Another thing], where we grew up everybody knew everybody. With one high school you were bound to be in classes with every girl and boy within two years of your age, so everybody fairly well knew everybody. If you tried to develop some personality that you admired, maybe in a movie star or somebody, everybody’d say, “Oh, you’re putting on. What’s with you?” But you get new faces down here you didn’t know, you could develop this personality and they would respond to it. It was exciting. You could be somebody else other than the slot you had been fitted into all your life. You found out you could be something else. It wasn’t too long down at Consolidated that they started having women work out in the yards as welders and Rosie the Riveter and all that stuff. I remember one time they had a problem with the restrooms out in the yard. In the past they had all been men, and they had signs—MEN—everywhere. So they took one of the restroom areas and put a “WO” in front of it. One day somebody laid a piece of tin across that “WO,” and some men walked in there. It was pandemonium because the men were not accustomed to it. Now, the men resented the women being out in the yard. They resented it. They had all kinds of jokes. They were very condescending, and when a

174

they called it the war effort

woman could do the job as well as they could they didn’t like it. They were threatened. Their superiority was threatened. We were accustomed to calling the doctor and within an hour having something. Now we had to wait five or six hours in the waiting room to see a doctor. The men were always taken first ’cause they had to go to work. But by now the women were working, and they were beginning to resent having to wait while the men were taken care of. By now women’s time was beginning to be worth something, and they didn’t like having to wait while the men went through first. Maybe he did cut his finger on the job and had to get back to work. But okay, I had blood poisoning in my face, but I had to get back to work, too. And that was another thing—you didn’t miss work for a hangnail. Your job was important. You didn’t lay around. Did those years change you? Well, I can see where I changed. I was so shy and reserved, and I tripped over my own tongue every time I tried to say or do anything. And I tell you why I started going to the USO dances. My oldest brother thought I was too shy, too reserved, and I needed to come out of it. I lost a bet, and to pay it off I had to go to those dances for a year. I got to meeting more people. I began making friends, and I found out they weren’t hard to talk to. Then when I started supervising other people I had to instruct them, I had to learn to talk, and it was the hardest thing in the world for me to do. When I had to go out in that warehouse and do certain things, I was embarrassed to death. Not anymore. But it changed us. We got to knowing other people and found out there were other horizons. It made all the difference in the world. I think we found out we were worth something, because we felt that the work we did was important and we were doing it well. We took pride in it. I think it really developed character and self-assurance. It did do that. I think it changed everything. Mother was right. Our way of life changed completely that day.



so excited and so worried we would miss our first day’s work Benita L. Hebert I was working for the WPA in Vermilion Parish, and then this war broke out, and through that they sent me up here [February 2, 1942]. I went to like a trade school [for a couple of months in Crowley, Louisiana] and

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

175

did sheet-metal work. It was just women, young people [at the school]. It’d be at night. We learned how to make things with the big machinery. We made little rubboards and little lunch baskets and things like that. We learned how to put the metal together—in other words, solder it. Then we sort of like graduated, I guess, from the trade school, and they sent us here. I was about twenty-five or twenty-six, and I was ready, I guess, to leave home, more or less. There was about three or four of us. We stayed in Vinton [Louisiana] the first night. We came on the bus, and then the next morning they brought us to Orange, and our big thing was the big, long bridge on the old Highway 90. None of us had ever come this way, and then from the bridge you could see the [shipyard]. I had an uncle that lived here. He was already working, so they let us come and stay in their little trailer that they were living in at the time. We all went and applied for our jobs and got our interviews and everything, and they assigned us to the different people that we was going to work with. Well, it was kind of comical, but we were really kind of dumb and so excited and so worried that we would miss our first day’s work. My aunt and uncle had an electric alarm clock. Well, one of us girls woke up during the night and discovered that we couldn’t hear the clock tick, so we decided we were going to be late for work and we all dressed. Then it dawned on one of us that it was an electric clock and it wasn’t gonna tick. You were from a town of what size? Oh, about a hundred people. I was raised in the country. The girls that I came with, we were all from Vermilion Parish. We was among the first girls to be hired, because my number, if I remember right, was either twentyfour or forty-two. We worked like a group. [Our] job was to put up toilet paper hangers and hang doors and mirrors. They would bring ’em to the ships, and then we would put the hinges [on] and hang ’em and put the props to where they wouldn’t bang up against the wall, and that was our job. How did the men treat you? They treated us good. They really did. They all had their tries, you know, but we were just part of the [group]. We all ate lunch together. We all did our thing. They had their “tries”? You know, wanted to tell dirty jokes and things like that—and proposition you. If you didn’t want to, well, then that was it. Some of ’em accepted the favors. [Laughs] How did you feel about your ability on the job? I guess I was pretty good. I thought I was. I thought I was doing a good

176

they called it the war effort

job. We all had our little toolboxes with our little hammers and screwdrivers and whatever, and then they had a big shop where you’d go and get your drills and whatever you needed to work with. The girls that we worked with, we got along real good. We got along with the bosses. They never ate us out or anything like that, so I suppose we were doing our job. Do you feel like your estimation of yourself changed? Did you feel like you had more confidence? I don’t know that I had any more confidence. I don’t think so. I think I was just always me. [Laughs] What were you doing for a social life? Well, we didn’t have too much of a social life. Now, once or twice we had tried to walk maybe across the bridge to go across the river where they’d have the dance halls and things. But I really didn’t go too much to that because I really didn’t know nobody, and we was kind of scared to walk across the [bridge]. I can’t say that was part of my life ’cause I didn’t go then. For one thing, I didn’t really know anybody who was going. I guess, really, looking back, it was all right, really. It was a good life. I was making as much money as the men. We was all paid equally. I didn’t have nobody in the war or anything to worry me. Were there stresses? No. Uh-uh. I didn’t worry. I never have worried too much except for here lately. [Laughs] In my younger days I didn’t worry.



i was good! honest, i was good. Vera O. Hopkins I feel like I done my duty when I went out and helped. Of course, there’s lots and lots of women out there helping, and I feel proud that I could help. I think I done my part. [My children] were proud of me. They said, “Mama, we can keep it good here in the house and keep it clean.” Said, “You’re helping to win the war, and we’ll help to win the war at home.” I don’t see how I done what I done, ’cause I’s around forty-two, I think. We were up in San Angelo, Texas. It was ’42 or ’43 [when my husband’s] company sent him to Orange, and he brought eighty men with him on the Riverside housing project. He was with a construction company, [and] they got the contract. I thought I was off on another planet [when we got

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

177

here]—honest to goodness. I slept some coming out here, and when I woke up and we was here, I just thought, “My God, where in the world am I at?” The first houses they got built was two-story houses. We moved upstairs in one, and it’s according to how many people’s in your family what size you got. We had four boys. We had to put pallets down and everything. After [Riverside] got nearly all built—[see], you’d go across the river to some clubs. So a man went across there quite often—I don’t remember what the man’s name was. And he thought, well, if he goes over there and gets tight he’d hang a lantern on the side of the house there where he’d know where to come back. Well, in the meantime the kids got to playing with the lantern and they moved it. So he come back in drunk, and he went in and he said, “Yeah, this is my house. There’s my wife over there in bed,” and said, “There’s me.” He stood there. “Well, if that’s me, who is this standing here?” [Laughs] I went to work for a little while for somebody else, and then I said I believe I’ll try to get out there on the ships. [My husband] said, “Don’t try to be a welder. You’ll burn yourself up.” I said, “I believe I’d like to be an electrician.” Well, I went to try to get in the school. Anyway, I couldn’t get in then. But one time I went by there, and [the man in charge of the school] stopped me [and] said, “A woman has dropped out”—or a man— “and you can get in now.” I don’t know what it was, but I just used to fool with my irons, and I’d make ’em work and everything. I liked to fool with things like that. When I served my apprenticeship I was in the hook-up crew. First we worked the telephones, and we went from the top to the bottom [of the ships] hooking up. And I’ve heard lots of people say lots of things, but I never did see a thing. I was a married woman, and I never saw anything out of the way—and I went from top to bottom. Maybe I’s just too dumb, but I never did see nothing wrong. I never saw nothing. When we first started hooking up on the guns—there’s two men with me—it took us seven days sitting on the floor hooking up on them guns. [There was a] big fire control board and all them cables coming out. We had to sit flat and just hook up them things. Seven days that we sat there, just long enough to get up and go to the bathroom and come right back again. How did you feel about going into the ships? I felt very patriotic. I felt like I’s doing something to help the war. I loved it. I couldn’t go over to do anything, and my husband didn’t. He was 1-A, but they never did call him. See, we had four boys. No, I just felt good about my work. I was good! Honest, I was good. [The two men I was working with would] send me around after things that they needed and

178

they called it the war effort

didn’t want to go after. I enjoyed going to do that, though, ’cause everything you could help do was, in my books, helping. And so [the leaderman] told ’em, “You can’t send Vera anymore. She’s on up now, [and] she’s going to sit right there with y’all and work.” [The workers] were all very congenial with one another and anybody else that come along. In other words, in my book I just felt like we’s a big family. They’s a good bunch to work with—a good bunch. How did you handle home? Well, I tell you, I raised my boys—they’re not sissies a’tall—but I raised my boys to keep things clean. I felt proud that I could do it, and I felt proud of my children. But I always raised them up that they had to help with the housework even if they were boys. Usually I cooked before I left, so maybe I had a big pot of beans on, and I’d tell [them] when to cut ’em off. What did you do for social activity? We didn’t have no social activity at home—only around the neighborhood. They were awfully friendly people. They were some of the best people in the world that lived out in them little places, those houses. Of course, sometimes we got a kind of a chinchy one, but we’d just let ’em alone. What would they have done? Well, kind of nasty. They’re nasty. One time when we lived upstairs I saw bedbugs getting around on things, and they were coming from downstairs. I turned in the housing [complaint], and they come out there and made them take all their stuff out. But I moved—cleaned it. Scalded the beds, slats and things, and they sprayed the house for ’em. You know, you get bad with the good, but most of ’em were just good people. Anyway, I felt very, very proud. I think I was one of the last women that come off when the [end of the] war was declared. There was two of us, I think, that come off the ships. They’s letting us go, you know. I stayed till the end. After we started to gathering our tools, did you know [the navy] tried to send me to Pascagoula, Mississippi, on that shipyard over there? I said, “I can’t go.” I was good. I was good. Anyway, I was happy then and I still am. I guess you’d say I felt fulfilled. I was happy with myself.



i’m just not a sissified woman, is what it is Lorena Sweeney You could take up anything you wanted—sheet-metal work, anything you thought you’d like to do. I thought welding would

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

179

be neat—and it is. I can weld with my son out there now at the garage and just still do pretty good. But I don’t know why I decided I wanted to be a welder. I just decided, and that’s what I did. I liked welding. I don’t think I’d a-liked sheet metal. My sisters liked sheet metal.   Do you ever get together and talk about that? We do every once in a while. One of ’em just says, “Well, we did so-and-so on the plane,” and the other one would say, “Well, I sure would hate to think I had to go across-country in that plane.” And I’d say, “Well, I’ll bet you my ships are not coming apart.”

When you came to Port Neches in 1942 were you planning to work? Yeah, after [my husband] got drafted. We had a little baby, and I found a lady where I could stay. She tended to the baby, and I went to welding school over in Orange. It was well advertised somehow that we could go learn to be a welder, and I thought that was a good idea. I must have been about twenty-one or twenty-two. That lasted three months, and I passed the test with flying colors and was put to work. I don’t like [keeping] a house—you know, cleaning house? I’m not one of those—but I do clean. But outdoors—I thought that would be real neat. Now, I enjoyed every minute of it—even standing on my head in a hold welding. What was it like for a female in the shipyard? Well, three-fourths was females. All the males had gone to war, and it was us and the old men. Most of ’em was old men. They were all nice. I’ve never had anybody, you know, to boo me ’cause I was a lady or to tell me anything. I’ve got no gripes. What about sexual harassment? No. Uh-uh. Of course, the leadermen were kind of old, you know, and stuff like that, but I’ve never been harassed. Now, walking out the gate every day, everybody knew the name was Sweeney, and they’d all call me “Sweetie.” I’d hear hollers from way across—the teasing part. But they took very good care of us workers. I was welding in a hold one day, and they didn’t have a proper blower. I was welding galvanized, and I got terribly ill. I’d started walking out at the gate when the whistle blew, and they sent an ambulance out to pick me up. Well, I had a little baby daughter in Port Neches, and I wasn’t about to get on the ambulance. They almost insisted, but then they let me go. But they took good care of us. You know, part of it was wintertime, and there’s nothing as cold as a cold ship. The only warm place was in the bathroom, and you’d better went in there and did your business and get out. They had a security lady. They got you out.

180



they called it the war effort

Were you commuting every day? Oh, yeah. A bunch of us did. My uncle had a brother that went back and forth, and most of the time we rode with him. About three of us women rode with him. So that was no problem. We just paid our share of the gas. [Working ten hours a day] I never saw Port Neches in daylight hardly— except on days off. It really wasn’t many problems with the work—just you got tired. And by the way, I was making $1.20 an hour, and that was scale wages. That’s the same salary men got. How about that! I don’t think I’d like to see any of my kids go through that, but I’d rather see my boys do that, though, than I had go fight. It was very dangerous. I can tell you. Were there many accidents on the job? Oh, yeah! Now, I know of three people that got electrocuted accidentally. See, somebody’d be working on one of those boxes, putting all these wires together, and somebody’d trip a switch somewhere. It’s horrifying. It’s just—you can’t believe something like that would happen. But a couple of men and this lady—oh, it threw her way up against the wall. Oh, we was horrified when we heard about something like that. Now, I got to where they put me in the galley, and I welded all of the tables down where the men eat. Everything that had to be welded I welded it, ’cause I passed the test that did it right. And that was my job after a while. That’s all they’d let me do. [It was] stainless steel. Mine stood the test, and I was the one that did it and that was good. I didn’t have to go in a hold anymore or up the stairs. From then on I welded all the seats down and all the tables and whatever else needed to be welded down. Everything needs to be welded down because of the tilting of the ship, and it has to be done properly. It didn’t take me long at all to pass that test. They let you weld. You do it flat, and you do it up and down, and then you do it overhead. They put that thing in a machine, and if that weld breaks you hadn’t graduated. You got to start all over. Did you pass the first time? Yeah. I was darn proud of myself. Sure was. Did you ever think that women were coming into their own? Is that something women talked about? No. I thought I was on my own the day I’s born. Rights of women have never bothered me, ’cause they just never put me down like I wasn’t an equal. We drew the same salaries as men. We thought that was all right. Now, you might’ve heard a griping had we not drawn the same salary, ’cause we were working just as hard. We got those ships built, too. We never worked less than ten [hours], and when I was working I never missed

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

181

a day. It was so cold in winter. We’d get cold and I’s just shaking, but you know that steel in those ships is cold. But I never got a cold or anything. Never did. I was a healthy specimen. I wore coveralls, and if it was very cold I’d put a sweatshirt under it or something like that. And then we had to wear Little Abner shoes for welding—and thick socks. Did you ever think you were any less a female when you were doing that kind of work? Uh-uh. That never did cross my mind. I’ve got two sisters that worked sheet metal. One of ’em worked at an air base and the other one worked someplace else, and they’re both nurses now. I felt good [about myself ]. It didn’t bother me. It didn’t make me feel less than a female. I know I’d a-rather done something like that than I had sell material in a shop or— yeee—I wouldn’t have done that. We were outside girls—all four of us. Didn’t bother me in any way. Somebody had to build those ships, and that was good money back then. I sure didn’t mind doing it, and that gave me something to do while he was gone. I wouldn’t have went to work in a dress shop. I didn’t want to fool with nothing like that. I probably wouldn’t have went to work at all. I’m just not a sissified woman, is what it is. I’m just not delicate. It wouldn’t have worked with me at all—and I wouldn’t have fit people’s feet with shoes neither. [It] made me feel good. I still feel good about it. I got a lot to tell my grandkids and stuff.



free all my life Fannye Beaty I know what struck me that was the most awesome thing that I saw when I came back on leave, and it still is when I think about it. Of course, everybody went to the football games, and I got to go to one when I was home. We were sitting up in the bleachers, and it was halftime. They turned out all the lights, and candles were lit. The band and the Bengal Guards did this thing with just candles. They played “White Christmas,” and it was a new song. In fact, I still think it’s the prettiest song I’ve ever heard, just about. But you know, chills run up and down your spine to see it. Overseas, naturally, we never saw anything like that. All we saw was bombed-out buildings. And then after that they played something patriotic, or maybe they played the patri-

182

they called it the war effort otic thing first. I thought if I could take just this one instant, if I could take it back with me and just let them [the 88th Infantry Division] see it one time, it would have been a great thing.

WPA sponsored the recreation department, and I was the director. December 7, 1941, I was in an old building downtown getting it ready for a photography exhibit that Sunday afternoon. We expected to have quite a crowd to come to the exhibit, but there weren’t very many people that came. Everybody was in a state of shock. It ruined my show. [Orange] was just a small, sleepy town. What’s the name of that book about the mockingbird? It’s about a little town—To Kill a Mockingbird. It reminded me of Orange. It had haunted houses and little vacant houses and this and that. Well, it wasn’t long before there weren’t any haunted houses. Every vacant house was grabbed and either repaired or [rented as it was]. I was at that time about twenty-two. Everybody I knew was all gung ho to go fight, and I was gung ho to want to go somewhere besides stay in Orange. I was biting at the bits to go. Somebody that worked for WPA out of Washington came down, and she was telling about putting her friend on a plane to go with the Red Cross overseas, and, boy, that’s what I wanted to do. Why did you want to go overseas? The adventure. It was always very embarrassing when someone thought it was patriotism. I’d tell ’em, and they tried to make me a hero or a shero. To me, if I’d wanted to be patriotic I’d a-stayed here in Orange and worked in the shipyards, and I would have died working in the shipyard or something that steady. I sailed to go overseas March 17, 1943. After I’d been overseas for about eighteen months my name was drawn out of a hat to get to come home on leave, and when I got here I couldn’t believe it, it had changed so much. I guess what interested me the most [were] all these new houses out in Riverside Addition. It was built right in the middle of the marsh, and nothing but a marsh and a good mosquitoery marsh. I wasn’t home ten minutes and they wanted to show me something, and that’s what they showed me. I couldn’t even believe my eyes. Another thing that impressed me just riding around [was] all the trailers and tents and everything that were in people’s yards. Orange was uglier, but, naturally, it would be ugly with any kind of ol’ transportation in the yard that you could sleep in and any kind of ol’ tent. Within a two- or three-block period there were a whole bunch of ’em, and nobody seemed to mind because they needed ’em. I guess it would be more like a gold rush or something.

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong



183

What kind of people were coming into Orange? Good. Hearty. Hard workers. Didn’t mind the long hours, and very patriotic. It made your heart feel good, because everybody was real patriotic. We learned this patriotism in school. We saluted the flag right. Armistice Day meant something to me when I was going to school. Maybe it was because it was a holiday, but, still, I can remember people coming to school and wearing their little soldier cap and tell you about World War I. Another thing, I’d never seen anybody work shift work before, and it was all shift work. Everything going on all night long. Things open all night. It just wasn’t like coming home to Orange. The only thing that hadn’t changed, seemed like, were the churches. They still looked the same. I really mean it, that [staying and working in the shipyards] would have been the patriotic thing. That’s what I described as being patriotic—to give up a lot of things they gave up to work that shift work. What do you think they gave up? They gave up a leisure life—the women I’m talking about and not the men. There were a awful lot of women that worked in the shipyards. How do you think those years affected women? I think it made women more independent. See, I’ve never believed in women’s lib ’cause I’ve been free all my life. I didn’t have to join an organization for women’s lib, and a lot of my friends were the same way. What was different about them when I came home [was] they could stay up all night and play poker and their husbands didn’t care. It surprised me that their husbands were all for them going out, go to somebody’s house to play poker, so they had a type of freedom that maybe they didn’t have before. And people drank a lot more than they did. I noticed that—not that I wasn’t drinking with ’em. I think that’s the thing that shocked me the most. [There wasn’t any] reason for it to shock me, but it did. You’d go to somebody’s house at ten o’clock in the morning, and they asked you if you wanted a drink, and they didn’t mean coffee. People had changed, I thought. They changed for the good. They were more realistic. They were more—well, what’s the word when they did things they wanted to—independent. If they decided they wanted to walk down the street barefooted and it wasn’t supposed to be ladylike, it didn’t matter anymore. What do you mean “more realistic”? Well, the world was more real to them. We’d just been involved in a war that nobody [thought] would ever happen. I know there were people that did because they followed what was going on in Europe. I always said, “Nah, we’re not going to get in it,” but after we did get in it life became so real.

184

they called it the war effort

They made me, when I came home on that leave, go to the shipyards, and they blew a whistle and made me talk over the loudspeaker for two or three minutes. I was scared spitless, and I know nobody wanted to hear you. It was supposed to be patriotic. What was the mood when you came back on your leave? A lot of people had money that they never had had, [and] had jobs that they never had had. The poor days were gone. I guess they were happier—or looked happier. They looked to me pretty happy-go-lucky. It’s bound to have made a big impact on people, having change in their pocket that they never had before. It probably gave them a lot more self-confidence. Another thing that did impress me [was] that people didn’t seem to mind the long hours. The long hours didn’t seem to bother ’em at all. They seemed to nourish on it, I guess, ’cause they were making money. I mean it was always packed downtown. Orange was more like a—not like a carnival—but it was like something big was fixing to happen.



telegrams never brought good news Lillian Robison It just seemed like I was very young and full of life and full of hope. We were always going to be married—my boyfriend and I, who later became my husband—and then all of a sudden that one December day changed everything. It suddenly made our plans very, very far away. We were married, as were all the girls and boys who intended to get married, but all of our fellows left, so there was this void for two or three years. Then when the war was over, the ones that came back, we returned to as near normal as we could. We just sorta picked up our pieces and began life where it was the three years prior. I was still a student at Orange High School. My boyfriend volunteered immediately the day that we heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor. We talked him out of it until he graduated in May of 1942, and then we were married two days after we graduated. He worked in the shipyards for three months, and then he joined the navy. Three months after we married, well, he was off to war. Did be talk about his motivation for volunteering? Well, it was the immediate need and appeal to the nation by the presi-

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

185

dent for volunteers. It was such a matter of emergency, and, of course, it was all so new to us even though the war had been going on. It wasn’t here, so it wasn’t affecting us until actually Pearl Harbor was bombed, and then it made it very real. It was awesome and very real. We were all very somber and very grief-stricken over it all. I remember we were all having a get-together. There was a large group of young people gathered at Mrs. Robison’s house, and we’d had a dinner. We had just like one small radio per house, and then we heard it. We just all gathered around the radio, and it was just an unbelievable silence that took place. What was the reaction the next day at school? We were all very quiet. It seemed unreal, and all of a sudden very close to home. But still, when you’re young, things aren’t really—I don’t know what the word would be—but it seems as if nothing is a problem when you’re young. We thought it would be of short duration. Little did we know how long and how involved it would be. But we finished school and were married, and then he worked in the shipyards. We even went to Houston to work in the shipyard, even though it was booming here. In fact, my husband worked on a certain ship, [and] later his brother joined the merchant marines and went out on that ship. He was killed on that ship—the maiden voyage. I came home and lived with my mother [when he left], and then I went to work for the U.S. Navy at Consolidated Steel. Of course, you were awfully lonesome, you know, and we wrote letters and sent packages and tried communicating. His ship only came in once a year. He was stationed on the West Coast, so the ship would come in [and] I would get leave then and go and stay a month or two, however long the ship was in dock or in port. How did you cope with the loneliness? Well, the USO was two doors down from our house. They asked for volunteers there, and I had been a young volunteer over there. When my husband came home on his first leave he went to the USO with me, and at that time the rules were that married people could not dance with the soldiers unless they had their husband’s permission. So I loved to dance, and he signed permission for me to be a dancing USO hostess. That took care of a lot of lonely hours. I served doughnuts and coffee and sandwiches, and then we danced. Some of the men stayed here as long as a year waiting for their particular ship to be finished, so many of their lives were interrupted just like ours. Do you remember your reaction that your husband had to give you permission to dance? Well, I thought it very unnecessary, because I was still very young and

186

they called it the war effort

really wasn’t even used to being married. I loved to dance and have a good time, and my husband didn’t mind at all signing. Now, there were quite a few men who would not. They would object to their wives dancing, but my husband did not. Did women talk about that? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. We weren’t used to the liberation that we have now. Now it would probably be a joke. But no, we were more formal, and everything at that time was still conducted very proper, and we went by rules. You signed in and you signed out, and you did not leave with anybody. We could not leave the USO with the sailors. I’m not saying some of the girls didn’t make arrangements to meet them, but those were rules and they were really carried out. We did what our leaders told us to do. If it was clean ashtrays or wash dishes, we did that, too. And we did it willingly, because I’d love to think that somewhere somebody was being that kind to my husband. Was that something that you were thinking about? Oh, yes! And he would write of that, because he visited the USOs, and at Christmas times it was so very lonely without them. Christmas has a way of being so lonely anyway, even when everybody’s here, but I remember those were the worst times, being without ’em on holidays. When your job was over for the day and you had that time to sit and think—we were all very lonely; sometimes angry because the war was between us and our loved ones, interrupted our lives and caused so much destruction. So anger and loneliness would be probably the chief emotions. Our lives were just on hold. After a year or two we didn’t know when the war was going to end, if it ever was, and so [it became] a day-to-day existence. A day-to-day existence? It really was very evident that life was very temporary, because you dreaded seeing the Western Union telegram boy. Mostly the telegrams were delivered by bicycle, and telegrams never brought good news.9 Because Orange was in the beginning very small, we always knew immediately who got a telegram saying that a son or a husband was missing or killed, and we were all greatly affected by this. Each time this happened you became more seriously aware it could have been you. My husband had been gone only about a year when we received a telegram—his mother did—that his only brother was missing in action in the Atlantic. I can remember when one of the leading citizens in Orange had a son who had been a prisoner practically the entire war. He had been freed towards the end, and I can remember these Western Union men running all the way down the street with the telegram to the [family] that he was alive. And we all shared in their joy. As I said, in the beginning Orange was so small that we were

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

187

close-knit, so we all shared in one another’s sorrow and joys at the time. And I suppose in that respect is how we learned to live day by day. How did you handle the anxiety? There was always someone worse. I had one friend whose husband spent three years on Guadalcanal in a foxhole, and he never came back to the States during this entire time. He was one of the first over and one of the last home. Therefore, I felt very lucky. I would see my husband at least once or twice a year, but she never did. So it was really easy not to feel sorry for yourself.



i knew that my life then was going to take a change LaVern D. Premeaux They traveled from Hattiesburg, Camp Shelby, by train clear across the United States. See, this was strictly confidential. Nobody knew that this whole outfit was being sent to the Pacific. That’s why us wives didn’t know either. But when he called me from Fort Ord, which is in California, that was the jumpingoff [point]. They were going to board the boat, and he told me, “This is my last call to you. You’ll be getting my clothes. The things I cannot take with me I’m mailing back to you.” Well, I knew then that we were not going to see each other anymore, and I’m not going to tell you how I fell into my mother’s arms and—.[Pause] And the day that I got his clothes back—’cause he had some civilian clothes with him—this is so childish to talk about it now, [but] I would smell of his clothes for days and days ’cause I knew that was as close as I could get. My husband and I were married in March of 1941. Of course, with the things that were going on we knew that inevitably he would be going into service but never dreamed it would be [so] soon. In 1942 he went into service. I was living in Vinton, [Louisiana, and] was twenty-one. He was twenty-nine. I remember what I was doing when Pearl Harbor happened. My husband was at work. He worked in the oil fields—Sundays were just like Mondays to oilfield workers—and I was listening to the radio, waiting for him to come home from work. Suddenly, I knew something was terribly

188

they called it the war effort

wrong, and even in my youthfulness I knew that my life then was going to take a change. When he came in from work we sat down to supper that night and we talked about it. We knew that it would be just a matter of time that our lives would change, that I would have to go back home and live with my parents and that he would be going into service. We had a reprieve from December until March of the following year before we got the letter that day saying to be in Sulphur, Louisiana, on the morning of so-and-so for induction into [the] United States Army. The morning he left—it was just like it happened yesterday to both of us. He knew that he would not be returning to our little home, and I knew that I would sever my ties with it myself. Well, it’s kind of hard for me to talk about it. [Pause] He [went] with a group from Vinton, several of the men that were going. One of the men, his father, took ’em all in the car. Now, some of them did not pass their physical and came back and talked to me and described what happened. I was so young. I went and jumped in the bed and covered my head up with the pillow and the sheet, and I just cried and cried and cried and cried and cried. And then I sat up and I said, “Well, I got to do something about myself.” I stayed all day by myself—and I preferred it that way. I spent the night in my little home, but the next day I knew I had to give it all up. The next call I got from him he was at Camp Shelby, Mississippi. He had passed his physical, and they had joined up with a National Guard group that was already assembled from the state of Massachusetts. They needed so many inductees to complete the whole outfit that was going overseas, but little did we know this. By that time I had already started moving, getting rid of my household things and getting my clothes and things back over to my parents’ home, and my parents took me back in as if I had never left home. I had younger brothers and sisters, too, that were waiting for me. We are a close-knit family, and my mother and daddy were very supportive. If it hadn’t been for my mother taking me into her arms and letting me share all the sadness that was enveloping me—well, you learn to live with this after a while. After the first six weeks of basic training he came back home for a weekend and I saw him then. And then, within two weeks he called and said that they had been put on alert—and alert meant nothing to me. He said they were going to allow as many wives as could come to be with their husbands over the weekend. He gave me instructions on how to get out there. And I might add that I’d been a very sheltered girl and had never even left Orange, Texas, until I married him and ventured over to Vinton, Louisiana, which is only ten miles. I had never been more than one night away from home in my life. So my mother and daddy helped me get bus

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

189

tickets and so forth, and that was quite an experience for a young girl that had never been out of Orange. I got to Camp Shelby and there were five hundred million soldiers there—or I thought there were, anyway. We spent the whole Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the dormitories that they had set up for the visiting ladies. It was a most wonderful time, but with one thing in mind constantly, that you were going to have to leave. And little did I know—now, he did ’cause it was strictly confidential and they could not share that with us—that when we went to the train station, and they had their packs and everything on, their uniforms, and when we kissed each other goodbye, that was going to be the last time for three and a half years. But sometimes what you don’t know is better, ’cause I rode back on the bus with a lady that cried every spin of the wheel on that bus, and I’d keep saying, “Stella, please don’t cry. Please don’t cry.” But those are just the beginnings. After a while you learn. You grow up. I grew up. I grew up! And he grew up, too. He left in August [1942], and I didn’t see him again until October of ’45. I caught the bus from Orange and met him in San Antonio, and when I stepped off the bus into his arms it was as if no time had passed. It was just like the night that we said goodbye to each other. But coping with it at home was easy, ’cause I had a wonderful family. How did the two of you cope with that four months of waiting, knowing that the letter was going to come? Well, you know, we knew every day the mail came it could be in there, ’cause he’d already been given his notice. Ahh—being youthful—and I might add, ignorant of what was going to happen—and also we’d hear of a friend that we’d known for a long time—they’d gotten their letter and was gone. See, the war was intensifying, and every day you’d hear of someone you knew real well that had gone, so you just knew that this was something you had to do. I mean you coped with it every day, and you joked about it and you’d say, “Well, I lived one [more] day without going”—or something like that. But, of course, in the back of your mind you knew that it was inevitable. You knew that. We agreed we’d just carry on our life just like we’d been doing. He worked, and I kept house and visited with my friends and mother and father as much as I could during the day. Now, we had parties among our friends. Like if Joe found out he was going next week we’d have a house party, maybe, to celebrate and get together. Then when we found out Jim was going, well, we’d have a celebration, or we may go nightclubbing and dancing to celebrate their going. The men that Choke went with—the morning he went [to Sulphur]—I remember the weekend before we all went dancing and had a great time together. And there was a lot of tears

190

they called it the war effort

that flowed along with it, but that’s how we did it. And we also kept up with the war, keeping [our] ear tuned to the radio, finding out what was going on in the world. You suddenly became aware that this was really war. We had sorta basked along on, “oh, it’ll never happen to us,” when Hitler was marching through Poland and all that. We didn’t take that as seriously as we should have. We were youthful. We went about our lives. I can remember when Rommel marched through northern Africa—never, never once thought it would touch my life in any way. But for me, even though that was a long time and lots of loneliness, I find it was a constructive part of our lives in this manner—we grew up. We grew ’cause we got to know more people. We’d just lived in our own little bitty world. We had our own little group of friends, our high school friends, our local friends, and we were sort of satisfied with that. But in the medium of the war we shared a communication that we would have never gotten. And we also learned to cope with sadness and appreciate joys more. I met a lifelong friend whose husband was in service—and by the way, it wasn’t hard to cope with this ’cause everybody you worked with, either their husband or their brother or their uncles were all gone, and you shared all these stories. She was like I was. She had not seen her husband in months. She would share her letters with me—excerpts from it—and then I would share what I wanted to tell her from mine. That’s how you shared your loneliness. We’d share our war tales. That was the main thing. You shared it with all of your coworkers and your friends. Everyone was subject to this. But I felt like there was a part of me missing all the time. I was brought up with a mother and daddy who thought once you married—in fact, it was emphatically carried out—that your socializing was over with, as far as just running the streets. And I had no desire to. So my social life was my work world, and that was mostly with women and girls who were in the same position I was in. But once I went home, letter writing and being with the family was about the extent of things that you did. Of course, I had lots of letter writing that I did every day—daily letters. It was like a diary, more or less—like two or three pages maybe. My first sentences always was, “I miss you and hope you’re fine today,” and “Hope you’re safe and sound when you get this.” [His were], “I am fine. I just miss you terribly. I am safe. I am sound.” Cause see, that was the key. That was the operative words. If he was fine and safe, then he knew that made me satisfied. Now, the hardest times for me was the holiday seasons. They were the hardest things to cope with, but there again, I go back to my family. They made ’em wonderful despite the gaps for me. Were his letters a source of consolation?

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

191

Oh, yes! My mother would call me the moment the mailman would come. See, sometimes I wouldn’t get a letter maybe for six or eight weeks, and then maybe three or four’d come at one time. Well, she would call me at work immediately. She said, “The mailman came today.” And sometimes she’d send my brother on his bicycle down to where I was working with ’em. She’d know how I was anxious to hear. And I’d line ’em up according to [the] postdate on ’em so I could have ’em all in a row. You kept ’em in your purse, and you’d read ’em and reread ’em. You’d try to get double messages out of ’em. You’d try to figure out where he was. And I might add, it’s good that we didn’t know what was really going on. You know, without being maudlin or over-religious, only God brought these boys back, because many of ’em with him did not return. I didn’t feel sorry for myself at all. I had friends that were the same way. I went down to the First National Bank to work the last year and a half of the war. The day the war was over in Europe they closed the doors of the bank, and we got out in the street and just danced and yelled and laughed and had the best time, ’cause some of the ladies in the bank [had] husbands over there. Then they would get long-distance calls as they would arrive in the States, and then we’d just celebrate. We realized from our experience with our friends and what happened in Europe that with Hirohito surrendering, well, eventually our boys and husbands and brothers and sons would be coming back. By that time Choke was in his early thirties, and he’d had a lots of time over there, so he was on some of the first rotations that came back. One day one girl said, “Say, you got a phone call from Seattle, Washington!” Well, I knew who it was, and I was so excited I became deaf and didn’t even hear anything hardly. I remember that just like yesterday. He said that he had had a poor connection, and there was about 500 boys around him wanting to [call]. Each person was allotted so much time at this telephone. He said, “I didn’t hear you either.” But the next time I heard from him he was in San Antonio, and that’s when we made plans for me to go. He was as excited about coming and seeing each other as I was. We laughed [when] I told him, “You know what, when you was on that phone you were yelling.” He said, “I was so afraid you weren’t going to hear me, I guess.” I caught the bus from Orange to Houston, and everybody was riding the bus. I stood up from Houston to San Antonio, but it wasn’t anything. I could have ridden on top of the bus and it wouldn’t have made any difference. What was the scene in San Antonio? Oh, wonderful! Of course, everybody was on the bus doing the same

192

they called it the war effort

thing. It was loaded down with servicemen and other girls. But I wasn’t aware of anybody else when I stepped off that bus but Choke. It was the middle of the night. I remember—it was absolutely wonderful. We walked clear back to the hotel, and we didn’t even know we’d walked. We didn’t even know we were there till we got there. We had so many things that we talked about. I’m not going to tell you how many kisses we had [laughs]— how many stops along the way. We’ve had lots of things happen to us in all these years. We’ve lost our parents—both sets—and lots of illnesses and things. But after experiencing what you did—and learn to cope—it prepared us for anything else we had to do in life. If this happened to any of the young folks today I hope they can gain from it what we did. But I don’t want this to happen to anybody. Orange itself changed. That was the biggest thing to me, was my hometown changed so much overnight—the visual changing of a very small, little bitty town. All of a sudden—all of a sudden you can’t imagine what happened to us. I’ll just give you a slight for-instance. Between my daddy and mother’s house there was a empty lot. It was more or less like a playground for all the young kids in the neighborhood. One morning we awakened, and during the night—we don’t know how this happened ’cause they were very quiet about it—I guess there was three tents on this piece of property. It was wintertime, and I never will forget it was frost on the grass. My mother woke us up—it was early ’cause we had to get to work—and she said, “Hey, we got neighbors!” And Barbara and I shot up in bed and said, “Where?” And she said, “Look out the window.” There was three families [that] had moved in during the night, and they had old-fashioned potbellied stoves in this because they had stovepipes coming out through the [top], and the smoke was just drifting across the neighborhood. Now, they didn’t stay long because Riverside Addition was furnishing homes for wartime people, but they came in just with everything they owned in a car. On the street behind us the people owned—and this seems untrue but this is factual—the people owned a large chicken house. And would you believe that they floored this thing and sealed it in? And a couple moved into this place and stayed the duration of the war. We had lots of educational things that happened to us—not regretful. They are not regretful years. There were lots of tears, now. There were lots of lonely moments for all of us ladies, and we shared those things, too.



The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

193

we’d talk about the things we’d do when he got back Betty Pinson10 [In 1941] I guess I was maybe in the ninth grade, ’cause I graduated in ’44. I got married in ’43. I went on the next year to school, ’cause [my husband, Sam Cooper,] went into the service in December of ’43. And then after I got out of high school I went to North Texas [State University, now the University of North Texas]. I had known him a long time, and we went to church together, but when we first started going together—one night he says, “I’ll walk you home.” So we went together for about a year not really thinking we were going together, but it was kind of a mutual understanding. He was two years older than I was. He figured that he would probably be drafted, so we just decided that we would get married because we knew he didn’t have a lot of time. He was eighteen. So we got married June 15, and then he went into the service in December. I went to see him in San Antone on a weekend, and that was just like overnight. He just had a overnight leave. I don’t know what date that was, but it was before I graduated in ’44. And then he came home after that for one time, and when he went back then he went overseas. He didn’t know what they were going to do or where they were going or anything. It wasn’t till he got back that they told him. My mother and dad built our little house on Burton Street. It was more like a dollhouse. It was one bedroom, and it had the living room and dining room together and then the kitchen, but it was something that we could have on our own for that little time. He was working. He [had already graduated and] was working at Levingston. I was a junior. That was in the summer, and then I went the whole next year and graduated in June of ’44. He’d planned on when he got out to go to college. He wanted to be a minister. And so, of course, I went on to college. Since he was in the service I thought I’d go ahead and do that. And, of course, then that’s when I got word. I hadn’t been there too long before I got the word that he was killed. Did young people talk about getting married because of the draft? I didn’t really hear a lot of people talk like that. I guess our thinking was just that we were ready to get married and we just wanted to do it. Of course, the farthest thing from our mind, you know, [was] that anything would happen. In fact, I was just really shocked that he was sent over so soon, not having any more training than he had. We had a picture made together while he was home, and I sent one to him, and he never even got that picture. I know he didn’t get my message back that I was going to [col-

194

they called it the war effort

lege]. He didn’t write to me and say I know you’re going or whatever ’cause he was probably on the way by that time. How did the two of you handle the anticipation he might be drafted? Maybe being so young like that we didn’t think that far. I don’t know. It was something that he had to do and then it’d be over, I guess. We’d talk about the things we’d do when he got back. One thing, he was hoping—I mean even in his last letter—he said if I was pregnant he wouldn’t have to go overseas. You know, he was hoping so much [for] that, but, of course, it didn’t happen and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. How did you handle the separation? Well, I felt like I was getting ready for the future by going to college— getting ready for when he came home. I guess you always think it happens to somebody else. He was killed in either September or October, and I’m wanting to get those confused. I know I hadn’t been [at North Texas] very long when I got the message, but I don’t remember the date school started. I got a telegram. When I came in from class one day—I was living in this private home in one of the rooms that they had for girls—and she said that I had a telegram. Did that mean anything to you then? Well, I kind of thought, “Maybe,” and so I went and got the telegram, and then I could see the star on the telegram. But I didn’t open it till I got [back in my room]. I had his Bible at the time, and the first thing I went to was that Bible. Before I even read the telegram I opened his Bible, and there was a place there where he had marked in red. I had never seen that before, but it was saying, “Who can hurt me if I be a follower of that which is right?” That just kind of gave me strength, and I read that over and over. I guess that helped me more than anything. How does a seventeen-year-old cope with a trauma like that? Well, I stayed [in college] and got involved in things there, and it was just—well, it was one of those things. Had I come back here—stayed here—it probably would have been a lot harder. My pastor couldn’t come up there with my mother when she came up to get me, but my [church] music director came with her. So they brought me home, and I’m sure I talked with my pastor some and he was a great help. Like I said, I felt like the best thing to do was stay in college, ’cause if I’d come back here it would have really been bad—you know, being in the surroundings and with the people that we were with here and everything. I lived in this house with this family, and this woman was an older woman, and she was real good to talk to. Then across the street was another house with a lot of girls in it, and I usually ate my meals over there, and I got to be good friends with them. Of course, then I had classes, and being

This Is My Town

Betty and Sam Cooper. Courtesy Betty Pinson.

195

196

they called it the war effort

“His best man was able to go to France, where he was buried, and he took a picture of the cross there with his name on it.” Courtesy Richard Reese.

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

197

a music student you practice at nights, so you’re going day and night, too. A lot of that kept me pretty busy. All those years, I looked [for him]. Every time I’d see somebody—of course, knowing him as long as I did I knew the way he walked and how he turned his head and everything—but I’d see somebody from the back that looked about his size, and I would just watch that person. And in my mind I knew it couldn’t be, but I still watched ’em anyway. There’ve been any number that I would see that would remind me [of him]—someone that had a part in their hair like he had. And, of course, every time they’d show a newsreel I’d always be interested in it. I guess unless you can see ’em right there and know that they’re gone you still think, well, maybe it isn’t true.11 Later on, I guess it must have been a year later, his parents had a memorial service for him in the church, and they had asked us if we wanted the body brought back here, you know, like they did to all of them. And they agreed that they didn’t care for it, and I said I didn’t either. But the fellow who was his best man was able to go to France where he was buried, and he took a picture of the cross there with his name on it. What was the role of your faith during this episode? You mentioned the Bible. We had studied the Bible together and prayed together, so that was just natural. That was the thing to do. I didn’t have my pastor there to talk to then, so that’s what you do. That’s what I was taught to do, so it was just like him speaking to me, telling me not to worry and everything was all right. I just kind of thought, well, now he is safe. I guess that’s the way I felt. When my dad passed away he was very, very ill, but to me it was like he was just put up on a shelf; because he was away from all this pain and everything now, and he’s safe and I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. It was like the same type of thing [when my husband died]. I felt like they couldn’t hurt him anymore. That helped me, too. That’s why I say that Bible [did] so much for me—the Scriptures did. And I wasn’t talking about—when it said, “Who is it that will harm me if you be followers of that which is good?” didn’t mean the physical body. They couldn’t do anything to him, to the spiritual body. Is it something that seems long ago? Well, I can see it. You know, as I speak about it I can see it. But I don’t just sit and think about it. I guess the one time I think about it, though, is Memorial Day—. [Pause] I think about—that he gave his life—for my freedom. You know, he wasn’t afraid. He never ever let me know that he was afraid at what might happen. I don’t know what people did that didn’t have the Lord to turn to, ’cause it’s hard enough with it. But I needed it and it was there.

198

they called it the war effort



he would only ask us to accept what we could cope with Marion S. Tilley Mrs. Tilley was interviewed on the Fourth of July, 1987. She was ninety-three. Her son, Bill, was the first soldier from Orange killed in World War II. When I came here [in 1924], Orange was one of the prettiest towns I ever saw. That Green Avenue was a perfectly beautiful street—big oak trees. The stores, of course, were small. They were country-style stores but nice-looking buildings, and the whole downtown was very attractive. And, of course, all those homes along Green Avenue were just beautiful homes—up to 1940. There had been no changes at all up until that time. And then they started cutting down the trees, and they started doing this and that and the other—and building in between the houses. They made a funeral home out of [one of the houses]—you know, just all kinds of things like that. Just the whole picture changed. That was in the early forties. The sailors came in and would go out on these destroyer escorts, and a lot of the people in town—we did—used to entertain ’em. Ask ’em out to dinner. We’d try to get them the night before they sailed and have a dinner and some sort of a party, because some of ’em were scared to death.12 They never had been in action before. We’d have a nice supper for ’em, and maybe they’d sing or talk or play games or something—or just sit around and talk most of the time. And they appreciated it, because they had just come from home. They were not regular navy. They had just enlisted, and some of ’em—I’ll tell you, I used to feel real sorry for ’em. There’s one—Warren. I can’t remember his last name, but he couldn’t have been more than about eighteen years old. We lived upstairs most of the time in my house, and Warren was coming upstairs one evening and the whole back seam in his britches gave way. They all started laughing, and, poor Warren, we had to put him in a room, and I had to take his britches and sew ’em up for him. Later on I got a letter from one of the boys off the ship that said, “Warren is sitting over under one of the stacks with a stout thread sewing his pants.” There are lots of funny things that happened, but they used to love to come up to our house. We had the big upstairs screen porch and some hammocks on it. They’d sit out there and enjoy the breeze and really relax.

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

199

There was a big, tall red-headed fellow from New York City, and he had the biggest feet that you ever saw in the world. I don’t know what size shoes he wore, but the last time he came up to the house he brought his good shoes and he forgot to take ’em back with him, and we kept those shoes all during the war. They looked like gunboats. We always used to laugh about John’s shoes. I think he’d taken ’em to the shoemaker to get the heels done or something like that and he brought ’em by the house. The girls used to take ’em and put ’em under their beds. [They] said, “When anybody sees these shoes under our bed they’ll never come in.” So we had a lots of fun about John’s shoes. But you know, they were a nice crowd of boys. Even after the USO closed at ten o’clock, we’d get home and there’d be two or three of ’em waiting there. They’d come upstairs, and they’d make pancakes or they’d do something crazy, you know, in the middle of the night. It was just a relief for ’em. Of course, I had the three girls and the other girls used to come up there, too. But they’d sit on the floor and just have a grand time, and sometimes we’d freeze a freezer of ice cream and things of that kind. Just something to take the strain off of ’em. What were your impressions when so many people came in? Well, we just wondered where we were going, how it was going to turn out. Your whole conception of the town was changed, and you’d go to church and they never mingled. Most of ’em didn’t mingle. They figured, I guess, they weren’t going to be here very long, and they just didn’t seem to want to make friendships. Of course, we had some mighty fine people that stayed that are very good citizens now, but the majority of ’em just came in because they had the jobs, and then they were gone. Most of the time you didn’t even know who they were. We were just sorry that the town was being used like it was. Of course, we realized that it had to be, that they had to build the ships and do the things that they had to do, but at the same time it just destroyed just about everything that we had had. Did people feel like Orange was being used? I think some of ’em did. Yes, I think they did. They weren’t going to be here very long, and they got what they could get. Mostly they were here after the wages. That was all they were interested in, really. They didn’t plan to put down roots. It was just a temporary thing. As I said, we have gotten some very fine citizens, and some of the others, just nothing suited ’em. This was a terrible town, and we didn’t have this or we didn’t have [that]. I told one of ’em, “Well, why don’t you go on where you came from? Why stay here if you don’t like it?” They just looked at me like I didn’t have real good sense—like I was a silly ol’ lady. [Laughs] What do you think happened to morals and values? Well, I think they had rather ragged edges. Let’s just say that. We had

200

they called it the war effort

a lot of things happen that we’d rather not have happened. That was one thing that kind of worried everybody, I think—how we were going to cope with that situation. And I don’t think we did a very good job of it. We didn’t have the facilities, for one thing, and we didn’t have the people to oversee these things. Facilities? Well, your police force and your courts. See, we didn’t have but one court here at that time. They just couldn’t take care of it. And I don’t think they really tried too hard. They thought it was a temporary thing, and they just closed their eyes to a lot of it. How did you hear about the death of your son? He was in Monterey, California, and they transferred him to Petersburg, Virginia, which is not too far from Richmond, and he went to see his grandmother in Richmond. I guess it was sometime in October, and they wrote us and told us that he’d been there. We didn’t hear anything [else about] him until the sixteenth of December [1942], and then we got the message that he had been killed in Africa. We still didn’t know when or how. It was the eighth of November that he was killed, and we didn’t get the word till the sixteenth of December. Mrs. Tilley was coming down to stay with us, and she was supposed to get here the sixteenth, but she missed her connections in New Orleans and came in the next morning. She was telling us about Bill, and we didn’t know how to tell her that Bill was gone. She just couldn’t believe it. She’d brought some photographs. He’d had those photographs made before he left Richmond, and she had picked ’em up to bring ’em down here. [He was] twenty-five. Now, I’m going to tell you something. We don’t talk about it, but after this happened Mr. Tilley told me that that Sunday morning he woke up— it was still dark—and he found himself sitting on the side of the bed. He said Bill was standing so close to him he could have almost touched him. He said he went down and marked it on his calendar, and that was the day that Bill was killed. Just feel like you want about it, but he said he was just sitting up on the side of the bed when he woke up. [That was] the eighth of November, the day he was killed. Of course, we didn’t hear from him. We didn’t know where he’d gone. We didn’t know whether he’d left the United States. We didn’t know anything before that message came. I guess that was why I was so solicitous of those boys that were going off, and, oh, I got so many lovely letters from their mothers. So many of the mothers wrote and thanked us. Poor Walter’s clothes were almost worn out. They were all just about his size, and when they had to go anywhere they’d come borrow Walter’s

This Is My Town

Bill Tilley. Courtesy Marion S. Tilley.

201

202

they called it the war effort

Above: Mrs. Tilley at USO information desk. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D. Below: USO buffet. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

203

civilian clothes. Walter was in the Navy Air Force. See, Coke Junior was on a submarine tender in the Pacific. All three boys were in the service. I used to laugh at those boys—“Mrs. Tilley, do you think we could borrow Walter’s clothes?”—if they had a date and they didn’t want to wear their sailor suits. They didn’t know Walter but they knew his clothes. I kept them cleaned and pressed, the shirt and everything to go with it—tie and his jacket and trousers. As I say, I got some of the nicest letters from their mothers. But you know, I felt like my boys were in service, and I’d like for somebody to be nice to them. You lost one son and had two others in the service. How did you handle the concern? I’ve always been a person that felt that you should accept God’s will, and that’s the only way you can handle anything of that kind. There was a great deal of anxiety, but you just had to put your faith in God and just hope that things would come through. I wasn’t bitter over Bill’s death. I realized [with] every one of ’em that that was what we could expect. They weren’t immune from it. They weren’t protected from it. They were exposed to it, and that was one of the things that you really had to think about and expect if they were in active service. What were your resources for coping? Well, I just don’t know. I guess maybe it was my upbringing and, of course, my religion. I always was a member of the church, and I prayed. That was my feeling, that God would take care of us, that He would only ask us to accept what we could cope with, and I think that’s true. Of course, it was a terrible blow, and I still miss Bill. That’s forty-five years ago, and every time the family sits down at the table I miss Bill. But it’s just something that you just have to accept. I never could understand people who wanted to know, “Why did God do this to me?” Well, God has a reason for doing everything, and unless you’re willing to accept what He sends you, you’re not a very good Christian. That’s the way I feel. Oh, it was terribly hard at first, and, of course, one thing, too—it happened so far away. It wasn’t like it had happened right there with you. I often wish that I could have seen him, could have done something for him. You just have to control yourself, I guess. But as I say, I still miss him. I still miss him very much. On the first of July—that was his birthday—he would have been seventy years old. So I said, “Well, I wonder what he’d be like if he was still living?” But I have an idea how he’d be. He was a very thoughtful boy. Those were kind of strenuous times with everybody, I guess, ’cause everybody had somebody in the service. You couldn’t help but worry about ’em, and it just had the same effect on the town, too. The people just

204

they called it the war effort

couldn’t believe it. He was a big worker in the Scouts. He’d been a Eagle Scout himself, and they just couldn’t believe that Bill was gone. I remember Mrs. Joiner said to me, “Every time Will and I go to a football game we can imagine we see Bill and his Scouts up and down, escorting everybody and seating everybody. We still see Bill.” But—well, those things happen. You just can’t help it.



There were pockets of public resistance and scorn—sometimes vocal—to women answering the recruitment notices. And there was the snidery. It was not that women could not and did not already work hard, because many of them had known hard labor on the farms, but in a community of traditions there was no precedent for females taking an active part in heavy industrial work. Maybe it happened in the East, but it “was unheard of in our small community.” Females deserved deference. They were to be protected, sheltered, cloistered. A young wife was required to have the written permission of her husband to dance at the USO. Hard hats or welding hoods, coveralls, grease and grime did not fit the image of the Orange woman. Despite the fact they were needed, there might be the implication that some father or husband was unable to support his family. It was natural that women would fill the many clerical or secretarial jobs necessitated by the paperwork of the contracts, but outside, in the yards, women faced skepticism. Much of the work appears to have been assigned with physical or ability levels in mind. Management capitalized on women’s fine motor skills, but tasks like working with sheet metal, welding, or pipe bending were not offlimits. Handed these jobs, they did not have the luxury of being “good ol’ boys,” so they had to work and prove themselves. It was as if they were on exhibit, and many could not keep from feeling a bit self-conscious or apprehensive. Many were there only for the money and could hardly wait for war’s end to return home. Others resented not being able to retain their jobs. After all, they had proven themselves. Their work had passed inspection. Some of them had even surprised themselves. They certainly surprised the males. Of course, one of the tests was how they could handle working in close proximity with the men—and vice versa. That was the “moral issue,” according to Red Moore. “ You don’t want to go into that. . . . I don’t want to talk about that.” 13 “Hanky-panky” seemed to be a frequently used term, and there was little doubt that it occurred—down in the hold of a ship or out on a parking lot. But most of this on-the-job contact took on more of a “visiting” character. More serious affairs generally occurred outside of work hours, the prelude, undoubtedly, established at work. Some women had the ability to communicate limits, but as might be expected, some men were slow in getting the message. After following a woman down into the hold of a ship, it was reported that one man came up with a

The Women: Very Good, Very Strong

205

severe gash across his forehead. She had responded to his advances with a piece of welding equipment. Another worker saw a sturdy woman walking to her jobsite when a man sidled up alongside, saying something. Without breaking stride she backhanded him and knocked him down, much to the laughter and amusement of his friends. There were openings out in the yards for all kinds of females—large, petite, grandmothers, music teachers, prostitutes—but special advantages seemed to accompany those who were young and attractive. It was not unusual for a chivalrous male to spell one of these workers and take over whatever task she was performing. Less attractive females might not be so fortunate—they were usually on their own. In addition to new employment opportunities, there were also added responsibilities at home for those women with children. Wartime separations demanded shifts in family roles and gave mothers critical leverage over the lives of their children and families. William Tuttle was unambiguous: “[O]ne thing was clear: It was the mother whose response to wartime change most affected the homefront children.” 14 Among the women who were left behind there was anger and loneliness, and often sorrow. No words do justice to their grief. Their anguish remains etched in our memory. For them, as for the countless others who lost sons, brothers, friends, and relatives, Memorial Day would forever be a special day, indeed. D’Ann Campbell concludes that the war years alone were not a watershed for American women. At best, those years “constituted one more installment in a series of events that shaped their lives.” 15 Their day was yet to come. As it was also for blacks, the war was only an installment.

6

Being Black in Orange “I had four helpers. That’s how much work they had. But now you see, the job I had, if I was white I’d a-been the plant superintendent. But by being black I was just Doug. A plant superintendent is a man that knows everything about a business, and that I knew.” Douglas Briggs

“I

f we’ve got anything in the house to eat you can eat out of the same skillet.” 1 Such was the relationship that existed between some blacks and whites in Orange. Black domestics might nurture several generations in a white family and be treated with the same love and affection as the most cherished family member. Peggy Garrett spoke of the intimacy in her own family: “We had the same black lady that worked for us for fifty-two years, and we were her family and she was ours. It was just like losing another mother [when she died]. She was part of us. When she died she still called my children her babies, when here they were grown and long since gone. But that’s the way she felt. She was one of us.” 2 White southerners felt they enjoyed with blacks a rapport unknown in other parts of the country, and what white worker would not “rather have a good black at the other end of the crosscut saw than a lazy white man” or who would not respect a good black man in the cotton patch. 3 Nevertheless, Orange was southern—very southern. The word “South” itself suggests location or place, and place was something with which black residents were all too familiar. Whites “didn’t come over, and you didn’t go over.” They knew their place, their space. Some perceived it as a “corner,” others a “boundary line,” but all knew there were “plenty of restrictions.” 4 A directory prepared by the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S.N., “The Orange Crate: A Handbook of Orange, Texas,” 5 provided information and listed recreational activities for officers and enlisted personnel and dependents. For Negro personnel and their families, one site only was identified: the Booker T. Washington Recreation Hall. While there was an Orange City Library in the Women’s Club House with its “wide assortment of books . . . spacious Reading Room, and a librarian in attendance,” Negro personnel were directed, again, to

207

Being Black in Orange

the Booker T. Washington Recreational facility for their books. The handbook mentions swimming options, including the “swimming hole” in Cow Bayou. There is little suggestion that blacks would have been any more welcome there than at the Beaumont Country Club pool, another of the recommended sites. Where black citizens lived, ate, learned, worshiped, worked, walked, socialized—even where they waited for the bus—were all restricted. There were front doors black people never entered and back doors they were required to enter. There were pews they never occupied. They had to eat back in the restaurant kitchen, ride in the back of the bus, and watch the movie from up in the balcony. The black male best step off the sidewalk and let the white woman pass. There were— “Well, you know how it was. They had the two restrooms and blah, blah, blah.” 6 If the line were long, some whites thought nothing of stepping in front of a black person ahead of them. Inside, the black man best take off his hat; the black woman best buy the hat without trying it on. They knew how to tend to their own business. If you were white and wanted to be polite you spoke of “colored town,” and the “nice” blacks were to be referred to as “colored.” If you were black you were expected to be polite. “On the farms—anywhere—it was ‘Mister’ and ‘ Yes sir.’” 7 In the black schools students received tattered and dated textbooks handed down from the white schools. One East Texas native recalled, “We would cry sometimes because a page would be missing out of the book, and the pages would not be missing out of the teacher’s book.” 8 A swift reckoning, for certain, awaited that student suspected by the teacher of tearing out a page in order to avoid completing a lesson.9 In his 1934 study of Negro education in East Texas, William Riley Davis concluded that the state had a dual educational system, but dual in name only. “[T]he Texas system is essentially a white system with Negro education incidental to it.” 10 The principle of separate but equal prevailed, but with little pretension of true equality. “Everything,” supposedly, “seemed to go along fine.” Some whites, however, would no doubt have acknowledged Frances Brown’s admission: “I know there was a black side we didn’t see.” If the war did not change things, it certainly set change in motion. The black community in Orange got paved roads and curbs, government housing, and plumbing. Job opportunities picked up, and education slowly began to improve. Blacks discovered options other than “the ’ol sharpshooter.” But possibly Geneve Paul suggested the most significant advancement: It was a small beginning in the attempt “to respect human beings as a human being, and this is what the war brought about, I do believe.”



208

they called it the war effort

it was the glory train Earl Kelly Sr. [I was in] five years and two theaters, Europe and the Pacific, and came on back home to “Lemon.” Yeah, most people used to tickle me. They never did believe I was from Orange, Texas. They say, “You’re pulling our leg, Sarge.” One time the navy, the U.S. Steel, sent out those books all over the army [posts] and show what a good job Orange was doing on building those destroyers and PT boats. They had that big ol’ destroyer sitting up there with all them guns going on it, and that’s the one I had worked on before I got drafted. The book came down at the USO Club, the day room, and they started reading it. And about four or five guys come running to the barrack and run up to the room, “Hey, Sarge! Sarge!” I say, “What the problem? Who hurt?” “No!” They had that book. They say, “This the little town you tell us you was from?” I look on that big ol’ destroyer on that cover and then turned inside to reading of Orange, Texas. I say, “Yeah, that’s it.” “You told us you was from a little country town. You from a city. I know you was pulling our leg.” I said, “You just seeing this destroyer. We builds ’em there,” I say, “but Orange is still a small town.” [Laughs] They were all over the battalion with that magazine, showing it. “This where Sarge from.” Say, “No wonder you so smart.” [Laughs] “Whew! I guess them folks somewhere after all.” It went on around there for four or five months. Everybody be pointing—say, “That sergeant there from where they build them destroyers. He’s from a city! No wonder they made him sergeant.” I say, “No, it didn’t come from this. It just come from studying my record. I performed my duty.” And I say, “I learned my orders and I’m up on it. I’m up on soldiering.” In 1941 I was in construction work. I was eighteen. I was working in the shipyard that’d just opened up in Orange, but due to the fact I was at the draft age I don’t think I worked over six months before I was drafted out of there. [Before] that it wasn’t too much to do around here, ’cause there wasn’t no big jobs or nothing of the kind. During that time I was working at a nightclub waiting tables across the river. What was life like over in Louisiana? Plenty of excitement. Dance band. Mixed drinking. Slot machines. And

Being Black in Orange

209

the people that had the money to afford it, it was the glory train. Plenty of good times. How would you characterize Orange during those days? It wasn’t too much to characterize, because not many jobs. Plenty of restrictions. Just waiting for something to happen or something to open up to create jobs. Restrictions? Restrictions on jobs that you could get—job classification. Most job classification was at a minimum for blacks, ’cause the most thing you could do then was wash dishes, work in a cafe, or work at a filling station. Longshoreman. Working on the docks. That is about it. Were people thinking about war? During the time I knew it was coming. I knew it was coming before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. My reason for knowing was because I went to a place they called CC Camp, Civilian Conservation Corps, where they set up these camp like Boy Scout go on. What you was doing then is just clearing the right of ways, cutting trees, building roads, bridges—learning the use of tool. It was something set up on that army. You was in army clothes. Army food. Army rationing. You stood retreat, reveille, just like you would do when you go in the service, and you had close order drill and extended order drill. It’s the same exercise you took when you went to service. But you learned good army philosophy—the using of explosion. Demolition. Blowing up ol’ houses. After I got out of the CC Camp, they had already passed for the shipyard to build those destroyers, and when the plant opened up they put out a application. The job opportunities were as good for the blacks as for the whites? Well, for what you was allowed to do, yes. [Like] layout, and get material for shipfitters and get rivets and things. Was there resentment about not getting the better jobs? No, not in the early days, because everybody was too glad to get the big boost what they did get. After the war broke out I would liked to have stayed home and made some of that big money, but you get drafted. You’re in that category, a-1, and you’re a citizen of the United [States] and then you’re drafted. There’s nothing you could hardly do, though, but resenting it. But resenting it, that isn’t it. This was the country of the flag you’re under, and this is where I was born and came up under, so I had to take my turn like everybody else. What were you hearing in letters when you were overseas? Oh, how much things was progressing. How much money was being made. What a good time they was having. They didn’t have to tell me that.

210

they called it the war effort

[Laughs] And how the street would stay full. You couldn’t tell day from night by the people that was being on it. The streets never was empty. Did the war years help the black community? Oh, why, quite naturally. Everybody got money in each hand to throw away each way. Anything you open up then you could make a living at it. Yes. Change and money was picked up by Kroger [supermarket] sacks full. It hadn’t got to be a whole lot of money before I left, but they was working, and the first thing they started doing is taking out saving bonds, try to get some kind of saving account going. Those who had business would take the money and invest more in the business to try to make it larger, and try to get their houses fixed up, the ones that had ’em. Try to jack ’em up and straighten ’em up and nail a board on ’em and take the tin off ’em. Most houses around here was just nothing but junk. Where were the blacks staying who were coming in? The people would have a extra house or garage off of the back, or they’d pay somebody some money to pitch a tent. In tents and just first one thing and another that they could sleep in to make that day’s work. They just needed a place to stay inside out of the weather, and then they could get up and go to work the next day. Blacks probably weren’t going over to Louisiana. No, the only time they was allowed they had to perform what duty they was hired to do, such as waiting table, busboy, bartender, porters, and things like that. No, at that point they wasn’t allowed to buy drinks or stuff. They had built places and stuff that you went to here [in Orange]. Little hole in the wall. Greasy spoons. You buy your beer or you play your jukebox. Some of ’em had food there and drink. Buy food and play music. Sit down and drink beer till time to close. My mother was here, and I had a sister here. They had a beer club for a while. And my mother, as she always did ’fore war broke out and went on—she had been [a] housemaid for some white people, and she stayed with it. War years didn’t change her one bit. Were you aware of any racial tensions in Orange during those years? Very little. We just didn’t—the truth is we just didn’t have any. Only one thing you can visualize and remember real good is that the white people that had the places, if they wanted to serve you they would ask you to go around to the back. That was the setup that they had. If you want to be served we can serve you in the back. You can go around to the back door and come in the kitchen and sit down and eat in the kitchen inside the place. Well, you’re more in the kitchen where all the food is than in the front in the white [section]. That’s one reason why that never did take effect on me. What did you notice about Orange when you got back in ’46?

Being Black in Orange

211

The improvement. That the people were trying to build homes. That’s just the first thing. People trying to straighten up their home. They had built quite a few and repaired those they was already in. And added on a few more nightspots. Plenty streets had been paved and drainage line put in. Everybody was still happy. It hadn’t sunk in yet that the war was over and they was going to have to slim back down to normal again. Everybody was still excited and the streets still crowded and still raving. What were people doing for a social life? Baseball games. Go to football games and to a nightclub. That’s it. To dances. Yeah, they believed in dances. They believed in going to dances. How did those years affect you? Well, one thing, it made me smarter. It made me start looking forward to things, to try to visualize more what could happen and take place than just set down and take things for granted. And try to do something—accumulate. And then on the other hole, I’d sit down at it, and when I really got down to serious thinking to relax off more—to really relax off more. To get rid of all anxiety. Because one thing, it got you to see [that] regardless of what you have or what you can get, something can come along and just boom—abrupt—and it’s gone. And then it makes you think a-plenty, too, about I went over here [and] I didn’t have to get back. And then it’d give you the foresight that regardless of all you accumulate and all you get and all they can give you or will to you, you live for a certain length of time and you still have to leave it. It’s nothing here permanent for you. I don’t care how much you get and what you got, you still leave that. And the more you can relax off and come to accept it, a much better person you will be and [in] a better peace of mind. You can say I’m just using this while I’m here. All this pass away. How did you learn to relax off? By coming out of pretty close [mishaps] and thinking about what could of happened that didn’t happen, and say it doesn’t have to go this way all the time. And you began to relax off, turn it loose; ’cause there’s some things that take its place that you can’t do nothing about. That’s like death. We can cry and holler and go get the doctor and get the best surgeon, all the technician in the world. But one thing we haven’t thought about, that same technician trying to save you, somebody going be working on trying to save him, and he gonna go. He won’t be here either. The same preacher preaching out of the book, preaching the gospel to you, well, he gonna lay down. He got to leave the Bible to somebody else. He going, too. Yes, it give you a real sense of relaxation. It’s something you can’t control and nobody else can. And I don’t care how much you whoop and holler and cry—it won’t help.

212

they called it the war effort

When you went into the military, did you think maybe you had just a certain amount of time left? When you’re at the age I was, you don’t think of nothing like that, ’cause, hey, there’s always the next fellow they gonna get. Not me. All I’m thinking about is where I can pull this little duty here, and run in and hit the shower and get in some GI and number-one uniform and scout this town and see what they got going on. You don’t think about that. That won’t come around until you start getting older. Do you think those years changed the people in this community? The only way I would say it would change maybe a few of ’em [was] if they accumulated a lot of money, and money have a way of changing people. You can just about prove all that by our politicians. Yes, money got a way of getting to you. How did it get to the people in the black community? Well, the thing about it, they never did get ahold of enough money for it to get to them, ’cause they still on that struggling day-to-day basis, trying to make it today to pay it tomorrow. A few [did] accumulate it, but what they did with it—it just like they didn’t. As I said about the glory train, the glory ride, when you get money it change you. You blows the money. Were you glad to come back to Orange after the war? Why, any human being that goes into a war and stays five years and stay thirty month overseas and he’s not glad to get back to Orange, Lemon, or Apple or anywhere in the United States, he’s crazy or he is lying. Yes siree. But I’ll put in one more phase of this. I wouldn’t want to go to another war. Sure wouldn’t. They’d just about have to be coming into my house for me to start shooting. What if it made money come into the community? I don’t want money that kind of way. I’d rather take what the Lord giveth, do [with] what I’m supposed to have and let somebody else make it. If that’s the way you have to make money I think we need to start crying every day, because I don’t think money is that important to kill off people and take bulldozer and cover ’em over. I think there’s a better way. Did you see much of that, taking bulldozers to cover people up? Oh, yes. That’s right. Them planes coming through the cloud looking like a load of blackbird with bombs screaming down. It cover a large area. I was running from it every day trying to get in a foxhole somewhere—if I see it. Yes siree. After that, see, you have aplenty to relax off about, and I wouldn’t want to go back through it either.



213

Being Black in Orange

i got workaritis Irma Overton I had three kids, and their father and I had separated. I lived with my mother and with the help of God and her, well, we made it. I worked two jobs—just domestic—going to people’s house. Cooking. Minding children. Just anything. [Mother] washed and ironed for a living and kept [my children].11 Did more blacks come into the community? Yes, blacks working as far as from San Augustine and all around. Some men stayed in a little house we had. We say that ain’t fitting to rent. It was just a ol’ house, and that’s where they slept and they fixed their food, and they went home every weekend. Some weekend their wife would come. Well, I’d get out of my bed and pile in with my daughter and let them have our room. They were all nice married people. They went to work and we couldn’t tell they was back there. They got in and went to bed, and Friday evening when they’d get off they’d head for home. Then they’d be back Sunday night. We always got along ’cause [Mother] had the washing and ironing she’d been doing since she been here, and then during the wartime it helped because they built a girls’ dormitory. We would wash for those girls—just wash their clothes. You see, they’d iron ’em themselves. It helped us, too, ’cause, see, you could wash, wash, wash, wash. They were nice white girls. Some of ’em young. Some old. What were you doing for recreation? Well, we went to Sunday school and church, and I let [the boys] go to the show in the evening. Sometime on Saturday nights, well, I might take ’em up to the drugstore and buy a ice cream for ’em. I always had to work. I didn’t have time to go dancing and going to the show. When the children was little I’d carry them [to the show]. Did blacks have troubles because of the war and all the people coming in? Well, if they did I didn’t know of it. The people that I was in contact, they didn’t have no problem. Putting it all together I’d just say it just helped ’em, ’cause there was no money here, and people just got along better and was able to do for themselves. See, a lot of times before then, well, you share with them what you had. I was lucky. Mother raised chickens, ducks—a garden—and washed and ironed, too. And I worked. Well, that made it easier for us, but then when a person didn’t do all that and they had children it’d been rough. But you have to have that get-up-and-go in you, now. Did you have a lot of get-up-and-go?

214

they called it the war effort

I pulled two jobs a day, and then when I went to work to the Holland Hotel I worked there every day. Then in the evening I’d go different places and work for people. Where were you working during the war years? I worked at the hotel. I was a maid. Helped clean up the rooms and things. But boy, during the war—I had the right side on the second floor, and I could tell—like those youngsters—I could tell when they’d been there [and] had a good time. You got there—“Uh-oh, I must a-had some boys in here last night.” I guess they’d just be feeling good. You’d find pillows off the bed, or [they’d] piled all the covers off the bed. I’d say, they must of had ’em a good time in here, ’cause the room would look like it was tumbled upside down. They’d have other people stay in there permanent. Sometimes some of those ladies’d say, “Boy, they had a bunch of little sailors in there last night. You could tell they’s having fun. They must have been wrestling, too.” I said, “Well, they must of ’cause everything was upside down.” I imagine they’d been out, and if they had a leave they didn’t have to be back to the base that night. What would you do when you got off at the hotel? Well, I’d either go to somebody house and clean up, or if I didn’t have to go there, well, I’d go home and wash. Mother washed, but I’d get the clothes down if they was on the line and fold and press and iron. I’d pull double duty and help her. That was our living. If you went to somebody’s house, how long would you work? Just how long it took me to clean up—maybe two hours or three hours. I’d be home around six or before six. In the wintertime I’s home before dark. Then would you work at home? Well, it depend. If we had somebody that was going to pick up their clothes. If I had to. She washed in the day, you know—and get up early. I’d iron. I have ironed at night, yes. If you wanted your clothes, when I get these children bathed and get [’em] to bed, well, I’d iron. That’s why the doctor said I had arthritis. I told him I had workaritis. Pulling double jobs like that, you know, you can overdo your body. [Laughs] I told him I didn’t have arthritis. I got workaritis. How did you use your money during the war years? Well, it took that with three children. I believed in my children looking nice. I may of had one uniform and maybe two Sunday dresses, but they always looked nice. I believed in them looking nice. I didn’t want them to be feeling bad or looking funny. You might have one uniform? I have worked with one uniform. When I come home every day I’d take

215

Being Black in Orange

it off. It was a white seersucker. I can see it now. [Mother would] wash it, and she would paint a little starch in it and put it on the hanger, and I went to work clean every day. I have had one. How many did you have during the war years? Two. But I never had over two or three. That was enough, see, ’cause I could keep ’em clean. I never care for much clothes. I didn’t have over, maybe, three good dresses. [I’d have] a pair of work shoes and a pair of Sunday shoes. That was it. In the black community during the war years, what did people want? Well, they wanted good clothes, fine cars, and nice houses—you know, what the average [person wanted], I mean if they had any get-up-and-go. And some folks just was content just if they’s eating and sleeping. They’re enjoying just sitting around and not doing nothing. You know that’s just human nature among anybody. You find ’em in both races they like that. This was real funny. We was getting ten dollars then a week. And so some men—they stayed in one of my rooms. They was from off somewhere. They asked me [what we were making], so I told ’em. They said, “Well, y’all ought to get more than that. You ought to at least get fifteen dollars or twelve and a half at the least.” I told one of the girls—she’s a black girl like me—but she went back and told the head woman. That lady told me, “Oh, you want more money. More money now. More money now.” So then I say, “Well, things cost more now. I can’t go tell ’em [merchants] I work at the hotel and I don’t get but ten dollars a week, and I got to buy food and stuff and they have to let me have it at a discount.” I say, “I can’t tell ’em that.” How much more did they give you? We got fifteen dollars.



no jobs for them nowhere. nowhere. i mean nowhere. Douglas Briggs I’ve never seen so much clothes to be cleaned in all my life. I mean you step on clothes all day long. Just clothes stacked up in the front to be cleaned higher than this icebox. And some of ’em would never come back. We had hundreds of dollars that people would come and work one day and you won’t see ’em no more—women and men. Black and white. Never would come

216

they called it the war effort back for their money. When I come to work here, every Saturday they would ask me, “You’ll be back Monday?” So one day I asked one of the ladies that worked there, “Why they ask me that?” She said, “Well, nobody ain’t never stayed here.” Every time they’d look up they were looking for somebody to work.

I came here [in 1943] with the intention of going to California. But after I got here and stayed awhile it seemed like it was just as good as any other place. I was twenty-five. I didn’t come looking for a job. They hired me out of Louisiana. Jarvis Stanfield owned the Quality Cleaners at that particular time, [and they were in Crowley] looking for pressers and cleaners. I happened to be standing in front of the shop when they came by. We were making, I believe, eighteen dollars a week at that particular time, and here was a man that offered sixty-five dollars a week for the same type of work. [My wife stayed in Crowley.] See, you couldn’t rent a house here. You could barely get a room, and they had five in one room. Everything available was rented. You couldn’t even buy property. I don’t think none of these real estate dealers existed then. They wasn’t here. And then, you see, there could have been property, but the blacks had a certain amount of space that was set aside for them, and that’s as far as you could go. I rented a bed spot. Got me a room. It was about six of us from my home here working together. We’d stay together, but everywhere you moved it was overcrowded. Did you have a closet or— Oh, no. That’s out of the question. That’s out the question. A closet? No. I was just fortunate enough to be working at a pressing shop where I could leave my clothes hanging at the shop. But that’s out of the question asking about a closet. I was sleeping in a bunk bed. Had to get up there with a chair. One ol’ boy come in half high one night and he moved my chair. Me and that floor we had it—getting down. But the first night I spent in Orange we go down to this fellow house, and the man [Mr. Stanfield] that brought us out there to get a room, [this fellow] told him, “Yeah,” he had a nice room. “It was real nice.” And he took us down the hall and showed us the room, showed the man who was going to pay for it, Mr. Stanfield. Mr. Stanfield paid him for the room, and that night when we got ready to go to bed that room he showed Stanfield wasn’t the room where we was going to sleep. [It was] in the attic! It was upstairs in the attic! I’ve never been in the service, but they had more cots in that room than they had in a barrack. All the night long somebody was coming in and going to bed. [Laughs] But the bed he showed the man, what the man paid for, we didn’t see that room no more. If you sleep in the big bed, well, your head’s here, your feet down. You

Being Black in Orange

217

see, I sleep with my head here; yours down here. You know, you got to mix it up. It was zigzag—three in the bed.12 That was a regular bed. And all night long somebody was working their feet. But you had to do that if you wanted a place to sleep. Now, [one place] they had about seven women living under us in the same amount of space that we had upstairs. Then they had a bathroom downstairs on the side of this building. It was attached to it. That was for everybody. So what we would do, when we’d get in from work the first one would go in and take his bath and he’d whistle, and one’d come down and he’d go in. Had to keep them women from cutting in on our bath. [Laughs] Every time one’d get through he’d whistle and another’n come down. How did all of that affect you? It didn’t affect you. It kept you tired all the time, but it didn’t affect me because the money was good. You see, Orange was so crowded at that time. I used to find more money than what I was making. Shucks, we’d find everything in clothes. No time for searching. People’d bring clothes to the shop on a Wednesday, and they’d tell you to come back in two weeks and get ’em, ’cause [there was] just that much business. The girls in the front couldn’t search the clothes ’cause they’d get behind with their work, so that’d make everything come in the back to the cleaner, and I was the cleaner. After they were dry-cleaned and get in the dryer [the bills] would automatically crumple up and come out. They’d come out the pockets. And I had two dryers right by the door going to the restroom. When you open the door, if they had that paper money in there it would be right against the door and it’d fall on the floor. Well, nobody had time to sweep. The floor stayed full of paper. But anyway, one of the girls come along—I was by my spotting board— and she stopped and stooped down and she went in the restroom. I was standing up there thinking, “Now, here is a girl here that wouldn’t pick up a dress if it was on the floor—or a pair of pants. Now, what made her stoop down there?” Finally she come out, so I said, “Let me have that money. I was just trying you. I just wanted to see if you would pick it up.” It was twenty-seven dollars. And with those clubs across the river, them big shots across there, they didn’t have time for nothing like that [to empty their pockets]. It was some money here then. We’d go to work at eight to five, [then] I’d go down to another cleaner’s and work most of the time when we finished there. I [also] used to help Charlie in the Drag [Dragon] Kitchen, a club on Second Street. Used to be a popular spot. Did you have time for a social life? Well, you enjoyed yourself watching these people have their fun. I

218

they called it the war effort

know one night I heard a fellow say—he was dancing [and] he was about drunk—he say, “You know, this place is a beautiful place. It look just like the moon up there.” He was on the patio [at the Drag], but he didn’t know that was the moon. [Laughs] Now, at that time you had to be so careful. They’d arrest you for anything. Was it hard on blacks in the war years? Yeah. Uh-huh. They would come down and raid these places, which they know was operating, and they’d go in these places and drink the people’s beer. I know one cop, he smoked big cigars, and he went into a fellow’s [beer parlor], and the fellow had ’em in a box. You know, the ol’ way was you didn’t hand a man a cigar. You handed him the box and he take what he wanted. And [the cop] did this—oh, maybe about eight or nine cigars— and the fellow told him how much that was. He told him he wasn’t used to paying for those cigars. He said, “But you’re going to pay for ’em in here. I don’t know what you do in them other places.” He got hot. He paid him and he walked out, but it wasn’t long after that that fellow wasn’t open no more. Aw, they did some heck of a things. A lot of things happened that shouldn’t have happened. Did you find much humor in the situation? Oh, yeah. Sure. You see, I wasn’t sleeping with strangers. It was fellows I was raised with. We had a lot of fun. Before we’d go to bed we’d probably shoot dice or play cards. We’d play cards to keep from going up on the streets, because we’d get in some kind of mess. So we’d sit there and play cards. Was there much street activity? Ohh. Ohh. People was always four and five deep. It just stayed like that. It was just packed all the time. They was working three shifts, and every shift left the street flooded with people. And then they had the naval base here, too. During the war it was just like a little [compound]. They had black sailors in Orange, and then about twice a week the soldiers would come out of Camp Polk in Louisiana [for] big dances and such things as that. That street, they must’ve had four liquor stores in that block, and all the other spaces was beer parlors. I remember one night we had to empty the cash register four or five times—full cash registers. Put the money in and it was just running out. Where the trouble really was, when the sailors and the soldiers come to town at the same time. See, the naval base was in walking distance. The sailors was always here, but when the soldiers come in they just wanted to take over the town, and that’s when you had a problem. They’d fight. I remember one night they started fighting, and gee whiz—oh, yeah! They was known for that. Now little people

Being Black in Orange

219

like us, we was nobody. They took over every little joint they had. Civilians was nobody. They’d walk over you. Gee whiz! You was a nobody if you wasn’t a serviceman. And you see, at that time the cops couldn’t arrest ’em. It had to be an MP or policeman that was in the service. But these cops couldn’t do nothing, and that made a problem, ’cause if they can’t arrest them I’m gonna arrest somebody else. They couldn’t arrest the soldiers, so they’d arrest the civilians. What would happen to the civilians? They’d go home, I guess. We know it was gonna be a fight when the [army] come in. No civilians would hang around these places. They’d just move on out and give it to ’em. See, every time they’d walk in a place there would be enough to start a war. See, you never would catch a sailor drifting by hisself or a soldier by hisself. They stayed in groups. How do you think money affected people? I don’t think nobody that I can remember made that money and did something worthwhile with it. In other words, they were listening at what MacArthur said, and MacArthur said the war was gonna last about ten more years. And it was over in six months after he said that. That’s what caught everybody off guard. People went from a low salary to a high salary and they just started living it up. If people could have bought homes back in those days, then they could have seen where their money went. But you couldn’t. See, the amount of property that was available to [the black folks], which wasn’t already taken up, it wasn’t a square mile looked like to me. That just like right now. There’s people now that’s making a little salary, and they’re buying homes, sending their children to college, ’cause they have to know where their money going. But back in those days, when weekend come they’d boogie-woogie it all off and start off Monday with another job, and that’s just the way it went because they didn’t have no responsibility. You couldn’t buy nothing on credit here—black. What about your friends from Crowley? What did they do with their money? Blowed it. Blowed it off. Gambling. They had gambling shops here wide open—gambling and drinking. And they had house gamblers, you know. That’s where you get took quicker. [Laughs] How were you different? I don’t know. Not that I planned it that way, but that’s just the way it was. I don’t know. I can’t say. I ain’t going to sit up here and say I planned it. No. And I got ’em all a job. I was the reason for all of ’em being down here, but I enjoyed it with ’em, you know. We was all—like if your socks was dirty, I got some clean ones. It was just a bunch of nice guys. Did those years change the black community? It helped the community a heck of a lot—financially. The lady next

220

they called it the war effort

door, she told me she’d fix her husband a lunch every morning, and he’d go to the waterfront and sit there for maybe a month ’fore a boat would come in. He was a longshoreman. So see, they didn’t have any work around here. Was there much of an opportunity for black women? Well, I would say no. See, when I come here the black wasn’t accepted. I don’t know what it was. Like they had one cleaner’s that would clean black clothes. Black had to walk to town and take their clothes to a pressing shop to be cleaned and go back and get ’em. I don’t believe they delivered medicine to black people. All this come as a surprise to me, ’cause I come from a little town in Louisiana and this here was done. But now, like black women, there wasn’t no jobs for them nowhere. Nowhere. I mean nowhere. Not even a clerk in the store. They had a drugstore downtown where when you walked in you take your hat off. The bus station, you go in and buy your ticket and come out and stand up outside till the bus arrived. I remember those things. You go in and get your ticket then come outside because there wasn’t no place inside for you. Did the blacks ever talk about that? No, because they didn’t have time. We had a few blacks here that was trying, you know, but they had a uphill battle, because most of the people that they were trying to [get involved] was not citizens of Orange. They was just people who come in here and planned on leaving—which most of ’em did. You think opportunities for black men got started in the war? Yeah. If it hadn’t been for the Second World War, I think it would a-still been right where it was. That was simply because people had never had a chance to be together, to know each other. And then when they finally went in the service and met each other it made a big change. You’ll find black soldiers bringing white boys home with ’em on their leave. White boys bringing black. I know one of the richest men here—his granddaughter—the best man in the wedding was a black boy, and I know he didn’t want that, but that’s the way it was. This soldier wanted that boy with him. They had been through a lot together. So it made a change. I had heard about how bad Orange was on blacks. I remember that from a boy. How did you feel about coming? Well, if nobody bothers me I ain’t gonna bother you. Well, you probably came to Orange not planning to bother anybody. Were you still apprehensive? Oh, yeah. [But] this man was offering me twice as much money as I was making, so it didn’t take much persuading to get me to move. I guess I was young and didn’t pay any attention.

221

Being Black in Orange



sadness was brought to the black family Velma M. Jeter Mrs. Jeter first came to Orange in 1926. She returned in 1943 after an absence of several years. The population was mushrooming because of the war activities. The Navy Addition was added to East Town. Prior to World War II [this] was a marsh, and I used to take the children out there for biological field trips. The streets in East Town were all dirt streets, and some just hardened by whatever overlays they used at that time. But the government ordered paved streets in this portion of the town because their officials were to live in the Navy Addition. [This] put the East Town blacks in the middle of the commercial district and the Navy Addition. [East Town] had been called the country, and it was just strictly a black residential district with a few black businesses; because at that time blacks had to sustain themselves with their grocery stores, their drugstores and their cleaning establishments, their barber shops, and other small sustaining businesses for blacks. What was the response of the black community to this influx? Well, it was really an experience that perhaps they invited because of so many of the advantages that they prior did not have. And at that time racial biasness was at its height, and, of course, the government brought many equities that were not a part of our living experiences prior to that. The black teacher was not getting the same salary as the white teacher. The black children were using used books that had been in the white schools. We had no laboratories in the black schools. Black education was definitely unequal. It was being called equal but separate, and there was no equalness anywhere in the activities.13 We paid more for insurances. We paid more for properties. In fact, I understand we paid more taxes even than white appraisals. Property values had to soar with the paved streets. Racial bias was still strong during the war years? Subtly so, yes. You know, it can be hidden in just so many places that [to] those who practice it, it is not noticeable. But the fellow who is bearing the brunt of it can tell you much about this. What were some of these subtle things you encountered? Well, really, I have been such an activist that whatever I encountered I handled. I didn’t suffer really too, too much discrimination, although I could tell you some hair-rising stories. Because of my complexion and facial contour and this sort of thing, many times I was mistaken for white.

222

they called it the war effort

I remember one day I was in [a] store looking at some patterns in the Vogue pattern book. A white woman came in, and she said, “When you have finished may I look at the book you are looking in now?” And I said, “Yes.” The clerk behind the counter reached over and whispered to her that I was black—well, she didn’t say black then, you know. We were called Negroes or colored or anything that you can [imagine]. She looked around in surprise, and she took her book and moved it almost two feet away from me, and she didn’t come back to get the book at which I was looking at the time. It was little things like that. We’d go in the department stores and black women were not supposed to try on hats because their hair was greasy, and yet they wanted them to buy them sight unseen as to how it made them appear. And the same thing with trying on clothes. The black woman really was put in precarious positions at that time. [They] had a hat shop on Fifth Street, and one of my friends and I went in. She wanted to try the hat on and [the owner] objected. I objected to his attitude, and he said, “She must have been to school somewhere. She has a little education and she thinks that she can do so-and-so and so-and-so.” I said, “She has. She’s a graduate of Tuskegee, and she feels that she does not have to accept secondhand citizenship, and neither do I.” Did blacks have that many more vocational opportunities during the war? In menial tasks, yes. They still were not skilled, and there were many, many menial jobs in these shipyards and industries that began to grow around here. And then, many times blacks who had skills were not promoted. They had no advantage as to promotion. If whites came in they were asked to teach the whites what they knew so the whites could go up. During that time they [had] what was called extended-day schools, and there were jobs provided for black women. We used some of the women who had degrees or had a high school education in some capacity during this time who had not had a job before. The schools were one of the major avenues for black women to advance themselves? That was the only avenue, really—just about the only avenue, because before then many of them had to be domestic servants. What was happening to family life in the black community? To me, the black family had always, up until now, been a happy family. They seemingly accepted the toll and went on and made life as happy as they possibly could under the circumstances. But it’s not that way now, because you see the families were together then. The families are so separated now, and even with the maternal families at that time the mother was in the home with the children. Even though she did domestic work the

223

Being Black in Orange

hours gave her an opportunity to be with her children after she was home from her duties. Of course, we had our boys to leave and fight, and many of them were killed. Sadness was brought to the black family as well as to the white family, and there were voids in those families as well as in the whites. What were the concerns in the black community? I would think that better living was their concern, because before then there were some people who did not have running water, electric lights, bathrooms. Many of these white landlords who had these row houses around here had to put in bathrooms, and they put them on the back porches. They would have to go out at night to get to them. So living conditions were definitely made better, and those people who went into the projects where the government had put in bathrooms and furnished the stoves and the refrigerators and this kind of thing that they had not been used to before then, it was quite a step up for them. We had many a little shack around here that was falling down [and] was razed, and better homes were offered.



you got yourself off the sidewalk Homer W. Rhodes I was six years old [when Pearl Harbor was attacked]. I remember all the commotion and all this other stuff. Things was kinda in a uproar because of what had happened. It was just like a ball of confusion, really, because you had people everywhere you could look. The influx just come in and people were there. It was kinda chaotic. It was kind of devastating because it was just like [people] didn’t have any directions. I do remember after then they began to start bringing in people to work down in the shipyard. Everything just changed all at once. The population just started building up, [and] people was trying to find places to stay. People was coming in from everywhere to work. If you just had a little shack or whatever it was you could rent it because people was staying four and five and six people in a house. My grandmother had a large house. Oh man—one, two, three, four. About four or five bedrooms. She had a huge house, and they had all these different people and families staying there. Husbands and wives. It wasn’t hardly any kids around. I remember the time that my mother sent me and my brother to go get

224

they called it the war effort

some shoes in Beaumont. You’d board the train and go on towards Beaumont or wherever you had to go. They was selling so fast and everything, I stuck my foot in the shoe, and the man put his fist behind it so I could be fitting it right. I said these things too big. He said, “They all right. They all right.” I told my brother, “Those shoes too big.” He said, “Aw, they all right.” Brought ’em back home and my mother had me to try ’em on. She said, “These things not [fitting you].” She made my brother take ’em back to Beaumont. They was selling stuff so fast you couldn’t hardly get in the store. It was just a mass. And he just stuck a finger in there, and, “Oh, they all right. They all right.” They were just selling one customer to another [because] they was trying to get you out of there. You just pay. You just go home. On a Saturday I would sneak away from the house early in the morning. Boy, [Mother] would whip me if she knew what I did, but I would go up there on the main street [Second Street], and look around on the streets. They had money just laying around. This is in the black neighborhood. We would have dirt roads but you would find it. You could find a couple of nickels or dime or whatever they had left. Sometime I’d find me a little something and sneak on back to the house. Why do you think she didn’t want you to go down on Second Street? Because people were drinking, having good times and the women and the men and all like this. You saw a lot of people, I’d say men and women, hugging and kissing and carrying on. But like I say, it was different because, see, all before then when I was small we used to go out in the Sabine River and crab and stuff like that, and you can get all the crabs out there you want. We used to go back there and pick berries and when all that come in that stopped some of the fishing and stuff like that. When they come in and they put all that sand in there that extend off of Riverside, well that was different then. That cut all that out. Do you remember them dredging the river? Yeah. Oh yeah. Uh-huh. I remember them dredging and they push all that sand. It was kind of confusing to me. It was amazing because I really didn’t know what was going on. Say they was gonna build houses out there. Well, they built ’em. They really did. I was wondering how were they gonna to do that with all this water and stuff out there, but they filled it in and they built those houses out there. Do you remember the war being talked about in school? Yes, they would talk about the war, and I distinctly remember that one of my neighbors, my mother’s neighbor, she had a cousin and he was in the navy. You know, he had all his decorations on his shoulders. He was like an officer. Had a white hat and he used to come to the school and talk to

225

Being Black in Orange

us all the time. He would talk about the war and he would talk to us about being good kids. He was black? Yeah. Oh yeah. But he was one of the few ones I ever seen with a uniform like that though. He was some kind of officer. I don’t know how that happened but I remember one time I went down and they was christening a ship, and how I got there I don’t know but I was there. And someone says, “Well, goll-ly. I don’t know why they’re wasting all that good champagne or whatever it is.” Said, “That looks silly.” You know they taken a bottle and they whack—. Said, “That looks silly. They just wasting stuff.” What was it like being a black child during the war? It was all right in a sense, but you know it has limitations too. Because I know during all this rigmarole and all this confusion when we go to town and go by these places, and shoot, when them white ladies come out and on the sidewalk, even if they would be halfway intoxicated you got off the sidewalk. You know, you got out of the way because you didn’t want to be looking at no white lady. You got yourself off the sidewalk and you walked around and then you’d get on back and go on where you got to go. Did you feel welcome downtown? It wasn’t too terribly bad because we were taught how to behave. You know, some stores you’d go in and buy stuff, they treated you pretty good, but some of ’em was pretty hard on you. Sure would. They act like they didn’t want to wait on you or you’d be standing there and they would be getting other people before they’d get to you. You had to wait your turn.



the colored people, they like their clothes tailored Solomon Johnson14 [The war] just made things come to life. That’s what happened. Made things come to [life] with the white and colored, ’cause everybody was just existing, you might say. In 1930 they started a organization named the Civic Betterment League, because the races was almost at each other’s throat every once in a while. If a white man and Negro get in a fight, about one or two times out of five or six the Negro would get shot. They was getting flusterated about nothing done about it—say [you were] resisting arrest and things like that. So these

226

they called it the war effort

fellows got this organization up to stop all of that, because things were going to happen in Orange they didn’t want to happen. We’s afraid there’s going to be a riot. Just before Pearl Harbor they got me in there, and we started getting the races together, working together, to let ’em know that we want to improve the Negro community. They had so many people at the employment office, and they was taking the whites—you know, getting their applications out and wasn’t getting the coloreds out. The fellow in there who was head of it, he say, “Well, listen, if you fill ’em out I’ll send ’em out there to you.” I say, “You send ’em out there. I’ll fill ’em out.” So he sent a lot of coloreds out there to me, and after a while he sent the whites and coloreds.15 When the application was given to the fellows at Consolidated, every time they see that I filled the application out they’d hire the guy because they didn’t have no trouble. I had all the information correct. We all helped each other. Some guy’d bring clothes in [to my tailor shop] and they’ll have a little garden—bring some eggs or something like that, and I’d go ahead and take ’em and fix their clothes up. Colored people go and clean the yard and they’d get some clothes. That’s where I really got experience cutting them clothes down for ’em so they could fill ’em, they could wear ’em, see. I was doing good then, man. I was walking in high cotton. People didn’t have much money? No, they didn’t have much money. I know one lady there, she had three kids, and I think she was getting $2.75 or $3.75 a week and had to put $1.50 of that for rent. Some of those women had one dress—I mean the colored. [They’d] wear that dress that day and come home and wash it, comb their hair and take a bath and everything and go back to work in that dress. I knowed a lot of [white] men, and I tried to get them to get ’em uniforms or something they can wear in their house [so] they [could] keep that dress there to go to church with. Did the war affect the way people lived? Oh, listen, lots of them just didn’t have a place to live. They’d live where they could. This house right over here, that woman had thirteen or fourteen people sleeping on the kitchen floor, and that kitchen floor’s just about twelve by eight or something like that. She put ’em in there and said, “If y’all can sleep together it’s all right, but I don’t have but one toilet.” Of course, this woman, she was taking roomers. She was in that business. They come here to her ’cause they had her name when they come. And she’d take ’em. [Even] if they had to sit up in a chair and sleep that night she’d take ’em. And they’d do it, because the people wanted to work. [Housing] was the whole problem. It wasn’t just the Negroes, it was the white, too. They

227

Being Black in Orange

just didn’t have room, and people had those henhouses, white and colored, putting floor in ’em. Some of ’em just put some dirt in there and covered it up and everything, and people was renting them henhouses. They put the dirt first, but then when they had time they started putting some flooring in it. So many people coming in helped your business? Well, at this time, especially for the colored people, they like their clothes tailored, see. That’s what they liked, tailored clothes. They just like the fit ’cause—they called them Jews’ clothes—[they’d] buy them Jews’ clothes, [but] they didn’t like ’em. They bought ’em all right, but those who could afford ’em, they want their clothes tailored. And if you didn’t have tailored clothes, you wasn’t nobody.



they thought they were a big mister Lorena Verdun In 1941 we lived in Port Arthur. My husband was a janitor [at the country club], and I served luncheon on Thursdays. I came back to Orange on November 1, 1942. I had lived here before. I worked for [a priest]. I was the housekeeper there. In my neighborhood you didn’t have too many [people] until they built the government houses across there. Then people started moving in and you started to see it change. Quite a few people built little shacks, ratholes, you know, to rent. Some of ’em preferred to live in there than to live in the government houses ’cause there was so many rules and regulations to live in those houses. I’m not a very outgoing person, and at that time I wasn’t much different than I am now. I was a very shy person, so I didn’t know too many people. I didn’t meet too many. We did talk about the people coming into Orange, because they were different people. You know, they were all from different places, and it was different from what we were accustomed to. Were the blacks different? They were different in a way. I don’t know. How would I put it? They were still living in the past. For instance, they didn’t know anything about running water, anything like that, and it was hard for them to understand all of this.16 What was the mood of the black community? For one thing, a lot of ’em were glad to be able to work, ’cause before

228

they called it the war effort

then—that’s why we moved to Port Arthur, ’cause there’s no work here in Orange. There was nothing, and they were glad to be able to work. And a lot of ’em did prosper from it. When we first came back [my husband] was working at a cafe for eleven dollars a week, believe it or not. And then when the shipyards opened up at Levingston he started working there. Did he talk about his work? Not too much. He wasn’t much of a talker. He was a diabetic and he took insulin. I don’t know if you know anything about diabetes, [but] when you feel that you have too [little] sugar you have to get something sweet, and he always carried either a little bottle of syrup or a piece of candy in his pocket. And [one day] he felt that he needed something, so he took that bottle out and he started to drink out of it. His foreman saw him and told him to stop. Well, a diabetic gets stubborn when they having sugar. They won’t listen to you. He went on drinking, so he just knocked him out. Later on they terminated him [Mr. Verdun]. They fired him. He could have gone to court and had himself reinstated, but he never did. So after that he worked for a furniture company. See, the man told him to stop. Of course, he didn’t stop so he took out his baton and whacked him over the head. I think that was the cause he went blind before he died. Of course, diabetes will cause you to lose your eyesight, but I think that lick had something to do with starting it. Did be talk about that? No. He never said too much. Were there other instances where you thought blacks were abused on the job? Well, not that I knew anything about. As a whole, I think they were treated fairly well. I hear that there were no racial problems in those days. No. You see, we knew our place and we stayed in our place—which I always did even after we was free to do a little more out. I know my position. I know my place. I know how white people feel, because I was brought up that way. Now, they used to tell you you couldn’t walk downtown in Orange, [but] when we moved here in 1931 nobody ever bothered us. Was the place of women changing in the black community? Uh-uh. Not any of the blacks. Very few of them. Just kept on doing like we had—the teachers—and then the rest of us did housework. That was it. They were paid a little more then but not that much more. Before the war I worked for $3.50 a week, and during the war it went up—get five or six or seven dollars a week. By the time I stopped working for the priest—it was in 1967—I was then making fifteen dollars a week. Did people change very much when they got some money? Some of ’em did, yes. They thought they were more than you if they had

229

Being Black in Orange

a nickel more than you did. They thought they were a big mister if they had a dime more than you did. Some of ’em did change. Did those years change you? I don’t think so. I always was a person that accepted reality. What is is, and there’s nothing else you can do about it. We think we can do something about it, but we can’t.



you couldn’t go in that front door Roy L. Jenkins I went to college for a couple of summers, and funds was real hard to get hold of. So I came out and went into the CC Camp. I got discharged from the CC Camp in about ’41 and came on to Orange and worked at the shipyard. I worked there for a year or so, and then in ’43 I went to the post office. I worked there until I went into service in ’44. It was kind of slow around here until the war came along, and when the war came, I mean it really boomed. A lot of the guys went into service. Well, the ladies could work and help supplement your income. I think it had its toll, but all in all it was more or less kind of a uplift for ’em because work came along. What did you mean, “It had its toll”? I think a lot of ’em become independent, and they just felt like if John Doe wants to get a divorce he [can] get it, because I can make my own living. Consequently, I think the divorces rose during that period of time. They just didn’t have to take anything off of the man. What were some ways the war affected your life? Well, I think it give me a positive look on life, because it really give me ambition and I could do some of the things that I wanted to do. For example, I never would have been able to complete my education had it not been for the war. I came out and Uncle Sam paid for my education—the GI Bill. During those times, [if ] you were a black person, there was just so many things that you would be accepted to do. This is along [about] the time you had to pick the places that you could go—I mean you couldn’t go in at the front door. I remember very well some of the leading eating places had a nice place fixed up for you in the back there. I remember specifically down on Green Avenue they had a place. I mean everybody’d come down from all over the world, but they had a little ol’ corner around there for us. We could go in there and get us a hamburger

230

they called it the war effort

and something like that, but you couldn’t go in that front door. And also at the bus station they [did] that. But after the war come along, I think that kind of straightened a lot of it up. We had some real genuine, good people to come in here, and [there were] a lot of things they didn’t like in Orange. And [they] taught our people here that some of the things that they’re doing looked foolish. For example, they had—well, you know how it was. They had the two restrooms and blah, blah, blah. Well, some of these people sat down and explained to ’em, “Now look, don’t you know it’s a lot [more] economical for you to operate one than it is to operate two?” I had a guy that I was doing some dental work [for]—I’m a dental technician, too. He had a black lady that was his cook or his maid, and, oh, he was just crazy about her—how good she’d cook and how well she took care of the family and all. But I noticed whenever she got ready to use the restroom she’d have to come out to the lab. So I sat down and told him, “You know, I’m noticing you. I think you got your priorities mixed up or something. You need to get your life straight.” “‘What you talking about?’” I said, “Now, you’ve got a lady that cook everything you eat and go down your stomach, and take care of your kids and all of that, and yet when she get ready to use the restroom she got to come out here. You need to get your priorities straight.” I say, “You know the way I think about you? I feel like you think more of your ass than you do of your stomach.” And he’d ride her in the back seat. I say, “Now, people are people. If you can trust the food that goes down your stomach, surely you ought to be able to trust her where you set your butt down.” [Laughs] And from that day on he told her, “You get in the front seat.” And then she started to using the restroom in the house. Some of the people that was here called us the “suitcase guys.” We came in during the war. We came in and built nice homes and educated our children, and a lot of those old-timers around here, they just were status quo. The ol’ sharpshooter was good enough. But with these other people coming in, I think it really give ’em a little spunk. They want to step up their way of life some. It gave ’em that kind of option.



he’d cut you or shoot you Bettie J. Curtis

What was school like for a black child? It was kind of tough because I can remember we never got new books.

Being Black in Orange

231

We always got the books that had been used at the white school. So we would get whatever was left over. I can remember that. I can remember even when I started teaching it was tough. When they had a lab full of typewriters, we had one. I can remember that and never ever understood that. We lived on the other end of town, way out there in a little neighborhood, and there were about four black families and the rest were white families. We were born and reared right out there, way on the other side of town. We walked to school and that’s a long way. It’s a long way. We walked to school, about two miles or longer. Walked to school every day and walked back home. Didn’t have a bus. Didn’t have a car. We didn’t get a bus until I was in the eleventh grade. Do you think the schools were doing a good job? I would say yes, the best that they could do under the circumstances. Like I was telling you about books, even further down the road you got old books that the white kids had used. You never got new books. But, you got books. It’s several ways you could look at that. Did they talk about the war in school? Not in school but in the home. My parents would be telling us times are really gonna get hard because [of ] the war and some things you’re not going to be able to have because we’re not going to be able to afford those things for you. But hopefully things will get better. Black schools didn’t get the attention that other schools got. You had black teachers out there teaching you, but they didn’t teach you about the war. In fact, a lot of things you had to learn it on your own. You had to read. Did you have problems as a black child? The girls didn’t really, but my brothers did. When they would get to Border Street [on the way to school] white boys would try to jump ’em and they’d have to fight ’em. And they would fight them to get on where they needed to go. That used to frighten me because I never knew what was going to happen. They never jumped on us but my brothers they would. But your brothers handled the situation. As God is my witness, they did. They’re still here today. Still here today. My father, he was tough. He was tough. Nobody scared him. Nobody. I promise you. Because he had fought himself. But my brothers had to fight, and they would fight because my father would tell ’em to fight. [They had to fight] walking to school, or if they wanted to go down there on the corner to the store the white boys would want to fight ’em. But they’d fight back because that’s what Pops taught ’em. If that’s how you had to survive, then you fight. And that’s what they would do. Finally the white boys left ’em alone because they knew they would fight. They were not afraid. That’s

232

they called it the war effort

the way life was. It’s unfortunate but these are the kinds of things that took place. [Pops] was the fighting king. They didn’t mess with him. He’d fight ’em. He didn’t mind going to jail. He’d fight. He could fight. [Chuckles] I hate to keep saying this but he could fight. He wasn’t scared of nobody, and that’s a mouthful. That’s a mouthful. He was not afraid. He’d fight you. You’d have to kill him but he’d fight you. Yes indeed. [Chuckles] O lordy. I started working when I was twelve years old, working in private homes. There were some things that could have happened but God took care of me. I wouldn’t want to mention those things. [They] could have happened, but God prevented it. Abuse of you working in somebody’s home? Yeah, and I vowed I didn’t want to do that the rest of my life. And that’s why I worked hard in high school; I worked hard in college because I wanted to be successful. I didn’t want to go through that. I didn’t want to scrub floors for individuals. I didn’t want to do that anymore. Scrubbing floors. Getting on my knees. Waxing floors. I didn’t want to do that all my life. I had decided and I was destined to be successful and to learn all I could while I could so I could make it and become self-sufficient. Not have to take anything from anyone. How did you come on these jobs? Some of ’em were people my mother knew, and she would say, “Well my daughter could clean up your house for you.” I would go, and like I said, some things would almost happen. I wouldn’t tell my parents. And then after a while I didn’t want to go. Period. Didn’t want to go. And I didn’t have to go cause they figured something was not quite right. They would ask but I would never tell them. Would these episodes be between the females of the house or the men? The men of the house. Do you remember your dad talking about difficulties he had as a black man working in a white world? Yeah, I do remember him saying things, and my daddy could curse too. He could manufacture curse words, I tell you. He would say, “That God damn so-and-so.” He’d come home cursing and raising sand. He could take care of himself. He didn’t let people push him around. He never did. Uh-uh. Never did, cause he’d either cut you or shoot you. [Laughs] He would. He’d cut you or shoot you. Boy, I’ll tell you. [Laughs]



233

Being Black in Orange

you know what a pig trail is? Geneve and Wickliff S. Paul Wickliff: I was working down at the Texas Creosote [in 1941]. Geneve: [I was] keeping house—housewife. Six children. Everything was like washing and ironing. Rubboard. Washpot outside. Ironing from charcoal. Well, you don’t have much time. Wickliff: I was living right here in the same place but not the same house. I had a eight-room [house]—big ol’ eight-room, tall ceiling, ol’ model house. I didn’t have no roads to get here. Didn’t have no sewage. Had no lights. The road stopped down there on Third Street, and I had to come through a pasture there, through a pig trail to get here. I had cattle and hogs back there in the woods, and one day they come and told me I had to get ’em out. The next two or three days they’s coming through with [a] road and cutting trees and building up. And the war started. Geneve: You know what a pig trail is? It’s a space that you create yourself to pass and drive your car. Your walking makes that trail. That’s what he calls a pig trail. Wickliff: [People] piled in here from everywhere—all East Texas. Louisiana. Everywhere. This little house I had over there, I believe I had five staying in there. A little ol’ two-room house. Five mens that worked for the shipyard was staying in there. They just piled up in there. Some worked at night. Them that go to work at night in the daytime sleep, and them working daytimes at night go to sleep. The government had built a bunch of little houses right in front there. I called ’em paper houses, ’cause after the war they just throwed ’em down and hauled ’em off. I think they was two room. Some of ’em was threeroom houses. They was just houses put up for that certain time ’cause they’d tear ’em down. I called ’em paper houses. That’s when electricity and plumbing come in. I got electricity and plumbing then and got in the city. How did these people feel about coming to Orange? Wickliff: They had felt good ’cause they’s coming to Orange to go to work. One come here from Louisiana, and he’s still here with me. He live in that little house right across there. Come here young and now he’s a old man. Geneve: I think they were [happy]. They were making money to feed their families, and some of ’em didn’t have a comfortable place to stay, but they were taking care of their family. That made them happy ’cause there never was anyplace for too many blacks to go—then and now either. And you could be more peaceful then than you are now. Seem to me like the

234

they called it the war effort

town was more comfortable to sit on your porch. We used to didn’t have to lock the doors. Now you got to stay under lock and key night and day. How did it affect people to be making money? Wickliff: Well, some of ’em enjoyed it. Just like it is now. Some of ’em saved their money and some of ’em just throwed it away on good time. Geneve: Well, I wouldn’t know because those things were never my cup of tea. I’m always home, and all these men going out like that—I don’t know what that is. When you’re working and you’re able to pay some of your bills—buy you some food—you can’t be nothing else but sorta satisfied. You’re not happy. Satisfied would be the word. Wickliff: Most of ’em that was out having a good time was the youngsters, but the family folks, they didn’t go for so much good time. Geneve: But good time went with classes of people like it will be to the end of the world. Some people just don’t care and some do. What were some classes in the black community? Geneve: Churchgoing people were one of the kind of people that didn’t associate all these places. That’s as far as I know, because I don’t know what “going out” really means. What about drinking and loud behavior? Wickliff: They always did have drinking in Orange since I’ve been here, and I’ve been here since ’27. They always did have a little drinking going on—but on certain streets. Like down on Second is where they usually have most of the drinking. Little joints. I call ’em joints. Did the blacks have an equal opportunity to find jobs? Wickliff: Well, they got into the shipyard, but it all was common labor. They didn’t have the opportunity to be machinist and stuff like that. Did the men talk about that? Wickliff: No, I never heard anyone talk about it. I’ll tell you, where I was working—I was a mechanic down there—and they had to keep it secret whenever they’d pay me off. They’d pay me off separate, ’cause I was making two nickels more than the rest of ’em and that would cause a confusion. So they just give me my check separate. I wouldn’t let the others know what I was getting. I was the only black mechanic down there. Were you happy with your work? Wickliff: Oh, yeah. I was happy with my work. Ohh, yeah. I was doing all kind of mechanic—welding, burning. All kinds of work. Most of the time I’d be down there eighteen, sometime twenty hours. I got a son now. He’s what—forty-something years old? No, forty-four. Something like that. He asked his mama one day, “Where my daddy? Who is my daddy?” I’d come in at night and go back. Geneve: He says, “Mother, does Daddy ever come home?” See, he

Being Black in Orange

235

worked when he was born, and he was young—physical—and he was healthy [so he worked all the time]. I see myself as a lucky person. I never had problems with black or white. I knew my rights and they knew their rights. We stayed in our corner and they stayed in theirs. They didn’t come over and you didn’t go over. We treat each other nice. I belonged to the Catholic Church, [and] we had church together at St. Mary’s. Catholic blacks and Catholic white went to the same church. They had separate seating. But there were so many [people]—like a lady would go [in and even if ] she’s black a gentleman, white man even, would let her have a seat. There was some gentlemens as well as some men—just the man with the pants. That’s what I called ’em. The man with the— Geneve: Who was wearing pants. [ Just] because he wear pants, that doesn’t say he’s a [gentleman]. A man is a man [with the pants], and a gentleman is the man with manners. That makes the difference. What did you do for a good time during the war years? Geneve: Go to church and come back. Go to our church bazaar. Wickliff: Sleeping. Sleeping. Geneve: Visit friends and all like that. We made our own pleasure among ourselves. We would laugh and talk and just make fun of your own. Wickliff: I had six children then, and they kept [up] enough noise. Kept you busy. Did those war years affect your children? Geneve: Well, yeah, it affect mine when he went to war. Wickliff: [Had] two. Geneve: Had two of ’em, yeah. They went on they own—they desires. Wasn’t mine. Mothers don’t agree. They prefer them in home. I just prayed for ’em that they return, and God blessed ’em because so many has lost their lives. How did you handle your worry? Geneve: Prayers. God and prayers is the key of all worry. You don’t get nowhere by worry, but you can pray to get help. When I got worried I prayed. I got a nephew that lost his life in the service when his ship sunk. He lost his life and that affected me. That hurt very much. How did you handle that? Geneve: The best way I know how, by crying and praying, and just like I do everything else. I don’t get angry about the cross I have to [bear]. It doesn’t pay for me. I believe it’s just prayers that change everything. Wickliff: The majority of the black and the white got more friendly than they were before the war. I think the war had something to do with it. Geneve: Yeah, I believe so, too. It had to be the war.

236

they called it the war effort

Wickliff: I know I got lots of white friends now—more than I had before the war. How did the war help? Wickliff: Well, I guess by soldier boys going across and fighting together, and come back and they’re all friends. Geneve: You know, when I was young I thought white people didn’t know what a black person [was], if they were really human. It wasn’t the children. It was the parents. And I think the parents nowaday are teaching their children more to respect human beings as a human being, and this is what the war brought about, I do believe. Because when I, like, go to meetings they don’t look at my skin. They look at me as a human being. So I say this war really brought them together.



African Americans were on the move during the war years, hoping like everyone else to improve their lot in life. In fact, in his book Daddy’s Gone to War, historian William Tuttle points out that the black population was more likely to migrate than the white.17 The majority of black newcomers to Orange were from very poor circumstances in deep East Texas. They were among the poorest of the poor looking for work. Many could not read or write, and they needed help with much of the paperwork required of even common laborers in the yards. Undoubtedly, though, Doug Briggs was not the only black perceptive enough to be apprehensive about moving to Orange. Being very southern with an early history of frontier justice, it is not surprising Orange also gained the reputation as a community with rather intolerant attitudes regarding the rights of blacks. Even as late as the war years, some white residents were indignant at black people moving freely in the downtown area, and blacks might be guaranteeing trouble if they were caught downtown after dark. Clearly, public mixing of the races was not accepted; and from the perspective of some individuals, racial bias was at its height. Racism such as this, Tuttle concluded, “meant that the problems that befell the white family in wartime usually hit the black family first and with greater harshness.” 18 Job opportunities for blacks before the war were extremely restricted. There was domestic work for females (“wash, wash, wash, wash”) and a few could teach in the black schools.19 For males there was little beyond the filling stations, the docks, or working in a cafe as a busboy washing dishes and waiting tables. Like the longshoreman sitting on the wharf hoping for a ship to come in, black folks were just waiting for something to happen. Living conditions in the black community were depressed. Most houses were described as junk; rent houses were shacks—“ratholes.” Few houses had public utilities, and the streets were nothing but dirt. Rivers of mud when it rained, bil-

Being Black in Orange

237

lowing dust when dry and disturbed. Black children attended segregated schools, and what materials they had were often discards from the white schools—separate, but hardly equal. The war years did reward the black community with modest improvements in work opportunities and living conditions. Black men found jobs in the shipyards, even if they were nonskilled and menial. For black females, though, coming by work in Orange and across the state was particularly difficult. In the book Texas Goes to War, scholar Cynthia Guidici explains: “Businesses found ‘unofficial’ ways to avoid hiring black women: by pointing out, for instance, that with increased production needs, there was no time to build separate restroom facilities. Or a business might claim that it would hire women of color just as soon as it had enough applications to staff a segregated shift—then the required number never materialized. Some employers claimed that white employees would ‘walk off the line if Negroes were hired.’” 20 The paved streets, drainage systems, and utilities did better the neighborhoods, and property values increased. Shacks were razed and the government came in with temporary “paper” houses to ease the crowding. Small, curbside businesses—hole-in-the-wall, greasy-spoon operations—catered to the people who jammed the streets day and night. Even though these changes were modest, black residents were, for the most part, excited and happy. One individual went so far as to say they were “raving,” another opted for “satisfied.” A select few were “walking in high cotton.” In general, though, the war did initiate positive changes, and under these circumstances it was difficult to get black citizens very interested in pressing for more civil rights. A group was organized to open communication between blacks and whites, and there were individual instances of activism, but most seemed to want to put the best face on the situation. Nothing was done that might create racial tension. Most agreed that the war provided momentum for better race relations and improved conditions for black people in Orange. With the widespread changes unfolding in the city, officials were increasingly concerned with conditions affecting all citizens, black and white, and of rising influence in community affairs were the managerial types from the shipyards.

7

Top People in Shipyard Management “Much of the job training and much of on-the-job training was provided by managers and supervisors and craftsmen with shipyard experience. See, there were a few top people in shipyard management and work.” James E. Evans “The word was out then that they were going to start hiring—not the shipyard workers first—but they wanted first to get all the administrative people in place.” Joe M. Powell

W

orkers arrived in Orange not only from different locations around the country but with different ability levels. Many had no formal education, while others had only a little. There were even those in supervisory positions who could neither read nor write, and it was not unusual for Cajuns to speak only the regional French of the southern Louisiana parishes. Because some did not know how to take measurements with a ruler, technical skills like reading a blueprint were sure to be foreign. Almost no one had experience in heavy industry and fewer still in shipbuilding. In all likelihood, most had only seen pictures of ships. Many needed help before they ever went to work. They did not know how to fill out job application forms or where to go for documents such as birth certificates. Nevertheless, as Isaac Dupree was one to comment, “[R]eally, the average American’s no dummy.” 1 These were people blessed with common sense. They had learned to survive off the land and to use simple hand tools. What few old cars and other machinery they had they learned to maintain and repair themselves. The basics from their limited schooling they seemed to have learned well, and they knew how to apply this knowledge in problem solving. Then too, many had known little more than a lifetime of problem solving.

Top People in Shipyard Management

239

Of course, a lot of the work in the yards was not all that complicated—just “plain bull work. Sledgehammer man. Lifting. Pulling.” 2 But the end products, those “magnificent warships,” were indeed sophisticated. A destroyer was “a tremendous thing . . . my lands, it’s just amazing.” 3 “To me it is still amazing to go aboard a ship today and see all this, and you’d say, ‘How did these people do this?’” 4 Well, these “farm boys” went to the various craft schools and learned some fundamental mechanical skills, or they learned on the job. Then the repetitious, assembly line nature of the work helped hone these skills and make for highly productive shipways. Indispensible, though, were the skilled shipbuilders looking over their shoulders. The Office of the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S.N, was established in Orange on August 24, 1940, with Commander E. B. Perry serving as supervisor. This office had ultimate responsibility for the completion and fitting out of all vessels built in the three shipyards, and it conducted training programs for the handling and operation of these vessels before they were released for duty. Then suddenly with Pearl Harbor came the unimagined weight of shipbuilding oversight, a pressure “which was to tax everyones [sic] patience, wits, and physical strength to the utmost.” 5 The first critical challenge was the launching of the Aulick. “It was absolutely essential to the success of the yard that the first vessel be launched on schedule,” and it is to the credit of the supervisor and Consolidated management that despite significant obstacles this historic event was achieved on time.6 Not only this premier launching, but also the success of the entire Orange war effort was due to the spirit of cooperation between the Office of the Supervisor and shipyard management. In the rush to produce wartime materiel, plant management and training were essential measures of effectiveness, so the role of the few top shipyard people cannot be underestimated. While management was already in place at Levingston and Weaver, those top people recruited at Consolidated were the first. They knew their business and were prepared to take charge. They dredged a major shipyard out of the marshes and then coordinated the construction of hundreds of vessels. They taught and supervised and administered. They worried over the paperwork, figures, designs, schedules, and weather and were generally the ones on call. They were people with special abilities and responsibilities.



those were magnificent warships Barbara and James E. Evans James: Upon being employed at [Consolidated] I went to work in the machinery scientific section of the engineering

240

they called it the war effort department. The first task assigned to me was to calculate the weight which would be added to each destroyer if the two main drive shafts from the engine rooms to the propellers were made solid rather than tubular as designed. Each of two propellers were about twelve and a half feet in diameter and driven by a steel shaft about sixteen inches diameter with a hole about eleven inches diameter bored out its center for the full length of the shaft. The total length of the two shafts was about 260 feet. The need to make the shafts hollow was based on saving weight and thus achieving maximum speed capability for the ship. The need to make the shafts solid was based on the shortage of shop facilities adequate for such a massive boring job. Completing the calculations, I was amazed to find that if the shafts were made solid, about forty tons of steel would be added to the weight of each destroyer. It was determined that the loss in speed would not be critical due to the forty added tons—about 2 percent of the ship’s weight. So the shortage in manufacturing facilities turned out to be the ruling [factor]. The final adjustment in this case resulted in building the first six destroyers with hollow shafts and the second six with solid shafts.

James: [In 1941] I was teaching at Orange High School. I taught there a couple of years before I went to work at the shipyard. I was teaching physics and some mathematics, and then the second year I continued the physics and taught chemistry and bookkeeping. Barbara: When the government started building all these houses, so many people in town said that there would never be enough people to fill them up. But, of course, they soon were and then needed more. They thought the government was being extravagant by building so many. My biggest impact, I guess, was trying to buy groceries and items like that that were scarce. If you heard that they had bacon or Cokes at a certain store you rushed over and got in line to get them. James: You know, they might get a few cases of Coke, and they might get a few cartons of, maybe, Hershey bars. And so many people adopted the habits which they had not had—and it happened at our house, too— we went and got ours. Like a case of Coke or a half a case. Whatever we were allowed. We were very careful to get that each week, even though we hadn’t been consuming that much before. Whenever we could get a box of Hershey’s, well, we got it. I thought that was ironical. It made many people consume more goodies than they had in normal times. We had

Top People in Shipyard Management

241

never bought some of these things regularly, but we did after they became so desirable. When did you make the decision to go to the shipyard? James: I went in the latter part of October in 1941. School had been going on about two months. My education fitted in very well with work to be done at the shipyard, and I found that I could get employment in the engineering department. My bachelor’s degree was a major in physics and a minor in mathematics, so that fitted me very well for doing engineering work. I realized that I could do something that was useful by going to the shipyard, and then, from a personal standpoint, I could make a bit more money. One thing, I adored the teaching part of school teaching, but I did not like some of the extra duties that didn’t have anything to do with knowledge or teaching. In other words, I didn’t like some of the housekeeping things, you might say. Barbara: Many people did quit their jobs and go to the shipyard—or several sold their businesses. In fact, our next-door neighbor had a filling station, and he sold it and went to the shipyard; and our daughter was quite small, and she told people that Daddy sold his school and took [a job at the shipyard]. What did the school think? James: I remember very well what the principal said. When I told her that I planned to go to the shipyard, she said, “Well, I’m not surprised.” She thought that was a reasonable thing for people to do that could make a contribution. She said after the war the capable ones will come back—or some of ’em will [come] back. I was a member of the machinery or mechanical scientific section. There was a hull scientific section and then a machinery scientific section. The two groups sat in the same room usually, and this involved computation or investigation about technical things, so that was a very pleasant type of a job for me. I really liked that. Ninety percent or ninety-five percent of the people in the shipyard had had no experience in a shipyard. Most were not fortunate enough to have had a great deal of education, at least past high school. Many had not completed high school. But anyway, here was this great mass of people, and after a few brief months that bunch of people did a magnificent job. Now, you may not have heard that from everybody, because a great many people, usually townspeople but very often shipyard people, played down the accomplishment that was made here. They said, “Well, there’s so many people down there that they’re walking over each other, and there’s not room to work adequately.” Well now, that was true, but the amazing thing was that the record of the people that worked there was extraordinary. It

242

they called it the war effort

was not only a matter of training, but the desire of the people there to learn for themselves. The navy gave many commendations to the shipyard for efficiency. Some people might say, “Well, all the yards were getting those commendations.” Well, maybe all of ’em were getting some commendations, but not to the extent that this yard here got. In fact, there was a large yard in Houston, [and] some of us at Consolidated found out during the war how they stacked up in some ways with this yard, and the navy was much prouder of this one than it was that one. Barbara: They did have classes, did they not? Night classes, for different areas? James: Well, I have jotted down here a sentence or two: “There were many types of training courses organized to provide new employees with education and skills to do their jobs. Courses ranged from engineering type of courses, such as naval architecture and marine engineering lasting several months, to many shorter, simpler types of instruction. Much of the job training and much of on-the-job training was provided by managers and supervisors and craftsmen with shipyard experience.” See, there were a few top people in shipyard management and work. There was skilled craftsmen in all of these different things to come here to help get the people trained. They worked at their job and showed people what to do. So briefly, the workers were getting on-the-job training, hands-on, and then many of ’em were getting training off the job in various courses at night or whatever time. Do you think learning a skill and being productive gave them a sense of pride? James: Oh, there is no question about it. It did that to a very considerable extent. They had pride in what they were doing. They were proud of what they were learning, and they were glad to do something for the war effort. And then, they were glad to make more money. So all of those things gave the majority of the people that worked at the yard a great deal of satisfaction. They groused, of course, about the usual things that people do grouse about, but it was somewhat of an elevating experience for most people. There were people that would catch a few winks on the job. There was a great deal of partying. One reason for that was that they had more money, and then another reason for it was that it was so convenient. That was one of the reasons that quite a number of people needed to sleep the next day—or they inclined to be drowsy, anyway. When I went there at the end of October in 1941, in the room where we had the scientific section there were a couple of ol’ boys that were estimating the number of personnel that the shipyard would have to have in order to complete the work. Now, at that time the shipyard only had the

Top People in Shipyard Management

243

one contract for the twelve destroyers, and so these guys after much work and referring to all types of data and records came up with a number of about 5,000. Well, at that time there were many people less than that. There might have been 1,800 or 2,000. And so quite a few local people thought—and said—that that was ridiculous. There was some bit of derision and laughter about that—5,000 people. Eventually there were 22,000 people that worked in the yard at the same time. I have known the figure about how many people were hired during this entire period. Of course, many people [were] hired and left. Many went into the military service, and then there were the people that worked here and went to some other shipyard or some other job. And so I don’t know how many were hired, but I think certainly between 50,000 and 75,000 people over that four- or five-year period. Was this a time of stress? James: Well, for the majority, I think, no. So many people gained new abilities and gained some training or education and made more money. Obviously there were difficult times, but I would not characterize it as a time of stress and abrasion. [Rather, it was] an example of some inspiration to people, because they felt like they had done a good job—or reasonably good job. And then they had started somewhere near zero as far as skills were concerned. There were so many positive things going on that people were excited about. You understood that you were a member of a large group of people doing a very important thing, and that appealed to most people. Even though they got tired and had the usual things to gripe about, well, they still had this very positive thing going on in their life. Did we talk about the number of vessels built here? I think the number is 238, and this included destroyers. I think there were thirty destroyers built, and those were magnificent warships. These vessels were unbelievably fast. It is hard to realize how fast they could go. I had the good luck to go on sea trials in the Gulf with the first destroyer, DD-569. That was the first one, and that vessel was run at full power in the Gulf. Now, no subsequent vessel built here was tested at full power by the builder. After the navy got them, well, then they took them elsewhere and ran them full power. The speed attained in that full power run was about forty knots, which would correspond to forty-three or -four miles an hour. And that ship was about 2,200 tons and slightly more than 400 feet long with a complement of 250, I guess, at sea. So that’s a mighty big ship to run nearly forty-five miles an hour. One time during that series of runs I was standing on the fantail near the stern. Of course, there was stanchions and wire rope around so you would have something to hold on to—you wouldn’t go overboard. When

244

they called it the war effort

the ship was running at full power it just set down in the water, and the bow hiked up sort of like that. So I was looking astern, and at that speed the mountain of foam—you couldn’t see over it from where I was. It just made a tremendous mountain of foam kind of like a haystack right at the stern of that ship. But those propellers were twelve feet in diameter, so two twelve-foot-diameter wheels turning—that kicks up some foam. Those two shafts, each one of ’em had 30,000 horsepower turning it. Hardly anybody that wasn’t in the shipbuilding business believed that, but anyway, there was 60,000 horsepower. It’s such a big number that it just doesn’t seem like a real figure, but it was an accurate figure. That 400-foot ship acted like a speedboat. It really did. It sunk down and took off.



in one way sadly and another way gladly Lanier C. Nantz I worked at different jobs in Orange and never very long, ’cause I was not in horribly good health in the first place, and I guess I wasn’t hungry in the second place. But if somebody needed me real bad, I’d work. I worked at the draft board. This is relevant to nothing, but some guy came in and he said, “Oh, the bus is leaving in two hours and I can’t go.” The woman who was head of the office said, “Why can’t you go?” And he said, “Well, I’m a preacher. I’ve been called by God.” She said, “Well, it’s too bad that the army called you before God did.” I married in August of ’41. At that time [my husband] Delbert was plate shop foreman at Levingston Shipbuilding, but he went immediately to assistant superintendent to superintendent to a vice-president. That’s how fast things happened in those days, ’cause it was a very small little yard when we were first involved with them, and during the war it grew to quite a big yard. The shipyards started getting all these contracts. We built things for the British. We built things for Rio de Janeiro. We built things for the Russians. They were the first memorable characters that came to town. I remember a [Russian] captain—and in those days we entertained over at the Grove. What I won’t forget about him is that he was so charming, and—I don’t want to insult the Russians—[but] he got up to dance, and I noticed he needed another drink so I ordered him one. He sat down and

Top People in Shipyard Management

245

said, “Who ordered this drink?” I said, “I did.” [Well], he made me taste it before he’d drink it. So even during World War II, even though they were allies they were still—. However, most of the time we got along very well. What was your husband telling you about the shipyard? In those days he would leave home about six in the morning, and it would very often be night before he got in. He was so tired he wasn’t telling me much of anything, really. It seemed to me that all he did was work, work, work. He felt bad ’cause he wasn’t in the service. They froze him on the job. He finally did try to get in the service and was 4-F anyway. It was just mind-boggling to me, because I never thought I caught up with myself all during the war. Does that make sense to you? It just all seemed to be happening so fast. What were the stresses placed on you in those days? I don’t remember a whole lot of stress other than a whole lot of worry. Yeah, I guess I worried about my brothers [in the service], and I worried about my husband, because there were times that he would only sleep four or five hours a night. I worried about my brother-in-law [Dr.] Wynne Pearce, because he would get up at six in the morning and work all day. He was called out a lot at night and probably averaged four or five hours of sleep a night. How were those years affecting your husband? Well, I’m sorry, they affected him worse than they did a lot of us. He ended up with a duodenal ulcer, high blood pressure, and eventually died in his forties with a heart attack. But he was so conscientious, and he worried so much about people thinking he was a draft dodger. You know, that was an affront to his masculinity. But he worked as hard as he could and he never objected to working. He was not the kind that could throw things off. He had a lot of nervous tension. He worried if the boats were going to get out on time, and he worried about a lot of things. Was Dr. Pearce seeing the impact of these years on your husband? Yes, he did talk to me about my husband. He’d tell me he wished Delbert would learn to relax. My husband would come home and he would worry about [things like]—if a strong wind or a little storm would come up at night he’d go back to the shipyard to be sure a boat wasn’t going to get torn loose. But I think if he’d a-been a cotton farmer he would have worried about his cotton, if it’s going to have boll weevils, too. And I’m not saying that he worried all the time. He also was a lot of fun. He could have a good sense of humor. [This] may be sacrilegious, but one thing he told me—my husband didn’t drink when he was younger—and he said, “You ought to get him to come home and have a drink in the afternoon. It’d be good for him.”7

246

they called it the war effort

Maybe [people] drank more. That’s possible. It’s very possible, because when we’d go to the Grove or something like that, I think maybe we drank more. I don’t mean that we got stinking drunk or anything, but before that point we never even took a drink. Most of us up until that point if we had people over served coffee, and then suddenly it just became a transition where you’d say, “Do you want a beer, a glass of wine, or a drink?” Did those years have any kind of impact on you? If anything I think they matured me, because I was like twenty-two and still kind of a happy kid. I think when the war was over I had become a woman, if that makes any sense to you. I might laugh about it and everything, but there were a lot of serious things—and people who were losing people, you know. It was my first contact with the reality of war—ever. I think it might have made a lot of people grow up fast. My main image is that we were all very, very busy, and yet we all seemed to have fun being busy. [But there was also] worry and prayer. Maybe I got more religious during the war. I think I did. In those days, in that war—which is not true in anything since—everybody’s family was affected. I don’t think there could have been a living soul in this town that wasn’t affected by that war. I know that it was probably the most [memorable] era of my life. I remember it in one way sadly and another way gladly, because it pulled me closer to my friends.



you buy hard hats and make the bastards wear them Fred Hanscom You know, everybody has a dream, and when are you a success in life? I guess you are a success in life if you reach your goal, your dreams—something that you really wanted to do. So a man—I hired him, a Frenchman—and I told him how much he’d get per week. We’s all working six days a week. We worked ten hours a day, five days a week, and we worked eight hours on Saturday. So working that many hours and getting time and a half and thirty or forty percent more per hour than we’s ever used to, it was good money. So I said, “Pete, what are you going to do with your first paycheck?” And he said, “Well, Fred, I’ll tell you. My wife has never had but one pair of shoes at a time in her life, and they were never a new pair. She’s never had a new

Top People in Shipyard Management

247

pair of shoes in her life.” He’s a man about in his late twenties I guess. “When we go to church or something out there in the country, well, she’d take her shoes off and carry her shoes till she got to the church and then put ’em on and go into church.” And he said, “I’m going to endorse my check, and I’m going to give it to my wife and tell her to spend it on nothing but shoes.” So I just couldn’t wait to follow up on that, and I looked him up—went out in the yard. I said, “Well, Pete, what did you do with your first check?” He said, “You ought to come to my house now and see my wife’s shoes. She’s got a closet full of shoes.” His check was pretty good, and she spent it all on shoes. So I said, there’s one person that’s made a success in life. He and she have achieved a life’s ambition. That’s true as the day is long. I was personnel manager at Levingston Shipbuilding Company. I came to Orange in November [1940], just about a year before Pearl Harbor. Levingston had three hundred employees. I went in as a helper in the time department, and in those days work was done pretty much on a cost-plus basis, so you had to know how much cost you had into a hull before you could collect your money. The way they kept their records they were always a week behind before they knew how much they had in a hull, before everything was charged to it. When I realized what was going on, I devised a method where they could get the records within three days. And one day Ed Malloy [the shipyard manager], God bless him, called me into his office. Well, I didn’t know that he knew that I existed, and I wondered what I’d done now. He said, “How would you like to be personnel manager and safety engineer?” I said, “Well, that’s fine. I know what a personnel manager is—everybody thinks they do—they don’t but they think they do—[but] what the devil is a safety engineer?” He said, “I don’t know. You buy hard hats and make the bastards wear them.” That’s all we knew about safety. How did you go about hiring workers? We were just coming out of the Depression, and there were a lot of unemployed people. To start with, you had a choice of people. Now, here we didn’t have a choice of skilled shipbuilders because shipbuilding had been very small. We had to hire farmers and country boys from up in East Texas, and they [were] coming to work in cowboy boots and Stetsons. And you can’t wear cowboy boots climbing on the steel deck of a ship, but you can’t get those boys out of those boots either. It’s worse than pulling a tooth. You can’t get ’em out of their Stetson into a hard hat. “Oh, a hard hat gives me a headache.” “I can’t wear that thing. It’s too hot.” “It’ll start

248

they called it the war effort

blowing off, and I’ll reach for it and grab and fall overboard.” All kinds of stories. But we were at the stage there where you hired anything that you could get if their body was warm. Shipbuilders and people in necessary industries were given occupational deferments. There was a classification [if ] you were in a critical job necessary to the war. Okay, the general of the army in this area [had] what they call a replacement table and a manning schedule, and you would have to show who you had on your deferred list, people that you had to keep. Then you had to show how long it would take you to train any replacement. Now, if he was a marine draftsman you’d take a long time to train a replacement. If he was a electrical engineer, construction engineer—any of those things would take some time. If he was a laborer, it would be hard to say I’ve got to have this man as a laborer, because you could replace him tomorrow—as soon as someone was available. We had training programs—on-the-job training, really. But on-the-job training is bad. If I am a skilled welder they need my work, but you come in and say we want you to teach [this man, well,] my work is cut down fifty percent, and [he’s] useless—for a while. [He’s] a handicap to us. But that’s what we had to do. Many of us had worked for twenty-five cents an hour. Fifty cents an hour. Thirty-five cents an hour. Men working in filling stations were getting thirty cents an hour. That was the standard, going rate. When they came to the shipyard we gave a little bit more than that, so to them they were rich. If you’re making thirty cents an hour and you go someplace else for forty cents an hour, that’s a thirty-three and a third percent increase in your salary. If you get a thirty percent increase in your salary, you know, that will be a darn nice increase. Anybody would accept that and think it’s a nice increase. And I remember after we’d had a raise or two—and wages were frozen by the government—I went to Washington and asked for permission to give an increase. We finally got permission to increase the starting rate to eighty-five cents an hour—which was probably about sixty cents before that. So we announced that pay was going to be eighty-five cents an hour. Well, at lunchtime a bunch of us were sitting around eating, and we were talking about this, and we all agreed that no man was worth eighty-five cents an hour. We were robbing anybody if we accepted eightyfive cents an hour. What were the values of people in those days? See, I’m a child of the Depression. People appreciated what they got. They appreciated the money they got, and I think for the first time in their life they were in a position where they could save something. Most of them had always been living just from hand-to-mouth, payday to payday, but they were buying things for their kids that they’d never been able to buy

Top People in Shipyard Management

249

before. Now, there’s all kinds of people. Some of them were going across the river and getting drunk and gambling their money away—get home with nothing on payday. I remember one time Mr. Ed called me at home. It was early in the morning, before my normal getting up time, and he lit into me. He was a very rough person and very tough talking—I’d cut off my right arm for him today if he was still alive. He just went on cussing good and hard. “I was supposed to be the personnel manager. Why wasn’t I doing my work here?” I said, “Yes sir. Yes sir.” I found out that three of our men had gone to Port Arthur the night before, and they got drunk and they got in a crap game. They lost their money and got in fights and were in jail, and he was giving me the devil because I hadn’t gotten them out of jail yet. If a man came to work drunk, well, we’d just stick him under a shower and sober him up a little bit, and I’d get a company car or get a chauffeur and I’d say, “Take ol’ Pete home and get him to bed, and get his wife off in the corner and see if she’s got enough money to buy groceries until payday. If she doesn’t have any money, well, let me know and I’ll send her some.” And we took care of people like that. That Mr. Ed Malloy, he was a construction man from way back, and getting drunk or fighting, well, that’s just a normal, everyday part of life. You don’t criticize a man for that. You get him sobered up and back on the job. How much stress was there on workers? I don’t remember the word “stress” ever being mentioned. I think the stress mostly was on people who had kids in the service, especially overseas. I don’t think it was the job stress particularly. When we worked ten hours a day—and Lord knows it’s cold in the winter—the wind off that river. That steel gets terribly hot in the summertime, and [when] you’re down inside of a steel-hull ship the temperatures are terrific. We had all kinds of blowers. Couldn’t air-condition ’em, but we had tremendous blowers with flexible metal air hose about this big around [18–24 inches] and snaking it down through the hull of a ship, go down two or three decks, and blowing air in there so the [hot] air could come out. I remember, in my ignorance, one of the first days I was there I saw some welders—and they had to wear leathers—[I should say] I saw some workers [because] I didn’t know a welder from anybody else at that time—standing out there on the deck where the breeze would blow on ’em and smoking a cigarette. Just standing there. You’d see little spots of ’em every once in a while, and I couldn’t understand that. I said, “Well, how come these guys just are loafing around there?” They said, “Well, if you want to know why they’re standing there, just go down where they’ve been working for a couple of hours.” You go

250

they called it the war effort

down there for a couple of hours, and you just have to come out to cool off. I made a practice of going down and talking with the men and keeping in touch with them. I went down at night and learned how to weld, because I was hiring welders and I didn’t know how to weld. How do I know a welder when I see one? I was hiring marine electricians, so I went to the head of our electrical department and said, “I’d like to be able to ask some intelligent questions of a man who says he’s an electrician.” An electrician, for example, has to read blueprints. Most of us can read an ordinary blueprint like a house blueprint or something, but if you’re going to degauss a ship you were completely lost when you look at a blueprint. It’s just a mass of wire—the lines. So I got him to give me a piece of a blueprint, and I learned to read that little blueprint well. So when a man would come in later on and say I’m an electrician, I said, “Tell me, what is that?” And if he looked at it and he said, “Oh, that’s a schematic I think for a degausser,” well, I knew he did because there weren’t many people who knew what degaussing was. Degaussing was to repel magnetic mines. This set up an electrical current which repelled them. That’s degaussing. Over at Lamar [College in Beaumont] they had a safety engineer teaching a course for safety engineers—a night course. It was needed because everybody was adding safety engineers. The government said we can’t afford for people to get hurt on the job. We can’t afford for them to be home. We need them on the job. So don’t let ’em get hurt. Make ’em wear gloves. Make ’em wear goggles. Make ’em wear hard hats. So I didn’t know what a safety engineer was. Nobody at the shipyard did either. So I’d go over there, and we’re to study chapter number six. Maybe that was about the safe way to construct a scaffold versus the unsafe thing you might do. I’d come back the next day, and I’d go out and start enforcing what I’d learned the night before. People began to think I was a pretty good safety engineer. [Laughs] I didn’t tell ’em how I knew this one chapter, and don’t ask me about chapter two. What were the safety problems? Well, there’s a lot of climbing around building ships, and you know how the ship is shaped. You’ll have to weld it on the inside and the outside. You had to put the scaffolding along the side of a ship, and the way it was done, they had what they called “A” frames. They were shaped like an “A.” And on the front side [next to the ship] was bars on which the scaffold boards could be laid. These boards were usually one-by-twelves and pretty long, and they were constantly having to be moved, so nobody would want to put up a handrail. Say, “I’m just going to be here for an hour, and I can weld this spot and then I’m going to have to move.” But you can’t stand on a oneby-twelve—or maybe some day you could get two side by side—without

Top People in Shipyard Management

251

great danger of falling. And if you get involved in a weld you’ll forget and you slip off. So falls was one of the problems that [we] had. The answer to that, of course, was every time you put a scaffold board up you had to put a handrail so that if someone did fall they’d fall against the handrail. People didn’t want to fool with those. They didn’t want to wear work shoes. They wanted to wear their boots. Hard hats—it was almost impossible to get ’em to wear them for a while. The way I got them to wear ’em finally, I told the plant manager, “You have to wear a hard hat or I’m going to quit. I won’t be safety [director].” What were safety problems? Falls from scaffolds. Slips and falls on steel decks. They were very slippery. A little bit wet then they’re hard to walk on. The barges were on the ways, but the ends usually stuck out over the water. I remember one night [the] head of all the welders just walked right off the end of the barge at night and fell into the river, and that was a fall of about twenty feet. He fell into the real shallow part, but that shallow part is where every time a man had a piece of scrap iron left over he just throwed it over there. He wasn’t supposed to, but they’d do it. And he fell right among where it was just lousy with scrap iron, and the water was only about this deep [3–4 feet]. He didn’t hit a single piece of scrap iron. He wasn’t hurt one iota. The next fellow could have gotten killed very easy, ’cause he could have fallen over here and hit his head on a piece of scrap iron. And then foreign bodies in the eyes. Of course, to start with I did the first-aid work, too. I was the first-aid man, and Dr. Wynne Pearce, a very fine gentleman, told me a few little things that I needed for first aid. I got some man who’d come in with foreign bodies in the eye—you’d get ten or fifteen of those every day—I’d take a toothpick and flip the eyelid back and take the foreign body out and send ’em back to work. Wouldn’t even make a note of this. There’s always danger of infection, but you didn’t have time to fool with that. If you’re watching a welder’s arc, that’ll burn your eyes badly. It feels like you’ve got sand in your eyes. And a lot of people didn’t know that, coming from a way different job. So you didn’t stand and look at a weld. That’s why you see welders, they’ll wear the hood and they’ll wear real dark, dark glasses to protect their eyes from burns. But we had a lot of burns. Now, they weren’t fatal and as far as I know never really affected their eyes permanently, but they would lose two or three days work and they were very painful. One man got electrocuted. We had a man drown—fell overboard and drowned. I played poker on Tuesday night with a man who was the head of the machinists, and he had two finger stumps. The common expression was, if

252

they called it the war effort

[a] man said he was a machinist you looked at his hands, and if he had all ten fingers he was not a machinist. Said you don’t become a machinist until you lose at least the tip of one finger, then you become a machinist. You seemed to have been a fast learner. Was that a part of the secret, that the workers had the capacity to learn? People would say, “Well, he can’t do that. He hasn’t got eight years of experience.” I have learned that a man can rise to the challenge if he’s just given an opportunity and the challenge and motivation of some sort. People have a lot more ability than they use. A lot of men, if they weren’t hired as welders they were just laborers. Anytime they got a chance they’d talk to a welder and said, “Let me try that.” And we wanted them to do that, see. And you sit there and try a little of it. Well, you’re lousy. [It’s] the first time you’ve ever tried, but you learned a little bit. And next time you pick up a little bit more and you pick up a little bit more, and pretty soon you’ll get it to where you could pass the beginner’s test to start in as a beginner welder. And the same way with a machinist. There was a high motive. Well, first of all [there was] the war, but then there was a lot of difference in pay between a laborer and a machinist or so forth and so on. So, get some money while you can. The war’s not going to last forever, and let’s do all we can to get what we can and learn a skill. As I say, so many were unskilled people. Would people reflect stress through some of their behavior, like irritability, absenteeism, drinking? There was a lot of drinking in those days. Now, the shipyard did a lot of entertaining. There was always somebody from Washington, some war hero coming. We had Russian crews come over to take vessels, and they would be here for a week or two and we had to entertain ’em. We couldn’t pronounce the names of any of them. We called ’em all “Bottoms Up,” because Russians think it’s a great mark of manhood to be able to drink your friend under the table. It’s just big sport. So there was a lot of drinking. Then there was a lot of foolishness, and we had a thing called the Screwball Club. The Screwball Club had no president, but everybody was a vice president, and we just did all kinds of stupid, foolish things. No regular meetings. No roster. Someone would say, “Well, the Screwball Club is going to meet at Pete’s Cafe.” Well, the ones of us who would get there, we’d pick up his tables and take ’em out on the sidewalk and make him feed us food out on the sidewalk. We’d just do crazy things, probably to let off the tension.8 I don’t ever remember using stress as a word. The worry about winning or losing the war was mostly [our concern]. Our navy was practically decimated at Pearl Harbor and we were in a bad shape, [but] I don’t remember

Top People in Shipyard Management

253

anybody having to be sent to Rusk because he broke under the stress—anything like that.9 No. Did those years have some kind of permanent effect on you? Well, it taught me that I could do a lot more than I thought I could. I wasn’t as afraid to tackle something. And it gave me confidence in other people. Did you ever stop to think we elect a man president of the United States—he’d never been anything but a general in the army—Eisenhower. That’s all he ever was, a soldier wasn’t he, but we’ll elect him president of the United States. But they say to be personnel manager at DuPont, well, you have to have worked in there for six years in the personnel department before you could be the director. Unions—you’ve got to be an apprentice for all this long. The carpenters will tell you you got to be an apprentice for three years before you can be a carpenter. I’m a great believer that people can rise to almost any occasion. Most of the time we don’t have any challenge to or reason to.



push, push, push all the time Clyde S. Childers I was chief draftsman at Constructural Steel and Fabrication Plant, known as Consolidated Steel of Texas. We built the shipyard. I’m a native of Orange, but I had left Orange in ’37 and was in Mobile, Alabama. I could see the war coming on so I decided I’d better come home. We built all the buildings out there and the crane runways and all that, and they started building ships. It took about a year and a half at least, and after we got the shipyard built and the war had started, then’s when the fun began. I couldn’t get anybody to work because all the young people were going to the service, and so I started to take in high school kids and working them until they had to go to the service. We didn’t have very many people working for us up there in the drafting room, and the ones that did work, why boy, they worked us all the hours we could. I’d go down there sometimes between seven and eight o’clock, and I’d come home in the evening and then go back and work till about nine. You’d work at least six days a week all the time, and I’d have to go down there the seventh day to try to get things lined up so that nobody would run out of work. I don’t know, it was rough. I was in Orange during the Depression, and [there were] fellows that finished high school that didn’t have a job and never expected to have a

254

they called it the war effort

job, because that’s just the atmosphere that [prevailed]. When this shipyard started hiring they didn’t know anything, but by Joe, they had the guts to get in there and do it—and they surprised me. It was people that never had worked in their life, publicly, that would go down there, and they’d teach ’em what to do and they’d do it. The kids that I’d get out of high school, they were really fine. They’d get in there and before long I’d have them doing work that would take, ordinarily, a man four or five years to learn to do. They were worthwhile, and then when they got to be the age—I think it’s eighteen—off they’d go. There’s no exempting ’em. Do you think those years changed you? It probably did. When I got out from under it and went to work for [a] chemical plant over there in Lake Charles, I’s a different person. I’d got off of the strain and stress, and I don’t believe I could have lived very much longer working under those conditions that I was working under. If that war had lasted ten years instead of just four, I don’t think I’d a-made it then. I think I’d just dropped off and had a nervous breakdown, or—well, I did develop high blood pressure in that stretch. When I went to work over at [Lake Charles], it was five of us had a car pool—sometimes it was six of us. Well, out of that bunch I think I and one other fellow are the only ones that are left living, and all of them had worked at the shipyard the same time that I did. I don’t know, I guess it just took something out of ’em. It was push, push, push all the time. It wasn’t the best of times. Did you ever feel trapped? Yeah, very muchly so, but I figured it was my duty to get anything done that I could do. It was an interesting thing in that it was entirely different from any life that you could imagine, and I wouldn’t want to go through it again. It’d just be that I’d just get plumb tired. I don’t know, it was trying times.



you can’t be normal in a time like that Opal Smith Mrs. Smith served in the first-aid clinic at Consolidated Shipyard from 1941 to 1944. It was hard work. It was very hard in the first aid. We had so much trouble with people getting their eyes burned from welding torches. We irrigated ’em with boric acid, and then, if necessary, we had several different drops we used to put in their eyes.10

Top People in Shipyard Management

255

What other kinds of medical problems did people have? Oh, broken limbs and fainting spells. Heart attacks. You name it. Cuts and bruises. All kinds of things. And they’d come up there if they’d injured their leg and bruised it or something. We had this big tub to soak their legs or feet in. I would work straight eight hours and sometimes maybe twenty minutes for lunch. I would stand at the table where we treated eyes, and the only times that I got to move from there was to go to the lavatory to wash my hands. We had two treatment rooms, and we were busy all the time. We had padded tables for the people to lie on for heat treatments and so forth—for sprains and bruises. There was five [nurses] on the day shift and four on the evening shift and two on the night shift. We had about five doctors. The nurses, of course, had problems. A lot of it was with back problems and things like that from lifting. Of course, when patients were badly injured we sent them to the hospital. And you know how some people rat on the job. There was certain men that was there every day for something, whether we were treating ’em for something or whether [they’d] just come in. [They] just loved to come to first aid. You can understand that. They loved getting off the job for a few minutes. [And then], you know men do like nurses. Did you treat very many women? Very few women until they closed the red-light district in Beaumont, and then we had plenty of women. They came over and went to work. They weren’t experienced in welding and doing things that was different from what they were used to doing, and they would get in trouble [with injuries] pretty often. Did you ever treat venereal disease? No, that would have been more or less private with the doctor and the patient. They’d usually go to their private physician for things like that. Did you see many stress-related disorders? Oh yes, we had a few of those. That was mostly people with family problems. [There would be] stress and worry and headaches and what have you. We usually sent them to their private physician. We only treated industrial patients. Did anybody ever sit down and listen to people’s problems? No, we didn’t have time. That was out of the question. It was bad times. People were so concerned about the war and everything that you can’t be normal in a time like that, hardly.



256

they called it the war effort

nothing but hoot owls and possums and a few armadillos Lois and Cecil R. Beeson Lois: I was born and reared and educated in Baton Rouge, which was a rather sophisticated place. We had a university there, and if you went to church on Sunday you dressed properly. But even if you went to town on Saturday you dressed with a hat, gloves, purse, heels. I mean you had to be a lady even to go shopping on Saturday afternoon. Well, I had not been out much when I first came to Orange, so I told Cecil, “Now, I want you to stay home and take care of the baby today, and I am going to town.” Well, such disillusionment you’ve never—I put on my hat with this feather plume, my gloves, my velvet suit, my black suede high-heel shoes. I mean I was dressed out like I would go to town or go to church in Baton Rouge. Well, I began to walk downtown, passing in between these little bitty piles of people, women as well as men standing there in blue jeans, and I got about three whistles before I got to the drugstore. I turned around and came home. [Laughs] I came home and I told Cecil, “I don’t think I’ll go to town anymore like that.” It was crowded, and they were standing there propped up against the posts spitting tobacco juice in every direction. But everybody seemed to be vibrant and happy. I mean it wasn’t meanness or anything. Cecil: I went to work at Levingston in October of ’43 in the capacity of a safety engineer. Now, I [had] been going through Orange since I was a boy. I was born and raised over in Pitkin, Louisiana. When I was a boy growing up, we used to be baseball enthusiasts around those little country towns, and we used to go to Beaumont to see the Beaumont Exporters play baseball every summer. We would work and saved our pennies until we could get enough money to buy a ticket and help pay for the carfare to Beaumont. So I had driven through Orange en route to Beaumont a couple of times each summer starting along about 1931 and ’32, and I had seen Orange when it was a beautiful little town. But it wasn’t any action going on except the sawmills were here, and they didn’t have any work. I used to drive down Highway 90 and through the middle of Orange, which is Green Avenue, and it had the reputation of having more millionaires on Green Avenue than any other place of its size in the United States. Had thirteen millionaires on Green Avenue and all of these big, beautiful palatial homes. Then later on, when I started going to school I used to

Top People in Shipyard Management

257

hitchhike to Beaumont to visit my friends. I used to walk all the way from the foot of Green Avenue, which was at the riverfront where the old bridge used to be, all the way through town. And that was a beautiful walk. Big old virgin pine. Longleaf pine timbers. I walked across there when there was nothing but hoot owls and possums and a few armadillos running across the road in front of you. Well, things had changed quite a bit when you came in ’43. Cecil: Oh, yes. Very, very much. There were people coming to work literally by the thousands. They were people off of the farms, people that had been raised to work where there was work to survive. Although they didn’t have a lot of formal education, most of ’em had a lot of common sense. They were easy to teach something, and they learned skills fast. We took people off of the farm that never had seen a ship. I never had seen a ship till I came to Levingston Shipyard—except pictures—and never had been on a ship. But people were taught the skills right in the shipyard. Well, most of ’em knew what tools were. They didn’t know what all the tools were, but they knew what pliers and wrenches were—and end wrenches and so forth. In the early thirties they had gotten familiar with ol’ Model Ts and Model As.11 See, the farm machinery didn’t break until the early Depression years, in the early thirties. But being raised around sawmill towns you worked around machinery—steam machinery, steam equipment. And you worked with crude but effective working tools—wrenches and different things. Well, anybody that was raised in a sawmill town knew how to work, because that was work. It was hard work. And one of the most skilled people in the sawmill town back in those days was the millwright, the man that kept the machinery operating and installed the machinery for the sawmills to cut the lumber and dispose of the timber. Well, when the sawmill business got slack in the early Depression years those people went to farms. Now, most of ’em didn’t have any kind of mechanical equipment. They had horses or mules and oxen to farm with like their grandparents. They were very limited with tools, but they improvised all kinds of tools from the blacksmith shops and from wood, particularly the plow tools that they needed to break their property and to gather their crops. Those people came into the shipyard in masses. We had people from the farms in Louisiana—the rice farms—that never had been to school a day in their life. Lois: Could not write their name. Cecil: Didn’t know how to read nor write. We had dozens of supervisors in our plant during the war that couldn’t read nor write until the time came that all of their instructions were in writing. [Then] they had to learn to

258

they called it the war effort

read or they went under; they went back to work with the tools. I started schools for those people—adults, so many of ’em twice my age, ’cause I wasn’t quite thirty. I had all kinds of men working under my direction and supervision there for years that their formal education was very lacking. I’ve had many, many good friends, good people that knew their jobs and performed masterfully, their skills unquestionable. But those farm people came into the shipyards and turned around what could have been a losing deal for the United States government and our war effort and made it possible to be successful. We had a mailman. He picked up the mail every day at the post office. Now, that might not be a big job for some people, but it’s a big job for this man because he couldn’t read nor write. He dispatched this mail and had to take it around to the various people in the yard, but he learned what the shape of their names were, and, of course, he would ask somebody if it got too bad—if this is so-and-so. What was the teaching style used to communicate these skills? Cecil: Well, you tell them first, and if you can draw pictures you show ’em pictures, caricatures if you want to call ’em that. We taught ’em by cartoons, by animation. We’d draw pictures of the job and what they were doing, and we’d put the words there and they learned those words. Lois: That’s first-grade technique, isn’t it? Cecil: We would take the people that had the most motivation and inclination and teach them to read and write. I had a lot of adults going to school, classrooms, and learning to read and write the ABCs up to the third-grade level. And they were so eager. Many times I’ve had employees to come to visit me—my friends. They said, “You know, Mr. Beeson, I’ll never forget you—.” [Pause] Lois: I’ll tell you a little story here. When I first began to teach school I was down in the French country. There was one teacher who lived in the boardinghouse where we were, and he just had a reputation for being the most successful teacher. I said, “What in the world do you credit [for your success]?” And he would say, “Well, I tell you, Miss Lois, I drew ’em a little picher [sic]. ” And that’s what they were doing at the shipyard—drawing a little picher [sic]. Cecil: I had a man that was the top man in his field of work, which was welding. He was the superintendent. Now, he could read a little bit, but he would have to have an assistant to read his job orders to him every day. They would go an hour earlier than anybody else in the yard. He would go to work at five o’clock in the morning instead of six. He’d get that man down there, and that guy would teach him what they were going to do that day in work. We furnished him [this] young man that had a high school

Top People in Shipyard Management

259

education as his aide. Well, this man, he says, “Every day when we go out of the yard I buy a newspaper—a nickel—from a little boy at the gate that was selling newspapers.” He said [he] couldn’t read it, but “I had to buy it to show my people that they thought I could read. I took it home with me and my little granddaughter read it to me.” So one day he told me, “I want you to help me to learn to read and write. My wife wants to go, too.” Now, both of these people were in their later forties. They had come from the central part of Louisiana. Just real French. Real French. Lois: Acadian, really. Cecil: So I go down to the high school and talked to [the principal and the superintendent] and asked ’em if there was some way we could provide some adult training. We started from that and got ’em to come in to the high school, and I started [with that couple] and half a dozen other employees down there. This was not publicized because we didn’t want to bring embarrassment on some of the people who were already in high [levels] in the plant. It had to be handled very delicately, but it was done and those people survived and they progressed. Lois: They were supervisors. Cecil: Not one but several of the employees would tell me about buying these papers, and sometimes some of their friends would make fun of ’em because they knew they were handicapped. But we started that adult-training program back in about 1944, and not one but dozens of people—and literally over the next few years several hundreds of people—went to those classes and learned their ABCs and their numbers. Lois: The very fact that they were able to get into the shipyard and make a living for themselves, a good living and could cope, it built so much self-pride. Cecil: Orange was such a beehive. We were hiring people right and left in those days, and many times they didn’t have a place to sleep. Right down the street within two blocks of the shipyard was what we used to call a flophouse. D. F. Luckie owned this building, and he had a bunch of cots in there. He could sleep seventy-five to a hundred people in there, and they slept by shifts. I would go in there looking for an employee that hadn’t reported to work, and we didn’t know whether he was lost in the river or what. This place was in semidarkness all the time because the people were trying to sleep. We’d take a flashlight and go around and look in the cots, but I was amazed at the fact that he kept that place full of people. It didn’t make any difference whether it was two o’clock in the morning or two o’clock in the afternoon, it would be full of people sleeping. Lois: I think one of the biggest social events would be the ship [launchings] and the affairs, the christenings. Everybody who was somebody was

260

they called it the war effort

invited to those affairs. Cecil and I were accepted from the very beginning. We went into the Methodist Church, and most of the people there were natives, but they accepted us just as if we had been living here all of our lives. There were many people who were not accepted like that. I suppose it was because Cecil and I both came on a level that these people could understand. We’re both college graduates, and Cecil had a lot to offer in the business. But we never had that struggle. There were many who did because they were not accepted. They were looked down upon to a certain extent, and a lot of it was, in my opinion, the fact that these people were not educated in the formal sense. People didn’t want these coming in like that and taking over. It was a proud little town to begin with, and close-knit, and you couldn’t say anything about anybody because they were all related, blood kin really, on one side or the other. It was the typical small town.



a wanton way about some people Mavis H. and Joe M. Powell Joe: They had what they called tea parties. You’d get a great big ol’ washtub and put a great big ol’ block of ice in it. They would pour every kind of liquor you’ve ever heard of over the ice with some kind of fruit juice, and everybody had to stir it with their finger. Mavis: It was lethal, I tell you. It was better just to walk around it. Joe: But anyway, there were just things like that that erupted. Mavis: We were young and we were invited to some of these things, and they were eye-popping, I’ll tell you, ’cause they came from everywhere. We got educated, didn’t we? Joe: See, she was into all this more than I was, because, finally, in 1944 they clamped down and said we’ve given you all the deferments we possibly can. You’re gonna have to go in the service, so I did. Mavis: That’s another thing to do with this morality thing, too. So many husbands were off—away. Joe: Are you getting ready to tell me something after all these years? Mavis: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s something I’ve been wanting to tell

Top People in Shipyard Management

261

you for forty-six years. But I think that these wives—a lot of ’em were lonely and probably involved in some of these things that ordinarily they wouldn’t have been to. Joe: It was announced that the contract had been awarded to Orange in the early part of 1941. The word was out then that they were going to start hiring—not the shipyard workers first—but they wanted first to get all the administrative people in place, and so I applied and I was the second person hired in the accounting department of Consolidated Steel Shipbuilding Division. Because of the job I had, I was deferred. I was single and young enough to be drafted, and I was given a deferment every six months. After getting six month’s deferments from 1941 until 1944—to show you what it’s like to live in a little town—the gal in charge of the draft board called me up one morning and said, “I know that you and Mavis have been going together for quite a while, and there’s been a rumor that you all are going to get married someday.” She said, “I’m going to tell you, though, they put the pressure on me about you because you have been deferred around eight times. And they said, now they couldn’t defer you anymore, because the theory is that they’ve given you a six month’s deferment to break somebody in to take your place.” So she said, “I’m going to have to send you your questionnaire and I’m going to have to draft you. But if the questionnaire comes back that you’re married, I can classify you as 3-A instead of 1-A.” Mavis: One way to get a husband. [It’s] not easy—have a war. [Laughs] Joe: So I told [Mavis], “We’ve got to have a date tonight.” We got together that night and talked till midnight and decided we would get married Saturday night. Mavis: See, he was madly in love with me. [Laughs] We had actually planned to get married, but we were thinking of a fall wedding. We married on the nineteenth of July, and it was within one week. Now, this was not a surprise, as though we had never even talked about getting married. We sat out in front of ol’ Sholars drugstore for the entire evening and discussed this. Sat in the car. This was when they served Cokes to the window. They had these little carhops who came out and attached this tray to the window of your car. Joe: I remember that they finally turned the lights out in the drugstore and told [us] they were sorry but they were closing up. But we stayed there to talk it out. Mavis: Our minister—this all had been such a whirlwind thing that by Saturday evening [I] wasn’t sure at all I could go through with this sort of thing—and he sat in Fellowship Hall of our church and just talked me into

262

they called it the war effort

it. “You’ve committed yourself now”—I was only nineteen years old. “This is a good boy you’re marrying,” and so forth and so forth. And he said I was the only bride who ever stood before him in his life that every time he asked me a question he thought I was going to say no. [Laughs] That is because I was still thinking it over. Do you think those years forced people into decisions before they were ready? Mavis: I certainly do. Joe: We did not know very many of the navy personnel, but a lot of the girls did because the officers were interested in girls. A lot of ’em were single and they wanted to date. I would say, yes, there had to be a lot of quick decisions, because, see, these guys never knew whether they were going to be transferred tomorrow or what. Most of ’em were stationed here a-waiting for their ship to be completed. Mavis: I think it was sort of a breakdown in morality in some ways, too. Maybe I was just so young and we had led pretty sheltered lives, [but] I certainly started to see things among people—and infidelities among people—that I didn’t know existed in the world. It was a shocking thing to me—the flirtations that went on in the office. Lollygagging around and horseplay. I just think it was sort of a wanton way about some people. It seems to me I was aware of things going on in the world that I’d never been aware of before. It was kind of high-living time. I didn’t see that much among the friends we knew and had grown up with. It was in a working situation where I saw this. I was astounded at office behavior, really. Was the rest of the community reacting to this? Mavis: Lots of buzzing. Lots of buzzing about it among my group, certainly. We associated with these people, because there were so many functions. As I say, it was a time of partying and people kicking [up] their heels. Joe: Because people were coming in here a lot from up East and Midwest and mixing with each other and talking, it just became the fact that you were hearing jokes—and I must say dirty jokes—nearly every day. Very funny ones. And people exchanged ’em. Every once in a while it comes up, “Whatever happened to telling dirty jokes?” It just doesn’t happen anymore in Orange, and I think the whole reason is that nobody mixes around. We’ve settled down now to our own little crowd of people. We don’t ever hear any new ones to pass on. But there were so many handed down. Every day you were hearing lots and lots of funny, funny dirty jokes. They weren’t just filthy nasty. They were funny, and most of ’em you had to act ’em out almost. But that disappeared then, after the war. Mavis: I think in spite all this fraternizing, [however] there were the Martins and McCoys here. It was sometimes us against them. There was always that feeling of these people—I believe—I may be wrong—that

Top People in Shipyard Management

263

many of them were big complainers. They had come from big cities. They came to a small town with nothing in it, and they didn’t have the finest restaurants. They didn’t have the finest shops. There are certain things they couldn’t get here, and they probably came in turning their noses up a little bit, not allowing or knowing that this little town had a lot of snobbery in it also. It was a little cliquish town of 7,000, and if these people came in and decided that they were going to presume to be superior, they were in trouble, because they were dealing with some people who were proud of their community. They were proud of their social lives. They knew which fork to pick up. These people [assumed] that they were in the boonies— and in a way they were. But people had lived well here and were educated. Did you see much of that clashing? Mavis: There was a lot of talking about it, and frankly, these people who came here, not just from the East but from other parts of the country, are simply more candid. I think southerners have a certain restraint and reserve [that these people didn’t have]. In other words, I may not like you, but I’m not going to walk in the room and say, “Look, I don’t like your shirt. I don’t like anything about you.” I think southern people—well, maybe we’re just a little more polite about those things, maybe a little more hypocritical. I don’t know. But people were offended by it. Now, these were not just like in the higher echelon of society, but these were among the workers. I saw this every day, because I worked in those personnel offices at the shipyards, and I could hear this among the workers who’d come in right out of the yard. They didn’t like these damn Yankees either. Did those years change you? Joe: I think it certainly helped my working career. There’s no doubt about it. Because I was given an opportunity. If that one hadn’t been there, I don’t know that I’d ever have found another opportunity like that to educate myself into the working world. Mavis: I think it probably broadened my tolerance of people and accepting people more for what they are. As I say, we were young. We had certainly led very sheltered lives. We were extremely innocent people. We really were. And we were thrown into this thing with all of these, what I called sophisticates at that time. Now I realize they were not sophisticated people at all or they wouldn’t have behaved like that—but learning you have to accept people as they are. And I found that hard to do in some cases.12 I really did.



During a period of rapid social change, quality of leadership takes on special significance. It was generally concluded, for example, that under acute wartime

264

they called it the war effort

circumstances and pressures the schools in Orange operated rather successfully. And whatever success the schools achieved was in large measure attributable to the leadership provided by the superintendent and principals. With the hurried buildup of the shipyards and the meeting of quotas and deadlines—all occurring in a crisis context—shipyard management could not be a secondary consideration. There had to be individuals in these positions who knew something about shipbuilding. The area did not have nearly enough men with the prerequisite shipbuilding know-how, so shipbuilders from other parts of the country filled key positions. At other leadership, supervisory levels men were selected for their training and experience. Welders, electricians, boilermakers, mechanics, shipfitters, and other metal workers were at a premium. Engineering or scientific training was invaluable. Multitalented individuals were also in demand because so much of the early work involved trial and error, adaptation, and improvisation. Workers with no background in metal or heavy industrial work moved into supervisory roles because of their initiative, work performance, or, in some cases, sheer chance. People learned quickly and were promoted rapidly, and one of the valued qualities of those in leadership positions was that they could recognize leadership potential in others. Another group of leaders proved their effectiveness in motivational and interpersonal skills. They had a knack for teaching and supervising unskilled laborers, and they were able to stimulate productivity and maintain worker morale. These supervisors took a personal interest in their crews and showed a concern that went beyond the job. They might go out and look for the man or woman who did not show up for work. They would talk to the workers about personal matters, bail them out of jail, help them get an education, or go to the assistance of their families. Some of these officials and supervisors inspired a loyalty and devotion that remained decades later. The individuals who said, “ You know, Mr. Beeson, I’ll never forget you,” were not recalling an impersonal or indifferent relationship. Fortunately, there were people in charge who combined both sets of skills. They knew how to build ships and they knew how to work with people, with the thousands of workers out in the yards.

8

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards “They got it done. They got it done. They really did. Everywhere you looked they was building a ship or building something. Then we got to building those minesweepers, and they were shooting them things out like popcorn. Man, I’m telling you they really built some minesweepers in a hurry. They got the job done. Just stop and think how many ships rolled out of that yard. It really, it really is something.” Raymond Selzer “They got the job done in that shipyard, and they didn’t have to have a lot training because of specialization. . . . They’d build things over and over. Something that would take a week to do it to start with would be done in a couple of days.” Clarence Parkhurst

I

t was a large, swallow-tailed pennant bordered in white. In the center was a white letter “E” set within a yellow wreath of oak and laurel leaves on a vertically divided background of red and blue. “ARMY” was on the red portion and “NAVY” on the blue, both in white letters. To see the American flag flying over war-production factories and plants was not unusual. Patriotism was at its peak and the colors were proudly shown. Not all plants, though, were privileged to fly the Army-Navy E, a flag presented to those select industries that excelled in the production of equipment and materiel for the war effort. It was the gold standard of war production: the “flag of the unflagging.” Overcoming production obstacles, avoiding stoppages, fair labor standards, effective management, and training were criteria of evaluation. Records of accidents, health sanitation, and plant protection were also examined.

266

they called it the war effort

In 1943 fewer than 3 percent of all eligible plants had received the award. The “E” had long been a proud military symbol of excellence, and the Army-Navy E became the hallmark award to civilians who performed above reasonable expectation. The banner was presented at ceremonies carefully designed to boost the morale and pride of all involved: employees, management, and community. Bands played, pins were given to individual employees, speeches were made, and everyone watched with satisfaction as the standard was raised. Levingston Shipbuilding Company received the award in August 1942, the first shipyard in Texas to be so recognized. One of the gate guards raised the pennant, “a battle flag awarded for having won an important battle in the war of production.”1 The guard’s daughter, a nurse, had been taken prisoner when the Japanese overran Corregidor earlier in May. Consolidated Steel Corporation was honored a few months later. When destroyer escorts were delivered to Orange from the Northeast for conversion to high-speed transports (APDs) or to be reworked due to faulty workmanship, workers had the opportunity to examine the quality of work being produced by other shipbuilders. This, according to the Office of the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S.N., “served to create a pride on the part of Consolidated Steel Corporation’s workers in the work they were turning out.”2 And as far as is known, this office maintained, Consolidated “is the only yard . . . which absolutely completed a destroyer picket ship so that the vessel could be sent immediately to the combatant area without the necessity of going to a Navy Yard.”3 A record was established in May 1944 when Consolidated delivered a ship a day, “thirty-one ships in thirty-one days.”4 For such a small community to have two “E” quality shipyards was, naturally, a source of great pride. After all, in 1941 Levingston had employed only some 250 workers, while the yard for Consolidated was still under construction. In the words of more than one observer, what the shipyards accomplished was rather amazing. Ancient marshland and thousands of unskilled workers were transformed into one of the country’s major shipbuilding centers. “We were good! Honest, we were good.” Vera Hopkins stated it unabashedly, and a majority of workers in all three shipyards would probably have agreed: “If you work here YOU KNOW you’re good.”



They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

267

tell him about the gambler going to the show boat Theta and Vernon W. Peveto Vernon: I was rice farming, and in ’42 I went to the shipyard. Whenever it got to where you couldn’t hire anybody—had to have help, you know— well, I sold out and went to work as a guard. I’s on the second shift. Two to ten. You worked six days. There’s no swapping shift. You went on that shift and you stayed there. And there was a hundred on my shift. The navy was running the shipyard. We were a member of the Coast Guard. We had to wear that Coast Guard band. We had to have the six-shooter and a billy club in our hand and a slapping jack in a hand. A slapping jack? Vernon: It’s a piece of metal that fits down on your finger, and [if ] they’re right in your face and you slap somebody like that [slaps hand] you knock ’em cuckoo. ’Cause there’s all kinds of people come in there. If you went to the personnel they hired you if you could stand the physical. No questions asked. They hired you, but they got your pedigree. You went on, and they give you the first night’s lodging and fed you. You went to work. Then the FBI taken over your papers and investigate you. And they’d come in the office—I’s working in the office—and say I want to see a man, say, the name of John Doe, badge number so-and-so. I’d look up the badge. I’d call the time office—“Where’s John Doe, badge number so-and-so? What shift does he work?” They say he’s working now. “Well, what ramp is he on?” And they’d tell me. The FBI would never go in the plant. The office was as far as they’d go. They’d show you their credentials and tell you what they wanted. Well, they’d bring this man in, and they’d tell him [what the charges were] and place him under arrest. You may never see that man no more and he may be back the next day. And you had picture badges, a badge with your picture on it. You must wear it and it [be] visible. If it was raining you put it outside, because it might be a picture of Hitler on that badge, somebody coming in with a picture of Hitler on it to keep you on your toes. You had to look at that picture and look at that man to see if it was the same or he didn’t get in. And you had to open up your lunch kit, and you had to open up your thermos bottle ’cause a guy’s carrying whiskey in there in his thermos bottle. They searched it. What were they arresting people for? Vernon: [Laughs] You’d have to ask them that. Theta: They didn’t explain their business. Vernon: I started out working on a ramp down in the yard. That’s the place where you go up on the ship. There’s a place you stood right there.

268

they called it the war effort

See, everybody that come on that ship, worked on that ship, had to have a certain kind of badge on ’em [indicating] that he was authorized to work there. Then I graduated to the main gate. After I worked for a while they was having a lot of trouble over on the ol’ river bridge. And they had a gate over there, entrance gate, called the north gate. They’s having a lot of trouble over there, and they wanted me to go over there for a while. I stayed over there around seven or eight months. Then they put me in the office, and I stayed there till it was over with. What kind of trouble? Vernon: People was coming up and wanting to get in, and they just didn’t have a strong enough man there to stop ’em. They jumped on one [guard] and beat him up, and that’s when they put me over there. They didn’t beat me up. They didn’t jump me. Theta: He was a much larger man then than he is now. Vernon: I weighed about two-forty [and was] six-one-and-a-half. I guess you could take care of yourself. Vernon: Well, I did. One man, they told him to open his thermos bottle, and he did. It had scalding hot coffee, and he done just like that—[threw it] and hit a guard in the face with it. He rapped him over the head with his billy club and broke the billy club. The union went in to the personnel man and told him, “We demand that you do away with them clubs.” He said, “Okay, I’m going to do that.” Well, they broke. [They’re] not any good, [so] “I’m going to get some that won’t break.” I’ll show you my billy club. FBI out of Houston gave me this. That’s bois d’arc wood. That’s loaded—lead in the end—[and it] was more effective than the gun. They knew you weren’t going to shoot ’em. You had to have that gun on, but they didn’t know whether you were going to hit ’em with that stick or not. They were more scared of that than they was the gun. Theta: He had a buckskin string that held it on his wrist so he wouldn’t drop it. Vernon: [You had that in your hand] all the time. You carried that. That was the same as your clothes. Theta: Tell him about the gambler going to the Show Boat. Vernon: There was a man from Shelby County. He was a professional gambler. Well, my working partner was from Shelby County—that’s when I was on this north gate over there. And this man was a-talking to him one day—come in the gate and talked to him. He said, “John, I’ve been to the Show Boat across the river. I’ve been over there four nights. I know how to break ’em.” Says, “I’ll give ’em a thousand dollars to learn it, but I want you to find me five more men besides yourself to go with me, because I don’t

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

269

want ’em to put me in that river.” And they’d kill a man, you know, and throw him in that river. That was a rough place over there.5 So I knew three of ’em, and there was three more I didn’t know. They were from Shelby County, but they’s working in the yard. They went over there with him, [but] they didn’t stay together. They just milled around in there. He won $60,000 and he told ’em, “Now, you all are not gonna drop me off in that river.” These [other men] all gathered right to him with their guns in their hands. My working partner handed him a six-shooter and said, “We’re going to walk backwards across that bridge.” And I knew it was happening. I was sitting there. I was sitting outside a-watching ’em, outside my guard gate under the river bridge. Theta: It was just straight across the river. Vernon: And they walked backwards, five of ’em did. One of ’em walked forward to watch for the cars that was coming and going, and they walked backwards across that bridge with their guns. And they [Show Boat personnel] come out. I could see ’em. They come out all right, but they didn’t follow through. I was expecting them to be a-shooting any minute, but there was no gun fired, and he never did go back over there no more, gambling. My working partner, he come back [and clocked back in]. He’d left his uniform in the guard house, [so] he put his uniform on and went [back] to work. Did people get liquor through very often? Vernon: Oh, yes. They’d find a way to get it in there. They caught one and he had some tied around his leg, inside his britches. [They’d put it] in their clothing, especially in the wintertime. That’s whenever the liquor would show up, in the wintertime. Theta: They had women guards, too. Vernon: Yeah, they had women guards. The restroom would be a block long down there, and they got to where they’d gang up. Men and women would gang up in the restrooms, and they had men that stayed in the restroom and women that stayed in the restroom. Why would they gang up? Vernon: To get out of work. Go in there and they’d gang up in there and talk. Not working. They were drawing their money but they wasn’t a-working. Was that common, people trying to get out of work? Vernon: Oh, yes. You’ll find that everywhere. That’s today and tomorrow and it’ll be here as long as there’s a world—getting something for nothing. Theta: I taught first grade over at Little Cypress. I had been there maybe a couple of months, and the superintendent came and asked me if I

270

they called it the war effort

would pick up twelve children, and I went up there and got twelve children and over the worst roads. When it was raining they were just practically impassable, [but I] picked up the children every day and took them home in the afternoon. We had a four-door Plymouth, and as long as one could get in there it was all right. I think I had four in the front. I tried to load the back first and some were standing. The little ones could stand, you see. Those were enormous rooms over there in that old building, but it rained nearly every day. And cold! It was just terrible weather, and the children, some of ’em, just had little thin jackets. I don’t know why. We didn’t have time to investigate any of the home conditions as to why children would come to school so poorly clad, but we put two classes together, and we had ninety-two children in one classroom—of us working with ’em. All we could do was work with their reading and writing and get a little math in for the ones that could do it. We kept them like that for three months. Then when it got warmer weather, she took her class back to the other room that she had had that was so cold. Do you think children were affected by those years? Theta: Well, yes, I think they were. It was a sadness. Usually children are happy and bouncy and they don’t think too much about what’s down the road or anything, but as I remember, those children were not a happy group. They came to school on buses that were overcrowded, and then the overcrowded situation in the classrooms. It wasn’t very good. And then some of them were living with other relatives, or two or three families living in one household, and that was crowded. There was just nothing to make them very happy. And no bath facilities in the rooms. The boys and the girls each had their own and it was about 200 yards from the main building down to the restroom facilities. Just an outhouse! That’s all. In ’43 I decided that I could make more money working for the navy, so I resigned teaching school and went to the Navy Department, and I think the first month I got sixty-five dollars a month more than I’d been making teaching school. Did you know teachers that went to work in the yards? Theta: None that I was closely associated with. I wouldn’t have gone down in the shipyard. Uh-uh. I wouldn’t have done that. It was a rough element and I wasn’t too sure that I could handle it. Vernon: All the [red-light] houses within a ten-mile radius of a defense plant was closed, and they went to work for the shipyard. I didn’t want her associated with that class of women. Theta: Now, all of ’em weren’t like that. But a lot of these women then came into the shipyard? Vernon: Yes. There was burners, chippers and welders, truck drivers and

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

271

everything. I heard one of ’em say, “This is the best thing I ever had. I make contacts in the day and make my money at night.” She said it in my presence. Was there a problem with men and women getting together on the job? Vernon: Oh, yeah. That was one thing you had to watch. Anytime you put men and women together you got that problem irregardless of where it is.6 If you’ve got enough of ’em together, you’ve got that problem. You may not agree with that, but it’s so. What did you do for a social life? Theta: We forgot it. By the time we put in eight hours or ten at whatever our work was and then came home and got the clothing and cooking and things done, you didn’t care about any other recreation. Vernon: All you thought about then was going to bed.



please cash our checks Otis P. (Pat) Nolan Sr. I was living in Burkburnett, Texas. I had been working on the WPA for about two years, and I read in the newspaper that they was going to build a naval shipyard in Orange, Texas. I wasn’t doing any good there. I’s making forty-three dollars a month, so I told my wife let’s sell what we have here and move down to Beaumont. I had some relatives in Beaumont. She agreed and went to stay with her sister at Bryson, Texas, until I got located down there. I go down there in January of 1941. I got with [a half brother] and went to work with him, and I was eking out a decent living. It was, I guess, along in August before I ever got over to the shipyard. I went over there and applied for a job in the shipfitting department, and come to find out I had to go to school. I had worked on riveted tanks, big steel oilfield storage tanks, before, and I could read prints very well, and I knew all the terms that they used. So I got in this class and the teacher said I was far enough along I didn’t have to go very much. I didn’t go but about a week and he said I was ready to go in—go to work. Well, went in the shipfitting department, and every department had a gate. Mine was 312 department. That was the hull department. And they had ’em lined up just like box stalls in a racehorse track. Had different stalls just lined up for maybe a quarter of a mile. Different departments had a different stall. I got lined up and went through this 312 gate, and the cards was up in a rack right by the time clock. When you went in you reached

272

they called it the war effort

up and got your card on one side, punched the clock, and put it over on the other side. The first vessel that they built was 569 and the name of it was the Aulick. Well, I worked on the Aulick. They gave me a job putting on collar plates. I was a shipfitter. [On] Pearl Harbor Day the Aulick wasn’t complete. It was nearly ready and they was putting in a propeller shaft. Had to bring it in on a barge on the river and bring it in from the stern of the vessel and ease it up in there in the ship and on up into the engine room there where they could connect it on to the engines. Pearl Harbor Day happened on Sunday. Well, I wasn’t working. Went on over there next morning to work and all these foremens and superintendents, they was in hysteria. Aw, they was cursing those Japanese. They was hollering and all the banging and banging and trying to get this propeller shaft up in there—all of ’em wanting to do it at the same time. There was a lot of confusion. They finally got the propeller shaft up in there and got it all connected up and got the propeller on. Now, I didn’t get to work much on this Aulick. There was a lot of men there ahead of me, and so I didn’t get to ride it in. I moved on over there to another vessel that the keel had been laid and it was 572. The name of it was the Dyson. Well, I worked throughout on it and I rode it in when they launched it. They selected me to ride this ship in. Before we ever rode it in we went around and checked all the seacocks that’s in the bottom of the vessel, in the bilge—there’s a lot of valves in there called seacocks—to see if they’s all closed—and rode it in. Our job then—they gave us flashlights to go down in the vessel and check those seacocks again and see if there’s any leaks down in there. We got ’em all checked and come back up on the main deck and the tugboats was there— it was out in the middle of the river—and tugboats was there trying to berth it. They finally got it docked and they got some tall ladders—those things without any machinery and anything in ’em they ride high in the water. And they got some tall ladders and put ’em up on the side of the vessel and we finally climbed down. Do you think people were conscientious? Well, I’ll tell you. They trained young men, like in my department, to do shipfitting. They trained welders. They trained burners. Trained different people to do different things, and then the army took ’em out. They were young men and whenever the army said go, they pulled ’em out of there. I was already thirty-six, thirty-seven years old, and my draft board didn’t bother me. Then, there at the last where all the young men was gone they hired men for helpers, ol’ farmers from up there around Jasper and San Augustine. And some of ’em had great big stomachs. They couldn’t even get in a manhole. They’d stay outside the manhole and watch me

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

273

and holler at me. I’d send ’em off to get something and they’d go off and stay a half a day. Some of ’em, they got smart. They’d go off somewhere and find a piece of steel, and then they’d go to wandering around over the shipyard. And if they got stopped they’d tell ’em that I’d sent ’em after a piece of scrap steel. I wouldn’t see ’em the rest of the day. If I sent ’em to get anything, a tool or anything, I wouldn’t see ’em the rest of the day. That was pretty common. And then at the last of it, I’ll tell you, we didn’t have very many mechanics. Just some ol’ guys like me. Along about 1943 I got sick. What they called galvanized chills. I’d go to bed feeling just fine and wake up in the middle of the night with a hard chill. I would get up about four or five o’clock—I had to catch the train to Orange—and I’d be in a dead sweat. I’d be so weak, but I’d get up and go to work. Tell me about riding the train. I’d say early ’42 the Southern Pacific Railroad decided to put on a train. The first morning they had three coaches. Well, I went down there and we got on that train and the thing was loaded. They was riding on top of it. All between cars. Standing up in the aisles. It was loaded. The next day we had five coaches. And the first thing you know that train [was] pulling thirteen, fourteen, fifteen coaches, loaded with men and some women. It’d leave Beaumont at 6:20 [a.m.] and we’d buy a book of tickets for the whole week. I think it was about five dollars—two ways, see. Some of those ol’ gals that was riding it, they’d get a boyfriend and they’d sit on the steps at the end of the coach and make love while the train was moving. They’d sit there and spark. That vestibule out there would [always] be crowded with people like that. The men, they was making so much money in those days they got to gambling on the train, shooting dice, playing cards—poker. And we didn’t have but about forty-five minutes to do that, but boy those men was loaded with money. And they’d get down in the end of the coach and close the door between the restrooms and bump those dice against the doors. Then the railroad put what they called railroad bulls [on the train]. They was police working for the railroad. They stopped the gambling on the train— all but the card players. There was one man that come there with a box of kitchen matches; he’d sell those matches for a penny apiece or a nickel apiece or something, and they’d play poker for matches till the train pulled into Orange. When it started getting into town, well, they’d cash out their matches. But they stopped the dice shooting.7 One morning we went down to the depot and our coaches was gone. The government had got ’em for troop trains. In their place they brought out three or four cabooses and some baggage cars and had some of those

274

they called it the war effort

cars that had postal at one end and passenger coach on the other end—and had a boxcar or two. Well, that was the only way we had to ride to work so we all got on that. We rode that train a week or more. Did you ever consider moving to Orange? I guess it was along in the spring of the year of ’42 they told us they’s gonna build a lot of houses in Orange. I told my wife, if I can get one of them I’m gonna move over there. So they got the first ones built right there on Destroyer Drive, and I went and made application and got one that was right on Destroyer Drive—282. And [had] a parking lot right beside of my house. I was one of the early arrivals there. We worked six weeks days and we worked six weeks nights. At night when we’d come out of the shipyard gate—we’d come out a back gate and went under the bridge—it was a passageway under the bridge—and I’s right there home, about six blocks from the shipyard gate. But they kept a-building those houses back in there. They built hundreds and hundreds of ’em. And some of those men they’d wander around. They didn’t have very [good] street lighting. Those houses was in rows and there’s just [like] alleys in front of ’em. Just a passageway. At four o’clock in the morning those men would get lost in there trying to find their own home. Walk till daylight trying to find their [house]. I could find mine. It was right there on the street. How did people get along in Riverside? Those women right around my wife there were very nice. Some of ’em had small children. [One of my boys] started to school there. Some of those ladies would take a group of ’em over there at once—those little fellers. Round ’em up and bring ’em back that afternoon. My wife didn’t because she was cripple. She had polio when she’s little and walked with one leg in a brace and a walking stick. She couldn’t get around very much. But the other ladies were very helpful. They’d take care of our children pretty good. Everybody got along good. Did you ever go across the river? Oh yes. My wife [was] gone, [visiting a brother home on leave]. And while she was gone one night me and another boy went across the river. I got to fooling around there shooting dice. Won thirty or forty dollars. I decided I wanted to get out of there, and you know, them guys followed me to the door. They didn’t want me to leave there with their money. They don’t want you to take no money out of there. They want you to leave yours there and not take any of theirs out. Went to the door with me and tried to get me to come back and play some more. Said, “You got some of our money. We don’t like that.” I said, “Well, that’s too bad. I got to go home.” Me and that boy got out of there. You take a couple of bouncers—they’s

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

275

nightclub bouncers. You take a couple of them big bullies, they’re liable to jump on you. I’s glad I got out of there when I did and didn’t ever want to go back. My wife come home in a day or two, and so [laughs] I stayed with my family. But I finally got out of there and I never did go back. The Show Boat—I think that was it. Tell me about the checks. [A letter from the company] asked us to please cash our checks. [See], we’s working such late, late hours we’d get in so late. We were working tenhour days. Even if we’s working daytime we didn’t get in until five or six o’clock, and we couldn’t get to the bank. [My wife couldn’t] get to town to the bank. People wouldn’t cash our checks at stores. I had one grocery store that’d cash one once in a while so I could buy groceries [and pay the rent]. This was a small grocery and he didn’t have much money to cash checks. And we just put ’em in a bundle and put a rubber band around ’em, and my wife carried ’em in her purse. There’s other people doing the same thing. They carried ’em on their person. There was a lot of ’em wasn’t cashing their checks. I know one ol’ man I worked with, he had a big bundle of ’em. [ Laughs] He said, “Well, they can go to hell. These checks is mine. I’ll cash ’em when I want to.”



a ship had a personality Lula S. Haley My husband was working at Consolidated. I remember one exciting day when the first keel was laid on the USS Aulick, and everybody and their dog went to that. They invited everybody for the laying of the keel. It was just crowds, crowds, crowds, and then later on when it was launched a lot of people [were] there then. When the Aulick went on its trial run—well, it was a wonderful day. It was a beautiful ship going down the river, and I believe we lived in Port Arthur then. We had moved to Port Arthur ’cause we couldn’t find a house. The house we were living in—it was actually a shack—the owner was going to tear it down, and so we had moved to Port Arthur. We used to run down to the canal in Port Arthur—we lived about three or four streets from there—and we could see ships [from our front porch].8 [We saw] that ship and [we spent] our gasoline driving down Lake Shore Drive all the way, as far as we could see that ship, that Aulick. It was a thrill, because it was the first one that was built here in this war. My husband happened to be home, and when the others began to come

276

they called it the war effort

for their trial run we’d follow it. The ships were exciting—or to me they were. Still are, for that matter. I wrote an article about [the] personality of ships. I never did finish it, but anyhow, maybe it’s because they put a name to them.9 I’ve always felt like a ship had a personality and [it] seemed like there’s an aura—you think of the men that are there and their lives and perhaps their homes and the personality of the men. It seemed like the ship takes on part of that, to my notion. (Following is the unedited, handwritten article Mrs. Haley had started.) I know that ships have a personality. There is an aura about them as though they were either living things or had been living things. I suppose they take on a little bit of the personality, soul, inner being? of the men who sail them. When you (one) go (goes) aboard a ship which is in service, there is a feeling of life, of activity of action of accomplishment, of a planning to do something; aboard an empty vessel that is no longer in service, one that is moored in an inactive status, a sort of hushed feeling seems to pervade the vessel, and one begins to imagine that something of the men is still there, that at any minute the stillness will be broken by some sort of sound—a voice calling out orders, the rattle of anchor chain, a boatswain whistle, etc. Possibly since ships are given names, this feeling of their having a personality follows. All will agree that the swift clipper ship the “Flying Cloud” seemed to be a living being as she sped swiftly thru the mountainous waves, all sails spread to catch every breeze on her way to the Far East for a cargo of spices, tea, silk, etc. When we see pictures of the “Constitution,” “Old Ironside,” there comes to mind the panorama of this great country’s history and what its Constitution means to all of us and we then in some measure apply this greatness to that ship which had so glorious a part in preserving our nation. All these thoughts and feelings come to mind perhaps because each vessel has a part of? history that stirs the memory and the imagination. The name “Titanic” conjures up a picture of a lovely, gallant lady fighting desperately against the icy waters of the Atlantic, only to sink dismally to the bottom of the ocean. Ships that have engaged in battle of course—

(At this point Mrs. Haley’s comments ended.)



They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

277

it amazes me today what they did down there Myrtle L. and Elva J. Richardson Elva: We used to have a lot of bond drives down there. They’d bring in some movie star sometime, and at times down there if you bought a bond they’d let you kiss the movie star. Myrtle: Oh, no. I didn’t know that. [Laughs] Is that why we bought so many bonds? Myrtle: He came to Orange [November 1940] before I did. I was teaching in Grayson, Louisiana, and that’s where he lived. That following summer we got married, and I came and started looking for a job. [The superintendent] had not been in Orange during a previous war boom, so he was really not at all prepared for what happened. He didn’t think he was going to need any teachers, so I went to [the county superintendent] and asked for a job. He was a very old man and had been here all of his life. He said, “There’s no point in your going out in the county schools to teach. You just wait till school starts and J. W. Edgar will call you. He doesn’t know what’s happening in Orange.” And sure enough, the day school started Dr. Edgar called me, and he needed teachers desperately. I was given a fourth-grade teaching job at Anderson, and I kid you not, every Monday morning I might get ten new pupils, it was growing so rapidly. I’d start out with fortyfour children and maybe I’d have fifty-four the next Monday, and we just kept splitting classes and dividing classes and bringing in more teachers. We were teaching in the halls. We had two teachers in one room. Elva: The town was already beginning to grow, and we got a one-room apartment. We had one room. It had the kitchen and a bedroom and everything. And I kid you not, we could start to load up to go to town or somewhere and people would stop and ask you, “Are you vacating that apartment? We want to rent.” I was in a receiving department a short while, and then I went from there into what they called preassembly as a shipfitter apprentice. There was a master mechanic [who] drank a lot, so they let him go and gave me his job. They were just desperate for people. They’d just grab anybody whether you knew anything [or not]. I told ’em, “I’m not qualified.” They said, “Well, we don’t have anybody else. You’re going to have to take it.” So people were pushed into jobs that they were not qualified to do, and we did the best we could do with whatever. We just got on-the-job training, is what we did. We went to lots of schooling. Well, I became a leaderman, which is the same thing as a foreman. You had a certain area that you were

278

they called it the war effort

in charge of, and you had a certain group of men, and it was your job to assign the work. Later I became a quarterman, which is over one of the shops. At that time there was quite a number of men under my supervision, but as I say, we just had to figure it out as we went along. It amazes me today what they did down there with a bunch of people that didn’t have any know-how when they went there. What about the behavior of children? Myrtle: I think it was probably an adjustment that children had to make where their mothers were going out working for the first time. A lot of the women worked in the shipyards and had full-time jobs down there, and this was different for them. They’d been living in the country where their mother was at home, and this was a new adjustment for them to make. I think they had to have additional attention from the teacher. They had to be given some extra love and attention so that they could adapt to the classroom program. And gee, I forgot this—we made home visits.10 At the beginning of school every year teachers were required to visit every home of the children that they were going to teach. I think that was a tremendous help, because you really got to see the type of environment that child came from, and you knew how to deal with him to make him more comfortable in school. We didn’t have telephones, so we’d send a note home with the child. We would give [the parents] a choice of times when we could come, and they’d check which day of the week would be most convenient. I don’t think I ever failed to visit every home of every child that I taught. There were some cases that we knew of where families ran into problems. Men and women working at the shipyard together began to come interested in each other, and there were some of our very best friends [who] got divorces and that type of thing. I think that maybe that was a new experience for some men and women. They’d not worked on equal grounds with the opposite sex, and maybe they didn’t make the adjustment like they could have. What were your impressions about females in the yard? Elva: Most of the women that worked down there with me were conscientious, and when they came to work they were eager to do the job. Some of ’em were just as capable as the males were, I think. Every now and then some of ’em would get out of line a little bit, and you may have to call ’em in and talk to ’em, but most of it went off real well. Out of line? Elva: Well, sometimes there was too much visiting between the man and a woman. You know, the man would be leaving his job, going down, and you could tell they were trying to make— Myrtle: Too much friendship.

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

279

Elva: Yeah, too much friendship between ’em, and they were letting it interfere with their job, and when they let it interfere with their job you had to say something. How would you handle that? Elva: Well, it’s not easy. I had the one feller there that he had a real fine family, and the woman that he was having an affair with, well, she was not a desirable person at all. She had made her rounds with several of the men, and she had already divorced a couple of men. She’d just play with ’em, and some of ’em would go nuts about her. We had some fellers in there that had never been around women much, some of these boys from up in East Texas, and these girls, if they paid a little attention to ’em, I mean it’d drive ’em up the wall. Now, I’ve had ’em to tell me what they did off the job wasn’t any of my business. But I’d tell ’em I’m talking to ’em as a friend, and if I was you I’d take a look at what I’m doing and try to straighten up, because I never would talk to ’em hardly till it started to affect ’em on the [job]. Was this stressful to have to deal with? Elva: Yes, it was. This guy that I’m talking about was a good friend of mine, and he had a wife and two children, and it really tore me up when he left his wife and those two children and run off with this woman. I tried to talk to him about it, and he wouldn’t listen to me. She stayed with him a short while, and she finally called his wife and told her if she wanted him she could come get him. He had pneumonia. She couldn’t take care of him anymore. Of course, the women out there when they’d come to work [they] didn’t look like they did when you saw ’em up on the streets. They’d come to work with an ol’ scarf around their head, and maybe they’d have a welding hood on and a pair of overalls. Well, time they crawl around welding and riveting or doing whatever they were doing they was like the rest of us. They was dirty, and I’d see some of those women uptown and it was unbelievable. It was hard to recognize ’em. Boy, they’d be all prettied up and in a dress, and they’d speak to you and you’d kind of wonder, “Now, who is that?” Did women talk to you about being bothered by men? Elva: Well, I have had ’em to say things to me. We had a timekeeper one time. She was a beautiful woman. Now, she didn’t have to wear these ol’ overalls and things. She would come out in a pretty pair of slacks. Well, she’d come down to the shop there, to each leaderman, and she’d pick up the time for his men for the day. Some of the guys [would] raise up and whistle at her. Well, I had a guy on my crew down there that whistled at her when she came by, so she talked to me about it. She objected to him whistling [at] her. And the women that were working there, I remember their

280

they called it the war effort

remarks: “She objected to their whistling? Lord, it’d tickle me to death if I could get somebody to whistle at me.” [Laughs] Did those years leave an impression on you? Myrtle: Oh, I think so. Don’t you? Elva: Oh, definitely. Myrtle: I think that life for us is very different because of what we experienced during the war. I really do. It was very stressful to think that so many of our young men were going to war and giving up their lives for peace. And the men in the defense work didn’t have to go, but at the same time we had friends who did and friends who lost their lives. Those were great losses to us, and I really think that has affected the way we feel toward humanity and the value of human life. Don’t you think? Elva: Definitely. Yes, I had one of those boys that come here and went to work for me that was bombed in Pearl Harbor, and I still think about it. He was a young feller, probably nineteen or twenty years old, and they brought him to me and told me that he’d just been released from the service and they wanted him to go to work in there and that he’d had some pretty trying experiences in Pearl Harbor. Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever been around a chipping hammer or not. A chipping hammer is a chisel in a air-propelled gun, and it makes a tremendous racket. If things was kind of quiet and you started one of those he would just go berserk for a minute. I’ve seen days that he’d come out there and he’d be so nervous he couldn’t do anything hardly. I’d tell him, “Take a walk, and go down by the river somewhere and get to feeling better and come back.” He’d take a walk, and after a while he’d come back and he’d say, “I’m feeling better Mr. Richardson. I’m ready to go to work now.” He had two boats sunk out from under him during Pearl Harbor. One sunk, and he swam to another one and they sunk it. And he had some legs that was all banged up because of it. It really had affected him for the rest of his life, I know. And you see those kind of things, you know, [and] it could get to you. Myrtle: We were saddened by the loss of one young man. His wife was a teacher, and she lived in the same building that we lived in, just across the hall from us. He worked here in the shipyards for a while before he was drafted, but when he was drafted he was on a ship—I think it was up near Iceland or someplace—but, anyhow, the ship was bombed and one of the survivors that came back said that the men held on to the ship until they literally froze. This boy went down in the icy water, and his body was never recovered. And this was a very good friend of mine. And you’re just saddened with that type experience, and you just never forget it. It just lives with you for the rest of your life.

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

281



an ol’ country boy shut up down there behind that fence Irene and James A. Heard James: In ’41 I was working down there at ol’ Consolidated. In ’41 we quit farming and bought that new car when I pulled out a crop, and I’s working there to finish paying for it. Irene: [I was] raising two little boys and keeping the home fires burning around here. It was country and we liked it. I had maybe like a hundred laying hens out there, and I was milking a couple of cows and had a barn lot full of porkers. Before we got all the navy in here and others coming in to work, [downtown was] a congregation center on Saturday nights. That’s about the only time anybody ever went to town was on Saturday nights. Every street corner was occupied with the old-timers thrashing out all the week’s happenings. James: [There were] two main groups. One clique was over on Abe’s corner—Abe Sokolski had a clothing store there. And the old First National Bank building was over here on this corner, and another group congregated there. Anytime you wanted to meet a certain fellow, well, on Saturday night you knew just where to go meet him, you see—which group he’d be in. Irene: But the best spot of all was the Farmers’ Mercantile. I don’t think anybody ever come into town on Saturdays that they didn’t wind up at the Farmers’ Mercantile. Back then the old Mr. Gus Harris was living, and I can still picture him and maybe a dozen other ol’ guys about his age talking and laughing and reminiscing about the past. You might hear the same stories for two or three Saturdays, and then may be the third or fourth Saturday a different story come in. That was one of the grandest pastimes we had to look forward to the whole week. James: We’d come in out of the fields pretty early and get cleaned up and get downtown there maybe a little before dark and park somewhere around that Farmers’ Mercantile and go in there and get our groceries and put ’em in the back seat of that ol’ touring car and then walk a block down the street to take in a show. Come out of that show and get in that car and go on home, and them groceries were still sitting right there like we’d placed ’em. What made you decide to go to the shipyard?

282

they called it the war effort

James: The pay. Different people I knew had already been working down there. When I started out down there I think [I was making] about forty cents an hour—a whole lot better than it was raising rice. Irene: Well, back at that time our salary a week was twelve dollars, and it was myself and the boys and James and Mama. James: See, at the beginning of the year we’d make arrangements for the expenses, what it was going to take us to make a crop, and that’s what we budgeted for our living expense, twelve dollars a week. Irene: It was a long time after we moved here before we ever had electricity and water indoors. Well, a matter of fact, December 7, when they bombed Pearl Harbor, we were installing our first kitchen sink we’d ever had since we were keeping house. What recollections do you have of those years? James: Well, mostly the grind of it. An ol’ country boy shut up down there back of that fence. As long as I was getting into something new every day or two it was all right, but after it got to be repetitious with that monotony, I couldn’t take it. Irene: He decided he wanted to go back to farming. James: Back to the country. It was all right as long as you’re doing something different. But say like you do this job today, tomorrow you’re going to come back and do another one just exactly like it, and you get to where you don’t have to think about what you’re doing too much. [It] mostly automatically comes to you. Did you get frustrated? James: Oh, definitely! [Laughs] Irene: Yeah, I think sometimes he’d bring a little bit of it home. It was pretty hectic everywhere during that time. You take just a few people in a small town as we were, and then all of a sudden you have hundreds and hundreds more coming in—or thousands. James: And everybody was in it for “me.” You know, that “meism.” In other words, I know where I want to go and what I want to get and don’t get in my way. Do you think people changed? James: No, human nature don’t change. Sometimes it’s got a little more freedom than it does at others. Then, too, you’re not so [conspicuous]. Looking in a crowd, you know, you feel like, well, there’s a bunch of ’em there. They don’t see me and— Did morals and values change? James: I don’t know as they changed all that much, but they’s more out in the open.

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

283

Irene: It was kind of raunchy while all of that was going on. We had two of our ol’ aunts that worked in that shipyard. They were guards of some kind over a lot of the women that worked in there. They could tell you some pretty good tales about all the—as they say nowadays—the hanky-panky and everything with the females and the males during working hours. James: One of them destroyers there, after they got her completed and sent ’er out on a trial run, there was a file on one of the gearboxes got in the gears. From then on they’d have a machinist crew go down there and clean that gear out and check every inch of it and cover the cases on it and close ’er up, seal it. All the time you was doing that that navy man was sitting up there on the catwalk somewhere watching. They don’t know whether that was a accident that file got left in there or whether somebody put it in there on purpose. Not only that, but a lot of times—like, we’d be lining up the coupling. Well, when you got that coupling on line that navy man was supposed to come inspect it. Well, say like it’d be three o’clock in the morning. You’d finally have everything on line. Well, maybe you’d find an inspector and maybe you couldn’t, and when that sun started coming up out of that marsh and heating that deck up, the expansion of that ship [would throw] that coupling out of line. Well, couldn’t get an inspector, and directly it’s time to quit and go home and another crew take over. Well, they’d start getting it lined up again, you see, from this expansion. Maybe we’d come back to work that night and we’d start all over again, the same thing we’d done the day before. And that wouldn’t be one night, that might be three or four nights a week. And you get disgusted. They’re hollering, “Give us more production. Let’s get this job done. We need it for the war effort.” And then there you are out there waiting on somebody and losing all this time. How did someone from the farm adjust to that work? James: Practically all my life I’d been on my own. You know what I mean? Whatever I done was for my benefit and— Irene: You had nobody over you. James: Well, if I could see a shortcut or someway to do a job easier or faster or cheaper [I did it]. But down there that was a cost-plus deal, and sometime you’d get to feeling they don’t want to do it any faster. You could sense the tension in him when he came home? Irene: Oh, yes. I think he was in a lot better humor when he come in from the farm than when he come in from the shipyard. [Laughs] Did you think he was changing? Irene: Well, no sir, I don’t think changing. It was just—like he was telling you about these inspectors not coming when they should and keep

284

they called it the war effort

doing the same job over and over day after day. That’s kind of like a housewife doing housework every day. He wanted to do the best he could, but I could tell it was pressing on him a lot of times when he’d come in. When did you decide to leave the shipyard? James: I believe it was [about 1945]. There was four of us, me and my daddy and two of his brothers that formed a partnership in this farming. In later years after it got to where they couldn’t hardly get no help the ol’ uncles decided they’d had enough, and they left it to the ol’ man. He couldn’t handle it by hisself so he put the [bite] on me. Either quit that job [at the shipyard] and come on back and take over this farm full time or he was going to drag everything up under a tree out there somewhere and leave it. And I’s just hunting for an excuse to quit down there. He said, “If you’ll come on back and take it over I’ll turn it over to you.” And, boy, that was right up my alley. It was just like giving me a ice cream cone. How did you feel the last time you walked out of the gates of the yard? James: Oh, boy! [Laughs] I was walking on [air]. Irene: Yeah, he looked altogether different when he got home that last day—happy and free again.



you can’t beat these ol’ east texas boys for working Elta Mae and Johnnie Talbert Mr. Talbert was one of many shipyard workers who commuted daily into Orange. As a welding foreman he had some “three or four hundred” welders under his supervision. During the war he and Mrs. Talbert lived in the woods outside of Deweyville, where they were still living when they were interviewed. Johnnie: I went down [to Consolidated] on July 2, 1941, and when I first went down there they was trying to get the buildings ready. In fact, they went in there before they ever filled that in with sand and built the foundation for the plate shop and the machine shop and the warehouses and everything. Then when they got the foundations built and the buildings on ’em, they had a dredge boat come in there and they pumped all that sand in the inside there.11 I guess it was about seven or eight foot deep. Elta Mae: We lived in Orange nine months, then we built and moved back out here. Johnnie: I had a ’39 A Model Ford coupe. I went to work over there,

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

285

and it wasn’t about three or four weeks and one of my friends down here on this cutoff road went to work over there. And a fellow that lived next to [him], he went to work down there. So they drove one week, come by and pick me up, and I would drive a week and go by and pick them up. We’d swap out. Well, I had that ol’ ’39 Ford coupe. Of course, you couldn’t buy no parts. That ’39 model was the first Ford that came out with hydraulic brakes and the first one that had sleeves in the motor. See—I was told all this—Henry Ford had bought a lot of these ol’ World War I ships. They melt ’em down and made those blocks. Well, I don’t know what happened, but a lot of cylinders had flaws in the block. So rather than scrap ’em all, they went back there and bored those cylinders out and put liners in ’em. That’s the first motor that came out with liners. You could pull ’em out and put another set in. So I had me two blocks, and I’d rebuild me a motor, run it about a year and a half, and it’d start giving a little trouble, you know, burning a little oil. I’d pull that one out in one weekend and put another one in. That’s the way we made it through the war. Just as quick as we got to the point where they had enough facilities down there where they could start operating, I was on the road hiring welders for ’em. And I tell you, you can’t beat these ol’ East Texas boys for working. You won’t find one of ’em lazy. There wasn’t too many jobs no way, and then when they got a job they wanted to take care of it. And I’ll tell you, some of the best welders I’ve ever been around were right over there in that shipyard there in Orange. I never will forget, when they got one of the destroyers they had a lot of chipping they had to do on it. All these watertight connections that went through the shell had a copper ring around it, and then you had to take a chipping gun and peen it, enlarge it, what we called “roll it.” But it was a peening is what it was doing. They had people that’s all they done. They got off of this ship, they went to the next one and done it. They got off this ship and they went to the next one. Same if you’re putting in your struts and propeller shafts and your boilers, all your compressors and everything. They had a crew that knew nothing but that. Instead of getting you where you could do everything, you went so far and somebody else picked up and went on. And when they started painting one of those ships they had enough painters that everybody knew exactly what part he had to paint. They’d sandblast that boat and then they’d paint it. There wouldn’t be but two or three days that thing would be ready to hit the water. Is that the reason it was so successful, you had people doing one thing? Johnnie: That’s exactly right. Just like you, for instance. I could take you out here and in three or four weeks get you to where you could weld pretty good, but you wouldn’t be no pipe welder. You’d be a plate welder or

286

they called it the war effort

something like that. Everybody didn’t make the grade. I’m not saying that now, but the majority of ’em did. A lot of the boys we got out there didn’t know how to use their [welding] hood. They didn’t use dark glasses like they should to protect their eyes. We’d find out pretty quick: “Well, you’re just not cut out for welder. Let’s try you on something else. Did you ever do any burning?” “No.” “Well, we’ll put you on a burning torch. Put you in the scrap pile cutting scrap iron up.” First thing you know, in three or four days he’s a pretty good burner. How long was it taking you to commute every day? Johnnie: Well, the way the roads were and everything—and stop and pick up—about an hour [one way]. So you were on the road two hours every day, and when you worked a tenhour shift that was twelve hours. What were you doing for recreation? Johnnie: Working. Working. We worked every day. We worked every day. We worked. Did that put much stress on you? Elta Mae: He loved it. It was a lot of stress involved, but he handled it. Johnnie: When you work till you’re almost ready to go over the hump, you’d come home to get a little rest, and time you get home the telephone’d ring and they’d want you back. Your time wasn’t worth fifteen cents to you. How would you know when you had reached your limit? Johnnie: Well, you’d get tired. You’d get leg weary. Now see, on the destroyers you had to go up a ramp to get up on ’em. And [when] you’d get to where you’d have to go about halfway up that ramp and stop, you’d know you had enough of it. [You’d] go back to the office and sit down and relax and drink you a cup of coffee, or find somebody that you could talk to for a few minutes [and] you’re ready to go again. I don’t believe in turning the gas valve on wide open. Turn it open about three-quarters, and if that takes care of everything that’s all you need. If it needs a little more, give it another notch. It won’t hurt nothing. But don’t work at your peak all the time. A man can’t work every day, every day, every day at full speed, and I got sense enough to know that. Elta Mae: And he had his days, you see, of blowing steam. Just come in a-griping and a-carrying on. Johnnie: I’d hate to have to go over it again. I can’t say I enjoyed it ’cause it was the wartime, but I think it was an opportunity. Did people change? Johnnie: Well, I tell you, people never was used to anything. They got to where they could buy ’em an automobile. First, a lot of ’em bought ’em a home, which was a good thing to buy. In other words they made about two steps up that ladder, a lot of ’em did. The thing that got me more

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

287

than anything else is the amount of people that it benefited. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think we need a war every ten years and every twenty years. I don’t go for that, now, but it was a good reckoning for those people. It taught people things that otherwise they never would have been in contact with. One thing I got out of it, a man can do anything he wants to if he’ll just apply to it. Boys that’d never finished high school—“I’d like to work with machinery and stuff like that.” “Well, how about going into the machine shop?” Well, the first thing they’d put him in there doing is putting nuts on bolts or something like that. First thing they know they’re miking them shafts, got a mike miking them shafts, and the boy didn’t even have a high school education.



training ’em to do assembly work, do one kind of work Otho H. Haunschild I went to work for the railroad in Kingsville in 1930 as a boilermaker apprentice and worked at different locations for Missouri Pacific. I came up here in 1941 at the suggestion of my draft board that with a defenseindustry qualification I could get into defense industry until they called me to go into service. I had graduated and served my apprenticeship for four years, so I did have the experience. I went to work as a mechanic at Levingston and then working in the plate shop fabricating parts and pieces for the vessels. We fabricated the doors and frames and all of the individual pieces of a vessel and put it together, and then it was delivered to the ways to be erected. Even sections of the deckhouse we would fabricate and assemble. The capacity of the crane was the determining factor of how much we could fabricate into one piece. When I came here Levingston had about 250 employees. They were building an experimental vessel for the government called the Sea Otter Number Two. At that time we were not in the war, but we were supporting Great Britain with materials of all kinds. We built more or less a box-type vessel, and it must have been 250 feet long, probably twenty feet deep and probably fifty feet wide. They would install a short bow on the forward end of it and build a stern on the aft end, and it was propelled with four propellers that were installed vertically, and each propeller was driven with

288

they called it the war effort

four Chrysler engines. They all were tied into a right-angle gear, which drove this propeller, and you had four of those. So you had sixteen engines. These engines were intended to be taken out and used when it arrived in England, and all the steel, they anticipated that it would be cut up and used for repairs for ships that were damaged in the war over there at that time. Anything that was installed was applicable to something that they had over there. It was a one-way deal. It was expendable. But that never did get off the ground, because it wasn’t too long before we got involved in the war. We also built a tug and some small army tankers. We built some oil barges for the navy and the army. Then we started building rescue tugs in early ’42. They were 143 feet long and thirty three foot wide and a seventeen-foot depth to the main deck. They had two General Motors engines in ’em and one propeller and a powerful towing wench in the aft end of the deckhouse. These were used to tow in the disabled warships. One or two of ’em would follow along in each convoy, and if they had a hit on one of these vessels they would tow ’em into a dry dock. We went from 250 people to a peak of about 2,600 employees [over], I’d say, eighteen months. Did that create any problems? No, you were building so many things that were duplications. Like we had two shifts building nothing [but] watertight doors. So we made a bunch of mechanics that were specialists. Kind of like an assembly line in a automobile factory. They know how to do one thing, but they’re not an all-round mechanic. And that’s the way we trained people. But it became very crowded. The peak at Consolidated was 26,000, and we worked ten-hour shifts. You can imagine 20,000 people coming out of those two gates at one time, what that was like. That was the most impressive [thing] to me. It was just a mass of human bodies. We had people coming by bus from DeQuincy, Louisiana, and we had people even coming as far as Opelousas. We’d hire a whole group of French people and only one or two of ’em could speak English. Of course, they weren’t skilled personnel. They had to do common labor. We’d take one person that could speak English and give him some extra training, and he’d be the supervisor for that group. What was the mood at the shipyard? Well, everybody was sort of restless. They didn’t feel like this was a permanent situation. They were here for a specific reason, and when people are in that environment things are just different. They’ll do things that they wouldn’t do around home. There was a lot more [promiscuity] going on. We had moved to Texas from southwest Missouri, and I think all of our

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

289

relatives, or ninety-five percent, lived in a close proximity. Then when the war came along I had twenty-four cousins that it just scattered ’em, and some of ’em never did go back to their home. They just situated in different places, and they met people and married outside of the area. I think this was the beginning of migration of people from the area that we had lived in from 1900 until that time. Do you think morals and values went through a transition? Yes, I do. Of course, we’ve had immorality ever since the beginning of time. It was more of it during the war years because people didn’t intend to stay too long, and a lot of ’em moved on. In a town of 6,000 people your business is everybody’s business, and when all the newcomers came in, well, then even some of the old-timers become more promiscuous. Then we had a lot of navy people in here taking the ships out. There was always a large group of sailors in town, and this affected the townspeople, too. The sailors were always looking for a date or—I don’t say that they were looking for anything—they just wanted some companionship, a lot of ’em did. They were boys from home, but they were away from home and they lost the rules of their family, and [it] kind of turned ’em loose.12 A lot of ’em had enough training at home that it didn’t change ’em too much, but others, they become pretty wild. What was the reaction of the community to all these people coming in? They were the upper four hundreds, the old-timers that were here during the war, and they were a little clannish from all the other people. When people like us came in it was a feeling that we weren’t, you know, of the same category as the people that had been here all these years. How do you explain the success of the yards in taking people from modest backgrounds and turning out quality ships? It was training ’em to do assembly work, do one type of work. That’s what I was stressing to start with. I keep mentioning the watertight doors. That’s all they could do, was build watertight doors. They couldn’t build a bulkhead. They didn’t know how to lay a keel for a ship, and they didn’t know how to do loft work. Before the war, when you were trained as an apprentice you were moved around from one department to the other. You stayed in your same classification, but you were exposed to everything within that classification of work. Like a machinist, he worked in a shop running the lathes, the drill presses. Then he also tore down the engines and replaced ’em. He worked on gears. He worked on pumps. We had regular programs, and each apprentice had to spend so much time doing this type of work. But during the war that wasn’t the case. We didn’t have the time available to [train people to do different things]. We built sixty

290

they called it the war effort

to seventy rescue tugs. For each rescue tug you had ten watertight doors. That’s ten times sixty. Then, say, if we built ten tankers, well, they’re still watertight doors. They knew pretty well how to build ’em.



the jukebox was playing “milk cow blues” Billie and Russell L. King Russell: I grew up believing and being taught that if you don’t work you don’t eat. We were poor. Daddy worked in the shop [for a] lumber company, but there was five of us kids and this was during Depression years. We canned. We farmed the gardens, you know, truck farms around the house. You talk about changes and all, the day I retired and just sat down and pondered, it dawned on me that I can eat, sleep, do what I want to and not hit a lick at a snake. Now, that’s one of the most profound changes that I’ve had in my lifetime. Russell: December 1941, I first came to Orange, shortly after Pearl Harbor day. I came down job hunting. Came from Nacogdoches. The first morning I came to town, at four o’clock in the morning, we hit the Strand Restaurant, and the jukebox was playing “Milk Cow Blues.” It was cold outside, but it was so warm inside the restaurant. Billie: I came in ’45 and worked in the cafeteria. Russell: The money they offered was so much better than the money I was making. It was an opportunity. What kind of people were coming in? Russell: Mostly with rural background. Now, supervision basically were people who had experience before in shipyard work, but for the rank and file, a lot of rural background. It was nothing new to have a welder working with you that he’d been a farmer up in East Texas four months ago. It was rather amazing [how] they learned and adapted. We launched the first ship on Texas Independence Day [March 2, 1942], destroyer DD-569. When it was launched it was just a hull, more or less. Well now, when it got to the outfitting docks there was a big, huge section of the deck plate that was left open. Then they would set the boilers and the machines and the motors and everything like that in. Well, there was a tremendous amount of catwalk in and around the multilevels in the boiler room. On the first two they were put in piece by piece. They’d weld angles, put the grating in.

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

291

Weld more angles, put grating in. But then—it’s just Yankee ingenuity— we had what we called a prefab shop that did a lot of prefabrication, parts for the ship. So we started putting ’em together in the prefab and bringing ’em down as units of the catwalk system and setting it in place. This type of thing. It was a-learning as you went. What was the secret to this learning as you went? Russell: These people weren’t dumb bunnies. They were people who had survived off the land, and knowing how to farm and how to analyze and do things and use a lot of common sense. And they were in good physical shape and making more money than most of ’em had ever made in their life. But it was something that they became dedicated to, and this was a motivating factor, because we had people, like I say, in just a few months were welding up a storm that had never seen an electrode before. I was a riveter, and that was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. The ship was an all welded ship on each end, but in the middle it had armor plate, oh, an inch or better thick that had holes where it overlapped. The hot rivet was placed in from the bottom, and the riveter drove from the top. The reason for the armor plate, of course, [was] for the protection of the vital parts of the ship. [The aft and stern] were welded. A lot of that was storage, crew’s quarters—things like that. [It was thinner], and, for the most part, a lot of it was galvanized. That was my first knowledge of galvanic poisoning. People would get sick on galvanized fumes from the welding, and the old home remedy then was drink lots of sweet milk. And it worked. Now, eyes being burnt from the arc, flashes of the electrode, I was familiar with that. My father worked in a shop there in Nacogdoches, and he would get his burnt, and Mother would take an Irish potato and make a poultice and put on ’em. Take one of the old diapers that didn’t have any little kids in ’em and put that over his eyes. And that starch or something in that potato—but I knew about that but I didn’t know about galvanic poisoning. Where were you at the time? Billie: Garrison, Texas. I had a brother-in-law, he was a dairyman, and he gave up dairying and came here. He heard about the shipyard days [and] he came down here with some of his friends. When he’d come home he’d tell us all about it, because on weekends he’d shuttle back. His wife, when she moved down here with him, [told] us about the cafeteria. Then three of us girls—two sisters older than myself—we three came here. [I was sixteen.] They made so much more money by coming, because farming was hard. In fact, his wife, I think, gathered the crop when he came. Were you aware of any stresses placed on them?

292

they called it the war effort

Billie: Just other than—you don’t usually see women work like men, and my daddy would always say that she’d work so hard, because she could plow and she could hitch up the wagon and all that stuff that men do. We lived about eight miles from her, and all of us would go at different times to help. Russell: It was always this looking—tomorrow we’ll do this. He was looking for a house. He had his name in the pot to get a house in Navy Addition, and they were looking for that so they could go be together. What was the mood in the shipyard? Russell: Well, meeting quotas was one thing, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for that. I remember one year we had the slogan, “A ship a day in the month of May,” and the ripples wouldn’t die in the river till we had another one in it. The main thing of the mood was, though, it’s a temporary existence. When this is over, I’m going. There was no feeling of permanency, and sometimes I think we might have been better off if some of us had built quicker and established roots quicker. What about drinking, sleeping on the job? Russell: I worked for a guy at one time, and he was French, from Jeanerette, Louisiana. He wanted to show his crew at Christmas some sort of a gesture for Christmas. So he brings in a fifth, [and] at a set time on that night shift—they had what they called a double bottom, way back in the fantail, down about four sets of stairs—at a set time the crew gathered back there and just passed the bottle around till it was gone. That was his way of saying “merry Christmas” to his crew. But as far as dogging off and goofing off, most of the people were proud of their job. Number one, it was more money than they’d ever made, and then number two, I think they had the patriotic feeling about it. They were proud. They were proud of meeting deadlines. I worked as many as thirty-six hours in a stretch so that ship could be taken on out on a trial run. You reached the point of fatigue, and then you got wound up tight. That’s the way you stayed until you just almost [dropped], but you had that motivation to reach that goal, to get that last rivet in. We had one stretch of minority-group problem. The black community stayed off, and it stands out in my mind vividly because they were the groups that picked up the food scraps around in the yard. I forget how many days, but it was long enough that there was a stench about it in the yard. What about race relations on the job? Russell: It was good. Well, I say it was good. Back then the black man was in a place and the white man was in a place, on the farms—anywhere— and it was “Mister” and “Yes sir,” and this carried over into that. The blacks were not in any skilled jobs. They were in the janitorial, the menial labor,

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

293

the cleaning, and so forth like that. But as far as conversation back and forth, it was just like it would have been if it’d been in a cotton patch in East Texas. And a good black was looked on with the same respect there as he was in the cotton patch, and I know, to quote her father, he’d always tell you he’d rather have a good black on the other end of a crosscut saw than a lazy white man. But you got to remember, at that time the sorriest white man in the South thought that he was better than the best of the black men. You gotta remember that philosophy pervaded, and it was in people’s thinking. What about women at work? Russell: Of course, there was a tremendous amount of women, to begin with. The women did a lot of lapping the joints of high pressure steam piping. Well, if she was close to middle age, maybe a little overweight, give the appearance of having a couple of kids, she’d work all day long on her job. But if she was fairly young and the Lord had blessed her fairly well, well then, you’d go by [and] there’d be maybe a painter down there spelling her off on that. Later on you’d go by there’d be a welder or electrician or something like that.13 But there was a lot of women and a lot of skilled women. Now, where their skill really excelled was in the wiring. A ship has a tremendous amount of small, little wiring systems, the radar and all like that—junctions—and that’s where the women really came in, sitting at those boxes day after day. But I don’t think, if you want to use the term “hanky-panky,” I don’t think that went on to any degree. Now, it probably generated a climate and environment for something after [work], but overall, within the confines of the yard itself, I don’t think [it occurred] because people for the most part worked. Keep in mind you’re in a war. War, environment and climate of a war, does things to people’s thinking that you wouldn’t normally do otherwise. Makes you look at things different and all. How were you looking at things? Russell: Well, [I wanted] to make as much as I could—to have a nest egg stored by and to find some form of permanency. To settle down, in other words. And basically, in my mind, it was to go back to East Texas and do it, and, of course, I’d think about buying me a little farm and having some horses and all like that. I lived in the barracks for single men there on the ground. We wore overalls and jumpers driving rivets, and the way we’d wash them, when we’re taking a shower we’d wet ’em and soap ’em good, put ’em [on] the floor, and while we were showering we would stomp ’em. And then we had steam radiators in the rooms and we’d dry ’em.

294

they called it the war effort

Billie: Where we lived in the dormitory was real nice, because [the woman in charge] was like a mother to all of us. When the guys came to pick up their dates they had to sit in a lobby. They weren’t allowed to go to our rooms or even in the halls. When we dated, the guys would come and sit down, and then the mother of the dorms would call us on the intercom. And we had certain times to be in at night, too. So we didn’t see a lot of drinking, and [because of ] our raising we did not date soldiers and sailors. You were not to date soldiers— Billie: Soldiers and sailors, because they probably had wives back home and everything, and they would story to you and all that. Of course, we was always raised in the church, you know, so I guess that’s where it generally comes from. Russell: Had you heard of that before, that philosophy?—“Don’t date servicemen!” Back in those days, ever so often the military would come through on maneuvers, and very few times when they left there wasn’t some little girl maybe expecting.14 It was just that built-in [notion] that you don’t know enough about ’em, and so the mothers prevented daughters from [dating them]. When you came, how did Orange receive you? Russell: There was a little bit of feeling of resentment of the Old Guard, because their way of life was being changed dramatically. That area north of Green Avenue, from about Third Street up to Fifteenth, that was more or less Nob Hill [referring to the exclusive neighborhood in San Francisco]. That was first class. The Old Guard people lived there. Yards immaculate. Azaleas. Bridal wreaths. Probably get a yardman for fifty cents a day. Houses painted and all. Well, you got a feeling that the old-liners more or less resented you, but they were torn because they had businesses, a lot of ’em, and they could sell anything they had. But at my level it didn’t affect me that much, because I wasn’t of the country club level or big up in management or anything like that. I can see where somebody [might be resentful] that had a nice home on a corner lot up there, and then all at once people were walking by going to work back and forth of a morning and talking and all that noise. Orange has been good to me, because we ate good, slept good. We worked hard.



They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

295

if i said i didn’t have a good time i’d be lying Eddie Morris When I went to get married about fifty-three years ago, I went to the back door of the church and called the preacher out of the church house and told him I wanted to get married. They’s having a big revival. “Well, come on in. We’ll marry you right in that church.” “No, I don’t feel like I ought to be married in the church. I’m not living up to the church, and I don’t think I ought to be married in there. Come out here on the sidewalk and marry me.” And that’s where I got married, on a sidewalk at the church. That’s the way I felt about it. I was working at Weaver Shipbuilding Company, but I was across the river at the time it broke out—at the Show Boat standing at the bar. I didn’t hardly believe it, nothing about it. But we’d been working at the shipyard for a long, long time building ships and stuff for the war whenever it did break out. It was good days, I’ll tell you for sure. It was wide-open from here to as far as you could go into Louisiana, and there was a honky-tonk every hundred feet. It was just wide-open from daylight till dark. Four or five of the places never did close. Never even had no doors on ’em. It was always something going. And it was lots of fun. Did you go over there regularly? Yeah. Very regularly. [Laughs] What was life like across the river? Well, you’d—the general rule—wind up in a fight might near every night over there. If there was any man to you a’tall you had to fight, because there was always somebody to challenge you across that river. If you’d ever been in a fight you’d get in a fight. Did you get in your share of fights? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I got in my share of ’em. They had a place out here on the highway. Well, I just walked in there one night—just walked through the door. The band was playing over in the corner, and I started walking over there, and whenever I got about halfway a guy jumped up from a table and hit me right between the eyes with a fifth of whiskey. Knocked me backwards, and I seen the guy coming back to me and so I knocked him down. I thought that was all of it, and I started on to the bandstand to put some money in the kitty for ’em to play a tune. Somebody hollered, and I turned around and he was coming, and I throwed my arm up like that and he stabbed me right through there [left triceps]. Come out here [and] just

296

they called it the war effort

went into here [chest] just a little bit. [The knife went through my arm.] And he stabbed me in the back. We fought around there for a few minutes, and after while he got a chance and he run outside and jumped in a car. He had a colored man for a chauffeur, and I didn’t even know who he was. Never seen him before in my life. But it was a [case of ] mistaken identity, and while he was cutting at me he’s cutting hisself. I was throwing his arm back and forth like that, and he taken gangrene in his arm.15 He’d put a tourniquet on his arm, and that nigger drove him all the way to Biloxi, Mississippi, and they had to take his arm off the next day. [The] constable went to get the guy and wanted me to file charges against him, but I told him, “Hell, he lost more than I did.” I bled. You’ve heard of blood running out of your boots, well, I had on a pair of cowboy boots, and it was sloshing out of my boot. They put me in the back of a pickup truck and brought me to the hospital, and I stuck to the truck when they started to take me out, there was just so much blood in the truck. That was about three months before they drafted me in the army. Did you have a reputation? Quite a bit. I think that’s why I went in the army. There was a guy that come in the Orange Athletic Grill one night, and he was a shore patrol. So we got in a fight. He hit me with that billy club and broke it over my head. We fought around there for a while, and he was a big man. I guess he weighed 230 pounds. And he stuck his finger in my mouth. Well, I bit his finger off. Bit it plumb off. Just about three weeks later I was building ships down here. I was working on a defense job, and I’d been turned down 4-F twice before. So they called me to go in the army. I caught the bus up there one morning, and when I caught it that shore patrol got on there. He still had his hand wrapped up. When I got to Houston they laid me down on a couch till my blood pressure got low enough to take me in the army, and that shore patrol was sitting right there. He’d got on that bus and went over there. He was there to see that I got in the army, I believe. I’ll always believe that. What would start those fights? Well, you’d be drinking, and them sailors down at that base down here— they was cocky, you know, and they thought they were something else. I had fights with lots of ’em. There’s a lot of people here from up in Shelby County. Everybody you’d talk to—“Where you from?” “Shelby County.” Well, there were a lot of rough people come from up there—a lot of rough people. Them ol’ farmers and stuff come down here, and it’d build up during the period of time around them dances. From eight till ten o’clock you hardly ever seen a fight around one of them places. Generally run from ten

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

297

till twelve, along in there, I guess.16 It could have been the drinking. People building up their courage with that whiskey, beer, I guess. I fought a little bit in the ring way back when I was young, and I’ve had a fight with lots of people. I’ve fought a lot of people and never lost too many fights. And it seemed like a person that had a little reputation would get challenged every time he walked in a place. Didn’t make no difference where you was at, whether it was in a bar or a dance or whatever it was. There’s lots of ’em that happened. Some guy’d say, “There’s ol’ so-and-so. I’ll bet you couldn’t whip him.” “Well, I believe I could if I had a fight with him.” Well, it wouldn’t be long before that same guy’d be over there with that guy telling him the same thing, [that] you said that you could whip him. It wouldn’t be long there’d be one got up. How were things at work? We worked hard. We were believing in trying to win the war and everything, and we had a deadline to meet in building these boats. We’d get up races on them boats to see who’d finish the boat first. There’d be a planking crew over here and a planking crew over here on another boat, and they’d get up a race to see whose boat would get finished first and all that stuff. But we worked. I’ll guarantee you we worked. Everybody was making more money. I mean [there] was bookoos of money. And that made all the difference in the world right there. How did people handle their money? Bad. Now, I never saved five cents during the war. I always had a lots of spirit, and I wanted to go all the time. I just wanted to be where the bright lights was, I guess. If I said I didn’t have a good time I’d be lying. Even getting beat up and cut up and everything else I would say that I wouldn’t sell my life. There’d be a lot of things I’d do different. I’d quit drinking before I did. Yeah, I’d say I’ve got something to remember besides just sitting here at the house. I can just sit sometimes and live them days over and feel good about it—lot of ’em. I always had fun when I was young. I was thirty-two years old when I went in the army, [and they] said you’re too old to go overseas. I wanted to go. Yes sir, I wanted to go over there, and there wasn’t no way they’d let me go. That gave me the reds right off, and I wanted to get out of the army. I didn’t care nothing about it then a’tall whenever they told me I couldn’t go overseas. Did you try to volunteer? Well, about three times. I’d been over there about three times and got turned down. I was a 4-F when they taken me. It made me feel bad because I couldn’t go in. I tried and they wouldn’t take me, and that made me feel bad. All my friends had gone, you see. It bothered me a lot. I’ve been called

298

they called it the war effort

a draft dodger and everything else, and me trying to go all the time. That’s what would make me mad, because I was in the first bunch that went over there from Orange to try to go in the army. Did that ever lead to any fights? Oh, yeah. With sailors mostly. Why were they turning you down? I had high blood pressure and my heart wasn’t hitting just right. I had open-heart surgery after I come back. I had leakage of the heart, whatever you call it, and they wouldn’t take me in. But they taken me when they carried me over there and that shore patrol went. Then they laid me on that couch and kept me there until I got [my blood pressure down], and it just did get down low enough for ’em to take me. I guess five minutes after I got up it was back up. Was there a lot of drinking in Orange during the war? Lord, yes! I’ve seen men a-come in there a-hiding it in their boots, working all day in that hot sun—drinking. Now, that’s something I didn’t do. When I was working in the shipyards I never drank. I’ve never taken a drink on the job at the shipyard in my life. I didn’t do that. And I never did feel bad after I drank. I guess that’s the reason I liked to drink. [But when] it got to where I wanted to take a drink the next morning, I knew then I’d done went too far. That’s when I quit. Come home and told my wife, “Well, I’ve quit drinking.” She laughed at me, and I said, “You can laugh if you want to, but I have quit.” And I never did take another drink. Not even a drink of wine. Nothing.



i learned early in life you have to have a job A. F. VanMeter That’s the first thing you have to have. If you don’t have a job there can be nothing for you. In my world you have to have a job. So many people that I have worked with, I’ve heard ’em time and time again say that my family comes before my job. But for me it couldn’t be that way, because there wouldn’t be any family unless I had a job. It had to come first. So when I had a job I tried to keep it. There’s a lot of people, especially in this area, that were able to come out of school—some of ’em possibly didn’t even have to finish high school—they were able to go to work in one

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

299

of these refineries or chemical plants. People that was able to do that and get a good job easy, it wouldn’t mean that much to them, I wouldn’t think. But it wasn’t that easy for me, ’cause you couldn’t get a job unless you knew someone. I didn’t know anybody, because my dad was a farmer, and that was a little ol’ farm that he bought down there in [South] Texas. And I didn’t have anyone working that I knew to help me get a job. You can’t do anything if you don’t have a job. You have to have that. I had a friend—he wasn’t a friend. He was someone that I had known that had a welding shop [in Premont, Texas]. I went to his welding shop and told him there ought to be some way that I could learn to do that, and he said he would help me. But we hadn’t got started good till he said, “I’m going to Orange.” He had a trailer house and he was married, and he said, “I’ll take you with me.” He was going to Orange because this naval shipyard, Consolidated, started hiring people. He said, “I can get you in a welding school over there.” So he had a wife and a younger boy and we came over here. He went right to work, and then—this was in the year of ’41—they did start a welding school inside the yard, and he was able to get me in that. See, they was taking only people that had had some experience, and I hadn’t had much. But he was able to get me in, and that was somewhere in the middle of the summer, I think, when we moved over here, and I was working before we declared war in December. I was twenty-five at that time. So it was one of those things that just turned out right for me. I got a deferment in the beginning. Then it came up again, but by that time they needed welders and they were taking in some women as welders. They had on-the-job instructors for these welders they were hiring then, and that’s what I was. I became a welding instructor, on-the-job welding instructor, and later I was a welding leaderman. It was hard work and you was in some real tight places, and sometimes there was so many of you that if you wasn’t careful you would get your eyes burnt. It doesn’t take much of that welding arc to burn your eyes, and if you accidentally get too much of it, well, it makes your eyes hurt all night long. I would be up there on the inside of that pointed bow of a destroyer escort welding something in that corner, and the people on the outside would get their air guns going and be chiseling, and it was deefening [sic] where you was doing that work. I went to where they had this slab out in the open. On one end of that platform we was working on two or three sterns and two or three bows on the other end. It was close together, and there were so many people with air hammers till it was noisy all the time—and we were out in the open! There was so much noise that you couldn’t hear yourself think. It

300

they called it the war effort

has impaired my hearing some, but I just tried to fence it out. I didn’t try to hear anybody. If somebody was trying to talk to me, well, it was impossible. Did you ever worry about your hearing? I wasn’t thinking about it at that time. I didn’t like the noise. I tried to shut it out, but my wife always tells me that I’m deef [sic] and that I ought to have a hearing aid. I know it’s been impaired, but I wasn’t thinking about it hurting my hearing at the time. Later I knew that I didn’t hear as well as other people, but it wasn’t whether I liked the noise or not. It was something that I had to do, ’cause I had to stay on that job. I learned early in life that I had to have a job, and it may not have been the job that I wanted, but if I had a job I had to stay with it. I had to do it unless I could find something better. After I had been there [possibly] a year there were some women coming in as welders, and I couldn’t believe it. I would tell the boss, “They can’t make it.” And he says, “They can.” That was something that was new then. That was the only place that I had worked before or after where there was women working right there on the job like that. But they were doing their job the same as anybody else. Some of ’em were fat, but they were doing their welding right on. They were out there doing their job. Do you think those years changed you? The only thing it did for me was it was a beginning. You couldn’t get a job. The Depression was there, and later I told [someone I worked with], “Well, the Depression didn’t end until ’41.” And he said, “Oh, yes.” He’d gone to work for the company before I had, and for him it was over. But for me that was all I had known, was the Depression. So this was a beginning for me when I learned this trade. I know that the places I’ve been and the fact that I have come out like I have, I know that someone up above had to be with me.



really, the average american’s no dummy Isaac Dupree Where I was born and raised [in Louisiana] we read about ships, but we didn’t see ships. Hell, I [was] 140 miles from here. We never seen ships. Never dreamed of working in any. Up to that time—I’ll be frank with you—I never had a steady job that I could depend on. Oh, I worked maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty different jobs. Month at one place. Maybe six months

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

301

at another and a year at another one. See, back then you had no trade, and if you did there wasn’t no demand for it. I worked at foundries. I worked in the oil [fields]. I done millwright work and a carpenter and moving work. I dug ditches and I picked moss. I picked figs. I picked blackberries. Dug a lot of ditches— just anything we could do to make a few dollars. I even farmed some and we just barely got by. You didn’t have much to eat. Milk and mush, beans and rice and homemade bread, and that was about it, mister. Potatoes. Didn’t have fried chicken and all of that jazz. That was out of the question. We ate meat once a week [and] that was on Sunday. I’d get a roast, and you’d get you a little piece and that was it. [But I] kept on and kept on till this come along. Now, that opened the door for me, really, into a steady job. From then on I started doing good. I was working steady. I was working at Levingston Shipyard. We were building ATAs, which was rescue tugboats. They were seagoing tugs, and we were building ’em for the British. Hitler was crippling a lot of their merchant ships, and you know a merchant ship out in the ocean without no power is dead. So these were very big, powerful tugs, and they’d go out there and they’d latch onto those ships that was dead and tow ’em into England. Now, if I can recall, they had two .50-caliber machine guns on each side of the superstructure where the pilothouse is. And in the front they had a little four-inch gun, what they called a four-inch Gatling, and it was powerful enough, now. When they bombed Pearl Harbor I was welding on the hull of a ATA, and I was on the inside ’cause I had just begin welding, see. I wasn’t good enough to go on the outside and do all the lacing, the fine work. But you have, oh, I’d say a hundred percent more work on the inside than you do the outside, so that’s where we all went till we got good enough. Then we raised a little hell and got on the outside where it was cooler. [These tugs were] about 160 feet, and they were powerful, mister. They could pull what you called a bitt—that’s what you tie on if you want to tow somebody or if you want to be towed. They were huge things about that high [4–5 feet], and I guess you’d call ’em a hitching post. You’d wrap your rope in a figure-eight shape around ’em, and they’d use about a two- or three-inch rope, sometime steel cables. Huge things. And on a dead pull they could set there and almost pull that off of the deck of a ship. They were powerful. They had huge screws on ’em—not for speed—and they had quite a bit of pitch to ’em. The deeper the pitch the harder the pull, see. And two diesels. Two great big engines. They were, I’d say, six feet tall and about

302

they called it the war effort

twelve feet long, and they both tied into a reduction gear in the back. One engine could turn one way and the other’n turned the other way. So both of ’em could get on that screw, make the screw go the same way, and give ’em extra power. How long had you been in Orange? I came in Orange in January of 1940. I was in Louisiana, and I drove a truck for a liquor distributor. Then it come along in ’39 [and] I got out of a job. I went over [to the unemployment office] one day, and that guy asked me, “Would you like to learn a trade?” I said, “Yes, I surely would.” They had a little mental test there, and if you could pass that he said, “We got some schools to send you to. The government’s sending people to school.” So I passed this and I went to a little welding school. We were not involved in the war, but we were very much involved in building ships for England, because Hitler was sinking ’em much quicker than England could send ’em out. He’d put ’em down on the bottom. I went to Mobile, Alabama. I worked about five months welding in the shipyard there, and in Mobile you couldn’t get nothing to eat and you couldn’t find a place to live. I was young and married and had one child, so I left. I stopped at Pascagoula, Mississippi, and I went to work there, [but] I couldn’t find no place to live there either. It was all little towns with a lot of work and a lot of people and no place to live. So I left there and I told my wife, “I’m going to California.” When I started, well, she said, “Why don’t you stop in Orange,” and see her niece. So I stopped here, and I seen all the lights and I seen a big ship coming. I said, “Let me go over there and see ’em. Maybe they’re hiring.” In front of Levingston there was about twenty to fifty men out there, and I asked one of the guys, “What are you all doing out here?” “We’re waiting for somebody to come out of the yard and put us to work.” So the guy come out said, “Do you want to go to work?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Come on.” Right at the end of the bridge was a little lot, and there was some trailers there—[a] few ol’ trailer houses. This man had an old trailer that was blocked up on blocks. It hadn’t run, I guess, in years, but he wanted to sell it for 250 bucks. It was an old, old worn-out one, but it didn’t rain in it and all that. So I bought that rascal for 250 bucks. I had saved my money—$250. It was a lot of money. It was all I had. We’d get little cups and put the table in it and put water around it to keep the ants from coming up on your table. We had no refrigerator, and we had a gasoline stove in that durn thing. We had about a million and a half roaches, plus we had ants. We had mosquitoes. We had everything. Boy, the wife when she seen that trailer, I’m telling you she was one unhappy woman. That little park was full, and that whole block was people living in little

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

303

homemade trailers, tents. It was almost a shantytown, really, but today’s shantytown is trashy and all of that—real poor-poor. These people back then, we weren’t poor-poor. We’s all working. We had a little bit of money. We could buy food and all. So we stayed till she come close to delivery time for [our second child], and then she went back to Alexandria. While she was gone I sold the trailer and moved in next door with an ol’ man from Arkansas. It was an ol’ trailer, too. It was just a bed and little ol’ gas stove, and I’d cook me a hamburger every once in a while. He was a good ol’ man, but he was one of these old-time gamblers. He knew a group from Little Rock, and he’d got in with them, and they would hit these different towns and go to gambling. Two men and a woman would come down and they’d come over to the trailer. They’d come in a big fine Cadillac [and were] dressed up in them hundred-dollar suits—and back in them days a hundred-dollar suit was a lot of suit. Anyway—and twenty dollar ties and so forth—and they’d come talk to him, and when they’d come in, well, I’d get out, see. He didn’t want me in there when they were talking gambling business. These were organized gamblers. They’d set up a game across the river in one of the joints. They would come down maybe once a month, and they would let the ol’ man win. See, he was the set-up man. He was in the game with the three people plus the outsider they could suck in, [and] he’d always tell me, “Don’t get in one of these games. You cannot win those.” Did you spend much time across the river? No, not really. I’d go over there every once in a while with the ol’ man on the weekend when he’d go gambling. He wanted me to stick around him. He’s kind of afraid that he’d win and—now, I tell you what did happen. There’s several bodies turned up, around back in them waters. So I’d go with him to keep him company, especially when they’d get ready to come home. He was afraid. I was young. I wasn’t afraid. He had money, but there was always a bunch of people. That bridge was constant. All day long they were going.17 A lot of milling around all night long. Twenty-four hours a day there was people there. How did these people from such humble backgrounds turn out such good work? Most of your places had this government-sponsored trade school. You could be a carpenter, sheet-metal worker, machinist, or welder. I took up welding. [Then too,] you could take one good man and you can work ten. One good skilled mechanic can work ten nonskilled mechanics, because not all of your work is skilled. Remember that. I’d say in all work you’re going to find 75 percent of it’s just going to be plain bull work. Sledgehammer man. Lifting. Pulling. Your actual finish work, one man can do the thinking and the final finish work. So that’s how it worked. And really, the

304

they called it the war effort

average American’s no dummy. Don’t take him long to learn something like that. It’s not [so] complicated. Back in them days didn’t too much of us [have] college educations or nothing. I wind up with a high school education, but we were pretty well taught the little bit we knew in school. They taught good school back in them days. They taught the basics to give you the knowledge to learn yourself, to reason things out. That’s all you need. You can be the brightest person in the world and be dumb as hell when it comes to common horse sense. I’ve worked with people like that.



it wasn’t any slouch at all Naomi and Q. B. Culpepper Naomi: Everybody was friendly most of the time—except when you went in the grocery stores and they wanted to get the meat. One time I went in to buy some old bones for my dog, and I got just bawled out by a man because I bought bones for my dog. I used my stamps, but he said that should have been for people. That’s the only time I remember anyone being unfriendly to me. Most of the time it was just like we were old friends with these people. We didn’t know anybody. They didn’t know anyone either. Q. B.: We came here in May ’42 from Spurger. We’d lived in [Mauriceville] for nine years, but the two years prior to that we were in Spurger. We came here and I went to work in the shipyard. When we moved to Orange County in ’31 and ’32 Orange was kind of apologizing [because] it looked so bad. During that time they put a lot of concrete streets in Orange, [and] some of the old-timers [joked] it [was] the first time they’d ever seen a cemetery concreted like that. Some people actually felt like that maybe [the mayor] visualized what was coming— these ships. See, the contract given for these twelve destroyers was the first contract that had ever been given in Texas for fighting ships. Everybody in Texas talked about it. It was a hundred-million-dollar contract to build those twelve destroyers—without the guns. They intended to build them here and then send ’em up East to put the guns on. But by the time they got ready for ’em the war was on, and they felt like they couldn’t afford to send ’em up without any guns. They were destroyers—twenty-gun, hundred-ton destroyers. They had five turrets with a five-inch gun on each one

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

305

of those. A turret is a thing that can be turned all around and goes clear down into the ship hull. That’s where the ammunition is loaded, and one man could control all [five] of those guns. When they sighted what they wanted they could all five of ’em shoot at the same thing. The Japanese thought that America had five-inch machine guns when they first used those. Five guns shooting, it seemed like a machine gun. They had two great big engine rooms down in there just full of all kind of pumps and then two fire rooms, they called ’em. It was a tremendous thing. It was all so compact, and piping—my lands, it’s just amazing. Well, anyway, they finished these twelve ships, [and] then they began to build LCIs, a little, small ship. They’d launch three at a time. Then they had a contract to build eighteen destroyers bigger than these others. They were twenty-two-hundred ton, and they had only three turrets but two five-inch guns in each one, so that made them have six five-inch guns. And then they built over a hundred destroyer escorts, which were three hundred feet long—almost as long as the destroyer but not much ammunition on ’em. So it became a real topnotch shipyard as they came along. It wasn’t any slouch at all. What attracted you to the shipyard? Q. B.: Well, actually, it was just getting to be the thing to go to work in some kind of war industry. I’d been in the school-teaching business for fourteen years, but it was just the popular thing and that’s where the money was. Everybody knew the shipyard was the place to go. As far as people, we talk about it being 60,000 in Orange. Possibly it’s true—the Orange area. But see, they were running big ol’—they called ’em buses but they looked more like cattle cars—big ol’ steel things with seats inside that would haul sixty or seventy men coming from Kirbyville, Silsbee, Jasper, DeRidder every day, bringing men in to work. They actually [looked] about like these things that they haul cars in, except they were all closed in and just one layer. Naomi: And cars were going just one after another all the time on that two-way traffic to Beaumont. You never passed a car. You just got in your line and that was it. Q. B.: The highway department made a map that the width of the line was in proportion to the traffic on it. Well, the line between Orange and Beaumont was the same width as the one between Fort Worth and Dallas, and yet the whole thing was only eighteen feet wide. Maybe it was twenty feet wide by then, but it was strictly two lanes. One lane each way. Naomi: My first month in Orange we were staying with friends, and I’d wake up every morning and hear that noise of the cars. I never will forget how that sounded going by, going to work and going home. If I

306

they called it the war effort

hear a bunch of cars [today] I always get back to those times when I listened to that every morning. We had been in Spurger where it was a little place. Traffic was just very sparse where our house was, and to hear that continue—it made me think that something was going on. Something—I don’t know how to express it—but it was good. I think I had been lonesome up there. I don’t know what else. Perhaps that was it, but it was exhilarating. What was the effect of these times on families? Naomi: Well, there was a great deal of people going back to the churches. They began really calling on the Lord. We had eight hundred in Sunday school and not room enough hardly to get ’em in there. That was one of the influences. And then, money didn’t mean much. People spent it because they were making it so easy, and they’d spend it for anything. It made ’em more reckless about economy. Now, that was one influence I feel like. Q. B.: A lot of people got frivolous with it and threw it away, but a lot of people that had never had anything kind of came up in the world a little bit. They began to dress a little bit better and think a little bit more and have a little more pride in their family. Just a lot of people, all they’d ever had was just what they could raise on a pea farm, and they’d been hard up and never had dressed up. Just so many people were just actually almost so poor at Mauriceville that if they’d a-wanted to go to church they couldn’t have afforded to go. And they became a better educated people. I think much more. You don’t have near the illiteracy that we did have. Naomi: These people in the backwoods began to come up, and it’s amazing how many of their kids are college educated, but then no one had ever gone to college from those families. And I believe it was not just getting the money. It was getting out of their environment, out of this deep East Texas environment into knowing what was going on and what other people were doing with their children and for their children. You know, at the time when that started, a woman who went downtown to buy her groceries wore her hat and gloves. Can you imagine that? That was very ordinary to see a woman in the grocery store with hat and gloves. And then here comes all of this mass of working people that just dressed every which way all around ’em. It was a kind of a frightening thing, some of these older people thought. Q. B.: You know, these people that came, they were proud of their job, and they all had to wear a badge at work. Well, you’d go downtown in the evening—they’d been home, changed clothes, had on a white shirt maybe—well, they’d be wearing that badge. They were proud of that badge, just a lot of ’em.18

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

307



they just had to go home every weekend Avis and R. D. (Dale) Morris Dale: I worked for a household appliance company in Longview. When two of the guys that organized the company got drafted, they closed it down. Henderson’s my hometown, so I went there to a little pipe-fitting school [and] then came down here and hired in at Consolidated. I think the [course] lasted a month. It was just basics, mostly math and how you figure bends in pipe and learn pipe sizes and thicknesses and all that sort of thing. You know how word travels that you can make more money down there at Orange than you can up here at Henderson. Then we heard about the school and we discussed it, and I said, “Well, we’ll just go to Henderson and spend the month going to school and then go on down to Orange.” There was a connection between the school up there and the office down here. You brought your slip with you from the school, and they just processed you right on through and put you in as an apprentice. The pay was a little bit more to start with, so I calculated right away that it would be worthwhile to spend that month going to school. Avis: I came down, and it was very depressing because there was no place to live. So we went over to Port Arthur, and a friend of ours from our hometown lived there. We stayed two weeks with them, and it was two weeks later that I found an apartment. Then Dale went by the office where they were building these houses in Riverside, and he put our name down to get an apartment when they became available. It was about a year before we got a place, and things looked a little better ’cause you could move into a brand new Sheetrock house. Dale: The part that they were building like crazy during the war was the Sheetrock part. They would Sheetrock inside and out, and you know Sheetrock’s not supposed to be exposed to the weather. But it was fast, and they painted it right quick before it got wet and sealed it with thick paint like whitewash or rubber-based paint or whatever. They finished ’em out, and people just moved in ’em as fast as they got ’em finished. What was it like moving into Riverside? Dale: The only bad part about it was that the houses were so close together and parking was so close together. And then the streets weren’t too good. They were built on sand, and they settled and sagged and water ran in from the sand around ’em. It was salty, and it’d eat the fenders off

308

they called it the war effort

of the cars. Just about all of the ’41 models on up through ’46 had ragged fenders on ’em, just holes all through ’em, front and back.19 We weren’t used to the crowd and everything. We [had] lived in Longview and Marshall and Tyler—never any places that were crowded. Got down here and, boy, it was bumper-to-bumper people. What about the shipyard? Dale: I had never worked in industry, so I didn’t have anything to compare it with. The only problem was that at times we got out of material, and we had to fiddle along and not do much until they got some more material in. I could understand why, because if things didn’t come in on schedule they couldn’t lay a bunch of shipyard workers off and expect to get ’em back for a short time. You just had to keep ’em out there so you’d have ’em when you needed ’em. Of course, it was more expensive that way and everybody realized that, but that was the biggest gripe. Most of the time they kind of strung [the work] out and would just give you a little bit to do and make it last a little longer, but there was times when we had absolutely nothing to do.20 Most of the time it wasn’t over for a day or two. What were you doing for a social life? Dale: We would go to Henderson. I had a car when we came down here, and there wasn’t too many people that had cars back then. We’d go home on the weekend, and there’s just many people wanting to go back on the weekend. They didn’t have rides. It’s 180 miles, so I saw right away that if I had something big enough I could haul people up there and make a little money out of it. So I was up there one weekend and saw this school bus [1936 Ford] sitting out on a car lot with a “For Sale” sign on it. I bought it and then brought it down here. I started driving it from Port Arthur to Orange, and I knew that they had a bus system and that they had a franchise on [the route]. I didn’t figure they’d let me do it, so I just drove it like I was going to work in it. I’d see somebody on the corner, [and] I’d stop and ask ’em if they wanted a ride. I didn’t tell ’em they had to pay anything. It wasn’t two or three days I had it full every morning. The same ones started riding—“Are you coming back this way tomorrow?” So at the end of the week they began to pay me. [But] it wasn’t long till the highway patrol was sitting down there and told me that the Sabine Bus Company had objected to my using their route and they’d have to stop me. That’s when I started running up to the country. I put a notice on the bulletin board out there that the bus was going to Henderson at four o’clock. People would just come right out of that shipyard and go straight to that bus. I parked it in the same place, and just about the same people went every week, varying a little bit. [I charged] four dollars for a round trip or two dollars either way if they wanted to go up there and

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

309

stay. They’d get on, then pay up as it got ready to go. We never had a problem with people paying. They’s just tickled to death. It was more than that one-way on the bus, and the bus wouldn’t give ’em any connection where they could go in one day and come back the next. [We’d] leave Saturday afternoon and come back Sunday afternoon. The Greyhound people didn’t say a word ’cause they realized the circumstances. They said we can’t make that kind of route and those people can’t go any other way. Avis: These were mostly men that just rented a room during the week. They’d go home when they could, and this was a good way to shorten their weekend by going home. The men and all of us had a lot of fun going up there and back. They were a talkative bunch and seemed to just really enjoy the trip. Dale: They were glad to get to go home on the weekend. One thing, they didn’t have anything to do from the time they got off till they went back to work the next Monday, and, of course, they wanted to go home to see their families. Most of ’em were just married people with wives and kids and no place to stay down here, and they just had to go home every weekend. They were happy. You could hear a continual roar of talk back there all the way—laughing and talking and going on. What would they be talking about? Dale: Oh, everything you could think of, from the type of farming going on or the best way to do this and that and the other about a farm or things that happened in the shipyard. Just whatever happened to come up.



i loved boats and water and still do Floyd Goodyear In 1941 I was working at Weaver Shipyard here. I [had] started in the shipyard when I was young, about eighteen years old. I had charge of repair work that would come in. They’d come up here to be docked, and we’d paint the bottom and do whatever they had to do. Weaver was a wood yard. We built—I believe it was twenty-six wooden minesweepers and two subchasers. And, of course, that’s when it started. People began to come in, and some of these old-timers would come in with their tools in a grass [feed] sack to go to work. Some of ’em were men from World War I. Some of the carpenters and caulkers were young men during World War I. See, we had at least two big shipyards here during World War I. There’s a lot of house carpenters come. There’s a lot of difference in a house carpenter and

310

they called it the war effort

a ship carpenter, as you know. They were good men, though, and we got the vessels done. We built ’em. Were people conscientious about their work? Yeah, most of ’em were conscientious about their work. The ol’ mechanics from World War I, they were all conscientious about their work. And then there was young men, my age, that was a-learning a lot. And a man that wants to learn, he is conscientious about his work. [Then too,] they were patriotic, and they wanted to do what they could for their country. A lot of my crew was way older than I was. One or two of ’em had fought in World War I. Went overseas to France. There was one particular one in my crew that drank some. Ever little bit he’d take off, two or three months or something like that. He’d pull a bender, and he’d come down to the gate and the guard’d tell him, “You’re too drunk. You can’t work today.” But he’d say, “Well, let me go see Floyd.” He wanted me to tell him he couldn’t work. I’d say, “John,”—he’d have his money in his shirt pocket—“how much money you got?” He’d give me two or three hundred or something like that, and he never was too drunk that he didn’t remember how much money he’d given me. I’d tell him he couldn’t work, [and] he’d say, “Well okay, I’ll see you.” And boy, there wasn’t no hassles about it. Would you keep that money for him? Yeah, I’d keep it until he’d come back sober, and then I’d give it to him. John always remembered how much money [he] had given [me], but one instance there was another fellow. On Christmas Eve we’d have a little party. They’d drink and so forth and get pretty loaded, and this ol’ boy had about 600 dollars on him. I said, “Let me have some of that money.” And finally I think it was 200 dollars I got off of him, and I gave it to Miss Weaver to put in the safe in the office. After he’d come back, well, I asked him did he have any money, and he said, “No.” He was broke. But he didn’t remember giving me any money, and I told him about this. He told me he wished I’d a-taken the whole 600 dollars. How had you gotten into your position? When I started in the shipyard years ago, Weaver had a little sawmill, a little cable-type sawmill, and I went to work stacking lumber at first. But I was always the kind of a fellow that wanted to learn, and I figured if somebody else could do something I could, too. I didn’t have all that much education, but I went to welding school. I learnt to weld. I’d help carpenters, and a lot of the tools that I have, the carpenters taken a-liking to me—the older fellows—and they’d give me a corking tool or a mallet or a chisel. They taken a-liking to me, and I liked them and I learnt. I wasn’t afraid of work and I learnt. I liked boats. I always did. My ol’ grandfather would take me when I

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

311

was a kid on the river in boats. I loved boats and water and still do. You might have seen my boat sticking out of the garage out there when you come in. I still work on boats—not to hire out, I’m talking about, but my own stuff out there. I just love boats and I loved the shipyard work, and I loved the challenge of docking a ship without a docking plan. A docking plan? You have a plan to show you how to set the blocks and so forth, and if a boat come in and it didn’t have a docking plan it was a challenge to me to look that boat over and find out all I could about it before I set the blocks. The docking plan told you how to set the blocks on the dry dock or the marine way to set the boat in. There was some of these ol’ timers which really loved their work, too. I remember one in particular, ol’ man Joe Bowler. When I was learning he’d come by—and there was another carpenter they called Henry Harvey— and if I was doing something wrong he’d say, “Henry Harvey wouldn’t do it that way.” He’d say, “I’ll show you how Henry’d do it.” He’d never tell me how he’d do it. Things like that. Yeah, there were some of ’em that did, and some of ’em was in it just for eight hours of work and get their money. But I really enjoyed my work, and I loved to work with a fellow that knew what he was doing, because I could learn from him, see.



a mosquito is a short-life thing Beulah and Raymond Selzer Raymond: They sat in the same pew every morning. Their papa sat there. Their mama sat there. And their [grandchildren] sat behind ’em. They all married people in the church, and, by cracky, an outsider was just coming in here and infringing on their rights. Raymond: After the war broke out I rode the shuttle train from Beaumont to Orange for about a year and a half, and that shuttle train carried in the neighborhood of four- or five-hundred people. We all met and it left at a certain time early in the morning. We’d arrive about the time to go to work, and it’d park and everybody bailed off and went into Consolidated. They needed electricians real bad, and I went down there and they immediately hired me. That train was something else. Not many people that I run into lately

312

they called it the war effort

rode that train. I rode it! I mean! It was fine until the mosquitoes got bad. One year we had mosquitoes—the fact of it is, it practically closed the yard. They were just like flies out in front of you and just tear you up. We burned buckets with ol’ rags all over the yard to keep the mosquitoes off of you. We’d go get on the shuttle train, and they’d burn these buckets [of ] rags inside of ’em so you could kind of stay in there till the train started. You know, a mosquito is a short-life thing, and thank God it is. Beulah: If it had not been for friends we could not have found a house to live in. Raymond: We moved into that house, and Beulah started teaching school here. Beulah: There were three schools that were being built—Manley, Colburn, and Tilley. Tilley was the only school that was finished by the time school began, so we had half-day sessions. During that time, even having the two sessions, we still taught two teachers in a room for a while. Two in the morning and two in the afternoon. Did the children have any unique characteristics? Beulah: They were just ordinary students—most of ’em were. The parents had problems, of course. See, all the houses were at least duplex, and the duplexes were so close together that it made it bad. They were not accustomed to that, so they had their problems. Some of them couldn’t get along with their neighbors. Raymond: You just cannot believe how many people were out there. You just can’t believe it. It was just people everywhere you looked. I had thirteen people working for me one time in one room [in a ship], and they were all in a little corner, in a little spot with fans blowing down in this hot steel. If you can, think of about ten or thirteen people in a room not much bigger than this, [about 15 x 20 feet] all in corners and doing work. And you’d go out on top of that ship—they’d stay down there as long as they could and they’d [have to] get out and get air—air hose, electrical cables, steel, and everything just all over the top. You think of a big ship, now. All this stuff, and they had to tromp over this and walk around. I guess the thing that was the hardest for me to accept was the congestion of people and crawling all over the stuff that they crawled over to get the job done, but they got it done. What about the mood of the community? Raymond: I think it was real good. Don’t you? Beulah: But some of the old-timers resented the influx of people. Raymond: Yeah, that was the worse part about it. The churches, the people in the churches were not receptive too much. And they told people. Many of the old-timers said, “We don’t like the newcomers in here.”

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

313

Beulah: Yes, they did. Raymond: I mean they let it be known. We didn’t have nothing to do with the war. We came here to do a job. Then after it was all over with, those of us that stayed and went in business, we went to work, and our efforts helped to build this town to what it is today. Then that old resentment died down and things began to level out. I guess maybe time takes care of things that way. Beulah: Well, and you can kind of see their point. They had their little town here, quiet and everything. Raymond: And then here come all those hustle and bustles. What were you doing for a social life? Raymond: I guess the best way to describe that is you worked. Get up early in the morning, dress and get ready to go to work. Come back tired and beat out and eat a bite of supper, and the next thing you know it’s time to go to bed. Get up the next morning and do the same thing over. There was no social life. There was a movie house ’cause we went to movies a lot of times—not very often then. Beulah: It didn’t really bother me not to have any social life. We could think about the soldiers over there. They had very little social life, if any. Raymond: You worried more about the war and the people who were suffering. You’d be reading, listening to the radio, and Life magazine was real popular during those times. It came out with stories about things happening in the war. Then you’d worry whether or not the soldiers would have a good Christmas. And you worried a little bit whether or not our freedom was at stake, and it was pretty much at stake. But the American people that I know—and I think this is pretty well conjecture here—I’d say they were just outstanding in their attitude and their feelings. Wouldn’t you, darling? Beulah: Yes, I surely would, other than resenting us as “newcomers,” they called us. And really and truly, the people that [were] cold, they probably didn’t mean to be that way. I mean, it wasn’t their nature, I’m sure. But circumstances had created it.



old orangeites stick together Laura and Herman Bowler Herman: We got a friend that’s been here since the war, but he says that old Orangeites stick together closer than any group

314

they called it the war effort he’s ever seen, and he’s been here since ’42, ’43. He says, “I haven’t broke into that group yet.” But he said, “You can always tell in a group if they’re old Orangeites. They’ll all draw together.” He thinks he can still feel it when he gets into a crowd.

Herman: I was at the yard when it was Pearl Harbor day. Monday, everybody was as excited as they could be at the shipyard. That’s all they could talk about. Everybody wanted to get deferred then and get a defense job so they wouldn’t have to go, but they left out of there just about as fast as they left everyplace else. The morning I was drafted there was three Greyhound busloads from the shipyard. They had come in here from all over, from everywhere thinking they was going to be safe from the draft, and there were three Greyhound buses that went to Houston that morning. I was working in the time office at the shipyard and out among the ships as they were constructed, in and out of ’em every day looking for people. We had to locate each one and visibly see ’em and check ’em, once in the morning and once in the afternoon to verify them being on the job. Besides having their clock that they punched in and out, they had to be seen on the job. Why check up on people after they’ve clocked in? Herman: Well, there’s always that buddy that would pull your card out and clock it for you, put it in the rack and then clock it out that afternoon when he went out. They had a government department watching Consolidated Steel, and they had their inspectors. They went along with the time checkers. You never knew when you was going to have one to go with you, and he had a list of your people just like you had. You found everyone, and he checked ’em off on his list as you checked ’em off of your list. You had to find ’em. If he clocked in you were supposed to find him out there. Were there other abuses? Herman: Sleeping. They’d find a place to sleep. They would go into the warehouses and different places and might sleep the whole shift, especially on a night shift. The majority of ’em were conscientious. I saw the riggers one morning [go] to this box to get their tools out, and when they raised the lid up there was a colored man in there asleep. They just lowered the lid back down and directed the crane over and put a sling around the box, lifted it up and carried it out over the river and dunked it in the river a couple of times and brought it back and set it back on the rack. When they opened the lid he come out of there a-running. Laura: We graduated from high school in ’38 and we’ve had some reunions the last two years, ’38 and ’39, because those were the last years of

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

315

old-timers, when Orange was small. After ’39 so many newcomers came [in]. Herman: Forty and ’41 and ’42, they can’t even find ’em. Laura: My brother graduated in ’43 and his class had a reunion last year. I think there were about 300 in his graduating class, and they couldn’t find so many of ’em because they had scattered out and gone back to different places after the war was over. Had no idea of where they were. There’s no one here that they were connected [to]. Herman: Take our class. We knew just about where every one of ’em lived. They either got a aunt or an uncle still living, or they’ve got a neighbor that knew ’em, and we were just about able to find everybody. Some of ’em left during the war and didn’t come back, but we was able to find ’em through these relatives that they did leave behind. But those in ’40, they didn’t leave nobody behind. They packed up. They left.



i got papers to show i’m not crazy J. D. Stanfield Since I had been married so long—nine years—when I went to the service I felt like I was an old man, and I was compared to some of the kids that I went in the service with—eighteen years old. The day that I was getting ready to ship from Orange we went down to the Southern Pacific railroad station. Every time we’d hear a train—back in those days there were trains going nearly all the time—we’d hear that whistle, and we’d all get ready and we’d start kissing. I had a lot of people down there to see me off, and hear another train whistle and kiss again—and it was the wrong train. We had three or four trains come in that wasn’t our train. It was a lot of fun, but it was a sad time for me and for them, too—for my wife. [You] learned to appreciate your friendship with others because you never know when it’s going to end. I think we made friends easier back then, more comradeship, and I think one of the biggest lessons that I learned was to enjoy your friendship. After the war broke out, I went down to Consolidated Steel Shipbuilding Division into plant protection. [I] attained the job of assistant superintendent of plant protection and stayed in that until I went to the service in

316

they called it the war effort

1944. Plant protection was fire and the security guard department. We had control over the entrance and exit of the employees, be sure that everything was secure, that people coming in didn’t bring any bombs or anything like that—we weren’t sabotaged if we could help it. We had about 20,000 and some odd employees all together [and] about six or seven hundred in our department. Quite a few people that I remember coming to work down at the yard as guards were former deputies or sheriffs from up in East Texas and places. Maybe they had been in law enforcement all their life, and they came down and did their part [for] the war effort, ’cause they were too old to go, some of ’em, to the service. Some of ’em were very well dressed. They’d wear cowboy boots and big hats, and they’d even come into town with their pistol on. Man, Orange was popular in those days. You could rent anything, and you could sell almost anything you could get. I remember a local man that had been born in Orange and brought up in Orange, and they’d sent him off to an asylum. He returned to Orange, and he was always on the street, always wore overalls, and his famous line that I remember was: “I got papers to show I’m not crazy.” I was on twenty-four-hour call. [We] had a lot of fires down in the holds of the ships. We’ve rescued people out of the holds of ships where they’d be overcome with smoke. We had some problems sometimes with men and women. We had free parking for the men that drove to the jobs, and we’d have to, sometimes, separate men and women on the lots. I recall that very vividly.



country people are hard workers Bessie and Frank B. Rach Jr. Frank: I was working for the Ford people here. They sold all the cars they had and everything, and Edgar Brown III had been trying to get me to go to the shipyard for a couple of months, so I finally made up my mind to do it. My boss said go ahead, because there wasn’t any more new cars to sell. Also, most of the mechanics, the shop foreman and all those people had left, and that’s where they had gone, so I went over there in January 1942. I went down there working in the warehouse. Bessie: We called [the newcomers] pea pickers and farm boys. Frank: They done pretty well when they come down here. Levingston was the first shipyard on the Gulf Coast that got the Army and Navy E

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

317

Award, and I remember the man that raised that flag. His daughter was a prisoner in the Philippines. She was a nurse on Corregidor when they took it. Her daddy was a guard at the gate. They passed memos and letters around to the people. All the men, all the hourly workers and supervisors and all, was in on the ceremony when they done that. They had speeches, and a national figure was involved in it, congratulating the yard and everything. But it was looked on as quite an honor at the time. Bessie: Of course, we were proud of the shipyard. We felt like that was what was winning the war. Frank: They [did] good work. We never had anything real bad [happen], like a boat sinking on a trial run or an engine going to pieces or anything like that. The workmanship was real good down there in all the departments, and everybody worked back then.21 One time I worked three years during the war without a Sunday off. Ten hours a day— Bessie: Seven days a week. Three years, seven days a week? Frank: Yeah. But I don’t know, it’s harder for a place of business now to get out of the people what that yard got out of their people during the war. That was the most togetherness time of my life that I ever saw. How did those hours affect you? Bessie: We were young. Frank: We were young and we could take it, but it got to you once in a while. It wasn’t too bad. How would it get to you? Frank: Well, you don’t get to spend the time with your children. She had plenty of time with them, but I had folks that lived here, too, and, of course, that helped out some—helped break the monotony. Bessie: There wasn’t any monotony. We were busy. Frank: I mean! Bessie: I had a Camp Fire group, and we collected grease for ammunition. We would take the little red wagon and a big five-gallon can, and we’d go around to everybody’s house. We’d get that jar of grease and empty it in our big can and carry it to our Camp Fire leader, and she had a big oil drum we put it in. Then they’d pick it up on the train, and it was used for ammunition. We collected over one hundred pounds—our Camp Fire group did. We’d take a picnic lunch and stop at the park and eat lunch. Everybody worked. It was just a time when everybody was busy. Frank: I don’t ever expect to see that again in my lifetime, or anybody else’s as far as that’s concerned, the way people got together and got a job done—and the cooperation of the people.22 And the leaders then seemed to make more of an impression on the people.

318

they called it the war effort

Most of these people that came in here from other counties were from Texas, like Jasper and Newton and all those counties up above, and they came down here with the intent of working. They didn’t goof off on the job or anything like that. They were good workers. I had several of ’em working for me. Bessie: Well, country people are hard workers. They’re used to hard work and they make good use of their time—[better] than city folks usually do. Frank: Lot of ’em are smarter than you think they are. They knew how to grasp things. What about the stress of those days? Frank: Well, most of those people were young to start with. That helped a lot. And then a lot of ’em ever’ now and then would take a day off or something like that to break the routine, but it just didn’t seem to matter much. I never saw any of ’em come in the yard drunk and unwind or anything like that. It was pretty calm. I didn’t take any time off at that time at all, [and] I was called out a awful lot at night. But I coped with it all right. I didn’t have any nervousness or anything like that. Could you see any changes in him? Bessie: We sent a picture of him and the new baby to his aunt, and she wrote back and said he looked tired. But I didn’t notice it. You kind of get used to people. What was the worst part of those years? Frank: Oh, the boys that were killed. I knew quite a few of ’em. Three boys that worked for me when I worked at the Ford place died. It made you stop and think about people, gone like that—young. It just seemed so useless, but I guess that’s what it’d take to accomplish what the United States went after.



the opportunity to learn Lois and Charlie G. Grooms Charlie: Pearl Harbor was attacked while we was living in Baton Rouge, [working] for the Standard Oil refinery. We was told if we wanted to continue working we’d better go down to Orange, Texas, and get in that shipyard, because they was going to lay off [everyone] around there unless it was just essential that they keep ’em. I told ’em I didn’t know nothing about

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

319

a ship, and they said, well, they’ll learn you something about it if you go down there. It was terrible. My little wife went on back up at Limestone County, where we come from, and I set out to find a place to live down here, and that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. [I stayed] down at the shipyard. The government had constructed a bunch of barracks down there, and I was able to get in there. How long was I in there? Lois: About four months. Charlie: It was nice. It was a hundred percent better than anything you could get. [It was] a long, straight building and rooms on each side, and at the end of it they had a recreation area on each barrack. You shared [a room] with someone. Someone from my hometown stayed in there with me. It wasn’t long before the government moved in a bunch of trailers out here, and we was given one of those trailers. They was just temporary housing, and we lived in those trailers until they built what they called some demountable houses. Lois: They were trailers that you pull that they had placed in there. They were new, brand new; they were small. Everything was new. It was just the fact we’d never lived in a trailer before, and it was new to us like it was to a lot of other people. It was all one room. The kitchen [was] at one end, and you had a little eating area and the bedroom. Charlie: You had a bathhouse. Lois: We were in that trailer just six weeks when we moved to the little demountable houses. They were kind of little, small duplexes that the government built out there. Two to a building. Charlie: They were built out of plywood. They was cheap-constructed houses that the government throwed up there just as fast and cheap as they could throw ’em up—overnight. What did you do in the shipyard? Charlie: I was a pipe bender. I worked in the pipe department. When I come here I was sent down to the pipe shop, and I stayed in that pipe shop four years—nothing but bending pipe. It was an outstanding opportunity for anybody that didn’t know nothing much about the trade, ’cause if you wanted to learn you could learn there. The fact of the business, that’s what they set out to do. If you didn’t know your work, well, they was going to learn it to you, and if you stayed there you couldn’t keep from knowing your job. The government had schools going all the time, [and] if you showed the willingness to learn, well, then they’d really give you the opportunity to learn. At first we didn’t have the women, and we’s all down there trying to make that thing go. And out of the blue sky here come the women march-

320

they called it the war effort

ing in. They said, “These ladies are going to work down here in the shipyard and they’re going to work here as helpers. So each of you might as well get ready to accept one of ’em as a helper.” And I was given one right off of the bat. What was your reaction? Charlie: Well, I didn’t much like the idea, because I couldn’t conceive of a woman getting out there, getting ahold of a bunch of heavy pipe and getting around with it. But they done good, and they grabbed ahold of it a lot better than you think they would. Do you think there were stresses placed on family life? Charlie: There was lots of it. You’d hear about it here and there. A lot of these guys was born right at the forks of the creek and never been nowhere and nothing else, and they come down here and was getting their hands on lots of money, and all they had to do was make a check and spend it [or] throw it away, whatever they wanted to do with it—drink it up or whatever. And, of course, that brought on lots of problems, and whenever you go to mixing that whiskey with that money, well, you would run into problems, and we had lots of that.



doing the same thing over and over again Hazel and C. A. (Clarence) Parkhurst Clarence: Moon Mulligan would come in with [his] band, and he had real good music and good singers. You’d listen to him while you was eating. They had a good crowd. Sometimes you’d have a preacher get up and start preaching, and sometimes, of course, there’d be nothing. But you didn’t have too much time anyway. By the time you ate and went to the restroom it was pretty near time to go back to work. Some of [the preachers had a crowd] and some of ’em didn’t. Depended on who was talking. If I knew the man, maybe I would listen to him if I thought he had something to offer. And if I knew him and I didn’t figure he had anything to offer from the way he was living, I didn’t go listen to him. There was one or two there that I would not listen to because I knew ’em. I just didn’t figure that they had any right to tell anybody how to live and how to do. They were workers that were preaching.23

They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

321

Clarence: [In 1941] I was working for my father, and [he] had a recreation parlor. We were just trying to make a living, if you want to know the truth of it, ’cause there was very little going on in Orange. They had pool tables and domino tables in there. I think it cost at that time about thirty-five dollars a day to keep the place open, and some days, on Tuesdays especially, we didn’t take in thirty-five dollars. The big change came when World War II started. The first sign was that they were wanting shipfitters and different ones, and they had a school out at the Orange High School. We went out there three nights, and a cousin of mine’s husband— he’s about the same size I was—we both went to work. Some of ’em went longer, but they said we could go on down and go to work. At the end of eleven months I was supposed to have been a full-fledged shipfitter—of course, that’s not long enough to make one—and they gave me a crew of about thirty men to [build] deck houses for some destroyers. When I first went down there I was a big boy, and this man I was telling you about was about my size. They’d pass over these little ones to get us to go move something. That went on for a couple of weeks, and then they found out that we could do something, and the next thing you know we were both fitting things. Before the war actually broke out, the first six months we worked on everything on a ship. After the war was started they specialized. For example, I told you at eleven months I was made what they call a leading man and we built deckhouses. All right, there’d be another group that was building sterns. There’d be another group that was building bows. There’d be another group that was building foundations. In other words, we got pretty good doing the same thing over and over again. But the first group of ships, we worked on every piece that came on. We’d work on the bow and the stern and bulkheads—everything. So we had a little bit better training in the first group—see all of it. But after that it was strictly specialization, and you could learn to do things pretty fast. They got the job done in that shipyard, and they didn’t have to have a lot of training because of specialization, especially after they got so many people in there. They got to doing one job over and over, and even if a man couldn’t read a print, some of ’em were good with their hands. You could tell ’em what to do [and] they could do it. They’d build things over and over. Something that would take a week to do it to start with would be done in a couple of days. I had four years of high school and a couple of years of college before the Depression came along and I had to leave. So I had a little bit better educational background than the average one. So far as going in and asking the one ahead of you what to do, they’d simply ask you what you thought

322

they called it the war effort

ought to be done and tell you to go do it. You knew more about it than he did. I worked there full time [without] ever actually working on a ship. I did the prefabricating work in the shop, and then I built the sterns and foundations and deckhouses outside in the open. Hazel: In the summertime he’d come in, and you could hear him coming—the perspiration, you could hear it in his boots. The water was in his [boots] it was so hot. And you know, I’d think a long time then before I would spend my money. I’d think how hard he had to work for his money. Clarence: As a school teacher said about the shipyard, “The steel’s too hot to sit on in the summertime and too cold to sit on in the winter.” What was the mood of the men? Clarence: Well, frankly, even sixty-five, seventy cents—and top wages got up to a dollar twenty—that was an enormous wage for the time for the area. Most of ’em were happy to get to work. And you didn’t have a bunch of government giveaways at that particular time. Most of the people knew that if you wanted anything you worked to get it. It’s a little bit different than the attitude of today. The only thing that I objected to, I’d take coffee down in a thermos jug. Especially in the wintertime, with your coats on and your armload of stuff, I’d have to open that thing up and pull that lid off and pull the cork out and shove it up and let ’em look and smell, because some of ’em were bringing liquor in. And one time I dropped my bottle and lost my coffee and broke my thermos. It kind of made me mad, the idea that we had to do that. It looked to me like it could be taken care of another way. I can tell you, [Orange] was bursting at the seams. It really was. It was our first taste of lining up to get things. Hazel: Oh, yes! Before my daughter was born we had to go to the doctor for a checkup, and sometimes there were forty or fifty ladies waiting to see the doctor, ’cause he would just have one special day for this. He had a porch on the doctor’s office, and ladies would be sitting all around on the porch waiting to get inside. They’d take you by your number. You had to get a number to go in. That’s how bad it was to see a doctor. One day I was sitting inside and [a] lady came in. I didn’t know her, but she was always very cheerful. Every time she came in it seemed like she just brightened the whole room. People would start smiling ’cause she always had something good to say, and her name was Shirley. And I thought so much of her, the way she helped others, that I named my daughter after her. And I didn’t know her, but just the way she acted when she came in there made us all feel so much better. I don’t even remember what she told us to make us feel that way, but she did.



They Got the Job Done: Out in the Yards

323

With the coming of the war there was a fair degree of local skepticism, even derision, about a variety of matters: the number of houses that were being constructed, the number of workers projected as necessary to carry out the shipbuilding contracts, and the quality of workers moving in to do the work. It was inconceivable that back road country people could build $8 million warships. But the three shipyards turned out some 400 vessels, including over thirty-nine destroyers built by Consolidated. It was hard to comprehend: “a town this size and a yard that small.” 24 Some of the reasons for the success of the yards have already been suggested: the schools that provided initial skills in many of the crafts, the quick and adaptive learning by the workers, the nontechnical nature of much of the work— repetitious, assembly line fabrication, efficient yard management, and capable supervision.25 “Jig construction,” a departure from conventional shipbuilding, was also a factor. Jigs were constructed and ships were built in sections that were then assembled on the shipways.26 Not to be overlooked were the absolute numbers of workers (“people on top of people”), the contribution of female workers, and the spirit of patriotism. One relevant observation was that over time the motivation became more mercenary and less patriotic. Of course, the money was important. It was important enough that people stayed with their work despite the monotony, frustrations, discomforts, and risks to health. But there also had to be something very gratifying about the launching of a major vessel and the pride most workers took in being a part of the war effort. There was personal and community identification with each major ship that sailed to war. However, the shipyards were more than simply workplaces. They were microcosms of the larger community, representing almost every conceivable activity within or immediately outside their gates. There was preaching, gambling, drinking, and socializing. A country-western band might be performing at lunchtime or a band composed of shipyard workers entertaining at a launching. Business deals could be transacted, everything from arranging sexual favors to scheduling a bus ride. There was humor and practical joking, tragedy and grief. Goldbrickers, firefighters, nurses, cooks, teenagers, ex-convicts, bankers, aspiring actors, wrestlers, shell-shocked veterans, draft dodgers, movie stars, ropers and riders—they were all there. Although the workers had money, almost everything seemed to be in short supply. But coming out of the gates they met children selling trinkets and lemonade and yesterday’s newspapers. There were peddlers pushing bundles of misfit socks and farmers with whom you could bargain for a watermelon. A grandmother might be waiting with her water bucket full of eggs. It was an enterprising time, and just a couple of blocks away was the center of most of this enterprising—downtown. Everybody went downtown.

324

they called it the war effort

Above: Consolidated Steel Corporation, Shipbuilding Division (Levingston Shipbuilding Company, upper left) during war years. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D. Below: Following the war. Courtesy Elva Richardson.

This Is My Town

Crowd of workers and visitors at launching of unnamed ship at Consolidated Steel Corporation, Shipbuilding Division, circa 1942. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

USS Duncan commissioning ceremony, 1944. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

325

326

they called it the war effort

Above: Launching of USS Claxton, 1942. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D. Left: Launching of USS Murray, 1942. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

This Is My Town

Launching of USS Farquhar, 1943. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Shipyard workers. Courtesy Marene Wardell.

327

Above: Shipyard workers. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Below: Oceangoing tugboat under construction at Levingston Shipbuilding Company. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

This Is My Town

Tugboats near completion at Levingston Chipbuilding Company. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Office workers. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

329

330 Army–Navy E Award Ceremony at Levingston Shipbuilding Company. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Army–Navy E Award Ceremony at Levingston Shipbuilding Company. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

This Is My Town

331

Minesweeper under construction at Weaver Shipyards. Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Completed minesweeper following launching at Weaver Shipyards. Courtesy R. H. Voss Jr.

9

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business “If you had something to sell, people had the money and they would buy it. They’d buy anything that’d come along.” Arthur Wilson “I could sell anything I could get in the store. . . . Anything I could get to sell was automatically sold.” Herman Wood

important notice The management regrets that it has come to their attention that employees dying on the job are failing to fall down. This practice must stop, as it becomes impossible to distinguish between death and natural movement of the staff. Any employee found dead in an upright position will be dropped from the payroll.

O

n another wall the promotional on a dusty, antique clock reminded: “Time to buy Calumet Baking Powder, ‘Best by Test.’” Nearby were equally ancient-looking promotionals, discolored by time: “‘Snap Back’ with Standback.” “Dr. LeGear’s Veterinary Prescriptions . . . One for Every Need.” Farmers’ Mercantile in Orange is described on a postcard as a “turn-ofthe-century general merchandise store.” Established in 1928, it is a community

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

333

landmark, and to set foot in the store is to step back in time. It has always been a popular shopping and gathering place, and almost any conceivable product or supply seems available: triple wormer, desert water bag, pinkeye purple-hull seeds, transom catch, horse collar, floating catfish food, sausage stuffer, hand churn. There’s the whiff of livestock feed and hay, of tack and saddle leather. You can find items to outfit a kitchen, shuck corn, or plant a garden. One window advertises “Pit Bull Dog Food.” Another, “Fresh Fudge.” The postcard encourages: “Shop for bargains or just look around.” Farmers’ Mercantile is about all that is left of the old downtown business area that bustled during the war. The buildings have long since been razed, the demise aided by a marauding fire in 1963. No crowds bump in and out of Green’s Department Store, the ABC Store, Cash Drug, the Bengal Cafe, or Sabine Supply. The “cheerful chime of the cash register” has gone quiet. There is no Perry Brothers with those hysterics at the candy bins for jelly beans, orange slices, and fudge. No Holland Hotel where Irma Overton toiled for ten dollars a week, and that “bunch of little sailors” had their fun. There are no picture shows to attract long lines. Around town, you can park your car without someone wanting to buy it; leave an apartment without someone wanting to rent it. No beauticians are around promoting “Beauty for Morale.” The street vendors and side street eating joints have disappeared. No longer is there an “across the river” where business operates around the clock. The wartime flimflammers long ago moved on, and no one peddles suspicious wares from the open trunk of a car. The shoeshine boys have grown old. The carnival-like excitement is gone. Some of the veteran businessmen and -women, however, did not go so quietly. Over forty years after the war Mr. Gus—as store owner Gus Harris was referred to by an employee—still held sway at Farmers’ Mercantile. Elmer Newman served as a director of the Orange Bank (in war years the Orange National Bank). Dominic Romano was in his shoe shop; Beatrice Fuller continued in the funeral home. Tom Cockrell barbered during the interview, and Solomon Johnson set aside the pair of slacks he was altering. Doug Briggs was still cleaning and pressing. A number of others continued to work, and together they provided an active link to that earlier time when it was anything but business as usual.



i was young and i was number one Ora and Herman Wood Herman: Someone started selling lots out, in Brownwood Addition, at twenty-five dollars a lot. One man came down here

334

they called it the war effort from East Texas in a wagon, turned it up on the side and got him some cardboard boxes and the little wood that he could scrape together and was living in that wagon. He used the bed of the wagon for a wind shield on one side, and he just got him a little room there. People didn’t like that, and he put a sign on it: “It Suits Me!”

Herman: [I was] managing Perry Brothers five-and-ten-cent store. I came here on January 1 of ’39. [The secretary] of the Chamber of Commerce or the Retail Merchants came in the store one day and said, “I need to ask you some confidential questions on a subject that cannot be repeated.” And he stressed that. “You came here from Lufkin, and I understand that they’re building some FHA houses in Lufkin.” “Yes.” “Can you tell me anything about it?” I said, “No.” We talked on a little bit and he said, “Well, I have [been] confronted with a problem. I’ve got to get five hundred houses built in Orange, Texas.” Well, when that five hundred houses showed up it was Navy Park Addition, so I imagine that was in ’40. I never did tell anybody back in those days. Sounded like a pipe dream to me. Now, Ora brought her mother with her [in ’38], and the only apartment she could find was in the same block with [a] honky-tonk. She had to listen to that for—how many weeks were you there?—playing those nickelodeons day and night. Ora: Yeah—“It Makes No Difference Now.” That’s where we lived for about six months. How did this impact your work? Herman: I could sell anything I could get in the store. It was a good operating store when I came here, but when the war influx came in I became the number one or number two store in the sixty-three-store chain. Anything that I could get to sell was automatically sold. I went over to Sabine Supply or hardware store and bought a case of six-foot zigzag rules, carpenter rules. At that day they sold for ninety-eight cents. I didn’t get to mark ’em. Just opened up the box and set ’em on the floor, and they sold right now. One to the man. Ninety-eight cents apiece. What were the popular items? Herman: The basics of life. It was all five-and-ten merchandise, but we sold socks and underwear and cosmetics, and, of course, in those days everybody bought their toothpaste at the five-and-ten-cent store because it was ten cents a tube. They came down here and got a week’s work, and they came in and wanted to buy some dishes, some pots and pans. There was a man taken over a boardinghouse, and he told me that he got in his pickup truck and went up through East Texas into the little

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

335

grocery stores and said, “What kind of canned goods have you got that are bent or torn labels?” Have you seen in the store any gallon cans of turnip greens or pinto beans or anything like that? He told me he paid fifty cents a can for those gallons. Didn’t care what it was in it. Brought it back, and they served meals in there, plus beds. When they’d come in to eat they’d open up a gallon of something, and if it was turnip greens, well, that’s what went on the table. If it was green beans, that went on the table. If it was corn it went on the table. There was a man running his father-in-law’s restaurant next to the Strand Theater, and it was the most popular restaurant downtown. During noon or evening meal the people would walk up there and stand behind the man on a stool four to six deep.1 And when [he] got up off of the stool you set down and said, “Give me some meat and vegetables.” No menu. Just get you a plate and set down and eat and get out. And when you got off the stool another man behind you sat down. In Perry Brothers I had two doors, and when closing time come in the afternoon I’d have to go and with my shoulder push one door together and lock it—people just clamoring to get in on the outside. The crowd would go to the other one and try to get in over there, then I’d move over to the other one and close it. The people that was inside the store, we waited on them and made them go out the back door through the alley. I’s working high school girls, and they’d come in after they got out of school, but they were supposed to get off at six. Well, you’ve got to shut down. That’s all there is to it. But I’ll tell you the most fantastic story. When rationing [was] set up for food, or everything else, a merchant was given a proportion of what he used last year. So here we are operating on a percentage of what we used when we were a town of 8,000. Now we’re up to 20,000, 25,000, 30,000, 40,000. It still held. That’s all we had. Well, on Monday I’d get in three or four cases of candy and on Tuesday I’d get three or four more, and I just set ’em aside. I had an eighteen-bin candy case. Normally we had a tin sham that was put in over there, and you’d throw jelly beans over the top and it made a nice clean display of it, and then it’d hold about fifteen pounds underneath there for you to scoop it out. Well, before the [high school] girls would come in at three o’clock, we would take wrapping paper and cover the outside of that glass—do away with that sham and cover it up. [We] would take that whole twenty-five, thirty, or thirty-five pounds of candy and put in each bin, whatever it’d hold. When the extra girls’d come in, one girl would weigh up a pound of what’s in this bin, and another one would sell it. If it was jelly beans you could buy a pound of jelly beans.

336

they called it the war effort

Well, those girls would work fifteen minutes and [people] just clamoring and yelling like somebody at a circus. Then I’d send two more girls up there to relieve ’em, and they’d sit back and have a fifteen-minute break. They uncovered [the next] one. They’d pull that [paper] off of the front, and [it may] have orange slices in it. Then you got orange slices. Well, when the forty pounds of orange slices was gone I had some fudge, [and] that’n got fudge. Oh, they hollered to the high heavens. They’d come in and form a line at the front. It’d go all the way to the back of the store, which was about seventy-five-feet deep, go across the back of the store, come back up the other aisle and then bend out in front of the bank [next door]. I would sell 3,500 pounds of candy that one afternoon! Maybe next week we would have 2,000 pounds. How was this affecting you, the pressure of business? Herman: I was young and I was number one. Ora: [Laughs] He’s a dyed-in-the-wool merchant. I’ll tell you one thing that [the war] did. When I came to Orange as home demonstration agent there were two forces in Orange. Orange was divided. There was a Starks group and a Brown group. And several times when I would go out in the community to work with people it wasn’t unusual for the women to ask me which side I was on, the Starks or the Browns. When this influx came in during the war that disappeared. Herman: The banker asked me that point-blank question: “Are you going to be a Stark man or a Brown man?” Did those years change you? Ora: I think it changed all of Orange to be more receptive, because when I came to Orange it was so—whew— Herman: Cold. Ora: Cold. Herman: You either belonged or you didn’t. Ora: [The war] did knock down barriers. Yes, indeed it did. I have never seen such cliques as were in Orange when I came. When I found out all of that—then when you worked for the extension service you had to work a year before you could ask for a transfer—I told my mother, “I’ll stay a year and then I’m going to ask for a transfer.” Well, it didn’t turn out that way. I’m still here. [Laughs]



Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

337

get in and get your bath before eleven o’clock Louise and Arthur Wilson2 Arthur: Just anybody who wanted to could find a place to open up a little store of any kind—why, they could make a lot of money. They had a small business district in the streets. If they just had a cold drink stand—if they could get the cold drinks—they could make money. We had just moved into a new little home in June of ’41. My wife and one daughter lived in the cottage, and we had a spare bedroom. My daughter moved her bed into our bedroom, and we rented out the front bedroom. For a while there was just one man using it, and then most of the other times we had two in the front bedroom, and the bath was between the two bedrooms. Did this create any problems? Louise: [Laughs] Oh, taking a bath at midnight. Singing at midnight. Using the telephone. A whole lot of different things. The girls washing their clothes out and hanging ’em on the foot of the bed. It was a problem, but it was helpful, too. The money was helpful, but the other part—well, they were nice people, but it was just too small a house to accommodate extra renters. Arthur: Of course, the roomers didn’t have any particular hours. They’d come in any time of the day or night, and it was really a problem to get a good night’s sleep until you said, “Listen, I’ve got to work, too, and we don’t want anybody in the bathroom after eleven o’clock at night”—that is, taking a bath. Get in and get your bath before eleven o’clock. They understood and cooperated for the most part. Of course, it had some psychological effect, I think, for the conditions under which you lived. Like I said, you could hardly get a good night’s rest, and we were crowded. It was something we just put up with [though], because we didn’t have to do it. They didn’t make you rent the room, but with your salary frozen you felt like you needed whatever extra money you could get, and so that’s the reason we did it. Of course, we worked hard at the bank [Orange National]. There were lines in front of tellers’ windows at all hours of the day. We would have the payroll [for Consolidated one week], and the next week it would [go] to the First National Bank. We’d alternate. And there were so many of those checks that actually it looked like a bale of hay when they were made up at the end of the week. And, of course, we had a lot of turnover at the bank. The biggest part of the employees were women. The girls would work a while, and the work was so demanding till if they could find comparable

338

they called it the war effort

work they would leave. So it was a continual problem finding somebody to work. Sometimes it was ten o’clock at night before we got through. You worked until you got through. You did not get off at a certain time. When your work for the day was completed, well, then you went home. I just worked. Went home from work and got up the next morning and went to work. Our bank was not air-conditioned at the time, and there were so many crowded in there and it was so hot, on several occasions women would faint. There wasn’t anything you could do about that. We had one lady that stands out in my mind very clearly. She had cashed a check for a certain amount, or her husband had, and they thought it was another amount. They thought the bank had shortchanged them. We were photographing the checks at that time, so we took her back to the photographing machine and got out a picture of it. We flashed it on there, showed the check payable to her husband, and she said, “Well, I wouldn’t believe any [photograph].” She was from up in East Texas, and she says, “I wouldn’t believe that at all. I know what the check was, and regardless of what you say or show me, that’s what the check was.” So we all got a kick out of that. The check was right before her, and still she wouldn’t acknowledge [it]. I think she was honest, but she just didn’t know enough about the way that business was transacted to believe it.



a dinner club called the grove Marian von Dohlen Sometimes I have a lot of time to think, and I think of [the war years]. But it’s like a montage, it just comes and goes. I remember more of the skippers. We had a waiter named Pops. He was as thin as a rail. He was like a thermometer. If he took a drink of soda water you could see it going down his throat. And nobody ever knew his name. The only time I found out his name was when I entered him on the Social Security records, and then I don’t remember it anymore. We buried him. And Slim, the bartender. Everybody in the United States knew Slim. He’d get letters and cards from Hawaii and Alaska [and] “Hooks-a-Switch” and places I never heard of. They worked for us for thirty, forty years. In 1941 we were running a dinner club called the Grove, four miles across the river from Orange into Louisiana, my husband [Sam Smith] and I.3 Let me show you a picture.4 It started off—[one] end of the building

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

339

was a cockfighting pit and above it was our apartment. The middle room was the club room, the largest room, where there was gaming. We had dice and roulette. It was a huge room, and next to it was a cocktail lounge and then the main dining room. It would seat around three or four hundred people. We had to have a large room because we hired big-name bands, and the room accommodated dancers—a dance floor in the middle of the main dining room. In the back were the kitchen and the storerooms. The cockfighting started right after we opened the place in 1937. June 11, 1937, I set up the books on the Grove. I was my husband’s manager and bookkeeper. We had them for a while, but they attracted the kind of people that really weren’t good for our business and just drew a lot of notoriety. They’re pretty terrible, you know, like a bullfight. You can’t hardly take it, so we did away with them less than a year after we opened. Then we used that room for a second dining room called the Peacock Room that seated 300 people. So we had a capacity of between 750 and 800 people with both dining rooms. Was it ever full? Practically always, until the war came. When the war broke out, gasoline was rationed and food was rationed. You had to have stamps for everything, and we had such a huge outfit. We employed at that time 102 to 110 people on our staff. So we couldn’t get anything to sell, people couldn’t come to buy it, and the business kinda petered out, you might say. [After Pearl Harbor] everything sort of went into trying to win the war. Everyone was thinking of only one thing—to try to win the war, because we knew we were really in it up to the hilt, and there were so many of our boys that were being shipped back as casualties, particularly in the Pacific. It was kind of a heartbreaking thing in a lot of ways, but it was heartwarming to see how everyone responded to the effort. As more people came into Orange, how did that affect business? Well, we practically went under because of a lack of gasoline. We were allotted forty pounds of sugar, twenty pounds of coffee, four hundred pounds of meat, and I don’t remember what our allotment was for processed foods like canned peas and tomatoes and things like that. We had nothing to serve and, of course, very few people to serve to. There were weeks when we had a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-week orchestra playing on the bandstand, and we didn’t have thirty people in the building for the entire week. So when Consolidated went into full swing Captain [Harry A.] Hird contacted me and said, “Mrs. Smith, would you be interested in catering on these destroyers that go out on”—well, first the commissioning, the launching of the destroyers, and then the shakedown cruises for three days out at sea for a complement of 365 men and officers. So I approached

340

they called it the war effort

my husband about that. I said, “Sam, we’re going to have to do something. We had thirty people in the whole building last week and our overhead was over $6,000. We’ve got to do something.” And I told him about Captain Hird’s proposal. “Aw,” he said, “that’s chicken feed. That’s chicken feed.” And I said, “No, it’s cost plus twenty-five percent.” I said, “I’d like to go for it—just to get people in here.” We had 110 slot machines and they were all silent. “Well,” he said, “I don’t care what you do, but I don’t want anything to do with it.” So I contacted Captain Hird and I told him that I would accept that job. It wasn’t the money so much. I wanted to be patriotic, too, and I wanted to be able to pay my bills. So we got an account from the navy, the Bureau of Ships. All the meat we needed. All the sugar. All the coffee. All the processed food and fats and gasoline. We were shipping meat, not from a packinghouse but from a meat broker, for $3.30 a pound, like rib-eye steaks, boneless, and you could cut them with a spoon. We began to get people there we had to turn away. That was between 1941 and ’42. The place was full. After they launched the first destroyer the commissioning party had to be held at the country club. There were fifteen hundred people and around $12,000 to $15,000 worth of food catered. Well, it wasn’t making the money so much, [but] we were able to get what we needed to stay in business. We had huge charcoal broilers, two great big dishwashing machines, and they were kept going. People began to come in and we were in business. Of course, we had a lot of navy personnel as our customers, and everybody was trying to get as much of the war off their mind as they could. We catered to people to give them some fun, and we had five first-grade floor shows and then we had two orchestras. We had one in one dining room; one in the other to take care of the number of people. So we came in contact with a lot of very interesting people, particularly the young officers who served on these destroyers, because the Grove was off-limits to enlisted men. There was only commissioned officers. [The enlisted men] created a lot of disturbances. It seemed like they hated officers, and sometimes they’d get a little bit out of hand, and we didn’t have the policing. We could only handle what happened in our building, but the shore patrol had to handle the boys, and there were so many more of them that [in order to] not have these disturbances they declared [our club off-limits]. It was more to keep peace in the family than anything else. It isn’t that we had anything against them. As a matter of fact, I found some of ’em a lot nicer than some of the officers. We tried to keep it just as first-class as we possibly could. You could bring your mother, your sister there. Even the high school kids used to come out there. They weren’t allowed in the cocktail lounge, but they could dance their heads off. That’s the kind of a place it was.

Left: Marian von Dohlen, circa 1940. Courtesy M. von Dohlen. Below: The Grove. Courtesy M. von Dohlen.

342

they called it the war effort

We had a lot of bad-acting skippers. [One was so despised by his men] they would go move to the other dining room or to the cocktail lounge, away from where he was. And they told me so. That’s how I know. He was a kind of a martinet. He was a big “I,” and anybody who came before him with an infraction he gave the limit. He had no compassion. He had no understanding, and he was a poor commander, too. He made a lot of boo-boos, and the sailor is the first one to know when a skipper makes a boo-boo. [The officers] were very young, very well educated, Phi Beta Kappas— young men that people like me would not normally meet socially. [These] were some of our best customers. One in particular was the son of a very wealthy American who owned huge tracts of land in Brazil, and he was a wonderful linguist. He spoke five languages, and it was a joy to have him at some of the dinner parties. Sometimes we gave dinner parties for some of the young officers to make them feel at home. Then there was another one who was a law student. He was a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Missouri. People like that that were so very interesting. One of them came to me one night about nine-thirty. He came in a taxi from Orange. He said, “We’re in trouble, Mrs. Smith. Our ship sails at midnight, and somehow or other we failed to pick up our warheads for our torpedoes. Some heads are going to fall. Could you help us locate the man who runs this express office here?” I said, “Well, I don’t know him personally, but get in the car. Tell your taxi to go on back. We’ll find him.” We found him and we got those warheads. They got them in on board the ship, and the ship sailed at midnight. The navy forgot to pick up the warheads. I often wondered how we won the war. Then on another occasion two young officers contacted me at the Grove and said, “Mrs. Smith, we need a car. We need some help.” [The] ship always sailed at midnight but nobody knew what day. He said, “We can’t find our skipper.” I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. Let’s go get my car and we’ll go to all these dives along the road here.” There were eight or nine. I said, “We’ll just go take in every one of ’em. We’ll find your skipper.” We only had about two hours before the ship sailed. We found him. We found him at the Show Boat—just a dive. It was a bucket of blood. But he was stiff. He had been drinking heavily, but the young men finally got him in the car. We took him to the pier where the ship was berthed, and we didn’t know how to get him on board. The young officer of the day and [the two officers who contacted me] went up there and were huddled and came down with a wheelbarrow and a piece of tarpaulin—now this really happened—and they loaded him up in that wheelbarrow and got him on board the ship. The ship sailed at midnight.

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

343

The best way to know about a person is to see them when they’ve been drinking too much. You learn more about their character and everything, and my heart ached for a lot of the young men that were entrusted to the care of such officers as that. We were trying to decide on the menu for these ships that were going out to sea, for 365 sailors—a lot of sailors to feed three times a day and snacks in between. The question came up, “What do we serve the sailors onboard the ship?” We were trying to make some money, too, and I said, “I’ll tell you what they’re going to get. They’re going to get rib-eye steaks just like the officers. It’ll be the same thing for officers and men.” “Oh, no! That’s going to run the cost up too high.” I said, “I don’t give a damn,”—a darn—“they are going to eat what the officers eat.” You had to serve coffee on board a ship twenty-four hours a day. They say that ships run on coffee. Those who stood watch and those who were on duty during the night had coffee whenever they wanted it. It was served in the wardroom in three huge urns. And they ate rib-eye steaks, and [the] rib-eye steak had everything that I would have served for the best banquet in the Grove. That’s the way I felt about it. I said, “To heck with the profit. They’re going to eat what I’m going to give them.” Why wasn’t the Grove making money? Well, because you see, in the navy you get sailors [and] you pay them forty dollars a month. We get a bartender [and] we had to pay him $300 a month. The kitchen would lose around $100,000 a year, but the cocktail lounge made $125,000 a year. See, one took care of the other and we were able to keep our help. When nobody else could get help we had help, because we really paid them. We paid them more than anybody. Why did the kitchen lose so much? Because a lot of the patrons were high rollers. All they had to do was sign the check. My husband took care of it. They didn’t pay, and we had thousands of people from Houston, New Orleans. We even had the governor from Michigan as our guest. We had, like, cardinals and priests that traveled through. We never let them pay a check. We always picked ’em up. There were a lot of freebies. That’s it. More as public relations than anything else. We had a Baptist minister who came to us one day and said, “Mr. Smith, we need a public-address system for our backyard in our church— and tables and benches.” And my husband said, “Well, how much would that cost, Reverend?” He said, “Well, the men can do the job. They can make the benches and hook up the public-address system, but the whole thing will be around a thousand dollars.” My husband gave him a thousand dollars. The following week—but, of course, this was after the war—the

344

they called it the war effort

following week on the radio this same minister is preaching about the den of iniquity called the Grove—not just once. That’s just one of the many things you have to put up [with] when you run a gambling house. What kind of people came to gamble? Judges. Doctors. Lawyers. Some of the most prominent people in Texas. Some of the most prominent bankers in Beaumont. One of them finally died owing my husband $125,000. Those kind of people. [Shipyard workers], too. You’d see those poor women in those overalls weighing about 200 pounds with a monkey wrench in her back pocket. She’d come across from the shipyard to the Show Boat, which was the closest, to get herself a beer and to maybe play the slot machines. Grandmothers! Gray-haired ladies with an old round cap with a visor on it and regular overalls. Walk across the bridge like a elephant. Look like a bunch of elephants. It was anything but happy, but it was anything but dull. I’ve heard of people gambling away their paychecks? They did. In one instance a man cashed a check with my husband for seventy-eight dollars, and he got into the crap game. He lost the money, but I don’t know if he lost it with us or not, because later on he went down to the Show Boat and said he lost his paycheck there. He cashed his paycheck with us, but he lost the money at the Show Boat. He came back to my husband, and he said, “My wife and children are going to go hungry. I cashed my check here and lost it.” Sam said, “How much was it?” He said, “It was seventy-eight dollars.” My husband went and found his paycheck; gave him his paycheck back. He said, “You take that home and don’t come back here anymore.” His wife came about three or four hours later and said, “My husband lost his paycheck here.” My husband said, “He cashed his paycheck here but he didn’t lose it here. I gave him his paycheck back.” Just people like that. He cashed it again somewhere else and gambled it again. Some of the famous oilmen, they were the ones that would lose the hundred, two hundred thousand dollars and think nothing of it. [One man] lost $150,000 one night and he had $50,000 in cash. He gave my husband a check for a hundred thousand on the City National Bank in Houston. We got in the car, and my husband and I drove to Houston when the bank opened and we cashed the check. But he made my husband a proposition. He and his brother were then opening the Kountze [oil] field. Kountze is a little town north of Beaumont, and they had already brought in two wells. [He] had thirty percent of the field, and he said he could surely use the money if my husband would take 7 percent of his part of the field. My husband refused. His cousin took it, my husband’s cousin. He died a multimillionaire. He died leaving eight million dollars. [Gambling] makes the nicest people act like jackasses, people that you

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

345

really like and have a lot of respect for. It makes some of those that are tough customers—and you wouldn’t like to have ’em for a neighbor—act real funny. They’re hilarious. They’re comical. It just changes their personality, just like from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. Some are very entertaining, especially one that has never said even hello to anybody will start doing handstands and all that kind of stuff—or trying to pinch a girl on the backside. When they were gambling? Well, during drinking. Usually people who gambled drank. But the heavy gamblers were sparing drinkers. They were more interested in the game than they were in letting their—whatever you call it—down. Did drinking frequently get out of hand? Very seldom. We had two men, one in the clubroom and one at the entrance, who wouldn’t admit anyone who’d been drinking heavily. They couldn’t come into the Grove. Those who got drunk while they were in the Grove were usually pacified in different ways. They used all kinds of tactics to keep ’em quiet and then gently ease them out. If they were too drunk to drive, we had boys working in our parking lot who would drive them home and catch a taxi [back], like from Orange. We never let anybody out of there that was too drunk. As a matter of fact, one very famous district attorney from North Texas, he and his wife were both bottle babies, and we knew they were going to be difficult. It was New Year’s Eve, and I had a $500 beautiful dress on, and my husband had his tuxedo on. He said, “Mr. So-and-So, I don’t think you ought to be driving home. You’ve had a little bit too much to drink.” “Aw no,” he said. A real bully. A real bully who started to sound off at my husband. And, as a matter of fact, he was going to hit him. My husband said, “No, I don’t want you to drive.” Well, he got away from him. He was a big man, six foot four, and jumped in the car and dumped his wife in there and lit across the highway into the ditch with about five feet of water in it. He came back all muddy and everything. My husband put on a raincoat—it was raining—and we had a Ford tractor. I put on a raincoat; tucked my dress up to help him. We didn’t want anybody to know. He was a pretty prominent man. And we pulled them out with the tractor. My husband got down there and hooked it up, and I drove the tractor and pulled the car out. So we got one of the boys to drive them home. That subdued him a little bit—that cold water in that ditch. There were other things that were kind of sad and some things that were funny. But all in all, people are people. I’ll say one thing—gambling is bad. Open gambling is bad, but closed gambling is worse. People get robbed. They get cheated. Did people like to dance?

346

they called it the war effort

Oh, yes! They liked to drink and dance and have a wonderful time. They needed it! They needed it, because those war years were pretty tragic there for a while. But people were full of hope. They hoped for the future. They’re not like today—“Well, what the heck, a bomb’s going to get us tomorrow.” I didn’t have much time to dance. Sometimes I’d have to roll up that $500 dress and go back in the kitchen and make salads if somebody didn’t show up. I was a kind of a mix-around and said hello to people. I want to show you a picture of me before I got old. What kind of pressures were people under? Well, mostly people seemed very subdued. They tried to find their fun [in] places like mine, but most of them were people who had someone in the service and were just trying to keep their spirits up. During the war the churches seemed full all the time, and people seemed—they were in a hurry but they seemed like they were working at something. To try to get something done. To help. There was an eagerness to try to do as much as they could. What about morals and values? [Laughs] Well, people never heard of morals until the navy got here. There were more babies born out of wedlock, I believe, during the war years—to hear Dr. Pearce, who was a very good friend of mine, tell it. But he was so humorous with it. Yes, the morals were like everywhere else. There was an influx of the good and the bad.5 Wherever there is a group of people there’s going to be one or two bad apples, and Orange had its share. But as a rule, they were more comical than lethal. As I said, the people seemed to be more religious, seemed to be thinking more in terms of eternity and trying to guide their children. They took special care of their children, which I think they always did until after the war. I think the breakdown in morals came after the war was over. Did those war years change you? Well, that’s hard to say. I never really tried to evaluate myself. I really can’t evaluate that. I never tried. I never thought about myself or my feelings. There was always something else to do, like chopping up the lettuce and getting that chicken in the pot. Trying to get the job done. Sometimes the whole crew didn’t show up for work and I had forty people for a launching luncheon. I had to cook and serve with a colored busboy and a waiter. I had to do the whole bit myself. I thought more in that direction than anything else. I thought I had a magnificent time. I’d never met people like that before in my life. I enjoyed their company, and being a woman, I enjoyed the youth and the grandeur of the truly manly young people that I came in

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

347

contact with. And we got their views and learned more about the outside world. I was a pretty country girl—pretty countrified, I’d say. I come from a very poor family. Were you the object of a lot of attention from the sailors? That’s it. I probably enjoyed more of that than anything else in the world. They even gave me dinners, and when the USS Wickes sailed, they had a scarf of mine on the masthead. Yeah, I enjoyed that because I’d never had anything like that before. But it was truly affection for the whole bunch, not just one but the whole bunch. I just admired them, because they were all truly gentlemen. They came from a class of people that I very seldom came in contact with until the [war].



relax, relax, relax Vernest O. Prince [In 1941] I was running the barbershop across the street from the old city hall and fire station. [I had] two barbers and a porter. Nobody’d give me a job because I didn’t have no following when I come out of barber school, so I had to put up my own shop in 1927. I didn’t have but eleven dollars to put up a shop. My uncle had loaned a fellow some money on a barber chair, and he had to repossess it. I borrowed that. I took the mirrors off of the furniture in my bedroom at home. I hung it on the wall. I bought a secondhand lavatory, and I hooked it all up myself. On Mondays and Tuesdays all three of us were busy from the time we opened up till closing time. Wednesday was the day that was just a little bit slack. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday it started again, all day long. I had about eight to ten waiting chairs, so that would be ten waiting, one in each chair, making it thirteen. What was the mood of people when they were coming in? The only thing that I can really say [is] that they were here because they were making more money than they ever did, and their lifestyle was better than it ever had been. I would say that they tried to be independent. That’s my thinking. Independent. “I’m so-and-so.” They had become big shots, if you want to call it that. Somewhat demanding. Coming from their background to the point that they were, to a point, made ’em arrogant. Their demands made me form that opinion—how they wanted their work done. There [was] not much conversation. In normal times the approximate time of cutting a head of hair is about three an hour. Because of the influx

348

they called it the war effort

we increased that to in the neighborhood of five haircuts an hour. So naturally there was not much conversation going on between the barber and the customer. What was your reaction to their demands? I was more concerned about keeping a good workman than I was keeping a customer. Anytime a controversy came up I leaned towards my employee instead of the consumer. But it’s in reverse when the economy is the other way around—cater to the customer instead of the employee. I [remember] that one of the barbers cut a head of hair that the customer wasn’t satisfied with and wanted another one of the barbers to straighten it up, and [I] took up for the employee instead of the customer. That’s just one case in point. Was much pressure placed on you in those days? Not anything more than being overworked. My physical condition from being overworked made me go to the doctor, two different doctors, plus one time I took off thirty days to rest. I went to Marlin [Texas] and spent thirty days in Marlin.6 I’m not a believer in those baths, but I knew it wouldn’t hurt me. How were you feeling? I just more or less felt like dropping. There was a tiredness there that the time that I had off I couldn’t recuperate—just Sundays off and the night rest also. I can’t elaborate on that [other than] being on the feet all the time. We got ice delivered to the shop every day, and the porter would fix ice water for us and kept it in the back room. So one day when I went to get me a drink of water—I had a little stool there that was extra. I pushed it over by the cooler and sat down, drew my water and drank, and when I got up I thought I was a different man. When I went back to the front I told my porter, “I never want you to move that stool from where it’s at.” And I told my men about my feelings, that I felt like a different person from just maybe two, three minutes of getting off my feet. I felt altogether different. And later on I also took fifteen minutes off. I didn’t live but about three blocks from the shop, and I decided to lay down for fifteen minutes. I put the timer on, and the first day I laid down I was just as stiff as a board. But my mind told me to start concentrating on one limb at a time, to relax. So I started on my left arm—relax, relax, relax. When I felt some relaxation I concentrated on my left leg. Then my right arm. Then my [right] leg. Then my back. And then I repeated it, all the fifteen minutes that I was laying down. Within three weeks time when I laid down I was just as relaxed in all of my muscles as a person could be. I didn’t have to count. And to tell more of what that story is, three or four years later there was an article in Reader’s Digest that I could have written on that subject. Told it exactly the way that

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

349

I done it. I conceived that idea myself, maybe the first or the second day that I started taking that rest, and within three weeks I could lay down and all of my muscles were relaxed. I felt a whole lots better. In my little world my business came first. That was number one. Everything else had to rotate around my business, and just as soon as I started feeling better I started dropping off my rest. Just as soon as I got through eating I started going back to the shop. I didn’t get into the stress that I was before. However, I started another program. I did not get any physical exercise in my work. You couldn’t get anybody to do your chores around the house, so I started getting up one hour earlier than I did before—which was a hard thing to do—to do my chores in the yard. There was a fiveminute whistle that blew at one of the plants that told me when to hang up and come in and start getting ready to go to the shop. That made another difference in my life—much, much better. How did people handle having extra money? You want a joke on that? There was one fellow got to where he made real good money, and he got so tired of working—and this is supposed to be a true story—that he took a week off and he and his wife went to the beach. And he saw a big crowd. There was people gathered around because someone had had a mishap in the water. So he elbowed his way close enough to see that it was his wife, and he had been hearing them say, “Give her artificial respiration! Artificial respiration!” And when he found out that it was his wife he says, “Hell no, give her the real thing because I got plenty money to pay for it!” That’s one of the attitudes that you can take from that. Wanted the real thing ’cause he had money to pay for it.



kind of like compounding your interest Alta Belle and Frank R. Smith Alta Belle: We had problems in the churches and all. The new people coming in didn’t know anybody, and the people that had been there all the time, there was not enough of ’em going around to speak to everybody. So they thought the churches weren’t friendly. See, they had to understand that maybe they came in and sat next to somebody just as new as they were. And then there wasn’t enough of us old-timers to go around to catch ’em before they left. So we started registering ’em. They would get visitors registered. That’s the first time we started that at the Methodist [Church]. Anyway, they’d say they went to a church and they weren’t friendly. Nobody

350

they called it the war effort

spoke to ’em. I said, “Well, you probably sat next to somebody that got there the last fifteen minutes ahead of you.” And that was true, I think, in all the activities. Alta Belle: I was working for the [Beaumont] Enterprise and Journal and as a reporter for the Orange Leader, too. I was down at the newspaper office on a Sunday afternoon, and [there was] a little radio in there. I turned the thing on and they announced this bombing of Pearl Harbor. Well, then, as soon as it was announced on the radio they started calling in to see where Pearl Harbor was—people did. Of course, I wasn’t any help, because I didn’t know where it was either. But I did call down to the shipyard. They started the shipyard [in] September, so they had the administration building up down there and a man at the desk in the center of the thing. I called him as security officer, and he didn’t know where it was either. I told him what happened. He didn’t know. So we finally found it, but I didn’t feel so bad about not knowing it since nobody else seemed to know it either. Frank: I had just gone into the dry-cleaning business in the first part of 1940, about five blocks from the shipbuilding program when it did develop. In 1940 there was nothing on that point down there. Consolidated of California bought that isthmus or peninsula or whatever—bend in the river— and it had formerly been the Orange Car and Steel Manufacturing Company and had been defunct, closed for ten or twelve years. [Orange was] economically depressed in 1940. The total population was about seventy-four hundred people; something over 2,000 residences in the city. With a brand new business, we had a hard time, a real hard time living out of the total revenue of our business, and that continued until ’42 sometime. Had it not been for the war years, it would have been a very decided mistake [to start the business], because I was fairly well known, being associated with the cleaning business at that time, having worked here for another firm. We paid our bills fairly well, but we charged a lot of groceries that we didn’t pay for on time. There was a man named Barney Gunn, operated a grocery store, and we were buying all of our groceries from him. We would charge ’em and I’d pay it once a month. Well, things got so bad that we didn’t pay him for a period of seven or eight months, and I was embarrassed to even see the man. So I went to see him one day and told him that I had a little money at that time, maybe one month’s bill, and he had never said a word. Not once did he say, “Frank, your grocery bill is getting too far behind.” Not anything like that. So I paid him a little something and told him how much we appreciated his generous attitude toward us during this time. He said, “Oh well, Frank, I wouldn’t bother with that. I knew you’d pay it when you got it, and I knew you’d get it eventually.” He said, “You

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

351

know, I went in business here about five or six years ago myself, and I know what throes you go through during those early days.” But that was kind of the tone of the whole community, that we sort of scratched each other’s back and got along. When did you first become aware of the impact of the war? Frank: Well, it was so gradual. It wasn’t like a flood at all. Construction people [were] coming in the latter part of 1940. Just a trickle. Maybe four or five men hired this week and mostly bulldozer operators and things of that kind. They were clearing the site and getting ready. Two of the [Consolidated officials] went to the Methodist Church one Sunday morning, and Ed [Barkus, our minister] was back at the door shaking hands with everybody and found out that they were with Consolidated of California. They told him that they had bought this site, old Orange Car and Steel site, and were going to develop it. They’s real sketchy in giving any details at that time. So the next day [Ed] came by my shop and he and I went together to see what was going on. And [this official] just opened up and told us what they were planning, and said we’re going to be building warships for the various allies. They were doing preliminary work for the design of the plant. Well gosh, that just picked us clear up, because he didn’t say that that’s what we’re thinking about, that’s what we hope to do, [but] that’s what we’re going to do. That furnished a stimulus to me that I could have lived on half the amount that we were living on prior to that awaiting the developments. And it seemed that they came awfully slow, but it was ever increasing. It was kind of like compounding your interest. It eventually adds up. What was the mood down at the Leader? Alta Belle: They had a lot of interest in these launchings at the shipyard, and they always brought in somebody to christen the ship. When they brought them we’d have to cover the paper for the hometown where the people came from, because the ships were named for somebody who was killed in this war. Wherever their hometown paper was we’d send the carbon copy of it or send it in by wire. It was kind of sad, too, sometime. The wife or the mother of the boy that was killed christened the ship and broke the champagne bottle. I went to all the launchings. [The boy] had to be awarded a medal above and beyond the call of duty. He’d have to be killed, because they wouldn’t name a ship for somebody that was living, ’cause the sailors won’t sail with it. They think it’s bad luck. How did this affect the cleaning business? Frank: Oh, like it did everything else. It was a seller’s market. We’d keep about a week to ten days’ workload ahead. A person coming in, well, we’d tell ’em we could have ’em [in] two weeks or ten days or something. We

352

they called it the war effort

were right on the thoroughfare going down to the shipyard. I’d go down maybe at four o’clock in the morning, turn on all the lights and open up the doors. Well, of course, nothing happened that day, but the next day there’d be eight or ten people drop off, stop in early. They saw the lights on the day before and they’d bring stuff, and by the fourth or fifth day, well, we had to cut out that early business because they was covering us up. The big problem by then was employees. They worked for us for a very small wage when they could go right down the street and probably get on at the shipyard. They’d hire just about anybody that was warm and breathing at about two and a half or three times what they’d make working for us. It was just a constant, mad scramble. It was in a way a kind of a survival of the fittest. I would [work] an average of about sixteen hours a day. I have worked there until two o’clock in the morning and go home and rest a while, change clothes, take a bath, and lie down for an hour and get up and go back to work at four o’clock. That wasn’t daily but that was more normal than not. For the first time in my life I was handling more money than we had to have to live on. I had stomach ulcers and suffered with that for about twenty-five years. I’m sure that the hours and the strain and never knowing when you opened up in the morning if you were going to have sixteen or twelve or maybe seven people show up for work [contributed to the condition]. I [saw] an article in the trade journals about a place in Seattle, Washington, where the defense industry boomed long before it got down here. They had the front windows just blacked out with signs—“We’ll be open Tuesday from eight to four. Bring in or pick up things on Tuesday or Thursday.” In that period of time everybody in the [Seattle] plant waited on the front, the counter, and the stuff just poured in there. They had everybody writing tickets, accepting bundles, and the same thing of outgoing bundles. And I had boasted that I would find a way to handle it. I wouldn’t ever black out the front of my place and say that you’ll have to come back some other time to bring your cleaning in. I thought I could handle any of those situations, but I found out differently. What was the best thing about those days? Frank: A chance to do whatever you were capable of doing. Of course, the best thing was you could get all the business you could handle, which to me was a godsend. At the other end of the spectrum, all you could handle was determined by your ability to recruit and train employees. And I’ll have to confess that from my earliest experience in the cleaning business the emphasis was on quality production. Fortunately, the first place I ever worked had that sort of attitude, and it was a constant emphasis on producing a high quality of service. [However], the situation got to the

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

353

point where it was virtually impossible to keep the same standard of quality we had been accustomed to. I got one real good production man and put him in charge of the production part of it, and he came up in a different school. He was far more interested in getting the stuff in and getting it out and increasing the volume dollarwise than he was in satisfying customers. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, [because] there’s going to be somebody else right behind you that will take your place if you never come back again. It’s a tragic situation, but that condition was existing in Orange at the time. Anytime the demand of the customers is greater, anytime that the demand of the market is greater than the ability to produce, whether it be merchandising or service or what, why, the public’s going to suffer. We sent things back and we’d do them over. And actually, we lost some pretty good production people as a result of getting tired of having to do over a job that they’d already done. As far as they were concerned it was done in an acceptable manner, and if we didn’t agree, why, just get somebody else to do it.



boocoos of ’em. mercy ! E. Bruce McClelland Has anybody told you about the shuttle train? As that train began slowing down those people would begin jumping off of that train while it was still moving. Just like a bunch [of ] wild hyenas. And it was several through the years that got killed jumping off that. Jumped right in the radiator of a car, ’cause traffic was heavy, see. When I was on the graveyard shift, our gate was right there about where the train would stop, and we’d get all our work caught up and we’d go out to the gate to watch the show, those people getting off that train. It was a new show every trip.7 In 1941 I was working for the public utility company. After the war really got going good there was only three of us with the company that was qualified to run the powerhouse, and we worked no less than twelve hours a day and up to sixteen hours a day, and we did that for about five years. I did a many a sixteen-hour days. They had a bunkhouse right there on the plant, and a lot of weeks I wouldn’t even go home. Just sleep right there on the plant for five or six hours and then go back and take my sixteen-hour

354

they called it the war effort

shift and come right back. Of course, I was at the age then, twenty-three, twenty-four years old, that I felt guilty for not being in the service. I kept trying to volunteer, and every time I’d go down and volunteer they’d tell me, “Well, your company says that you’re too essential to ’em. So you’re on deferment. Until you hear from us otherwise you will stay on deferment.” And I did. Was anybody giving you a hard time about that? Well, let’s put it this way—slurs. You see some woman with maybe a kid and maybe her husband had just up and joined the army, and they’d [say], “[I] don’t understand why he’s not in the service. He’s only got a wife. I got two children and he’s in the service.” I think every person—I’d hate to see it—but I think if you go through a war period it makes a better person out of you. Personally, I learned a good trade that I would not have learned hadn’t it been for the war. I worked with men that had been working in the electrical trade all their lives. Then on account of a shortage of help I was put in charge of a shift, running the plant, and that dumped a lot of responsibility on all our backs—the other young men, too. See, all that wouldn’t have happened. Maybe the experience I’d a-had [would have been] pumping gas or working in a grocery store or something like that, see. I’ve often wondered how I’d a-fared if I’d a-got in the war, whether I’d have come back or not. You know, you always got to think about that. So many of ’em didn’t come back. Orange had a big percentage of losses. What kind of impact did that have? It had an impact on everybody, because when they went in the service Orange was small, and everybody, every family knew everybody else. Nearly everybody went to school together, and all the people still remembers the boys. Billy [Tilley] and I played high school football together, and that was a horrible loss. I think he got killed in ’41, but after that it got to being so frequent that you’d kind of just get used to it. Names got to coming in so doggone fast you’d hate to pick up the [paper]. Every day there’d be some of ’em in there. It got to the point where I would hardly look at the front page. A horrible thing that happened, there was a well-to-do family that had a real young son, graduated from high school at the crucial years there about ’42, and he got drafted. He wasn’t but eighteen years old. Six weeks after he got drafted he was killed in France. It was six weeks! He didn’t get much training. Those kind of deaths is what shook us up more than anything else. These guys that was twenty-three and twenty-four and twentyfive years old—but when a boy didn’t get his chance to live at all and got killed—Ohh, we had boocoos of ’em. Mercy! You know, a lot of people in a

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

355

big city, they read about something and they say, “Well, I don’t know him.” But when it came out in the paper in a town the size of Orange it hurt, and it hit everybody in Orange. All the families either went to church together or lived together, and everybody was hit by the impact.



“big mamou” and “jole blon” Crawford Vincent My sister gave me a fiddle when I was nine, and I got an ol’ barber down there on the Mermentau River to tune it. I played fiddle the first time when I was nine—well, harmonica when I was eight. You could pack that in the cotton field. You just play ’em, and then when they get kind of dirty you boil ’em in hot water. Anybody can play a harmonica, but they don’t master it. I played it pretty well, but I never did play it in a band. I played guitar, fiddle, and drums with the western-swing band. I was [in] what they called then a CCC camp in Hackberry, Louisiana. It was sorta like the army. I enrolled in that in 1940, and in 1941 that’s where I was living then. I was nineteen years old. I was on the shovel digging ditches for about five months, and then I got the job as a toolhouse assistant clerk and the head of their gas station. So I was glad to get off that shovel. I moved here in October of ’44, not with the shipyard but in the entertainment [field]. We [Leo Soileau and his Rhythm Boys] were coming through here, and we were playing music at these clubs around Port Arthur mostly. Then this fellow here [a bartender at the Show Boat] said, “Boy, this is a booming town. You should move over here.” So we moved here and had this sit-down job [at the Show Boat]. I first started with these boys, what they called the Hackberry Ramblers, in 1940. That was until ’42 and then I went to the army. They were the first string band to record “Jole Blon,” and [then] they started playing music like Bob Wills and Milton Brown and the Light Crust Doughboys. Well, I needed a job, and I got to playing drums for three dollars on Saturday night, so that was quite an income in 1940, on Saturday night. I was working for a dollar a day. We got thirty dollars a month from the government and a room and board, so this was just a sideline, you see.

356

they called it the war effort

Leo Soileau and his Rhythm Boys. Back row: Eddy Pursley, D. W. Thibodeaux, Herbert Duhon. Front row: Soileau, Crawford Vincent, Gene Navarre. Courtesy Crawford Vincent.

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

357

I got hurt, a disability, [and] came out [of the army] in ’43, and that’s when I met Leo Soileau. We were at the Show Boat [in ’44]. Those people working at the shipyard really liked country and western music, because when we got the job, the man [Claud Williams] that owned [the Show Boat]—I hope I’m not discriminating—but he had a colored band. The fellow that worked for him, he says, “Why don’t you hire these boys here? They play country and western music like Bob Wills, Milton Brown, the Light Crust Doughboys, and Ernest Tubb.” But Mr. Williams said, “Well, I don’t know. I hate to get rid of my colored band.” “Well,” the bartender says, “they ain’t bringing you crowds like they should be from the shipyard.” I was the leader, the roadman, and I said, “What about if we just try two or three weeks?” So anyway, he tried us, and we stayed there two years because the people at the shipyard wanted that kind of music. There was wide-open gambling then. Plenty of slot machines and blackjack. They had a restaurant in there, and sometimes at two or three o’clock in the morning they’d have a new shift [from the shipyard]. A new group of people was getting off, and they’d end up over there, have a beer or whatever and play slot machines. That was big business then, that’s for sure. We’d start [playing] about eight-thirty until about two or three o’clock. He had us on a salary, and we’d get a lot of tips, because the people in Texas tips more than Louisiana. I hate to say that, but we had a lot of tips, and we’d make sometimes forty or fifty dollars a week. We had a kitty box. Those people that were coming in on the late hours from the shipyard, there wasn’t nothing cheap about those people. There was a big bar there, but he had a [picket] fence [around the dance floor] when I first started there. He had a little bitty dance floor. The floor was small because wasn’t too many people dancing then. Then finally, when we started playing, he had to take that fence down. Mr. Williams said, “Well, I didn’t know if I’d ever get that kind of crowd dancing.” He’d call that tune “Big Mamou”—you know, that made [a] national hit—he called it “Big Moomoo.” He couldn’t speak French. He’d say, “Play us some more of that ‘Big [Moomoo].’ That’s what they seem to like to dance [to].” You see, it was a French waltz, and they’d dance to those waltzes a lot. Shipyard workers, they were good customers. I thought they were a very friendly people and happy. Good, hardworking people. It looked like to me there was two different crowds, the people that mostly danced and the other people that was gambling. I could see [the gamblers] dressed up. They sure didn’t come out of the shipyard, because a lot of ’em [came] with ties and coats. The people that were gambling, some of ’em didn’t even pay attention to who was playing. They were strictly gambling.

358



they called it the war effort

How did people handle the money that they were getting? They did real well, some of ’em. A lot of ’em had never got a job like that. There’s no doubt in my mind that from the cotton fields to this shipyard, that was quite a shot in the arm. It was not like it is now. A lot of ’em [had] no education and no skill, you see. A lot of ’em was barely getting by. I grew up in them marsh countries on a cotton farm making about $300 a year. That’s about all we could make. When I left down on the farm I bettered myself. Fifty cents a day, that’s what I was making exactly when I left there in September 1940. I was just fresh out of high school. Finished school in June and found a living jobbing around. Fifty cents a day. Then I joined the CCC camp that October. You see what I mean? A dollar a day was better than fifty cents because I was getting room and board. What kind of music were you playing? You mentioned western swing. It was mostly country and western songs or western swing like Bob Wills’ songs, “San Antonio Rose” and “Walking the Floor over You,” and Floyd Tillman’s “Slippin’ Around,” and another love song, “[I Love You] So Much It Hurts.” There’re a lot of love songs. Actually, when you’re playing nightclubs, it’s like Hank Williams’ songs. It’s songs that’s something about love affairs, like Bob Wills’ “Corrine Corrina” and stuff like that— and then “Roly-Poly.” Then there was a lot of wartime songs that was sad songs, like “[Stars and Stripes on] Iwo Jima” and Gene Autry’s song “Be Honest with Me” and “I’ll Be Back in a Year.”8 Al Dexter made “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” [and] that was a song that we played a lot. And there was songs like “[There’s a] Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere.” We didn’t play that too often because maybe somebody had been hurt, you know. I don’t think that we played that too much—sad songs. There was something about losing a loved one—and “White Cross on Okinawa”— something like that. Mostly they didn’t request those songs—not often, anyway. “Kind of Love I Can’t Forget.” And we got a few requests on French songs. “Big Mamou” and “Jole Blon” was just two at that time that the people requested a lot. They wanted mostly happy songs—”I’ll Keep on Loving You” or the “Waltz You Saved for Me.” And like I said, it’s a song that they loved to dance to. This is dancing country here. It’s not like around Nashville, where they have these auditoriums, just people sitting. Rather, in this area here they wanted to waltz, and the jitterbug at that time was kind of popular. We’d play a little bit of “Woodchopper’s Ball” or “In the Mood” and then Glenn Miller’s songs sometimes. And then songs like “It Makes No Difference Now” and happy-go-lucky songs, especially the ones that we were playing for the shipyard workers. Did you ever think about going to the shipyard?

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

359

I thought about it at one time, and then I changed my mind. I could of went [but] I was over here playing at that time. [We were] like a family group, you see. If I’d a-quit the band, for which I was kind of the road manager, well, it would have been the end of them. Just like a family.



abnormal times doing abnormal things Lee Roy Boehme I was operating the ABC Store drug department, right across from Anderson School. I was operating that up until I went into the service. We were living on Cherry [Street] at that time. We had half [of a house], and I think it was something like thirty-five dollars a month. After the war boom began to pick up and housing got [short], well, the lady that owned the house said she could get much more for that, and so she raised the rent to a hundred dollars, which was more than I was even making. So anyway, we moved in with my dad and mother while I built a little house right next door to them. When the shipyard was getting started they used Anderson School as a training ground. When school was going on [training was] in the evening, but in the summertime they had it all day long. They’d send ’em to school there to be electricians and a lot of other things. So we had a lot of people coming into Orange going to school there, and then they’d come over across the street and get a drink or whatever. They’d come over in the middle of the morning for a midmorning break or at noon or the afternoons. So I’d have an influx of new employees for the shipyard coming in to buy drinks or ice cream or cigarettes, candy—whatever. When they’d have a recess or something I could sell almost anything that was a good drink, and so I made good money on that. [Business] jumped tremendously. Almost anything you could get you could sell under normal conditions. How would you describe the attitude of the people coming into the store? The old-time customers kind of sidled up to you and wanted preferential treatment, which we usually tried to do because we were taking care of our own, so to speak. By and large, though, it was kind of a get-whatyou-could-while-you-could-get-it. I remember when the ice cream truck would come up he’d allocate four or five big tins of ten gallons of ice cream. Well, it wouldn’t take a half a afternoon to sell all that and you was out. So the people that heard about it came right away. Same thing with cigarettes or candy bars or anything that was hard to come by. It was kind of touch

360

they called it the war effort

and go between the merchant and his old-time customers, we’ll say, and those who had come in later. You were still trying to take care of your regular customers and help the new people who were coming in also. But it’d get to be a rat race as far a taking care of all of ’em. Were people under very much stress? I would say a lot of people were, for various reasons. I’m gonna cite one. Lots of time you’d have, say, a fellow from up in East Texas. He’d come down here and maybe he’d leave his family back home. Well, there’s just certain things he could do. In other words, he would put in his eight hours or twelve hours or whatever he was working, and he had a room down here at one of the wartime facilities, and maybe on the weekends he’d go home to see the family or whatever. Well, then he had time on his hand, ’cause you could go to the movies [just] so much—or across the river. So there was lots of time when a lot of people had time on their hands—where they would normally be [in] a family situation. They didn’t have that. And another thing, you would have a family and maybe all of them were working and living in small, cramped quarters, so their normal lifestyle was not at all normal. They were in abnormal times doing abnormal things, and conditions were abnormal. So I’m sure it put stress and strain on many, many families from many angles. I wasn’t faced with that except I put in some real long hours seven days a week, and I’m sure a lot of people did the same thing. I think that was the reason that drew a lot of people across the river. See, that was a kind of consoling fact that they could put in their hours and then go over there and drown them in drink or good times or gambling or whatever their thing was. I guess the whole thing was that they were trying to get away from the rat race just for a few minutes. To change scenes, so to speak, whether it was to listen to the nickelodeon or gambling or drinking—anything to break the monotony of eight to eight working seven days a week. I could see where you could finally fall into that kind of a trap real easy, and lots of us did. If you got through with work at ten o’clock you could run across the river for a couple of hours and have a drink or two and maybe dance a little bit and whatever. That broke the routine. It was a little different diversion. Most of the time people kind of fit into the situation that they had found themself in. It was hard times, long hours, and shortages, but they figured, well, that’s just part of it and I’ll endure it. Of course, not everybody’s going to have that same thought. They’re gonna say, “Well, I can’t take no more. I’ll quit and do something else,” which I’m sure a lots of young men did. They’d say, “I can’t take this shipyard no more,” and, of course, they’d quit and the army, navy, or somebody else had them. That’s probably one of the things that moved me to join up to go into the service,

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

361

and it’s not that you was running from anything. You just felt like if I’m going to fight the war I might as well fight it where the action is.



i didn’t come here to make friends Valton Landrum In ’41 I was running the old ABC Store out there. I was manager. Problems really started when they started rationing stuff—and most of the merchandise was rationed. You could sell almost anything you could get. I had a guy come in and offer me five dollars for a bottle of ketchup once. He didn’t have any ration stamps.9 If we got bacon in, it usually lasted about an hour or an hour and a half—a week’s supply did—and then you’d be out for the rest of the week. There was kind of a scramble over it. Some of the women cried ’cause they were too late and they didn’t get any, and for a while they’d ask the butcher to save the bacon for ’em. But then if somebody else come and saw ’em get a pound of bacon, well, there was a big squabble, so they had to stop doing that. They had to just be first-come, first-serve. People would come to me and beg. They couldn’t see why— they’d been a customer for a long time—they couldn’t put the stuff up and save it for ’em. I tried to explain to ’em the trouble it’d cause, and some of ’em understood and some of ’em didn’t. Did that put quite a bit of pressure on you? You bet. I tried to talk to people and handle it the best I could, and as far as the stress was concerned, well, I was tickled to death to get home every night where I could relax. We opened at six-thirty in the morning and closed at six at night, and, boy, when six o’clock got there at night I was tickled to death to go. And we usually had people banging on the front door wanting in at six o’clock after we’d already closed. We started out originally letting some of the people come in, but if we did, well, they just kept on coming, so we finally just had to draw the line on it. We just let ’em knock and knock and knock but wouldn’t let ’em in. Did you lose any friends because of this? Yeah, I lost a few. A lot of [the natives] actually resented the people coming in, because they were working at the shipyard making so much more money than [they] did. And some of ’em were kind of a rough type that moved in. Not all of ’em. In fact, just a small percentage of ’em was kind of rough. But it’d give people the attitude [that] these people that were coming in were

362

they called it the war effort

a rough-type people and helter-skelter, and they’s going to be gone just as soon as it was over with. They just left a bad taste in people’s mouth for the other eighty percent of the people. My dad was in the grocery business, and he was managing the store uptown. He was about kind of like I was, easy to get along with and kind of easygoing. The only time I really remember him being upset, one of the navy wives came in and he walked over and introduced hisself and told her he was glad to see her in Orange and everything. She said, “I didn’t come here to make friends. All I want to do is buy groceries.” And that upset him considerably. He talked about that for about two days afterwards. He worked all through the war, and he didn’t take a vacation until after I got back in ’46. Dad, I’m sure, was under [a] considerable amount of stress. And he was older than I was, so I think it affected him more than it did me. Ordinarily we just carried $1,500 change before the boom started, and that was enough to cash what payroll checks that Levingston had. We upped it to $5,000, and it kept somebody beating a path to the bank, turning those checks in and getting cash for ’em and getting back out to where we could cash more checks. Of course, that was a good deal of money in those days. Were you ever concerned about going back and forth to the bank with that much money? Really, I never gave it a second thought. Never even thought about it. [There was] not very much [crime] ’cause everybody was making good money in those days. They broke in more during the Depression than they did after it got to be a boomtown. Most of ’em that broke in during the Depression just got food.



it all seemed kind of distant Maureen and Grady Gallien Maureen: All of us was poor as dirt just about, and those people flocked in from everywhere. You know how they came from Clute and down from these other little places and never had had anything but what they raised on the farm, and they came down and went to work in the shipyards. They’d come in the store when they’d get their money, and they’d [say], “Don’t guess you can change a hundred dollar bill, can you?” Grady: What was amusing, we’d had a customer come in

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

363

one day and give us a hundred dollar bill for a purchase, and just shortly after that a man comes in and he had a $103 check. He says, “Can you cash a hundred and something dollars check?” I said, “Sure.” So he endorsed that thing, and I pulled out that hundred dollar bill and whatever else he had coming, and he looked at it and he said, “I might as well have the check back.” [Laughs] Grady: [I had] begun working for the ABC Stores. Well, when our draft numbers came up for the service, Valton Landrum had the opportunity to get in OCS or flying school, so he said, “Grady, you stay here and manage the store and let me enlist.” So he enlisted and I stayed and ran the store, and I never was inducted in the service. When the influx first hit, the ABCs and the A&P and the Piggly Wiggly were the leading stores. And without realizing it, suddenly, from the time you opened till the time you’d close, there was a steady line just like it is today in these big stores of people waiting to be checked out. And, of course, we weren’t geared for this kind of thing. How was consumer behavior? Grady: Basically it was real good. People tried, of course, to get you to save those short items like tobaccos and Cokes and things of this nature, but I don’t think there really was a real serious problem. One problem we did have was people would pick up items that they had plenty of money to pay for, but they’d pick up items because they never had any stamps to get them. Maureen: Steal, you mean. Grady: Right. I’m sure they’d have been quite willing to pay for it if you’d let ’em have it. But realize, we were faced with the situation that if we ran out of stamps we were also limited as to what we could replace. If we never got all our sugar stamps, then we couldn’t buy more sugar. We were in the same situation as the purchaser. Maureen: The store had to have their stamps or they didn’t get a replenishment. Grady: We couldn’t replace our stock, and, of course, if you never had those short items you certainly wasn’t going to get a lot of customers for the other items. Did that kind of behavior increase? Grady: Yes, I think it increased from the mere fact that people who would never do such a thing otherwise was put in a position to where they were doing it. One time this well-dressed lady walked out the front door, and I walked out with her. I don’t know what it was at the time, but I said,

364

they called it the war effort

“You forgot to pay for something or other.” She never did say a word. She just turned around and walked back in and put it on the counter and turned around and walked out. Never did say a word. One time just before a holiday one of the customers came up. We’d already checked up and the butchers had gone and—“I got company coming in! I just got to have some meat!” I said, “Well, [there’s] nobody here to cut any meat.” He kept on and kept on, and I said, “Well, I’ll cut you something.” So I’s getting this hindquarter and he wanted some steak. I started cutting that thing, and he looked at it and he said, “That’s all right, I’ll just make a roast out of it.” [Laughs] What kind of hours were you keeping? Grady: Oh gosh, we worked pretty long hours, because we opened the store—was it seven? Maureen: Yeah, it was pretty early. Catching people going to work. Grady: And then after you closed at six o’clock in the evening, well, we still had things to do, and on Saturday nights we stayed open till nine o’clock, because if we went to the picture show we just barely made the late show. And it seemed to me like [we] had plenty of time to do whatever needed to be done, whether it’s mow the yard or wash the car or whatever. Back in those days we delivered, and sometimes the orders would be backed up at night and we’d have it sacked right on the floor. When you took these orders every week, every week, every week it got to where you could almost tell what people were going to buy. Even today I can remember some of the things that some of ’em would buy. Did those years change you? Grady: I can’t really say that they did, or put [my] finger on anything definite. I just waited around to see what was going to happen like everybody else. I’d let things happen as they would. It never bothered me [that I might be inducted] because I didn’t know what war was like, really. I was born after World War I, and you never got all the news and information, the publicity that they gave wars in later years. So really, I didn’t know what war was all about, and I don’t think a lot of other people knew that were anxious to go. I knew the Colburn boy, [Frank] Colburn. He was in my class at school. And I knew Grant Manley, and I knew the Tilley boy that the schools were named after, but it all seemed kind of distant, for some reason. It never affected me that, hey, something might happen to me. I feel like that we never got a lot of the publicity then because they might have wanted to keep it hidden, you know the number of casualties and how things were going.

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

365



club busters Mario J. (Buster) Johnson You get a reputation. “Don’t go over there. They’re not gonna put up with that now. Let’s go somewhere else.” You get your reputation like you do anything. Like a reputation of honesty. Paying your debts. You get that reputation and you keep it. Did they call you Mister Buster? Oh, yeah. I didn’t want ’em to call me mister. I’m not no mister. I’m just a normal person, but I want ’em to respect me. In 1941 I was across the river in Louisiana. I was operating a club over there at that time called Club Busters. [I had been operating it] in the neighborhood of twelve years. Thirty-five to thirty-four [employees]. It was a [combination] of a bar and a restaurant and gambling facilities— whatever you wanted. [We could seat] about fifty to sixty in the restaurant; in the bar about three hundred. Sometimes I had some real good popular bands that I imported in here. In fact, Guy Lombardo played in there, whether you believe it or not. A one-night stand. He was coming through here maybe from New Orleans or something and stopped and played for a reasonable fee. Now, business didn’t really get to generating until after the war broke out. Everything picked up during the war. What kind of people came over? Well, I would say middle-class people, working-type people. Whitecollar people, too, but mostly workingmen that were drawing weekly checks. I cashed a lot of checks over there. I sure did. And they drank and spent money in the place. Everybody had money during that time. Everybody was walking around with a thousand dollars in his pocket. First, when I went over there, we had mostly trashy-type people. Had a lot of gouging. I brought ’em out of that. Just don’t want your business. I cleaned it up, and then I started getting a little better trade. Did you get a lot of the shipyard workers? Oh, yeah, ship workers. But they had to behave themselves. I don’t care whether they worked in the White House. They wasn’t going to come in there and cuss and [bother] the ladies and all that. Uh-uh. I knocked all that out. Did they behave themselves?

they called it the war effort

366

Yeah. They learned to behave. They sure did. I approached ’em, “You can’t cuss in here. Go to your house and cuss. Don’t cuss in my place of business. Behave yourself. If you don’t want to, there’s the door.” They never were used to that kind of money, and it just went over their head. They got all excitable. The money was kind of driving ’em crazy, see. Makes [’em] just go wild. I’ve seen the time that I’d see a person come over there and got to know him, and he’d lose his paycheck. I’d call him on the side, “Come here. Now, you lose your pay money here. That money belongs to that family at home first before you come here. So let me tell you what I’m going to do with you.” Say he lose a hundred dollars. Say, “I’m going to give you fifty of it, and I’m going to call your wife to tell her that I’m sending fifty dollars home. But you stay out of here. You understand that? I don’t want to see you in here.” He can’t afford to be in there. “You belong with them kids and family.” Would they listen to you? Oh, yeah! They listened to me. They couldn’t come back. I’d what you call “bar ’em” from the place. The person at the door would know their name. They’d take a picture and know ’em when they’d come in and say, “Hey, you’re not allowed in here. Goodbye.” Actually take a picture of them? Yeah, take a picture of ’em so they couldn’t miss ’em, they couldn’t sneak in and play. That was people that were crazy about gambling. Just want to play all the time. Couldn’t control their self—like drinking. Now, people that could afford it, I don’t pay no attention to it. Do you remember the most anybody lost at one time? Oh, I’ve seen people lose anywhere from five hundred to seven, eight hundred dollars—in that neighborhood. Less than a thousand dollars— or he might even win a thousand dollars. But nothing bigger than that. Because these were working-type people. They wasn’t no millionaires or head of no big company. None of that type. What about alcohol? Watch that, too. Watch that, too. When they go to drinking too much, tell the bartender to cut ’em off. “No more drinks. Sorry friend, you can’t have no more. Now you can go home. See you later.” You have to run a business with a firm hand of control. That’s the most wonderful thing in a person’s life, is control of himself. Don’t get all upset. Don’t go to hollering and screaming and yelling. Do you think people in the war years had less control? Yeah. I tell you the money made ’em go crazy. Money excites a lot of people, you see. Drinking and gambling is the two logical things to control yourself in. You overdrink yourself, you get to feeling high, then you go .

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

367

berserk. Or you gamble and you lose and you can’t afford to lose and you go berserk. Were the naval people coming over? The navy was all right for a while, but I barred ’em out of the place. I didn’t allow ’em in my place. I kept ’em out. I went down to the navy station and told the captain, or whatever he is—the major or lieutenant—I don’t want ’em. Put ’em off-limits. They were bad. They were ugly to people. They come in and they cursed, and if somebody’d be sitting there with their wife or their girlfriend they’d want to come over and [propose] that she dance with ’em, and [if ] they didn’t want to they had to push themself on ’em. I just didn’t want the attitude. I kept ’em out. Basically [it’s] how you run your business. That’s all it is. The bank runs a bank business. You can’t go into a bank cussing and carrying on. Could you? Well, I’m just as important as the bank is. He isn’t any better than me. That preacher down there ain’t going to let you go in the Baptist Church hollering and screaming at everybody. Well, I got a place like he does. That’s all it boils down to. What were the major changes in Orange? Well, it was money. Money. Money. Money. Money’s everything. That’s all. You can talk all day. It’s money. Money makes things change. Do you miss the days across the river? Oh, no. No way. No, no, no, no, no, no. At my age, no way! I did a lot of work then. Lots of work. Lot of hard time that I went through with that place to make it go. Uh-uh. No way. I don’t want to go back. There ain’t enough money in that whole United Bank up there to give to me if I’d go back. No. You get old, you can’t put up with that. There was a lot of agitation on you, and the stress that you call it—which I can take that. But anyway, I don’t want to ever go through it again. What was the hard part? Building it up. Run them [riffraff ] out of there. Straighten it up. Clean it up and run it right. It wasn’t easy. You just had to be firm and let ’em know that you mean business. Don’t back up. If you back up you’re in trouble. Did you carry a gun? No. We had a bouncer that carried a gun. That was his job. I never did carry no gun. I wore a suit and dressed well. A suit. Necktie. You want a good appearance to the public. That’s what you want. What was the most gratifying thing that happened to you? Mixing with people. Dealing with ’em. Being along with ’em. Watch ’em and listen at their bad stories and managing. I love to work with people. I was mostly kind of a greeting man in the front of the door when

368

they called it the war effort

people come in. “How are you, Mr. So-and-so?” Seat ’em and see that they’re taken care of. Kind of an overseer. That’s all.



for less than a day’s pay, cold protection for a year Marion and J. F. (Fritz) Lee Fritz: We moved to Orange about February 15 in ’41 because my wife’s brother saw an opportunity to buy an old drugstore that we could remodel. It was on Front Street, a couple of blocks from the shipyards. It seemed like a real good location, and the ol’ story, if you go into business three things are most important: location, location, location. Marion: I was supposed to work some, and [my sister-in-law] was gonna work. We never had worked before. So when we came in it was about nine or nine thirty at night, [and] it had been pouring down rain. We drove down to the supposed site of the store, and it was down on the river. I said, “Oh no, my brother wouldn’t let me work down on the river.” I guess I was brought up to think anybody that lived on the river [was] pretty bad off. It had an old tin roof hanging down. No curb around there. No streetlights in town that we could find, and I just thought we had made a big, bad mistake. Fritz: I can remember one person that I think was typical of a lot of the things that happened and that perhaps we weren’t aware of. This one man in the drugstore, he ate at the soda fountain and drank coffee there, and he was glum-looking and all. I was talking to him one day—“How are you feeling?” and so forth. He said, well, he was terrible. And he went on and told me that he had come here because of a recruiting team, and he was off of a farm up in Arkansas. He said, “There’s nothing here that is like I’m used to living. It’s all against [it]. It’s the opposite” [from the] place he lived—his work and all. And he said, “I’m thinking very strongly about going home.” After that I believe he [did go] home, and there were others that told me in not so graphic words that this sure wasn’t for them. I remember him well [though]. He was a red-headed fellow. Big, rawboned type guy—and strong. I’m sure that it wasn’t that the work was that hard, but all the amenities, the social customs if you will, and all that went against his grain. In a large measure it would have been the wives and children we were

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

369

filling prescriptions for. Even if the man was sick it would probably be the wife that would bring the prescription in, ’cause he didn’t take off from work if it was at all possible. Was there any pattern to illnesses? Fritz: Oh, yes! Colds, influenza, was the biggest thing for absenteeism at the shipyard. A big pharmaceutical company came out with a cold serum in tablet form. I believe it was supposed to be a cold preventive, to vaccinate you against colds, and it was partially successful. We bought it in bulk and packaged [it]. It figured up to about six-fifty or seven dollars for this little bottle of twenty pills. Marion: Vacogen, is what it was. Fritz: Vacogen, yeah. And we packaged that plus a bottle of vitamin C. This had begun to be a rage, too—vitamin C to prevent colds. We had some success. People thought they were doing well with taking these, and it started selling big. My brother-in-law went down there and talked to one of the bosses at Consolidated to tell ’em about it, that we were selling quite a lot of it to their employees and the employees thought and we thought that it was reducing absenteeism—they seemed to have less colds. And [he] asked them wouldn’t they allow us to put—or they would put—a notice on their system that went all over the shipyard about our special deal on these cold tablets. We painted a sign on the outside of this brick building that we were in: “For less than a day’s pay, cold protection for a year.” I don’t know how we worded it, but that was the sense of the sign.



good years for me Jewel D. McLamore I had just come to Orange in ’40. I was a beautician. I came and bought a one-chair beautician’s shop, and then I moved [and] stayed in business [there] for about ten years. My business picked up, [and] I’m sure all the other girls’ businesses picked up, too. In ’44 I had eight operators. There was only one girl that worked for me that was a Orange girl, and the others were transient. They had moved in and only stayed a few years. I worked unusually long hours. I went to work most of the time at eight o’clock, but there was a lot of people that worked in the shipyard on different shifts, [and] I would go in at six thirty, seven and do their hair. Then

370

they called it the war effort

they’d come back by there that evening and I would comb their hair, or they’d come back at lunch. Sometimes I worked till eleven o’clock—there’s a lots of nights—and the other girls in the shop worked, too. Did that have any effect on you? No, I don’t think so. I say that it [didn’t]. It’s bound to have, as much as I did that, because I did do quite a bit of it, being I was working for myself. And naturally, I took all the overflow that some of ’em couldn’t do. I would take it after six o’clock, seven o’clock. Nearly all of us had appointments up till after six o’clock nearly every night. I wasn’t married at the time. I was a widow with three children, two boys and a girl. I had a girl that came every morning at seven o’clock and cooked the meal and cleaned the house and did the washing for three dollars a week. And I kept help like that. The children came home for lunch and they went to school. That was the one reason why I went into the beauty work, so I could stay close to the children. My shop was in the home. [Those] were good years for me, because I raised my children through all that. The war enabled me to do things for them that I couldn’t have done otherwise.



the war drums were already beating Anne Brandt Quigley People were so busy—and coping. I think people were too busy to be bad. See, everybody was busy with the war effort, they called it. We owned the Orange Leader. We had bought it in 1936 in the depths of the Depression, [and] we were just struggling financially. The war drums were already beating, and everybody was kind of scared because there was so much seething in the world. But nobody really thought that it would affect Orange. Just once in a while you’d read in the paper where the Japanese ambassador was in Washington, but it didn’t ruffle your feathers. Business went on. Levingston, you’d hear their riveting at night now and then. [Orange] was kind of a class town. There was the poor and there were the middle class and there were the rich. I don’t mean that ugly. It just was. It was an accepted way of life, but the war changed that. The families here that were prominent, that didn’t get along, for the community’s sake they

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

371

started compromising, like on selling a block of land or helping the navy. It made a difference. They had to send in these skeleton crews, they called ’em, a few months before [a] ship was finished. Maybe it’d be the captain and his underlings and a few seamen so they could learn the ship and watch it being built. I guess when they had to repair it at sea or something they’d know every little bolt and everything. The USO really kept those boys off the streets. We had dances. We’d have three and four and five hundred a night. And they’d come from the USO to my house when the USO would close up. Maybe two or three o’clock in the morning we’d still have a big roaring fire in the fireplace, and it was like it was a home. But there’s always somebody that could play the piano, and all the windows were always open [in the summer] because there was no air conditioning. People would just stand in the street in front of our house and listen—say, “Play so-and-so.” It was just fun. There wasn’t any rank. In my house, when anybody walked in, those caps, the commanders’ caps and the sailor caps, were put on the stairway landing. There was no rank when they walked in my door. Has anybody talked to you about Brownwood? Brownwood was the tent city, just in a woods. Just one tent after another; every form and fashion. Some made with partial tin cans. Some that were almost like a big room with a real tent and then wood about this high around so dogs and things, I guess, couldn’t get in. But whole families lived in those. And where Pine Grove is now the army brought in hundreds of trailers that were like khakicolored bullets. They were the ugliest things I’ve ever seen in my life. They parked ’em—a fat person couldn’t have walked between ’em—and it was hotter than Hades. I delivered the Orange Leader there. I’d drive with a car full of papers like every Friday and give a free paper to each one, and I walked through those woods and those trailers. Here were these little children [that] had been locked in with this heat all day long with nobody, ’cause see, the women worked, too. But the children suffered. That’s the beginning to me of the change in the whole web of America. The poor little critters were locked in, and there were screened doors so they couldn’t get out—little toddlers in diapers. They were just out there in that bunch of pine trees with flies on ’em and everything. It was very depressing. Mrs. [ James] Neff was—I guess you’d call it the counselor—at the high school. Like these girls that lived in a tent and in these army trailers were going to school, the big kids, and there was no place for ’em to wash their hair. They didn’t have the facilities, like in Brownwood in these

372

they called it the war effort

tents, so these prominent people—like Elizabeth Neff was the high society although she was in the school—they would take these girls home and let ’em bathe and wash their hair. I worked at the hospital—an eight-hour shift every day—as a nurse’s aide after taking the Red Cross courses. And Bundles for Britain—everybody did all this civic work. We just worked like dogs. We made pajamas and clothes before we got into the war. All day long we’d cut that thick wool for those Englishmen and sew ’em. There were about twenty or twenty-five women, but everybody started working together. It was long before we were in the war that all this started, because we were a part of the world. Isolationism wasn’t going to exist much longer. We couldn’t afford to live in a world and not get on the side of the people that were going to save our necks—which they were doing. You know, you weren’t suspicious of people. It made me grow up and grow bigger in my attitude. I began to accept everybody. I used to drive to Beaumont by myself in a beat-up car, come home at eleven and twelve o’clock at night, stop on the highway to help anybody that was stopped in that old Model T that’s broke down. [I’d] help ’em fix their tire. Never thought of anything happening. I never did bring anybody in the house to feed ’em, but bums and drunks that was just out of the drunk tank down the street, they used to know my house. They’d come to my side door and I’d put their milk in a mayonnaise jar in case they had syphilis or something—’cause I’d worked in the hospital. You know those ol’ chancre sores that they have. I’d fix ’em big ham sandwiches. I never turned away anybody from my door in my whole life. I always had a nice lawn and I didn’t have a fence, and the lights were so bright from the shipyards that they would just stop in this green sward. They would just come and sit by this old house inside of my yard. I’d sit in the window sometimes at night and I’d listen to ’em talk, and it was just music to my ears, these men all laughing and talking and smoking. I never thought about them trying to even break a screen, and anybody could have walked in. There was nothing to keep them out. Did those years change you? I think it changed everybody—some in a way for the bad and sometimes for the good. I’m a better person for the war, I think, because I loved working at that hospital. All my life I had wanted to be a registered nurse and my mama wouldn’t let me. I fulfilled myself during the war. I loved it. I loved every minute of it. There wasn’t anything quite like the war. I don’t think there was anybody that was grown that lived through it [and] was not changed. I almost want to cry when I say that, ’cause there’s so much of memories—wonderful memories—and frightening.

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

373



nobody twisted their arm A. P. ( Jack) Fuller [In 1941] I was running a service station on Sixteenth and Park. At that time that was the main highway. I was on what you say the outskirts of Orange at that time, but there was a lot of traffic on Sixteenth Street because that was the only way that traffic from the north could come in. What kinds of people were you seeing coming into Orange? The most people that we saw coming into Orange was the people coming from East Texas. They were all coming to Orange to try to get a job. What little bit they had was on that Model A or Chevrolet—or maybe it was in a homemade trailer. Most of ’em had never worked at public works, and they had a hard time trying to learn where to go and what to do to get a job. I spent a lot of time with people trying to fill out papers for ’em, to try to help ’em get a birth certificate and things like that that they needed before they could get a job. They’d say, “Well, how do you go about doing something?” “How you go about getting a birth certificate?” All up through East Texas there’s a lot of Fullers, and the Fullers were all in grocery business, gasoline business, furniture business, and through East Texas the Fuller name was very popular. And when they saw my name they thought they’d found a friend. They did, and I would take the time to try to help ’em. You know, you had a lot of government papers to fill out. There’s a lot of ’em that couldn’t read or write. They would keep coming by. They remembered where they got their help, and they always seemed to find me when they needed paperwork done. Most people were too busy to try to help ’em. We only sold three gallons of gas per customer, and that didn’t take long, and we had a little time, really, in a service station because we weren’t that busy. They had to have their tires inspected before they could get tires, and they had to fill out the paperwork and answer the questions, and a lot of ’em were not familiar with it. They had to fill out the applications for the stamps that they got, and they were not familiar with that. And a lot of them could not read or write? That’s right. Especially in your colored people. Very few of the colored people back in them days could read those forms and understand ’em, and we had a lot of colored people come from East Texas. Lots of ’em. The tire situation was real serious. I finally became a tire inspector for the whole county. Everybody in Orange County would have to come to me to get their tires inspected before they could apply for a tire. Now, that was a headache. There was five of us, and we could inspect on a good day

374

they called it the war effort

sixty cars. I had to look at the tires. I had to personally inspect it to tell you how long it would last, how many miles was left in it, or whether it was beyond [hope]. Back in those days they was made out of rayon and cotton, and you didn’t get the mileage from ’em that you get today. On a normal set of tires, if you drove at normal speed and so on, 20,000 miles is all you could get if you had no injuries to ’em. Those tires were easy to break down the wall ’cause they were soft, and what ruint most of the tires was hitting something and you’d cut a gash in ’em. You could boot ’em but they didn’t last too long. Of course, in them days there was very few concrete roads, so you didn’t know if your tire was out of balance or not because the roads were so rough. I’ve heard gasoline was rationed to keep people from using their cars and wearing out their tires. I would think so, because I always had gasoline. The only time I ran out of gas was when they were going to ration it. The day before the last day that you could buy gas, I ran out of gas that night about ten o’clock. We filled up everything from milk bottles to bathtubs. They put it in gallon cans, five-gallon cans, and ten-gallon milk cans. It was unbelievable the things they’d bring in. I asked a man where he was putting his gas. He kept coming and getting five gallons, five gallons, and he said, “About the only thing I have to fill is my bathtub. Put it in my bathtub.” He was pouring it in something, ’cause he kept bringing the same can back. How did cars hold up in those days, with limited parts? The cars back in those days weren’t too hard to maintain, and you had a lot of people that were pretty good mechanics on these ol’ model cars. About the only thing that’d give you any static was in the distributor. You put a new set of points in and a new coil or condenser, and usually the carburetors would give ’em no trouble unless you got a lot of trash in ’em. Fuel pumps would go out and most anybody could change a fuel pump, and the cars were made better. You had a lot of grease fittings, and if you kept those fittings greased they didn’t wear out. And, of course, people didn’t drive unnecessary mileage back then either. If it wasn’t necessary they didn’t go in their car. One of the things, they only could get three gallons of gas a week to run around town. Now, if you had to drive fifteen or twenty miles to work they’d give you a B stamp that would allow you five gallons per stamp, but you only got enough just to run you back and forth to work. If you had to go out of town on account of sickness or a death, you could go to the ration board and they would issue you fifteen or twenty gallons of gas for that purpose, but it had to be a bona fide trip. What were most of the service calls you would make? Most of ’em were calls for flat tires. Very few were calls for [being] out

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

375

of gasoline, because they knew whether they could or couldn’t. A lot of your calls were in the mornings when the cars wouldn’t start. Be on account of a dead battery or a weak coil or spark plug troubles. And some automobiles have a tendency to sweat, and if it was a wet, foggy morning a lot of ’em just didn’t start till you dried ’em out. We usually dried ’em out with a blow torch, and then we’d take kerosene and lubricating oil and mix it and wipe the wires with it. They’d usually start. And we’d take along a hot battery. The batteries weren’t too good back in those days. If you got a year out of a eighteen-month battery you did all right. Most people bought an eighteen-month battery, and they’d buy a new [one] every winter. [People] were all doing so much better than they were used to. They had better housing. They had places to go. They had plenty to eat, and a lot of these East Texas people weren’t used to that. They had money to spend. A lot of those people took advantage of it and they saved money. Some of ’em threw their money away, ’cause gambling was wide open across the river, and a lot of people went over. Nobody twisted their arm. They just did it on their own. A lot of people never set foot across that bridge and, of course, a lot of ’em did. It was there if you wanted it.10 Did those years have any lasting effect on you? Nothing bothered me [during] those war years. We just learned to cope with it and go on. We had quite a few people that were hyper, and a person that’s real hyper you can’t do much with ’em. They stay hyper all their life. They stay on that high pitch and they never relax. [They] stay flusterated all the time. Nothing ever pleased ’em. They just couldn’t settle down. It wasn’t that the war caused it. I think it was just the chemistry of their body that caused ’em to be that way.



mother, before the war, what was in the newspaper? Estelle and Forrest H. Clough Forrest: I was at the Texas Creosoting Company, and that [was] not war related, so I quit it and went to blueprinting. I thought that would be a little bit war related. I tried to get in to make training films, but I never could do it. I was just too old, I guess. We had an awfully hard time. We couldn’t get any tires except for a real emergency, and it took us seven and a half minutes to change tires. We timed ourselves, because we had so many flats and flats and flats.

376

they called it the war effort

Estelle: At the grocery store, people just crowded in there, and we weren’t accustomed to that. And when these women would come in we soon learned not to go to buy groceries late in the afternoon. We’d see those hard hats coming and we’d just give them room, because if you didn’t they’d just stomp you.11 They had worked all day, and they were tired and wanted to get home and just didn’t allow anybody to get in their way. We were under 8,000 people, and everybody knew everybody, and when a well-known citizen died the stores uptown closed and they posted these notices around. I believe Forrest’s dad was the last person they closed the town for [in 1945]. People resented it that you could no longer honor our older citizens. That time was past. Nearly everybody worked day and night, and Forrest worked most of the time. Forrest: Yeah, I worked a long time. We used to have a system of making Van Dykes for reproduction of other prints, and I’d make those Van Dykes and hang ’em on the line until they dried. I’d go to sleep for fifteen minutes, then I’d get up and take ’em down and work up another batch and put them up and let them dry and sleep for fifteen minutes. I’ve done that all night long. [I’d come home] just to eat. I sure didn’t realize much out of it monetarily. I heard one man say that he hoped the war never ended ’cause he was making so much money. Yeah! Came out and said that! Oh, I felt so sorry for him. Forrest, you are an artist. What colors would you have used to paint Orange? Forrest: I’d use a lot of reds because it was blowing up. Estelle: Down there where the shipyards were, it was red all night, wasn’t it?—the lights and the noise. I remember one morning we were reading the paper—Bob was about nine years old—and we were reading about these Japanese making a landing and how the Americans killed and killed and killed them till they couldn’t do it anymore. There was just no end to it. And he said, “Mother, before the war, what was in the newspaper?”



trying to fill some bottles with soda pop Ledia and W. B. Hilliard W. B.: Had an ol’ man come in from deep East Texas, and housing was short. I mean real short. You had to work at a defense plant to even get one of these rooms that you would

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

377

register with the housing authority. This ol’ man went to the housing authorities, and they asked him where he was working, and he said, “I’m working for Dr Pepper.” He came back in, and I said, “Did you find you a place to stay?” And he said, “Aw, yeah. They were nice to me. They gave me a little apartment.” [See], anybody working for a doctor had priority. W. B.: I was president of the Dr. Pepper Bottling Company. People from all over the world came in here to work, and we had no place for ’em to stay. We rented out the front part of our house. One of the tenants had a little boy, and he played mumble peg in the house. We was going to raise the rent to get ’em out of there, and the board wouldn’t let us raise the rent. We couldn’t move ’em. Ledia: The mother worked at the shipyard, and her husband worked at the shipyard. First when we rented the apartment she didn’t have any children. Then after they stayed there a while she came and told us that she had a problem—“We have two children.” Her children were staying with some relatives and they didn’t want the kids, to that effect, is what she told us. Do you think there was much conflict with roomers? W. B.: I don’t think there was really any problem there, because these people, most of ’em was farmers or from small communities, and they were accustomed to living at auntie’s house or going to grandpa’s and things of this kind. When they moved in here they were kind of home folks, with the exception of a few. The government slapped controls on oils, meats, sugar, metals, glass, and they gave you a quota. Say in 1938, 1939, 1940, those three years, you bought $10,000 worth of one of these items. Well, then they gave you a 6 percent quota of that after the war started. We could not ship sugar into the United States, but we could ship [syrup]. So I went to Pineland, Louisiana, and they had a barrel stave factory there. I bought two boxcar loads of barrels and shipped ’em to Mexico. They filled those things with sugar, poured water over the top of ’em and made syrup out it and shipped it back into the United States to Orange, Texas. Evidently those years made people improvise more. W. B.: Oh, yes. You just couldn’t buy parts for machinery. Our particular filling machine had a rubber gasket in it, and the bottles, if they’d explode they’d cut this rubber gasket. We were using six or eight or ten of those things a week, and we couldn’t get those rubber gaskets because of the rubber quotas. I had a machinist. I carried one of those rubber gaskets down there, and I said, “I’ve got to make me a form for this gasket.” So he

378

they called it the war effort

put a chunk of steel on the lathe and he hollered those things out and we made this template. You could get retreaded tires and it was good rubber, so I went down there and got me some of that raw rubber and brought it to the house and put that thing in the oven and baked those things and made my own gasket. Now, I smelled up the house pretty good, but we kept making soda water. The customer, the retailer, that kept his bottles sorted so that the driver could go in and set off five cases [and] pick up five case of bottles—because we didn’t have any replacements in bottles those days—he got service three times a week. But the ol’ grouchy grocer man or filling station operator that made us sort our own bottles and had ’em all in the backyard scattered around and stuff like this, he got his quota. We had a sheet made out—Joe Blow Texaco Service Station: Get two cases on Tuesday. Now, if Joe Blow would put five cases out there on Monday, Wednesday and Friday he would get fifteen cases, because the drivers were working on commission, and they were working twelve to fifteen hours [a day]. I had drivers that was making fifteen to eighteen hundred dollars a month. Just a soda water driver. You couldn’t get any bottles, so we decided that we had to do something ’cause we was using up our breakage on bottles. [A friend] was running a dairy, and I said, “Dick, how do you get bottles?” He said, “Man, I just buy bottles. You can buy milk bottles. No problem.” So I phoned Owens-Illinois at Petersburg, West Virginia, and I said, “Can I buy some eight-ounce milk bottles?” “Yeah. How many you want?” I said, “I want a carload of ’em.” They loaded me a boxcar of them things. I don’t know, I think there must have been 4,000 cases in that thing. And I bought me a milk filler to put paper stoppers on them things. Now, the only thing I could use this [for] was lemonade, still grape, and still orange. Didn’t have no carbonation in it. We modified the bottle washer so we could run those things through the bottle washer. This is that improvising that you’re talking about. [Our] bottling machine was capable of an average of seventy cases an hour, and before the war we would run maybe three days, four days, six, seven hours a day. Then when the war started and all this influx of people, we could sell all that we could manufacture, and I ran that bottling machine from seven o’clock Monday morning until twelve o’clock Saturday noon. Then I shut it down. The wife was always wondering where I was, you know, and I was trying to fill some bottles with soda pop. Supplies was the main thing. The ol’ crown, soda pop stopper, we even bought a thing [recrimper] with paper disks to reshape these things and put these paper disks in ’em, because we couldn’t buy the new stoppers, crowns we called ’em—the metal top. These dealers would save ’em for you. That was part of the deal. They could get more drinks by furnishing

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

379

us with the raw material so that we could remanufacture. You taken the ol’ cork disk out, and then you put this thing in a solution, a caustic, and it shined when you got it out of there. Then you rinsed it off good and you put it in this machine, and it opened it back up so it would fit the filling machine. Then you put this paper in there. You couldn’t get cork. Did those years change you? W. B.: Nah. I don’t think it made us any different. We stayed busy. You didn’t have any time to change your life or anything. You stayed busy.



i want another one of them fast haircuts S. K. Hubert I was barbering. It’s just people everywhere. I went to town one morning, and I went into the drugstore next door. The manager of the Chamber of Commerce was in there talking to a guy, and he says, “You know where this man can find a place to sleep? He says he’s slept in his car one night, and he’s slept in the Salvation Army Hall, and he’s been as far as Sulphur, Louisiana, trying to find a place where they could get a bed. He’s got a job and wants to go to work.” And I told him, “Well, my wife and I were talking about that the other day. It’s just a room. You can sleep [and] you can eat out somewhere. It’s a place you can go to sleep.” So when I got home that night this lady had talked to my wife, and they stayed [in that front bedroom], I guess, two years or more until he went in the service. They come from up at that oil country, Borger, [Texas]. My wife told her, “Why, you can’t live in that one room.” She said, “Why, that’s a palace to what I’ve lived in in them oil fields.” We’d go down in the morning—the porters [would] have the shop opened up and things straightened around—and there’d be customers sitting there. The night men would come by on their way home. By the time we’d get them out of the way it’d go to filling up, and we’d just have to walk off and leave ’em there sometimes to get something to eat. At night we’d close the door and work out what we had and come home. You didn’t get out and fool around. I’d just come home. You’s tired. We started, I believe, at seven o’clock then and closed at six. You didn’t leave that chair all day long. Just one place all day. I didn’t keep time. I just stayed there and worked, and I didn’t look at that clock. Had a little guy come in from up in East Texas where they’d just go to the barbershop and set around for an hour, and it’d take ’em thirty or forty

380

they called it the war effort

minutes to get a haircut. They’s talking. So he got in my chair. He got out, and he looked back at me and looked up where there was a mirror. He looked and he turned around. I said, “Is anything wrong?” He said, “You know how long you kept me in that chair?” I said, “No, I didn’t time it.” “It was just five minutes.” And he said, “I didn’t believe it could be done in five minutes.” So he kept looking and didn’t find anything wrong. When he left I said, “Well, come back, fellow.” He looked back at me. He didn’t know whether he was going to do it or not. And he went home and he got everybody to examine his haircut. And when he come back he said, “I want another one of them fast haircuts. I’m in a hurry this morning.” He got another one like it, and I worked on that guy for a long time. He was one of my regular customers. Did you have a chance to talk to your customers? You could talk to ’em while you’re working on ’em, but you didn’t have much time to lounge around, ’cause when one got out there’s another one in there. And you had to be a diplomat and a psychologist. [Laughs] Everybody that got in your chair had a different idea about things. Did people talk to you about their problems? Oh, yeah. Most of their problems was their family problems. I’ve had ’em get up and just talk cruel. They’d have [some] drinks and get up and walk the floor and go to telling you about their wife cycling around on ’em and all this stuff and just cry and carry on. You feel like taking ’em by the collar and push ’em out the door. But they had to get it off of their mind. A bunch of the girls around, they got to playing around with those navy boys, and they’d go to town at night. The town closed up, and those doorways and alleyways, why, they’d meet. And they had about four or five of ’em out here. Sometimes when I’d get home I’d have to go back to town maybe to a meeting or something, [and] I’d pass those girls walking to town. I never stopped and picked one of ’em up. Noo. Cause I knew where they were going, and [if ] one of them little ol’ gals come [into] trouble they’d say, “Yeah, I see you were picking her up in a car.” That’s all they’d want. I wouldn’t give ’em a drive, and I knew ’em, too. I guess they thought I was something else. [We] didn’t have any [social life]. I’d come home. I’ve been working in my church all of my life. Once in a while we’d go to the picture show, but not very often. When I got out of that shop I was tired. What would you do to relax? Well, now, I don’t know. I never got keyed up. I’ve never been a nervous person, and a situation come up that I couldn’t do anything about I could pretty well adjust to it. I had three things. I had my job and my family and

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

381

this church work I was in. I didn’t get out and mix in that other stuff. I just never did. Some of those men [from across the river] would come in there. The ol’ man by the name of Sam Smith, he had a place. Well, them people would come in the shop, and if you didn’t know the difference you’d think they were preachers or lawyers. They never said one word out of the way. They were pleasant, and there were a couple of boys [who] worked at the [Grove]. They were brothers. You never met nicer people. They’d say, “You been over to our place and looked it over?” And I’d say, “No I haven’t. I don’t drink.” “Well,” they says, “you don’t have to drink. If you come over there sometime I’ll take you around and show you what we’ve got. You don’t have to drink.” I never did go. Did people’s behavior change? No, I don’t think—the local people—that they did. Oh, there’re a few of ’em. They go through a change whether there’s anything going on or not.



you had one time to do it Beatrice Burton Fuller I didn’t have but one time to do it. A funeral business is different from anything else. Now, if the cleaners didn’t do your suit good, you tell ’em about it and they’ll do it better the next time. But now, a funeral business is entirely different. You have one time to do it and one time only. In ’41 we were in the funeral business, and we were doing good to pay $250 a month on the business. It was a struggle ’cause we were still in our Depression days. People were accustomed to going to funerals. We had large attendance. They didn’t have anywhere to go, and they knew everybody so they went to funerals. With the influx coming in we started knowing that we had to have some more men to run the ambulances, so we built a room in the back here. Across the river in Louisiana the nightclubs were very popular, and the boys that played over there, it was hard for them to find a place to stay. So they would play over there, and then they would come and run the ambulance at night and sleep here. The government came in and started to cutting down on where they

382

they called it the war effort

could save on everything, you know from sugar to meat to leather to gas to rubber. All right, then it got down to caskets, and if you weren’t six feet tall you could not be buried in a state-size casket [six feet six inches]. You put a man in [a regular casket] that’s six feet or over, well, he’s cramped, but the government knew how tall you were, and you had to sign an affidavit that he needed something larger than that. The Orange Casket Factory was here, and all those state-sized caskets they had not finished, that were just in the making, they had to be sawed off six inches. They couldn’t sell ’em because there wasn’t that many people that was over six feet tall. You could handle [just] so many in your showroom that were state-size, but then you had to have more regulars. And then we didn’t have metal, so you had to go to wood and cloth cover caskets. We worked under regulations, so you didn’t get expensive [and] you didn’t sell expensive caskets. Every woman that was pregnant had to be taken to the hospital when she was in labor, and then when she had that baby she had to be taken home. And it got to be real funny. When Riverside was built it was hard to get through there. The streets were narrow. We’d get down there and you couldn’t get through the streets. Some of ’em [would] be hollering, “Come this a-way! Come this way! We’ll hold up the clothesline, and y’all come on through.” So they’d hold up the clothesline, and we’d take the ambulance through there. We’d get ’em and load ’em out the back door and then hold ’em up till we’d get ’em out. And we had to take ’em home the same way. And when any wrecks over there happened, you had to go around the streets and under the clothesline, and around the trash cans and everywhere to get to it. So like Everett [husband] said, “We’ve got nine ambulances—six working and three in the garage getting their brake shoes,” [from] that sand in Riverside eating the brakes up. We had more funerals, probably three or four times—maybe quadruple—in a year’s time. And we had the United States government for any sailors for the Eighth Naval District. And then we had two years with the British government. One of the boys that was working here got one of our [account] books down [and] said, “Mrs. Fuller, how’d y’all live in the month of December?”—in a certain year. I said, “I’ll tell you what, we worked on a average of three hours sleep a night,” with the number of funerals that we were doing. Did the character of funerals change? Yes, they changed to the effect that if they were on a shift they came when they were off shift. [See], you have the time for visitation. That person [would] come at the time of his shift change where before then we used to have, actually, larger funerals. [Funerals were smaller] because people were working. Everybody was working.

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business



383

What about military services? The ones that were shipped back to us were shipped back in metal sealers. This happened in our family. My brother’s oldest child, J. E., went in, and the best that we can figure he was in the Battle of the Bulge, and nothing was ever found that belonged to him. After a few months passed that his parents did not get any word, they were inquiring what happened. Well, they wrote her a letter and said that he was lost in action and that they would further get in touch with her. They sent her another letter and [said] that after one year they would deem him dead. It made a drastic effect on his mother. She had left the key out. This [also] happened to about five other people I could tell you that did the same thing—that that boy, if he ever came home or he was a prisoner and got loose or something, he’d know how to get in the house. Isn’t that peculiar? But they did it. They left the key so they could [get in the house]. After that Ruth never got anything. All of us, every time we’d see war pictures—and I’ve talked to my other brothers and sisters—we’d look to see if we couldn’t see J. E. And he never came back, which is harder. The boys that would come in [would] come in in a nice casket, but they were sealed, and they would also be escorted in. And then these escorts would stay with the body until the funeral was held. It affected the family. This one mother says I can talk about it but my husband won’t talk. Then sometimes the daddy would talk about it and the mother wouldn’t talk. Some of ’em would talk to themselves and not talk to the children because it would affect them. And then sometimes they said let’s just have a group session and all get together and talk. But it affected every family in a different way, and you could see it. And then when the body would finally come in, well, it was a great relief. And they had a doubt in their mind if this was really my son. I guess I heard that more [than anything]. But under these conditions—and the honor guard that came with them would tell us it would be best not to open the casket. Well see, that’s all we could pass on to the family—it would be best not to see it. And before the funeral they would bring his belongings and they would present ’em to the family. Then they would be relieved to know that they did get something back. This is his. But the one that was the saddest is the one that got nothing back. And on another occasion they got nothing back, but on the same train [was] a boy that was in the battle. He talked with the family and told ’em exactly what happened. On another occasion [the boy] had to go in the hospital, but when he [got out] he went to see this family, and that mother called me and she told me what happened—you know, that he was with

384

they called it the war effort

[her son]. And she said, “Now I do know that he is dead.” So it was so many mixed emotions.



screaming and hollering for their shoes Dominic Romano There was lots of times that we fixed shoes for people that didn’t have the money. I don’t know whether you can visualize, these people came off of these farms in East Texas and western Louisiana. They didn’t have anything. There wasn’t hardly any money before the war. In fact, it was just as bad with us in the shop there. I can remember when my dad, the shoe shop, didn’t take in ten dollars in a whole week. They would come in there, and their shoes were all gone. Would I fix ’em for them? They were going to go to work the next week at Consolidated. Sure, we did some of ’em. Some of ’em we didn’t. It’s just according [to] the way they hit you at the time. And you had to be leery. There were a lot of con games going on. Most people that came into the shop, they were just mostly short-tempered with us because we couldn’t do the work for them immediately. And after looking back, I guess I could understand that. They couldn’t buy new ones and they had to have them fixed. So I guess they got a little frustrated. When the war broke out I was working at the Green’s Department Store, manager of the shoe department there. From there, though, I went back in with my dad in the shoe-repair shop. My brothers left for service about ’42 and ’43. When they did, well, then my dad was by himself, so I had to go back in there and help, and I just stayed. I had a customer come in [Green’s]—this was during the war but before shoe rationing—and I was trying to get her to buy a pair of shoes. She liked them and all, but she thought the price was too high. This was on Saturday night. I said, “Well, you better take ’em right now while we’ve got ’em.” She said, “Aw, that’s all right. I’ll get ’em some other time.” So I was home listening to the radio, and the radio come blaring out with the news—shoe rationing. Beginning midnight, Sunday night, shoes could not be sold without a coupon. In fact, there’d be a moratorium on shoes. There wouldn’t be no shoes sold for a week. It kind of shocked me because that’ll

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

385

be a whole week I won’t be able to do anything—or I may not even have a job. So when I went back to work Monday morning, here was this lady. We hadn’t even opened the doors yet, and she was banging on the door. She said, “I come to get that shoe that you showed me Saturday night.” I said, “Lady, I can’t sell you any shoes.” She said, “Why not? I got the money.” I said, “Lady, I cannot sell ’em to you. In fact, I can’t sell anybody any shoes for the next week.” Oh, she was unhappy. I said, “You heard it didn’t you?”—about shoe rationing. She said, “Yes, I heard it over the radio yesterday. Then I thought maybe you didn’t hear it.” [Shoes] weren’t as scarce as the coupons were scarce, so a good many of ’em would offer you a little extra to let ’em have it. Any plastic shoe you could buy without a coupon, but if it was made out of leather then you had problems. They had just [begun] to make plastic shoes—rubber soles—and we had problems in the shoe-repair business of getting leather. We had problems of getting thread, flax thread, to sew the shoes with, and that was imported from Ireland. Everything we did we did it as quickly as we could and used the best material available. People had the half-heels, and they looked better on shoes. Well, if they get worn down a little bit it took us time to fix ’em. We could jerk the whole thing off and put ’em one solid rubber heel on. A lot of people didn’t want that, but that was the fastest way we could do it. It was a little hectic because everybody was for himself. There was a lot of people that come down here from East Texas and western Louisiana. They were just simple people, and they were used to having their own way. Sometimes it kind of made my blood boil [to] just have ’em come in and want you to do things for ’em right then, and there you were maybe a week or two weeks behind. During the Depression there you had more time than you had anything else. You could do any job that you wanted for someone, and you could take your time and do it right. But when you’re about two weeks behind and people are screaming and hollering for their shoes—they couldn’t buy new ones so they had to have ’em repaired—that just made it rather difficult on us. We couldn’t get help. It was just me and my dad, and we had a deef and dumb man working for us—very unreliable. Maybe he’d show up and maybe he wouldn’t. When I was telling you about rubber heels, actually they were reclaimed rubber. I can remember women coming into the shop just raising all kind of Cain with me because the rubber I’d put on made a black mark on their floors. It was the carbon black that they put in these heels and soles to harden it, and there wasn’t a thing that I could do about it. I said it’s either this or nothing, and that was another one of the problems. Was that a stressful time for you and your family?

386

they called it the war effort

Yes, it was. Very much so. Especially ’cause Dad was old then. He’d already reached his late [sixties] and early seventies, and my mother was a heart patient, and everybody was gone from the house. I was the only one that was left in Orange—and my kid brother. Twelve hours was a normal day. Fifteen and sixteen was very common, so it made it pretty hard on us. You mentioned that the shipyard executives were getting appointed to the regulatory boards. Right. They’d have maybe one or two local people on there, then again they’d have four or five others. The local people were in the minority on these boards. See, we had a board for tires. They had a board for gas. They had a board for overall prices, and we had to make up a price list and prove it. We couldn’t just write down that we were going to charge so much for this and that. This had to be retroactive to a certain date, and we had to prove that was the price at that particular date. [I had to make a list] of all my services according to men, women, and children. It was approximately seven pages—I don’t really remember—[and listed] everything that I did and the prices. These people come in, and they were determined that they were going to punish everybody that overpriced or did price-gouging. Well, that part didn’t bother me. If people were gouging they should be punished. I didn’t see nothing wrong with that, but it seemed to me like they were just deliberately going out of their way. In fact, the last time I went up there the president of the board started in on me: “Mr. Romano, we can settle this with just a fine or we can make it tough on you and bring you to court.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “We have a complaint here against you of price-gouging.” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I haven’t overcharged anybody at all.” And he said, “Well, now, we got the receipt here, and I hate to bring you up to court here.” I said, “Well, you prove it to me.” And the same thing happened. A man’s shoe [had been repaired and charged and] they looked at the child’s list. They would always pick up the child’s page and look at it and compare it with my price receipt. Well, that would be wrong, see. I didn’t charge the same price for a child as I did for an adult, and I didn’t charge the same price for women’s shoes as I did for men’s shoes, which is common. It always has been that way and probably always will be. And they would invariably look at the lowest price, the children, and then start in on me. I’ll always remember him. He was threatening me. I was going to go to jail.



Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

387

he pulled out a empty bull durham sack Helen and Elmer Newman Elmer: [We] had to work like the devil, ’cause you turn all those payroll checks loose in Orange in a week, you got to spend a lot of time cashing ’em. In fact, we had four tellers to take care of it, and when they paid off, the lines would be out on the sidewalk to get in the bank. Then they had a big office down there, and those office girls would come down with fifteen or twenty checks, and they’d want to cash ’em separately. A bunch of ’em in the office would give [one person] their checks, and they’d come down and cash ’em. We closed at two o’clock in the afternoon and then we’d balance. [On Friday] we’d open up at four o’clock again, just the tellers and a few supporting people, and we would let the merchants and everybody bring in the checks that they had cashed already that day and convert ’em into money so they could go cash some more. That was a hard day. Helen: He got as thin as a rail, and we’d go up to my mother and dad’s for his vacation, and he wouldn’t get out of his pajamas the whole time he was there. He just relaxed and rested. Elmer: I think everybody from Shelby County came down here and worked for a while, till they got ’em a little nest egg, and then they went back home. A fella came in there to close out his account, and he told Arthur [Wilson]—I think he told him he had eighteen hundred dollars or fifteen hundred, something like that. Arthur went back there and looked at his account, and it was eight hundred dollars more than that, and he checked it pretty close. But the man closed his account and took that eight hundred dollars with him. Arthur was so sure he just had that other amount, he said, “I’m gonna check some of those deposits that he made on there.” Sure enough, he found [someone] of a very similar name [whose deposit] had been credited on that man’s account, and there he was, gone with the money, and he lived up here at Center [Texas]. So Mr. Marsh, the cashier of the bank, took off one day in a taxi cab. The taxi cab driver was a good friend of his and a customer of the bank. He could get all the gas he needed, and he says, “I’ll take you up there.” They took off one morning and they got up there, and he said, “Man, he lived out in the country on the worst road you ever saw.” They got out to his house and his wife said, “Well, he’s not here. He’s in Center around the square with a wagonload of watermelons.” And so they went back, and they caught him, right there, and he looked at ’em and he says, “Yeah, I got that eight hundred dollars, but how you gonna get it back? I done been to a lawyer, and he says I don’t have to give it back to you.” “Well,” Mr. Marsh says, “it depends on how you feel about it. It’s not your money. It belongs to another man, and we’d

388

they called it the war effort

appreciate it if you’d give it back to us.” And he looked at him a minute, then he reached in his watch pocket here and he pulled out a empty Bull Durham sack. In it he had eight one-hundred dollar bills wrapped up, and he gave him that money. He got it back. Did people save much in those days? Elmer: Whew! That’s all they did do. Nothing to buy. Helen: No place to spend it. Elmer: We had a little vendor there and he’d have these strokes—epileptic—and he’d even have a stroke in the bank sometimes. But he went carrying a basket around selling— Helen: Pencils. Elmer:—small items and shaving stuff and stuff like that. And you know, he accumulated and saved fifteen or twenty thousand dollars—just selling out of that basket. The ones that we saw, that got in there in the lobby like that, were the most intelligent. They were the office people. The common laborer, the twenty thousand of ’em, we never saw them. They are the ones that cashed their checks there at the stores and everywhere else. But the ones we got were the office girls and things like that. Their payroll, God, they used to have to send in about a $5 million deposit to take care of the payroll, and on every destroyer that they build new that went out of here on its maiden voyage we had to put $40,000 in cash on it. Why was that? Elmer: Well, I guess when they had shore leave or when it’d come payday.



that’s when the real stress came Dick Terry I’ve had some of ’em tell me, “My ol’ dad would give me a quarter on Saturday, and he’d say, ‘Son, now you’ve got this to last you until next Saturday,’” and they learned what it was to be conservative from their rearing at home. And those type people didn’t blow it. It was just those that were just overcome with all this great wealth.

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

389

[In 1941 I] was local manager of United Gas. I came here in ’32. When we came in, the city limits had a little sign—you know, most all the towns, it has population so-and-so. And I think, if I’m not mistaken, the city limits out here at Adam’s Bayou said, “Orange, Texas, population 5,000.” When they first rumored that United States Steel was going to have a shipyard and they had gotten contracts for building destroyers here, you could see this town just literally exploding. It’s just like an oil boomtown, I presume. I’ve never been in an oil boomtown, but when they hit it, boy, it just exploded, and it was just beyond anybody’s comprehension as to what would happen next. Lines! Lines to everything. You stood in a line to do anything you wanted to do, because there were a hundred other people who wanted to do the same thing you did.12 How do you remember people reacting to that? Well, there was some resentment, particularly of the old nesters, to have to wait in line to cash their check behind a bunch of shipyard workers. Here we are. Now, we helped establish this town. Our families before us created the housing and they created this, that, and the other, and me, being a pioneer, I’ve got to stand behind some guy from East Texas up there trying to cash his check for more money than he’s ever seen ever in his life. And I resent it. I’m different. I’m not a shipyard worker, so why can’t I get in line first? There were some, of course, that tried to use any influence they could to call bank people at night and say, “Can I give you my check and you cash it and then mail it to me tomorrow so I won’t have to stand in that line?” I have to say this now, the only lack of lines that I can remember—and it’s a shame to say it—was the churches. I can’t recall anybody standing in line to get in church—but everything else. Did you get out and meet these people that were coming in? Oh, yes. As local manager I worked Saturdays and Sundays—on call anytime for these people that got in. For instance, they’d get in here on a late Saturday night. The office was closed. They didn’t have an opportunity to come up and make a deposit for a meter and apply for service and that sort of thing. Somebody of the old crowd would say, “Well, call Dick Terry. He probably can help you.” And I got calls all night long and all weekends. And in cases where I didn’t have to set a meter, just turn the service on or something of that kind, I filled in, because number one—we want to keep this in mind—PR is most important with the utilities. And all I was doing was making points for Dick Terry while I was making points for United Gas. In fact, yesterday one man walked up to me, and he said, “Dick, I remember the first time I met you. I came in with a small baby and a wife, and I got a job at the shipyard. I needed gas bad ’cause we needed to heat

390

they called it the war effort

the bottle and this, that, and the other. Somebody told me to call you and I did, and you were kind enough [to come out]. My mother-in-law and my wife and I will never forget you for coming out and giving us that service.” Now, I appreciated it, and I appreciate even more being told this late in life. We had such a tremendous influx of people from everywhere—well, of course, East Texas, these people that had been eking out a living on a little ol’ five-acre farm up there and just barely getting by. If the weather was good to them they could make a crop, just enough to get ’em by until the next year. Then all of a sudden they come down here, and one paycheck was more than they’d make in five years up there. One paycheck! And they didn’t know what to do with that money. They had it bulge out of their pockets and everything else. When they came into the gas office to pay their bill they’d reach in there and they’d pull [out] this cash money. They didn’t want a checking account. They wanted to hold on to that money, because that was something that they had seen so little of in their lifetime. They wanted the actual money, not a piece of paper that says pay to the order of so-and-so. And they’d cash those checks just as fast as they possibly could and put that money in their pocket. They could feel that stuff, see. It’s unbelievable. I think some of ’em had it cashed in dollar bills to make a bigger bulge. And, of course, you’d go to the grocery store and there was the same thing. These shipyard workers—you could tell ’em because they always had this big roll of bills they’d pull out to pay for the groceries. They didn’t seem to mind exorbitant rents and exorbitant flophouses, because they knew Friday they were going to get another check and have another great big roll of money. When the shipbuilding business ceased there was just a tremendous adjustment that had to be made. From a land of plenty to a land of scarcity was just almost an overnight thing. These people were hanging on, even though there wasn’t work here. They were hanging on to find whatever they could, because they were reluctant to want to go back to that life that they had known before, like on these little five-acre farms. So they hung on and hung on and hung on. Then the people that had taken their homes and divided it up with beaverboard and made apartments out of [it], all of a sudden they had no renters, and their home was practically gutted to make room for all these transient workers. Now, there was a lot of stress there, too. I guess a much greater stress was manifest here when the shipbuilding closed down than it was as it was opening up, ’cause everything was brighter then and there was a tremendous future in store. But then the depression that hit, this other deal, was just the reverse, see.



Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

391

here it is happening again Mary Jo and Alonzo Craft Jr. Alonzo: Mary and I were building a new home, and just before the house got built, news about the shipyard broke out here. All the carpenters left except one man. He was not a first-class carpenter, but he stayed and finished the job so we could move in the house. I had the honor of helping serve on a rationing board for the control of the service stations and operators in Orange to see that they operated right. Three [of us] were in the wholesale oil business, and, naturally, we got the call to serve [in] that category. Some of the boys would try to cheat a little bit every now and then, but, as a whole, most of the service stations dealers operated according to the way the government wanted it run. Everyone was hunting stamps all the time. If you had a extra ration stamp you were a big friend if you’d give it to somebody. Of course, we, being in the gasoline business, had to fool with the durn stamps. We’d have to pick ’em up from the service stations who got ’em from the public. We’d have to account for ’em to our company who [had] to account for every gallon of product that we handle. So it was pretty tight. We deposited those coupons in the bank just like you did the money. We met once a week to go over the records, and if for some reason or another somebody would lose some gasoline or lose their tickets or something like that, that was our job to handle that for ’em. We had no one that we had to file any charges against. There was a provision where we could file charges and they would be brought up in court, but it never got to that with any of ’em. Some of ’em would lose some tickets for various reasons—somebody stole ’em or this, that, and the other—and it was up to us to either believe ’em or close ’em up. We had that authority, but luckily we didn’t have to close anybody up. Mary: A lot of the people that came in had not been to Texas before, so they didn’t know just what they were expecting. One lady thought we were going to have orange trees all over the yard. We had moved to [a] little house [across the street] because of the fact that he thought he was going into the service. We had to lease our new home for a year. You couldn’t just rent it by the month, so we had to sit over across the street and watch the people use our new house. That didn’t feel very good. Alonzo: [If I’d been drafted] she would [have been] closer to Mother and Dad, and we leased the house out to this family. Naturally, we had to live with the lease. Even after I found out I wasn’t going I still had to abide by the lease.

392

they called it the war effort

Did the people coming in integrate themselves pretty well into the community? Alonzo: I don’t think so, as a whole. Now, there was a few of ’em that did, but the average worker, I don’t think so. I know we had a flood here during the war. The Sabine River got out of its banks, and they had to throw up some temporary levees down there to keep part of Riverside from floating away. I know I spent several nights down there servicing the vehicles to keep them running, and the other oil companies did the same thing. But we would see people sitting on their porch over there doing nothing when most of us, if we wasn’t doing one thing [or another] we was filling up sandbags to keep their houses from floating off. They didn’t join in too much. The local people took care of it. It always kind of got me that some of ’em didn’t come lend a hand, ’cause we were trying to keep the water out of the houses. What were some of the consequences of people coming in? Alonzo: It was hard for some businesses to operate for the want of help. I can’t blame ’em, because like when they were building my house, the fellows left my job and went to the shipyard to make a hundred times more money than they were making working somewheres else. Some of the businesses were pretty short of employees. A store operator couldn’t pay what the shipyard was paying, and, consequently, he couldn’t hire the people. Where would these people get employees? Alonzo: A lot of ’em’s wives worked [as well as] the kids that couldn’t work in the shipyard, under age, and people that were too old to work in there. That’s about all that was left that we could hire. A lot of businesses were just a mom and pop operation. You take a community with 7,500 people in it, and then you dump 60,000 people in here, the business area is not big enough to take care of ’em. And nobody was very much interested in going into business because, heck, the war was going on. We’s trying to win a war. Everybody had that on their mind. Of course, we were glad that prosperity had come back to Orange. They tell me during World War I it was similar to that but not on that big a scale, and here it is happening again.



Wartime businesses had customers shifting impatiently in line and pushing on the doors. They wanted in before the doors were open and after the doors were closed. People were in the market for any and all goods or services. To some, it was the first time in years when opening a new business seemed to make sense. Small-time entrepreneurs, including children, were operating everywhere: on

Buy Anything, Sell Anything: Doing Business

393

the streets, in alleys, out of cars, from a rickety cart, and even out of baskets and water buckets. Lobbies and aisles stayed full, and behavior might easily become unruly as shoppers shoved and elbowed for merchandise that might be gone tomorrow. Shipyard workers, tired and grimy, could be intimidating as they reached menacingly for the last bottle of milk. It was as if all of the customers’ pent-up frustrations reached the breaking point when shopping, and not infrequently the resulting irritation was displaced onto the merchant. Merchants, in turn, had their saturation points, and their blood might boil at the demanding, pushy behavior across the counter. It was a seller’s market, and dissatisfied customers frequently ended up without recourse. Business owners were under a number of pressures. They had difficulty getting merchandise due to shortages and the quota system. Then, too, the quality of the merchandise they received might not be up to accustomed standards. There was the strain of trying to keep both old and new customers happy. Short items were not on the shelves for long and generally required coupons. Not only were the coupons, along with other government paperwork, a hassle for the merchant, but they also created bottlenecks at the registers and a feeling of helplessness in customers who had the money but often not the stamps. Long working hours also made it difficult for some workers to shop during regular store hours, and this was especially true for single people. There was the problem of getting and keeping reliable help. Everyone—from mechanics to carpenters to clerks—was going to the shipyards. Employable young men were being drafted, and many employable young women were following their young men to military bases around the country. Because good workers were so hard to find, an owner might well take the side of the employee in case of conflict with a customer, thus arousing more customer irritation. Some workers routinely failed to show up for work, leaving the already harried employer even more exasperated and with additional responsibility for the day. Joining the armed forces could sometimes seem like a less stressful alternative to being a business owner. Most of the businesses were small, mom-and-pop operations with long hours and little relief. Some owners, and employees, literally had to sleep at work. Parts and supplies were difficult to obtain, so it was often necessary to improvise and patch overextended equipment. Improvements in buildings and facilities had to be postponed because of the shortage of building materials. Staying in business almost became survival of the fittest. Most business operators probably tried to play the role of diplomat or psychologist because the times were stressful and people needed a little extra consideration. But the men and women who were providing community services had a unique sense of what was going on among the people. They saw and heard things unknown to most other citizens.

they called it the war effort

394

10

Health, Education, and Welfare “I was civil service, and I was transferred on April 15, 1943, as project supervisor with the Public Housing Authority. . . . As we became more familiar with what we were facing I appealed to the regional office for professional assistance coping with these problems of health, education, and welfare. . . . You would really have to be here and experience the things that I’ve told you. I haven’t told you all the things.” Bess Schofield

A

favored term in talking about wartime Orange was “influx,” literally “a flowing in.” Those who were in Orange during the First World War could clearly recall the human flood of those years and the neighborhoods of small “toy town” cottages erected to house the rush of shipbuilders. Some of these old-timers knew that if another war ever occurred there would be a similar population surge, but few could visualize the magnitude, the mass of humanity that would result. As suggested earlier, when the government launched the vast housing projects in the early forties, many of the natives were dubious. It was a pipe dream. There would never be people enough to occupy the thousands of units. The government was being extravagant. But then, what else could you expect from big government? The newcomers came, however, in a seemingly endless torrent. The population not only doubled and quadrupled, but also eventually multiplied sevenfold. Public health and social problems were inevitable. Historian William Tuttle has summarized congressional findings with respect to complaints and exposures in congested wartime communities like Orange: “[S]ubstandard housing and exorbitant rents; health hazards ranging from scabies, ringworm, impetigo, and other skin conditions to life-threatening epidemics such as meningitis, rheumatic fever, and polio; open sewers, leaky septic tanks, loose refuse and garbage, and other sanitary deficiencies; shortages of fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, and

395

Health, Education, and Welfare

milk; inadequate child-care facilities; crowded schoolrooms, teacher shortages, and upsurges in juvenile delinquency.” 1 Not only were efforts to provide housing in Orange severely challenged, but all government and community services were strained to the breaking point. People waited for everything from mail service to a new book of ration stamps to medical attention. Expectant mothers waited outside on the porch and were called in by number to see the doctor. Dr. P. V. Seastrunk, retired from the practice of dentistry due to an automobile accident, opened a small office on the back of his house to help meet the need for dental care. In the summer heat, patrons were passing out in the long lines at banks and the post office. Garbage collection, sanitation, prostitution, fighting, public drunkenness, food service, traffic, emergency fire responses, and domestic conflicts were just a few of the problems aggravated by the expanded numbers of people. Police officers were required to make calls without the assistance of a partner. The schools were besieged. Hospital emergency rooms were overextended. Churches ministered not only to spiritual needs but also to the sundry hardships of displaced individuals and families. Many people were simply unprepared for modern times and urban living. New to close living conditions, they were unaware how their behavior might impact their neighbors. Then, too, there were those characters who preyed on boomtowns, and many others arrived with little potential for good citizenship. As Mrs. Tilley acknowledged, Orange had few “facilities” and few qualified people for dealing with these classes of newcomers. “That was the one thing that kind of worried everybody.” People often seemed in bad humor, and public officials could feel harassed and discouraged. Addressing these issues was not easy, and more than one professional required the determination of Bess Schofield: “I’m a fighter. I’m a believer.” More than one volunteer shared the spirit of Anna Laura Burrows: “I had always felt like I owed something back to people, like I should do something for other people. And when I came here it really gave you the opportunity.” More than one police officer would have nodded in agreement with Alton Williams: “ You just had to do the best you could.”



they didn’t believe it was right to have a bathroom inside John E. Wheeler Day by day, wasn’t too much different from day to day today. That was the way things were then, just like things today are the

396

they called it the war effort way they are today. You look back on it and you can see a lot of difference. I wished now I was a photographer bug and had taken a lot of pictures of some of this stuff, but I wasn’t and didn’t. I think of one man [who] went to the bank to borrow money to build a dairy barn. Your barn had to meet certain requirements, so he had a good dairy barn, a milking room and equipment and everything—just first-class for that time. Next door to it was his house, which was one room about twelve by thirty. That’s where he and his wife and his daughter lived. On one end he had his stove and then his living room furniture. Then the bedroom back there, and they had a curtain hanging across where the daughter had her a private room. You could see dirt all through the floor everywhere—big cracks. And also wind blowing. It’d just come right through the walls. It was just a shack. Then you’d walk out to that dairy barn and it was shiny and pretty. And you could stand right here and take a picture of that and then a picture of [the shack]. I wish I’d taken a bunch of pictures of some other homes of these dairies. There were these old-time buildings with the hillbilly sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair, ’cause that’s the way they were living. Then they had their modern dairy barn off to one side.

I came here in February of ’46, and [it was] still crowded.2 You didn’t have hardly any vacant lots. Somebody’d build shacks on ’em or put up tents, and people were still living on ’em that was shipyard workers. And I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—tents just right next to each other on all these vacant lots. And even people renting out their garages, still, for sleeping quarters. Most of these shacks were just one-room buildings, no plumbing in ’em, and most of ’em would have one toilet out in the middle that everybody would use—and a shower. I came in as milk inspector [with the Health Department]. They were having problems here, and the county judge had written Austin, asked them to send somebody in to work on the milk supply. At that time Orange had two milk plants and, oh, must have had twenty or thirty people selling raw milk house-to-house delivery plus to the stores. Was the situation in ’46 much as it had been in the preceding years? No. It wasn’t as many people here. They’d started moving out. Let’s go back and mention Riverside. Most of the people that moved in here to work in the shipyards were farmers from East Texas—used to living on the farm. Well, when they moved into rent houses like Riverside, the first thing they did was take the screen doors off, get rid of ’em, ’cause you get better

Health, Education, and Welfare

397

air circulation if you had no screens—to cool off. Plus, they could throw all the garbage out the back door. That’s the way they did at home on the farm, and the chickens and dogs would eat it. Except here the chickens and dogs didn’t eat it. The only way that we would know at the Health Department who was doing that was when some neighbor didn’t like it and would report it, and you’d go out and talk to ’em. They couldn’t see anything wrong with it. That’s the way they’d done all their life—throwing it out. And like some of ’em said, “Well, that’s the way we raised our fishing worms, under that ol’ garbage we throw out.” The city had good garbage pickup out there. We had fifty-five-gallon drums in every parking lot, and the people might have to walk forty or fifty feet to reach those drums, but a lot of ’em wouldn’t do it ’cause that wasn’t the way they were used to doing it. Then going back to some of this other housing, all they had was a row of houses, and in the middle would be a shower and the restrooms. Some of ’em had just one that both men and women shared, and some of ’em would have two—one for men and one for women. One lot had all kind of tents and shacks and stuff on it. Whoever owned that managed to get enough pipe to connect to the city sewer, and right in the middle they brought that pipe up above the ground and put a big funnel in it to where everybody could bring their slop jars and empty it into this funnel. And that was still there after the war was over, and all over town you had open service toilets. That began to be one of the big jobs of the Health Department, getting people either to hook onto the sewer or put in a pit toilet. But it took a long time, ’cause then you couldn’t go buy plumbing. And you had a lot of oldtime Orange residents—and that included [areas] at that time which were not incorporated—they didn’t want to hook onto the sewer. They didn’t believe it was right to have a bathroom inside the house. I know of one case in West Orange where the people hooked onto the sewer system and boxed in their back porch and put in a bathroom, but grandpa was living with ’em and he wouldn’t use it. He’d still go outside to that outdoor toilet ’cause it just wasn’t right. The neighbors reported it, and I told the neighbor, “No, those people have hooked onto the sewer. I’ve been there. I know that.” “No they’re not!” So when I went out that’s when I found out that grandpa was using it. And when I talked to the people they said, “Please write us a letter telling us we must tear down that ol’ outdoor toilet, ’cause that’s the only way we can keep Dad out of it.” Another one I’m familiar with didn’t have a toilet at all. They was using the woods. And I told ’em, “To get a permit to sell milk you’ve got to have a septic tank or a pit-type toilet.” The man said, “All right. The next time you come out I’ll have one.” So I went out the next time and he’d built a

398

they called it the war effort

new pit toilet, papered it with pretty wallpaper and painted it on the outside—real pretty. Wanted to know if that was all right. I said, “That’s fine. Couldn’t do better.” Then when I went back later to make another inspection I checked it, and I said, “It doesn’t look to me like you’re using it.” He said, “Oh, heck no! You didn’t tell me we had to use it. You just told me we had to have it, so we’re still using the woods.” I said, “What are you using the woods for?” “Aw, they’re closer than this toilet.” And he had the toilet halfway between his house and the dairy barn. He said, “Well, if we got to use it I reckon we will.” And your cafes were having trouble getting new equipment. A lot of the oven doors were propped up with two-by-fours to keep ’em closed, ’cause the hinges were gone and you couldn’t get new ones. A whole lot of the equipment was just patched with baling wire, you might say. They could still keep it clean. It didn’t look very attractive, but, really, it wasn’t anything wrong except being more inconvenient to use. [But] the main thing to me when I first moved here was all the people and the way they were living everywhere. What was your reaction when you saw these conditions? I reckon I just accepted it, ’cause I’d heard there were so many people here, and when you come into it back then you accept it. Just like today. What you see you accept. I didn’t think anything about it then. That’s just the way it was. Some of it was neat and some of it was cluttered. You had all kinds. Some of them, even though they’s living in a tent, dirt floor, they’d try to keep everything neat and clean, and they’d complain about the neighbors that didn’t. And the neighbors could have kept it just as clean as they did. All they wanted to do was draw a paycheck from the shipyard and take off across the river to the gambling joints in Louisiana and the beer joints in Orange, because all of the end of Green Avenue, east end, was beer joints. Some of these drive-ins, especially the beer joints, these carhops would pay to work there. You didn’t pay them to work. They’d come in and beg for the job and pay you so much a week to be a carhop. Some of those cafes would sell the carhopping job to the highest bidder, because these shipyard people tipped good, and some of these girls really knew how to drag that tip money out of ’em. Some of ’em was paying as much as fifty dollars a week to have the job. In some of those places the waitresses were nothing but prostitutes, and they would take the job so that they wouldn’t get arrested for vagrancy. A lot of those girls would come to the Health Department every week to have blood tests. Now, we required ’em to have a test every six months that worked near [food]—all the food handlers. But they’d come in every week, voluntarily, and you’d tell ’em, “Now, you

Health, Education, and Welfare

399

don’t need to.” “Oh, yes I do. I want to know what’s going on!”—which I reckon was good. They’d want a health card so they could show the customer, “There’s nothing wrong with me. See here, I had a health check last week.” So I reckon you could say the Health Department was helping their business, but at the same time it was good to know that if they did have venereal disease we’d take ’em out of that business, too. What about the black community and their housing conditions? It wasn’t much different than it is today. The main difference was you had a bunch of blacks come in and open cafes and barbecue joints that were not native, and they didn’t care what shape theirs was in. The blacks gave more trouble on eating joints than anybody else, but they wasn’t your native blacks. Most of your native blacks had the eating joints on Second Street. They were [in] pretty durn good shape, but another one would come in or get off on some side street or in an alley and open a barbecue joint, and there would be everything wrong with it until I caught it, and then I closed ’em up. Same way with some of ’em putting in beer joints. One in particular wasn’t washing his glasses, so I told him he had to go to paper cups. He did, until I went back and he was rinsing the paper cups out and using ’em again. So, no more cups. They drank out of the bottle. But again, that was a colored guy out of somewhere that came over just to get just what nickels he could. The biggest trouble with some of ’em was the landlord not trying to keep the building up, and I’m referring particularly to some landlords that lived in Beaumont. But they didn’t care. All they wanted [was] to come over and collect the rent, and then the building started leaking or something and they didn’t want to fix it. But we had several landlords like that that lived out of town. One of the big problems—and this was on white property as well as black—they’d have seven or eight houses in a row and managed to hook ’em all onto the city sewer, which was fine except they wasn’t hooked individually. There’d be one sewer line in back of the [houses that] everybody hooked onto. All right, one of the guy’s sewers would get stopped up, [and] invariably it was the one closest to the street. That would back up on everybody else, so they’d go out there with a shovel and dig up the line and break it and just let it flow all over the ground so theirs would work, because the landlord wouldn’t clean this other one out and fix it. So just as soon as material became available we made ’em hook every one of those houses up directly. But it wasn’t anything wrong with hooking it up that way if they had taken care of it. But it was your out-of-town owners that caused the most trouble, ’cause they came in here just to pick up everything they could and leave. On some of ’em we’d just tell the people they had to move out, and [we’d] lock the houses up until the landlord fixed it.

400

they called it the war effort

They’d get real unhappy then, because they’d come over every week to collect the rent—I mean regularly.



just bring him in, one way or the other Alton Williams I went [to the Police Department] in about ’42, I believe it was. Didn’t have too much problems then. It was just drunks and disturbance. Fights and such as that.3 I worked a-many a night by myself, and the captain was the dispatcher and I had to make the calls. We finally got on up to four men to a shift—one man outside—and then give a man a day off, and me or whoever was working made the calls. How does a police force that small handle that many people? You don’t handle ’em much, I’ll tell you. They’re just hard to handle, especially on a weekend when they all get drunk. There was lots of drinking. They went across the river when they got off, and before they went to work they’d go across the river. They’d consume it and come back here and go in to work. Someone would be put out, wasn’t able to work, but then the other ones made the eight-hour shifts. There was a lot more drinking going on then than now, but if it was one to three men outside you didn’t make every call you had. What are some of the calls you remember making? Well, just family disturbance, drunks, and every now and then you’d get a break-in call. There were fistfights and, just like I said, family quarrels. When one got off at the shipyard, well, he’ll cross the river and get drunk and come back [and abuse his wife], and then we’d get a call to make that call. But you didn’t have nobody going with you then. When we got three or four men to a shift besides the dispatcher we thought we had a lot of men. Were there very many family disturbances? Oh, yes sir. Lots of ’em. There were [lots of killings]. You would find one and pull him out of the creek down there, or out from under the bridge where he [had] started over and somebody knocked him over or hit him and throwed him over. It happened to a lot of ’em. Never did find who it was. Had lots of murders that we never did find out who it was. They’d go over there and gamble and lose all their money and go home and not have any money—it’s payday—and then that’s where hell would break loose. Were there many problems in Riverside?

Health, Education, and Welfare

401

Yes sir, there were. Had lots of fights down there and disturbance. Lot of time you wouldn’t bring ’em in. You’d just talk to a man and his wife and get ’em to straighten it out and save you from bringing ’em in, or if you couldn’t, well, wasn’t nothing to do but just bring him in, one way or the other. You never did know what you’re going to run into working by yourself. It was a lot of stress to be under. You went home supposing you were going to stay there and rest, and then you’d get a call to come out. Had one man a-working and a gang fight break out somewhere, and just get a pair of britches and your shirt on and go down there. Was it common to have to subdue someone and bring them in? Yes it was, ’cause they knew you didn’t have any help. You take one of ’em fellows that’s been working in the oil fields or something like that, a big 220-pound man, and you get a call by yourself. You either talk him into going with you or one way or the other—of course, you had to bring him in. The chief didn’t believe in making a call and leaving a man there. If you had a call [you had] to bring him in, and you just had to do the best you could. How would you handle that? Well, just the best man won. That’s just about it. We had black jacks and billy clubs, but I never did hit a man with a billy club, black jack, or anything for the twenty-four years I worked down there. I never hit a man with nothing other than my fists. I weighed about 190 or 210. Something like that. Did any of the other officers have serious problems? Everyone they picked up they had serious trouble with him. Some got hurt, bunged up a little bit. But you finally got him in and got him into the station. We had screens up behind the front seat and the back seat, made out of steel. Once you’d get ’em in there, well, you kinda halfway had him unless he kicked the window out. Of course, I’ve had ’em do that lots of times. The window’d just kind of shatter, but I’d be in the station by the time he had it kicked out. I’d get out and open the door and have to fight him again to get him up to the booking window. I didn’t mind the fighting and tussles back in them days, ’cause I had done enough of it in the merchant marines and rooting around that I didn’t particularly mind ’em so bad. But now I’d talk to a man a half a day before I’d try to bring him in, if he didn’t want to come. Were there some people who were known to be fighters? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you had them. They had some that just went in some of these places picking fights. And you get hold of one of them, you had to fight to get him—if you got him.4 You’d call another car if they had one and

402

they called it the war effort

they would come and give you some help. But sometimes you’d get help and sometimes you had to go back and fight. It was rough during the war.



a jumping-off place Bess Schofield When they were contemplating transfers of people with civil service, this associate in another department came to me and he said, “I think they’re going to transfer me to Orange, Texas. Do you know where that is?” I said, “Well, I think it’s a jumping-off place.” He said, “Well, I don’t think I want to go.” I said, “I don’t blame you.” And within three days they called me from the Fort Worth office and asked me if I’d be willing to go [to Orange]. It was a war effort and it could be an indefinite assignment and would I be willing to go. This person I was talking to said, “It’s a real challenge.” I said, “Well, let me think about it and call me back tomorrow.” So I didn’t sleep that night. The next day when they called, I said, “Well, I’ve decided that if it’s a challenge I’ll go. I like a challenge.” But when I came here I thought I was at the jumping-off place. I’ve never been in such a situation in my life. Number one, they housed me over in this demountable. I stayed there for one month before they were able to get me a house. When I would go home in the evening I’d open the [icebox] and there was no ice. The butter was all melted and it was full of roaches. It was sheer determination that caused me to stay and to believe that I could help in a situation that looked impossible. What else was so discouraging? The lack of cooperation. I wasn’t able to convince ’em of the need, of what I was trying to accomplish. These people were pretty well satisfied, the old-timers. They weren’t concerned with these low-income, low class of people. Why would they be? They’ve lived here comfortably all their lives. I would, but that’s because I know how poor people have to live. I was in San Antonio working with the Department of Public Health. I was civil service, and I was transferred on April 15, 1943, as project super-

Health, Education, and Welfare

403

visor with the Public Housing Authority. I had all of the public housing facilities—health, education, and welfare. First I made a survey of the conditions of the community, which I reported back to our regional office in Fort Worth. And the first three months I hadn’t really scratched the surface, because at that time I think the general feeling of a lot of the older citizens of Orange was a little resentful of government interference. See, we grew from a population of about 7,500 to 65,000 before the war was over, and we had a class of shipyard workers who came in here from all over the country, but primarily from the adjoining counties in this vicinity. They were families who were very poor, who had never had any benefits at all, including what we consider necessities—like indoor plumbing. They’d had no experience at all with the modern conveniences in a kitchen, and my job was to recruit as many volunteers as possible to help cope with that situation. As we became more familiar with what we were facing, I appealed to the regional office for professional assistance in coping with these problems of health, education, and welfare. But it took an awful long time for me to be accepted, because the people didn’t understand what I was supposed to do, I suppose. Acceptance by the natives or the new people or both? Both. Especially the new people who came in. And I think it was the most difficult position that I’ve ever had, and I’ve worked all my life. It took me about eight months before I was able to even feel that I was doing an adequate job. But it was a problem of education, of informing the people in such a way that they realized that the community had a responsibility in dealing with these problems. Then after a period of time I made contacts with the people in authority, with public health and the public schools. The superintendent of the schools here was my lifesaver, really. He supported me from the word go and gave me a lot of encouragement and moral support, and also provided me with lists of people that he felt would respond and perhaps volunteer to do some of the things that I was proposing on a volunteer basis. Maybe I was the one that was the problem. [Maybe] I expected too much too soon, ’cause it was all so new to them. [But I contacted] the heads of agencies—the Ministerial Alliance and the public schools and the health authorities, the governing bodies, city and county, the Lions Club, the Rotary Club. I made a lot of contacts with all the churches. I enlisted their assistance very quickly after I got here. But when I came I just don’t think that [the agencies] realized at that point that their needs were that great. My job was working with people that lived in the projects. We had what we called demountables. They were collapsible-type things they

404

they called it the war effort

could move any place. And in addition to that, in Pine Grove they had maybe 300 trailers. They already had low-income housing here, which was Navy Park Addition, and when I came they were in the process of just building all of Riverside. People were just moving in here in these undesirable, uncomfortable facilities with large families—no refrigeration. They had iceboxes that held twenty-five pounds of ice. You got twentyfive pounds of ice every other day, and all of these facilities were infested with roaches. You’ve never seen as many roaches in your life, and I’d never lived where there were roaches before. Of course, they got them out of these undesirable places as soon as they were able to complete houses for them, but, again, that’s when I was presented with another problem of their not knowing how to use the modern facilities. And maintenance was a real problem in a lot of those houses. The people’d move in and they’d try to flush diapers, for instance, down the commodes—or vegetables that shouldn’t go in a commode at all. They used it and thought it was what we’d call a garbage disposal now. [But] the community began to respond. The community realized what it meant to business—to the grocery stores, the downtown dry good stores, and the men’s shops. I suppose within eighteen months people were more receptive to what we represented, and they took greater interest in what we were trying to accomplish. Were you involved in the tent cities? No, not directly. My only responsibility was to work with the community. If the community called me and told me that these things were happening [like people living in tents], I’d advise ’em to get in touch with me and perhaps when we were able to provide facilities for them we could get ’em moved—if they were shipyard workers. Now, we had an awful lot of people that were not good citizens move in. We had a lot of alcoholism. We had prostitution. But resistance at first in identifying problems. That’s right, but it was not directed directly at me except that I represented the government. It was most difficult, and at one time I just almost gave up on it because I didn’t think that I could cope with it. It was depressing, and I had really never experienced anything like this. But I think the thing that kept me going was that it was a challenge. When I came, after the first few weeks when I went into the grocery stores and saw the quality of vegetables that they were getting in here, I was appalled. All the good things were going on to Beaumont and to Houston. We were being bypassed. The quality of vegetables you wouldn’t believe. Maybe the people who had money and could go to Beaumont [would] go

Health, Education, and Welfare

405

there, but there was nothing for these low-income people that were shipyard builders—and they had money to spend. I never shall forget the afternoon that I was so tired and so disgusted with the whole situation. It was on a Saturday afternoon. I went to the grocery store and I found this little thing of celery that was just about this big around [two inches], and when I got ready to check out I said to the checker, “Is this the best that you have?” He said, “If you don’t want it you don’t have to take it.” I started crying. I walked out. I didn’t buy one grocery. Now, that was just an indication of the attitude of a lot of people. You know, this little community—they were pretty well satisfied with themselves during that period of time—and before. Why weren’t the citizens complaining? I don’t know. That’s what I wondered. That was another complaint that I made to the regional office, and as I remember they sent someone in here to survey the situation. But we began to get better vegetables. See, this thing all happened so fast. These people moved in here so fast that you wouldn’t believe it. At one time there was around 700 ex-convicts and their families that moved into Riverside—which presented another problem. I spent a lot of time working with the families. They had all kinds of problems with their children, and a combative attitude toward a man and a wife, and the children running away and getting lost. That was another problem we had. You take people from the country—they don’t know how to get around. You remember how close the houses were together? And a lot of ’em couldn’t read or write, and every house looked the same. Those people had so many problems that you wouldn’t believe. I was sitting in my office one morning, and these two little boys who had been to my office over and over—the people were housed across the street in Navy Park. There was a wife and her husband and these two little boys, and I couldn’t keep them out of my office. They wanted to come over every day, every day. Well, I’d talk to them for a few minutes and I’d send ’em home, send ’em across the street. And then the wife began to come over and tell me her problem. The husband would come home drunk every day or maybe he wouldn’t come home at all, and he was having an affair with another woman—and all the details of how it was affecting these little boys. I think this went on maybe for a month, but I’d always say, “Well, come back and we’ll talk tomorrow. Maybe things are going to get better.” And I’d tell her the things that I felt she might do. I asked an awful lot of questions—if his meals were on time and prepared, and did she fix his lunch when he left and all those things—and advised her the best I could. Well, this particular morning—and this was early—I hadn’t been in the

406

they called it the war effort

office but a little while. The children came over, and I said, “Why are you over here so early?” “Mama sent us over here.” I said, “Why did she send you over here so early?” “I don’t know.” I let ’em play around in the office a little while and didn’t think too much about it. I thought, well, I’ll send ’em home in a little while. And just about that time I heard this horrible gunshot, and I ran across the street—I closed the little boys up in my office— and she had shot this man as he walked in the door. This was early, we’ll say eight o’clock in the morning, maybe eight thirty—and she’d shot herself.5 I think that’s the most dramatic thing that I went through. Anyway, I had no record of relatives for those little boys. I took those children home with me. I kept ’em for about three days before we could get relatives here. But through the records at the housing office we finally traced ’em and we got the family here. But there was so much fighting, and there was so much whiskey available. I don’t know where it came from, but, anyway, I’m sure what presented an awful lot of their problems was drunkenness. What were the stresses being placed on people? Well, a lot of ’em, of course, were spending more money than they were making, and that was one situation, I think, that presented a lot of these problems between a husband and wife. They weren’t spending it on their families. They had a lot of women. They were going across the river, drinking and carousing around with women other than their [wives]. They were spending an awful lot of money and would stay out all night long. What were your solutions? Well, of course, we were able to get good recreational facilities. The government built community centers. Of course, we had USO. That wasn’t my responsibility, but that was just primarily for the navy personnel. They didn’t get the class of people that I was dealing with. They got the best girls in Orange to help entertain the sailors, and that was an entirely different situation. I worked very closely with USO as an agency and they were very helpful, but the people that I was dealing with, unless they went there voluntarily and qualified as participants with the USO, they were not a class of people that would be accepted. I couldn’t refer them to USO. See what I mean? How did the churches assist you? They contacted them to see if they could interest them in coming to church—home visitation. And that was very helpful. I don’t remember what percent of ’em responded, but I know that the ministers made an effort. I think they probably were as discouraged initially as I was. It was just so hopeless that people were not responding. I don’t think they got very

Health, Education, and Welfare

407

much response from these people. And after all, unless you’re paid to do it as I was, you give up. I think I failed to mention the cooperation that I got from the housing managers. I spent an awful lot of time educating them as to what I was trying to accomplish. It wasn’t easy ’cause they had a big job to do. They came to my rescue on a lot of these things and appealed in my behalf to the regional office for professional assistance in coping with these things. If I hadn’t had the managers on my side it would have been even more difficult. But they were responsive. They knew [that] what I was trying to accomplish with the people who lived in these houses would make their job a little easier—for instance, the maintenance problem. As I told you, they were most destructive in a lot of ways. You can’t imagine the attitude of some of these people who had never had anything in their whole lives, how they treated their surroundings. What kinds of destruction? The screen doors—that was a big problem—and the front porch. The boards out of the front porch would be knocked out, and the posts—the little entrance thing—that would be knocked down. And the plumbing problem you wouldn’t believe. Oh, I can’t even describe the interior of the houses—some of ’em. The managers would take me in to show me some of ’em and I couldn’t believe it either. But these people, they didn’t care. How did you handle those problem people? You just continued to work with them. They were shipyard workers. We were trying to win the war. I think we helped an awful lot of people through the professional help that we had. We certainly helped to keep some children in school, and I think we improved their health to a certain extent. I don’t know that we did too much for their social life, ’cause they didn’t participate in anything except what was happening in the project. I don’t think many of the local people realized all of the things that I’ve told you. You would really have to be here and experience the things that I’ve told you. I haven’t told you all the things. They finally built a dormitory for women down close to the shipyard, and I believe we housed at one time three hundred women in this dormitory—which presented another problem. I think that we did a good rehabilitation program with the dormitory. We had a good housemother—I think we called ’em housemother. We had sewing machines. We had all the things that you would have in a home that make for comfort and recreation. We provided a pool table in there. Again, [these were] shipyard workers. They were all single but all classes, again. That’s where I found

408

they called it the war effort

out about all the prostitutes, but, again, it was our responsibility to see that they got treatment and that they were isolated when necessary. It was probably built about the early part of ’44. See, they didn’t have single women in the project. That was all families. I think we did a pretty good rehabilitation with a lot of those women. I know we improved some of their health. Some of ’em were suffering from malnutrition when they came to us, and we had a couple of cases of tuberculosis that were discovered after they got there. I know that their social life was improved—just the environment and the association with the other people and [what] the supervisor was able to do for them.



abe more or less talked me into running for mayor Homer E. Stephenson I moved to Orange January 7, 1941, to practice law with my uncle. Before the year was over we were growing, and there were more people here and more people in need of the services of an attorney. We had a mayor, Abe Sokolski, who ran the men’s store right downstairs from where my office was located, and Abe more or less talked me into running for mayor of the city of Orange in 1944. I’d only been here about two and a half years at the time, and I thought it was much too early to get into politics, but some of my Methodist friends and Lions Club friends and others encouraged me to run for office. So the next two years were really something. Orange had grown by that time to around 50,000 in population, and everybody, it seems to me, stayed more or less in a bad humor. I’m not sure I ever did anything that anybody ever approved of while I was mayor of Orange. I remember one thing in particular that I thought was real important for me to do. We didn’t have a garbage collection system in Orange. Everybody sort of took care of their own at that time, and some of the awfulest looking garbage collectors you’ve ever seen would go around in various places where they had contacts, in old wagons maybe, horse-drawn, and pick up slop and garbage, and it was obvious that’s what we needed. So we talked the city commission into passing an ordinance creating a municipal garbage system. And you probably won’t believe this, some of my good friends were opposed to it because they didn’t like the idea of having to

Health, Education, and Welfare

409

carry their garbage out from their backyard and put it out on the street in their front yard. We decided we needed to have a city hall, so we began to look around. About that time Edgar Brown was building his new home, and we negotiated with Edgar and arranged to buy that entire block with that beautiful home on it for $15,000. And believe it or not, there were some who thought that was far too much to pay for that property. We did complete that transaction and acquired a new city hall, and it’s still located today where it was then some forty years ago. Still using it as the city hall. And we converted the garage to a jail. The jail we had before that time was a real disgrace. It was something that you wouldn’t believe still existed in modern times. We had a very low tax rate—it sounds like I’m trying to convince you what a good mayor I was, doesn’t it? [Laughs] Nobody ever complained about city taxes, and we didn’t owe anybody and paid all of our debts, and everybody was happier from that standpoint, if from no other. But it was an exciting two years and maybe the worst two years of my life, though, because as I already mentioned, nobody was happy. If anybody thought I was doing a good job I don’t think they ever came around and told me about it. How would you describe the mood of Orange? We were extremely overcrowded. You can imagine a county going from 7,500 to 50,000 just almost overnight, the problems that we ran into. That describes the mood just about as well as anything I could say. Crime was probably at its lowest ebb. Everybody had a job. Everybody was earning more money than they’d ever earned before, and it wasn’t necessary to go out and steal and rob. We did not have to take the precautions that you have to today about protecting yourself and your family and your homes. People were still leaving their doors unlocked and going anywhere they wanted to at will. [But] I decided that that would be my last venture in politics, and sure enough I stayed out of politics until 1953, when I was appointed to the district bench and then spent the next twenty-five years as a judge. What made you decide that? It was just an unpleasant two years. There was more unpleasant than there was pleasant. I enjoyed the recognition, of course, and had a certain amount of pride in some of the things that we accomplished locally and in Washington for Orange. But I said, “Never again.” I wasn’t able to devote near enough time to my wife and our home. It kept me extremely busy and there was a lot of pressure. I think that’s about the time—no, I’d already had high blood pressure, so that couldn’t have brought it on. And let’s see,

410

they called it the war effort

I’m not sure whether I had my ulcer by then or not. [Laughs] I think the ulcer even came a little later. Did you ever think about what this was doing to you physically? Oh, yes. You know, at the time they knew very little about handling high blood pressure. That was one of the reasons that I had not been accepted for military service, was my high blood pressure. Seemed like to me I’d had high blood pressure all my life, [or as] soon as they started testing you for high blood pressure. It certainly has to have had an effect, all of the pressure that I was under at the time.



a volunteer Mrs. Clifford Burrows I was living in Henderson, Texas. My husband was here in Orange, but I wasn’t able to move here until ’44, when we were able to get housing in Riverside. Nearly everybody that you’d talk to, they’d say, “Have you just cried your eyes out since you’ve been here?” And I said, “No.” When I moved to Orange that was my home, and I expected to find Christian friends in the neighborhood and friends everywhere.6 I cried when I left Henderson, of course, but I didn’t ever cry after I’d been here. Why were people so unhappy coming into Orange? Well, I think that you find that with just an awful lot of people if they have to move and give up their homes and come to any place. It wouldn’t necessarily be Orange, and naturally, most of us had lived in better homes than we had in Riverside. Of course, the houses were not bad at that time, and if you kept up your yard—now, we didn’t keep our yard up pretty because we were always out doing volunteer work. [My husband] had come to Orange to work in the shipyard. He was a mechanic and had his own garage. It had gotten so bad that he could not obtain parts. All the parts went to maybe the Ford place or Chevrolet, so it was hard for him to really be making a living at that time. Consolidated Steel was advertising for workers. Each day there was [an ad] in the paper wanting people to come down, that they needed machinists particularly. We probably talked about it for about six months before he really decided to close his shop and come. [He] was here for a year and a half or more, and then he was able to obtain this house in Riverside. He had had a terrible time finding a place to stay. In fact, sometimes he was sleeping at night in

Health, Education, and Welfare

411

the same room that someone else had slept in in the morning. He would come home to go to bed and they would get up and go to work. We owned our home there and we had a little girl who was in school. It was quite a move to come here. Of course, the worst thing was that she was kind of a daddy’s girl anyway, and when he would phone and talk to us—nearly always during the week—well, she always ended up crying. Naturally, she didn’t want to move to Orange when we’d come here and see all these people. She just wanted her daddy to come home. What was it like moving into Riverside? Well, it was pretty bad in some ways. Most of my neighbors were rather nice neighbors, but there was a lot of riffraff. At first we just didn’t get out much at night. We went back and forth to the church, and that was just about all the getting out until we’d been here a few weeks and they asked us to work with the young people. There were so many children that were on the streets till midnight because their parents were working shift work. And so the USO group asked my husband and myself to go down and open up the youth center. They had a nickelodeon and they had a lot of different kinds of games. It was kind of pathetic, because some of the parents were working and some of ’em were over across the river, and so we did keep that open for quite a while. [Some things] were just different, quite different, from our little small town of Henderson, which was 3,500 at that time. You’d drive down the street and see a drunk person, which I’d never seen before until I came to Orange. I know when I’d go down and pick up my husband at times, so many would just head for all these ol’ bars. How often would the center be open? About five nights a week. And sometimes we’d have as many as a hundred children. [It was] open until around ten, and on Friday and Saturday nights we kept it open sometime a little later to try to keep the children until maybe their parents would be getting home. [For] so many, their parents had changed so since they moved here. Seems as though they had moved here from a smaller town, but after they moved here—and there was drinking across the river here and gambling across the river—children found that their mothers and fathers were going across over there and not really showing them any attention. That was most of the problem with the youth, [and] they would [talk about it]. They really did. Now, quite a few did attend church, but so many of ’em didn’t. I know one Sunday morning I was keeping two little boys of my best friends in Nacogdoches. We started out to Sunday school one morning, and this little boy five years old said, “Anna Laura, look at those children out there play-

412

they called it the war effort

ing in the mud and dirt, and this is Sunday morning. Don’t they love God?” And I said, “Oh, honey, I’m sure they love God, but they just haven’t been taught like you have been by your mother to go to Sunday school and church on Sunday morning. But we’re going to try to see what we can do to get ’em interested.” And that did happen so much of the time. Now, the churches were good about sending buses out there to pick up children. So the churches were responding to the need. They were doing something. Now, there’s a lot of the town people that really did resent all these influx of people coming in here. A lot of ’em didn’t know that I lived in Riverside, and you’d be surprised to hear someone say, “Do you mean that they’re letting people in Riverside join our church?” And, of course, I’d speak up and I’d say, “I’m one of them.” Well, then they’d turn red in the face. But I’ve had several say that at different times. I think there was a lot of people who maybe had gone to church in their hometown. When they came here they were just a stranger and nobody made ’em maybe feel welcome. Seems like to me something could have been done for that type of person. I had always felt like I owed something back to people, like I should do something for other people. And when I came here it really gave you the opportunity to really do something for other people, and I really feel like I did. Did very many people share your attitude? Not too many. They really didn’t. Most of the people that I came into contact to—not all of ’em but so many of them—felt like I’m just going stay here and make some money and I’m going home. Going home. And they didn’t feel like they owed the people in Orange anything. Now, I’m sure I’m wrong about that, but that’s the attitude I have.



a preacher sees things different lots of times Melba and C. H. (Cleon) Hogan Cleon: One lesson I think that we’ve learned, and I think the whole country learned, is that righteousness always pays. It may seem that the dividends are slow coming and the picture is slow achieving, but if we are going to fight a war we want to have the

Health, Education, and Welfare

413

right reason, the right motive, the right purposes, and then the zeal and courage to go out and do a good job of it. Be sure we’re right and then go in there and win it. I think the victory comes to those who are right. Now, I had a first cousin that fought in France during the invasion of Normandy. He was a fine looking man, over six feet tall and nice brown curly hair. Well, he came back [and] his hair was gray—that war put him through such a strain. He said, “Cleon, we were on the right side. We were on the right side.” And that’s the way he felt as a soldier; his cause was right. And so I believe that righteousness creates strength. People who are right—we might not always win, but in the long run we win. Cleon: I was pastor at West Orange Baptist Church. I came in ’37. The community was really in distress. The Depression was still effective here, and some of ’em worked for [the] bean factory for ten cents an hour, especially some of the women. Many of ’em were unemployed, and if they had employment it paid very little. Well, the populations grew rapidly with the war, and people moved in every nook and crook of the whole country. We had a garage, and a man and his wife came and they rented that garage from us for fifty dollars a month. We didn’t ask him for fifty, but that’s what he gave me. He put a floor in there and some beds and some little cooking utensils like a hot plate, and he and his wife lived in that and worked at the shipyard. They would beg you for a garage or a chicken house or anything—any kind of a shed you had. Melba: We had a Mr. Tom Lowe who lived down here, [and] he had a big dairy—well, I guess he had let those cows go. Anyhow, he had this big red barn, so he converted that into apartments and people lived in that barn. Now, we visited there for the church, encouraged ’em to come to church. Cleon: Another thing that I remember very vividly was the lines of people. When we went to get our stamp books we’d go to the courthouse, and there’d be a line of maybe 200 people waiting there for the courthouse to open. I’m an impatient person. That was provoking to me to have to wait so long. What was the impact of those years on the church? Cleon: Well, not as great as it should have been. Not as much as we would naturally expect with so many people coming. Lots of people came to Orange and they didn’t attach themselves to the church, and lots of ’em did. Our church quickly filled up with the new growth, but there’s a lots

414

they called it the war effort

of people who came to Orange who were church members and they didn’t want to move their membership from up the country. They wanted to go home now and then and support the ol’ home church. The churches were in support of the war effort. The preaching and the teaching and all was that of loyalty, strict loyalty. We were anxious to do what we could to promote the war effort, and I think all of our people had that thought in mind. Of course, the churches were interested in the spiritual salvation of the people. There was a great evangelistic fervor among the churches, and they had evangelistic revivals and campaigns to reach the people for Christ. They weren’t asleep on that idea. What about church visitation? Cleon: Oh, we did lots of that. In our church over there, my wife and I and some of the people, we visited all the time. Every day. Melba: They just built Riverside up almost overnight. Houses just came up, just sprung up like mushrooms. People moved in there, and we visited them to try to get ’em to come to the church. Well, some of the people worked even on Sundays. We had a man in our church, he said, “Now, don’t give me Sunday work unless you really have to. Let someone else have that that wants it. I go to church. My wife and I head up the Junior Department on Sundays, and I prefer to be in church. But if I have to work I will work.” And so when he had to work on Sunday, well, he called that “church money.” One time he took his Sunday work pay and he bought song books for the Junior Department, and they cost quite a bit of money. He said, “That’s the Lord’s money and I want to use that for the Lord’s work. It’s not mine.” What happened to family life? Cleon: Well, some very tragic things happened. We were living in that parsonage over there, and a beautiful young lady came there, and she had three or four children. She was crying and heartbroken. Her husband came down here ahead of her and went to work, and he got interested in a young woman in a cafe and divorced her and left her and her children—and her children were small. She was having a hard time because they were small and they needed her attention at home, and she couldn’t go out and work much. We had a lot of tragic cases like that. Sometimes prosperity is a great thing, but oftentimes it creates a tension, and oftentimes when people become prosperous then they do radical things that they wouldn’t otherwise do. One of the radical things they do is to get a divorce and marry other people. So there’s a tragic side to this story, and we kind of hate to deal with it because there’s a sadness. Did you lose members of the church to the war? Cleon: Oh, yes! A lot of ’em went to the war, and lots of ’em came back

Health, Education, and Welfare

415

and some of ’em didn’t. [One family’s] boy was seventeen, and they came and told me he was going—I was teaching him in Sunday school—told me he was going to join the service. And he came and talked to me. I said, “J. D., you’re not old enough to be drafted. You’ve got another year or two. You should stay at home and finish your schooling.” No, no he’s going to join. It seemed like it wasn’t over three months till he was killed by the Japanese in one of those island invasions. Oh, goodness gracious! That was the only child they had. They never got over the grief. They lived for twenty-five or thirty more years after that. But we at the church, the people rallied around the mother and father and loved ’em and prayed for ’em and tried to comfort them as best they could. What do you think happened to moral standards? Cleon: Well, I guess a preacher sees things different lots of times than the layman. Morals were very low, generally speaking. There’s a lots of Christian people that held up and lived according to their standard right on through, but there was a “don’t care” spirit to a large degree among a lots of people. They kind of let down and gave in to the pressures. It’s like I say, prosperity makes a difference in people. Their whole disposition will change when they get prosperous. They don’t even seem like the same people, and that works over into the church, too. People that were humble and friendly and gentle, kind—some of ’em became haughty and arrogant and hard to deal with—and sassy. A lot of young girls came up pregnant ’cause they were exposed to a lot of temptation, and I think the morals in the country deteriorated, but that’s been going on ever since I can remember. The high standard of morals that our grandmothers had—and our grandfathers—don’t carry today. Did you address this in your sermons? Cleon: I did. I did address it in my sermons, but it’s a sad thing to say, people do not respond positively to sermons a lot of times. I’ve preached against smoking and the harm that smoking does to the lungs and to the person, but I don’t know if any of ’em ever quit or not. I don’t think they did. Seemed to me like they just went on smoking. Well, the same thing with drinking alcohol. I’ve preached a lot of sermons about that. Back in those days all the preachers did it, and I don’t think it’s helped very much. Maybe it helped more than I know. The church is the greatest thing we got in this country of ours, I mean for the influence for good. I don’t know what would happen to us without the influence and strength of the churches. [But] there’s always the influence of evil counteracting it, and the Scripture says [to] overcome evil with good. You don’t just set down and watch the world get better. What was the good in those days?

416

they called it the war effort

Cleon: Patriotism. Patriotism was one of the greatest spirits of good. People love this country. Even if they don’t live Christian they love their country, and they realize that we can’t afford to lose it. We had in the churches—the spirit of loyalty became very strong. Very strong. You know, the American people are a great people, and they are great lovers of their country. When that loyalty is stirred with a crisis it becomes more intense, and that was the thing that was very impressive. The churches felt a surge of support that they hadn’t had in a long time.



they’ll know that i’m an all-right person Mary Lynn and Clifford S. Weir Mary Lynn: As a teacher I was aware that a lot of bad things did happen. I don’t want to say I would listen to children’s tales, but you’d have news reports in the morning and they’d tell. You’d try to say, “Well, let’s just not hear that,” but parents would be involved in bad things—turmoil and bad actions. I just keep thinking—across the river. That’s where I thought it happened. Probably disputes within the neighborhood—maybe. Were the kids talking about this? Mary Lynn: Yes. The children were aware of it. Yes, they were. We ate lunch with ’em at noon, and they would tell you. And, of course, children being innocent would say things. But to tell you a lot of specifics—I have always, I guess, trained myself to let the bad come in here and out over here and not to try to take up with too much of it. Just generally I know that it did. Were there more discipline problems? Mary Lynn: No! No! No! The discipline problems came on in the later years. Teachers were in full control and children were saying “Yes sir” and “Yes ma’am.” No! No! And they did not sass. Not in the war years. No. No no. They were very obedient, and the parents, most of them, cared, and—no, the discipline was under control. Clifford: I was in Panola County, Texas, teaching school. I came to Orange during the Christmas holidays in December of ’41 and talked with a couple of fellows down there in the personnel office [at Consolidated].

Health, Education, and Welfare

417

I had really not contemplated changing jobs or doing anything—making a move during that year. I suppose the war caused me to make that decision. I felt that I was not physically able to go to the service, and I came on down and went to work. Sure enough, I was examined twice later and turned down by the service. I was in the time department the first three years, and the last year I worked I was in the payroll office. In the time department I was out a lot on the boats seeing that the people were on the job that were supposed to be. I never had been in a shipyard before, and it was all new to me. I hadn’t seen welders and fitters and the other crafts that it took to build ships. Were people conscientious? Clifford: There were some, occasionally, that I thought were loafers, but most of the time I thought they worked pretty well. They were not coordinating their work too well, and there was a lot of time lost waiting for the other crafts. I remember that my immediate supervisor thought I would work better as a supervisor than as one working along with the others that didn’t feel too much responsibility. I didn’t like playing on the job. He was one who liked to play, and I didn’t go for that too much and he realized that. [He would play] little tricks on some of the people. I just didn’t partake, and I didn’t appreciate that kind of stuff—on the job especially. That was one reason I think I was transferred to the payroll office. I don’t know whether I was getting ready maybe to resign at that time or what, but, anyway, they asked me if I would like to transfer and I told ’em I would. We got married in September of ’42. My wife came down from East Texas—she was a teacher up there, too—and she got a school here starting in the fall of ’42. Mary Lynn: We had great difficulty getting a place. They were hard to come by, which was a shock to me. I thought, “I’m a teacher. They’ll know that I’m an all right person.” You can believe that if you want to, [but] they didn’t care who I was. [Laughs] At Tilley we were taking care of children I’d say at six o’clock in the morning until about five-thirty maybe that afternoon. Crying children— the mothers would leave them and go to work at the shipyard. Now, this was through the federal government. Extended day is what they called it. They were very well taken care of, perhaps better taken care of than they would have been under other circumstances. Like, there was child care provided, and, see, there was food provided. The supervision was so complete, and there was a lot of equipment provided. There were a lot of toys and things in these rooms, and we had extra help through the schools because of the federal government.

418

they called it the war effort

Maybe it was because I was younger myself, but my feeling for those days is that the children had an opportunity. There was food in those kitchens in the schools. There were facilities for good hygiene. Probably some of those people had better living conditions in Riverside than they had where they had been living. It was a better day than we may really have realized because, generally, those children were clean. See, they had shower facilities, and they were cleaner then than some in some areas of Orange right now who don’t have the facilities. What about family life? Was there much turmoil? Mary Lynn: Some areas [of Riverside] were so much better than others out there. It just seems like one little circle would be so wonderful, and they’d plant trees and have flowers and everyone would want to move there, and then there were some of the blocks that were just horrible. One section was just always bad—just terrible. The people who moved in there, I don’t know, they just seemed to find each other—and junky cars—and it stayed that way to the end. How would you account for this? Mary Lynn: People. People, people. Some rough elements were there. And when they were combined there you were with some of these way-out people—and the parking lots would become dirty and there’d be trash out there. See, we moved out there to get our own apartment, because the one [we were in] we entered through our back door, went through our bathroom to our bedroom which was also our living room, what have you. Any entry to our house was through the kitchen, through the middle of our bathroom. So we thought we were bettering ourself, and we did [know], even then, [to] get on the edge. Somehow, on this end it was better, generally speaking. It was that far end that had some of those bad blocks. But I can recall one addition where a lot of fine people lived, and that was one of the better additions in Riverside. A lot of teachers and a lot of good folk lived right there in [that] circle. I think before they’d move they’d tell someone that we’re moving, and if you want to get in here we’re telling you to go ahead and apply for it—and maybe a little pull through the office [helped]. We knew where we wanted to be. They told us, or somehow we were guided to believe, that on the edge [would be better]. You didn’t have to drive as far down into the addition, for one thing, and as it turned out, the houses on the edge, generally, were better.



Health, Education, and Welfare

419

that’s something new—stress Viola C. Deon and Patsy McKnight Viola: I was working at Frances Ann Lutcher Hospital [in 1941]. Patsy: I was at Hotel Dieu [Hospital] in Beaumont, and I didn’t come here until December of ’43—and it was a boomtown. Viola: I was on call twenty-four hours a day, and I’d meet myself coming back and forth—babies and surgery and everything. Patsy: I worked in a lab, and I had to make house calls to tents. I’m a medical technologist, and I’d be sent out there to get blood counts and stuff like that—people that were bedridden and couldn’t go to the hospital—or like diabetics and things like that. Out in Brownwood there was one [tent] right after another. I’d just have to ask around who lives where. Viola: Everybody’d know who was sick. What did you see in the tent city? Patsy: What I saw was just a bunch of tents there and people sleeping on the ground. Cold! It was cold, and they had no heat except body heat in the tent. They’d be covered up—sick, high temperature. No cots. They were on the ground, the ones I was in, and how they prepared their food I don’t know. [There might be] four in one tent and maybe two or three kids. Blankets and stuff on the floor. You might see some grocery sacks over on one side, and that was just about the gist of it. I don’t know what they used for bathrooms or anything like that. What about contamination, epidemics? Patsy: We didn’t have too much of that. Diphtheria, we had an epidemic of diphtheria, but I wouldn’t call it an epidemic. We had several cases of it. But other than that, I don’t think it was any worse than it is now. Viola: They had a lot of surgeries, but it was like appendectomies and— Patsy: It just made volume. That’s all. What about psychiatric cases? Viola: Well, I’ll tell you the honest-to-goodness truth, if there were any psychiatric people here in Orange the doctors must have taken care of it. They never sent ’em to the Frances Ann. I don’t believe we had as much psychiatric stuff back then as we do now. What about the stresses of those days? Patsy: I really just couldn’t say. You just take one day at a time. Viola: You just take everything in stride. You didn’t worry about that. That’s something new—stress. There’s more emphasis put on stress today than there used to be. If anybody was stressful back then nobody else knew it. So if somebody came to Orange and had to sleep in their car—

420

they called it the war effort

Patsy: That’s all right. That didn’t bother ’em. It was someplace to sleep. It was just like those men in [those boardinghouses]. I’d think about bedbugs and everything else today, but, heck, they didn’t care. Boy, it was a place to stretch out. And it was work. They had the work. I thought it was a pretty good time myself. What about industrial accidents? Patsy: Yeah, there was quite a few of those. Some of ’em were real bad. I know we had one or two in that hospital that lived there for a year that was all bunged up. I’m talking about legs and chests. Viola: It just takes a long time for crushed things to heal. Back in those days we had to roll all our own plaster. We had to fold all our own sponges. We had to cut the gauze. We had to make all our own Q-tips, applicators. We had to do all kinds of things like that that took our time. Anytime that you weren’t waiting on a patient you were doing something like that. Patsy: [But] when you’d go home at night you always felt good, like you’d accomplished something. You helped somebody during the daytime. And you know, those kind of feelings just can’t be bought.



the teachers were not too happy with the red beans Mary Etta and J. D. Ritter Mary Etta: I didn’t come till August of ’42. I was hired to teach home economics and manage the lunchrooms, but I really didn’t ever teach. The main [challenge] was getting the old-timers and the new people working together. For instance, the schools in Orange had always dismissed at twelve o’clock. The children either went home to eat lunch or they went out under the tree on the playground and ate a sack lunch or they went across the street to a little cafe. And this was a whole new idea, that kids couldn’t leave the school ground without permission. We had to have staggered lunch periods, and this was really hard for the older teachers. It was hard for them to shift into that kind of a situation. J. D.: I went to work at the post office in April of ’41. We couldn’t get enough help. Whenever they’d get off in the afternoon they would line up, [and] that post office would be full of people trying to send money orders or buy stamps or something like that. What was the mood of the people who were in the lines?

421

Health, Education, and Welfare

J. D.: Well, most of ’em were amiable and [would] just wait their turn. Now, we had few instances of people that if they’d catch a Negro or colored man in line they’d step ahead of him. I caught one man doing that and I told him to get back in the line. What would have been the reaction of the blacks when that happened? J. D.: Well, they never said anything that I know of. Mary Etta: They had not been even coming downtown much, had they? J. D.: No. At night the police didn’t want any blacks downtown at all. Mary Etta: I roomed over there at a house. Had a big porch around it. The man was secretary of [a civic organization], as I remember, and he would sit out there on that porch and watch the blacks go up and down that street and just get hot under the collar. It was just so new to them that the Negroes were allowed to come downtown. [He thought] they should stay down on Second Street. J. D.: We had a janitor, and I was going to work at four o’clock in the morning and so was several of the other people, and we would send this janitor out to get coffee for us about five o’clock or something like that— down to a cafe downtown. And the police knew the man and everything, but we got a substitute in there and he went down there and, boy, they collared him and threw him in the hoosegow. He wasn’t supposed to be downtown at night. They didn’t want any nigras downtown, and they wouldn’t believe his story a’tall. The postmaster had to go down and rescue him. What did kids like to eat? Mary Etta: Anything you could fix with ground meat. And they really did like red beans. I remember that some of the teachers were not too happy with the red beans, but the children liked the beans.



you were god, not only teacher Edna P. Hare, Ethelaura Hare Ramey, and Mary J. ( Jerri) Leicht Ethelaura: [I remember] the football colors—orange and black. The sound of the drum and bugle corps and the band. One thing for me from childhood on up was the smell of the cotton-pickin’ paper mills. The feel of the winds coming in, hurricane force winds or nearly to that point. Seeing the trees on the other side of the street bend over. The smell of the rain as it came in off of the Gulf. The smell of the pine trees. The air was cleaner. You felt a little freer when you went out. The noise was

422

they called it the war effort constant—the humming, the drumming, the drilling. But you got used to it. It became like the ticking of a clock in a room. After so long a time you ignore it.

Edna: I [taught] at Curtis School. We had what we called the extended day. The parents brought the children to school early in the morning. They were put on cots to sleep until breakfast time and then they had breakfast. At about eight o’clock they went into the schoolroom. We kept them all day and then they had extended day in the afternoon after four. I taught the extended day. If there was any in extended day that needed extra help you gave them extra help in math or reading or whatever they needed extra help in. We had to stay down [there] till the parents came by and picked ’em up. Ethelaura: I started teaching just outside of town and moved into the city district in ’43. Jerri: In ’44 [I] got a job teaching at Anderson School. Edna: I’m ninety-two years old and I’ve been here all my life. We were a nice, quiet—more of a community like. You knew everybody, where they worked, and everybody’s family, and even out in the rural districts you knew who lived in certain places. Jerri: I know I used to come in late at night on the train and walk down the railroad tracks to where I lived [about five blocks] and never thought a thing about it. We’d walk uptown at eight o’clock at night, if we wanted to eat, my roommate and me—never worry about anything.7 When were you aware that Orange was changing? Edna: When people began knocking on your door and begging for a room or someplace to stay. I had two front doors. They thought I’d have an apartment or one room, which I rented. And across the street there was a two-story house, and in her hall and out on the front porch she had cots lined up. The men would come in from the yards and just fall in ’em, and as soon as they were out another one took over that cot. Ethelaura: I had one child in class in ’44, I believe it was, that continually fell asleep. I changed what I was doing. I finally chose his best subject, the one that he liked more than any, [but] every day at two o’clock he fell asleep no matter what we were doing. If it was P.E. time, still he’d just go off and go to sleep. Finally found out that he had to give up his bed at four o’clock each morning because of the shifts at the shipyard. Someone came in and took his place, and the child was up from four o’clock on. So [he] was desperate for sleep. And this happened not only to him but to many of the children. Both parents were working, normally at the shipyard, and there was no one to take care of the children. I think that [children]

Health, Education, and Welfare

423

idolized a teacher more because they needed a role model, an adult close to them. Edna: That’s right. [Mothers and fathers] were gone all the day long at the shipyard. And then at night, by the time they got there, it was time to go to bed. So they almost idolized their teachers. Ethelaura: A normal classroom was forty-five, sometimes fifty children.8 Then the following month you may have forty of those fifty children brand new. You’d never seen them before. So with constant turnover you were challenged to keep up with any type of curriculum or course of study.9 We moved into heterogeneous grouping at one period of time simply because children from throughout the state and other states were falling in here. And I mean falling! Just constantly coming in. You couldn’t keep a register. One register would not do a teacher over one classroom all year. You had to have several because there’d be so many entries. Maybe in a normal classroom you would have 150 to 180 different children during a year, and then maybe they’d be back in two more weeks after they’d leave. Did you see stress in teachers? Ethelaura: You betcha. One [sign] I think was wanting to get away. By the weekend you needed to get completely out of the situation—not see children. Not have contact with them, but attempt to free your mind. Just relax. And there was no place to relax. You taught them not only the regular classroom, you taught them manners—table manners. We went further than the textbook. You were mother. You were God, not only teacher. You were everything under the sun to that child. You ate your meal with them. It was not a matter of teachers having thirty minutes by themselves or an hour off for lunch or even going to the restroom without half a dozen along. You stayed with them all day long. You chatted with them at the table. You taught them how to make conversation. You taught them how to use a knife and fork. How to set the table. Anything under the sun. What about parent-teacher conferences? Edna: Oh, we had plenty of those. Jerri: We had plenty of those, yeah. You had children that had not been in this system and you were trying to bring ’em up to the level of your classroom, and it was necessary to talk to the parents. Sometimes the father would come. If he didn’t go to work till late in the afternoon he’d meet you before school. If mother got off at a late time you waited for her at school to talk about the problems this child might be having with just catching up, not particularly because he was bad in the classroom. You didn’t have too many of those problems. Ethelaura: And whatever suggestions you gave they tried desperately to follow it. So parents were quite concerned. There are many times teachers

424

they called it the war effort

had to stay there until six or seven o’clock at night until someone could get off to talk to them. What did teachers do for a social life? Jerri: We had a great time, if you want to know the truth. We had a marvelous time. They brought in shows for the USO and they had a dance every Saturday night. Sunday afternoon you went and played cards with some of the sailors that came in from the ships. We had a good social life here. You were single? Jerri: You better believe it! [Laughs] I never felt I was under any stress at all. I was having a ball. I think I was too young to be stressful at that time. I might have gotten that way later, but I don’t think at that particular time I was. Were teachers expected to maintain a different level of behavior in their social life? Ethelaura: Yeah. There was a lot more expected then in this area.10 Jerri: You had a certain dress code. You were different. Ethelaura: Unless they were well dressed and maintained an extremely high level at all times—twenty-four hours a day—they wouldn’t be here the following semester. I mean, it was high level. Could a teacher go to the USO and dance and play cards? Jerri: That was acceptable behavior, but you had to have very high moral standards, you have to understand. Edna: That was your patriotic duty—to help to entertain ’em. Jerri: There was no fooling around. Ethelaura: Very, very little. Very little. There were one or two [incidents] that we heard about—grapevine thing. It was hushed up. They were out of town the following year or whatever was taken care of, and you knew, “Boy, I don’t or I won’t be here next year either.” You didn’t get drunk. You weren’t seen drunk in public. Did the role of women change during those years? Ethelaura: Drastically. As a teacher, there’s a little item that I resented wholeheartedly. The girls I went to high school with and had not one day of education above that were paid three and four times as much money as I was when I had gotten my degree and [was] in there teaching, and [they] had been making that amount of money while I was in school trying to get it—putting money out. I did resent it. There was extreme change in ideas. There was practically no more homemaking or agriculture classes in the high schools. Girls didn’t take them. Boys weren’t interested. Where it had been an agricultural area, they no longer were interested in such. Math became extremely impor-

425

Health, Education, and Welfare

tant. Girls who had never cared for those subjects began getting into it and going into accounting and bookkeeping and things of this sort. The curriculum changed. [Females] became more assertive, more self-reliant than they’d ever been before. They were allowed thinking room which they hadn’t had. They were given opportunities to do their own thinking and to carry through with what they thought. This was not the usual procedure. They no longer relied on someone else to tell ’em what to do or how to do something. They dared to go on their own. Jerri: It changed the dress code. That changed completely, because when I was a teenager you went to town all dressed up with a hat and gloves, and once the war came along the ladies were going to the grocery store in the middle of the night with slacks and things on which I had never seen before. Cause, see, they were working in the shipyard and they had to suddenly start wearing slacks and things, and that had not been very acceptable up until that time. We wore hose and we dressed up when we went to town. Then after that it just seemed to break down, all this getting dressed up to go to town. That wasn’t important anymore.



grapes of wrath Emma Lena and Dave Journeay11 Emma Lena: I was just a housewife, [but] I wrote the Orange social news in the Sunday Beaumont Enterprise for eighteen years. I got to meet a lot of new people that way. We had the navy base here, and they had the NOW Club, the Navy Officers’ Wives Club, and I got to meet a lot of them. They had a big social group of people, and they loved parties and all that kind of stuff. They really liked their name in the paper and that was okay with me. I never did go to parties where they served sherry. They loved sherry parties. They were really a nice group, but to me they were different from me. The traffic was just terrible, in the afternoons especially, when the shipyards got off from work—change of shifts.12 Of course, living on Park Avenue it was an open thoroughfare, and we didn’t have lights then, speed lights, and there were a lot of wrecks. It was really terrific. You know, we got to where we kept a first-aid kit handy. If it happened to be a minor accident we’d try to help people. Dave: They had an area in north Orange that reminded me of the motion picture Grapes of Wrath. Have you ever seen that? Well, you know

426

they called it the war effort

what I’m talking about. They had a limit on account of the war that a person couldn’t buy over $200 worth of building material, and that’s what caused this place out here to be such a mess—the Brownwood Addition, as it was known. They built platforms and boarded it up part of the way with that $200 and then made just tents. They just lived in any kind of a thing that’d get ’em out of the elements. It was really a mess. Emma Lena: We called it “Grapes of Wrath,” and, really, people used to drive around there and it was unbelievable. We just couldn’t believe it. It was pathetic looking. Dave: Now, as far as the post office was concerned, we had difficulty in giving any of those people the postal service they needed. At that time I was superintendent of the mails. I had to supervise the incoming as well as the outgoing mail. I did most of the hiring and firing because the postmaster delegated that duty to me. I had the duty of teaching and supervising that group of people, and that was another difficulty—there wasn’t anybody available. The only thing I could find was somebody that was classified as a 4-F. [The war] brought in more people from the outside than was on the inside at the time, and it was just an entirely different city. What was the reaction of the natives to all these people? Emma Lena: It was mixed feelings, of course. We were always a patriotic little town, and we felt like we were doing our duty in having these shipyards here, and that part was all right. But it was inconvenient, really, the crowds and the traffic and the shortage of stuff. There were happy times, patriotic times. Then there were the bad times where you had to stand in line and stuff like that. You’d start to pick up maybe a jug of milk and somebody’d just reach over and take it away from you—not all the time, but it has happened. People might be rude. Dave: Of course, where there’s prosperity there’s always a certain amount of people like in the underworld or gambling and things of that nature, judging by the number of FBI [who] contacted me for information, mostly as to where certain addresses were. They kept quite a crew in here. They had a man in Port Arthur that was head of this [area], and I saw a lot of him. He used to call me out of Port Arthur on the telephone. Wouldn’t even tell me who he was. He knew who I was by our voices, [we were] so used to talking to one another over the phone. They couldn’t find their way about in Orange, and when they’d come over here the first place they headed would be the post office.13 They’d always pick me up, and I’d have to be the guide and lots of time give them information that I had. During the war we were permitted to give the FBI information that I don’t think would be legal now. We were permitted to do what we called

Health, Education, and Welfare

427

“put a cover” on a man’s mail. They were looking for a man, and they had a good idea he was in California. They wanted me to put a cover on his mail, and if I found mail from California or anywhere else it might indicate that this man was writing to his family, which were living in Riverside Addition at that time. So I went back and gave the mail carrier an order to put coverage on his mail, and before he carried the mail out bring it up to me. If I found anything in there that had an address that looked like it might lead ’em to him then I’d get on the phone and call the agent in Beaumont. Finally, we got one from out there and I called him. And I think they picked him up out there. They were looking for spies and people that were out to do us damage down at the shipyard, like maybe setting something on fire, or somebody like that. I remember in one case this agent came in, and he pointed out a certain guy in the line. His back was toward us. He said, “I want you to go around there and find out where he’s sending that money [order].” I went around there and got the information and got it back to him. I said, “You fixing to pick him up?” He took me over to the window and said, “See them two guys down there on the corner? Watch ’em when this guy comes out.” So this guy went out the front door and started down Main Street, and one of ’em moseyed on down to the corner and the other one [stayed] about fifty or a hundred feet behind him. I had seen things like that in the movies, but this was the first time I’d ever seen that in real life. They had trailed him from California into Orange, and he was supposed to be a go-between [between] the communists in this country and over in Russia. He didn’t tell me what they did, but he said he was well taken care of. What was the impact of those years on your family? Emma Lena: Well, in our case Dave had to work all the time. He was on twenty-four-hour call, and we never got the rest that we needed, and it was just traumatic a lot of times. We converted our dining room into a bedroom. It was a problem. For instance, some of ’em worked at the shipyard and they’d come in all hours. We had lights on each side of the mirror in the bathroom, and one of ’em hung his coat up over one of the lights and it caught on fire. And then one night one of ’em left the door open and a burglar got in. Dave: In places like banks and post offices and public services of all kinds, they were just jam-packed and overburdened. We were terribly overburdened at the post office. I know! Our lobby was very small, and it had a big skylight up there, and it was just as hot as it could be. We used to have to bring women in there all the time and bring ’em to. They’d fall out in the line. The Red Cross gave us a stretcher, and we’d take it out there and load ’em on that and bring ’em in the postmaster’s office and raise

428

they called it the war effort

their feet above their heads and bring ’em to and call ’em a cab and send ’em home. We had that happen nearly every day. We had a facility—and that same thing applied for nearly every other business in town—we had a facility that was maybe built for 10,000 population at the most, and we were accommodating 60,000 at least. The banks were the same way, and the courthouse and places like that were shorthanded. Nearly everything that could be filled was filled by women back then. I had fifty-five women in there at one time, and did we ever have a big problem! We had one restroom and only one toilet. They practically had to draw numbers to get in there. Some of ’em [were] real good [workers], but the majority of ’em were ninety-day wonders, I called ’em. They’d go to work in there, and they’d just pile up a little money and then they would quit. Did the war years change you? Dave: Well, I’ll have to admit it did some. I learned a lot of things about people. It [gave] you an insight on some people’s character. I got to where I could talk to a person a while when I went to hire one and almost tell about what kind of character they were. It did change me to that extent, that I like to look into people’s backgrounds before I do any business with ’em. Maybe I don’t have as much trust in human nature as I used to have. Now, don’t misunderstand me, there were a lot of good people that came in Orange. The majority of ’em were good people—those that I came into contact with, anyhow. Of course, everybody was affected by the war, I don’t care whether you were here or somewhere else, but I feel like people here were more so because we had all this boom. It’s kind of like a gold rush. You strike gold, well, that’s where they headed, and that’s the way it was here. There was money to be had.



gold stars in little plaque forms Frank W. R. Hubert I had moved to Orange in 1938, just having graduated from the University of Texas. I taught in the high school and the middle grades and also on an itinerant teacher basis for band classes, youngsters just starting on their instruments. I had students in high school band who worked part time in the shipyards, in the evenings and nights, who made more money on a part-time job in the shipyard than I made as band director and director of instrumental music for the Orange Independent School District. There

Health, Education, and Welfare

429

were at times a strong temptation—remote times—to try to get to where the larger bucks were. But I was more concerned not so much with moving to a better paying job as I was to seeing so many of my close friends going into service by the draft who had two and three kids, and there I was just with one youngster still not being called. I was really more concerned about that part of my living than I was about money or opportunity to move to a better paying job. It really got to me so much that I finally asked for voluntary induction and went into the service. There were just too many people I had associated with there on a friendly basis, married and who were going into the service, and there was ol’ Hubert still at home, you know. So I just didn’t feel right. Did anyone say anything to you? Never did. Never did. Not a word. I think it was the later part of ’43 that I requested voluntary induction, and I had my physical and all that stuff and then soon thereafter in April was called up. But no one ever made a derogatory comment of any kind. It was an internal struggle. I just couldn’t feel that my teaching music at the secondary school level was a real part of the war effort. [My wife and I] talked about it at length, and I think she could sense my uneasiness and was a strong helpmate in making the decision to go to service. I guess your life was changed— Oh, yeah. I don’t see how anyone really could escape the strong influence that those years brought. Being inducted and going into the army or navy or whatever, that’s a pretty big change. Kids in high school going right out of high school into service, that’s a big change. And then the unhappy part of it, the impact on the community of those youngsters who had lived there and grown up there—and whose families were well-established families in the community—who were killed in action. That’s a tremendous change. The band hall was an old gymnasium that had been converted into a band hall, repaneled and soundproofed as well as you could a gymnasium with a tin roof. And we had a system of putting up gold stars in little plaque forms for every youngster out of the musical organizations who had gone to service. Then, if they were killed in action or missing we’d identify them in a special way. It had an effect upon the people, but it was, I think, a sober, introspective type of an effect of thinking about the war and such. We had a full-time maintenance man there as a part of the staff of the instrumental music program—which was entirely underwritten by H. J. L. Stark. And Lutcher Stark employed me as he did this maintenance specialist [who] repaired instruments. And with the director of the girls’ organization we came up with this idea of the stars. Harry, who was for-

430

they called it the war effort

merly a cabinetmaker, would make them himself [and] paint them nicely, a nice little plaque with a student’s name on each one, and they attracted some good attention on the part of the students. How did the students respond to this? In a sober fashion.



to the river to baptize Mrs. W. W. Kennedy He was a jovial fellow, always telling jokes, and you know a good joke can really win the people, ’cause a good laugh is good for the people. He never met a stranger, and he could pretty well bead in on whether you needed him or how you needed him and pretty well touch the subject. He just had a unique way of doing things like that.14 Did that seem to be a time when people needed to laugh? Oh, yes. I think so—as well as they did the church. You need something, a release of tension. When the war broke, my husband went to work at the shipyard in the toolshed. Some of the different men around the town that were working down there said, “Preacher, why don’t you come help us?” [Then] during the noon hour they would have him preach to them, and he could eat later. The men knew that he preached and they just wanted him to preach. At that time the men were just working day and night building ships, and maybe some of ’em didn’t get to go to church.15 I don’t know just how it started. They’d sit down on the ground and eat their lunch while he preached. They insisted that he preach to ’em during this time, and if anyone got after him about eating later, well, they would go interference for him. He said that he had quite a few men that had been converted down there. Was he pastoring at this time? Yes, at the Cove [an area in south Orange]. It was a mission at the time from the First Baptist, but they immediately released it. He resigned [from the shipyard] and started pastoring the church full time because it grew so fast. It was just a small, growing church. We had thirteen members when he took it, [and] he became permanent pastor in’43.16 Just going out among the people and inviting them to church was an

Health, Education, and Welfare

431

experience, because very seldom we got turned down. They usually accepted an invitation, and it was a thrill to see the people respond to Christ. We had a three-weeks revival, and we had to get out into a tent to hold the people. Out of that I believe there was 157 for baptism. That was really the beginning of our church. It just took off from there. We just had a small baptistry in the old church, so they went to the river to baptize these people on a Sunday afternoon. It looked like half of Orange came out to see the baptizing, because that was something that very seldom had happened like that. It was right where the current was, and when he got ready to come out of the water the men had to hold him up and bring him out, because the current had hit his leg so much until they were so weak he could hardly stand up.17 Was there something about those days that made people so responsive? I think it was the conditions, the fact that we were in war, and I think they realized that they needed to depend on the Lord. What were the needs of the people? Other than just personal guidance and personal touch, I guess the people needed someone to listen. When they had problems they wanted someone to just sit and listen to their problems. [They needed] the personal touch. Our church wasn’t a wealthy church. They were the middle-class people, but our men got in and built our church. We didn’t hire it built. They even put the carpet and the electrical work and everything in, and I think they needed that close fellowship and the togetherness. Our church was more like one big family, and I think that’s what they needed, that closeness. Lot of our folks were from up around East Texas, and, you know, most farmer people are close. They’re a friendly people. I think they missed that, and I think our church just filled in for that. Our church has always been one to go to the needs of the people. If a person was hungry they were fed, and if they were having problems, like on the road. A lot of times the people that were traveling, if they needed to get to a place our church helped them if they were in a bind. They didn’t have to be people of our church—if they were just transient people. They always had a big heart. We had a pantry, and we kept clothing that the ladies would take and see that the buttons were sewed on. And we tried to size ’em so that we could get to them properly, and we tried to clothe the people and feed them. If they came through Orange hunting work or were going to work somewheres, if the need came to us [we would respond]. We helped some of ’em pay their rent just to get started out in Riverside. What was happening to families? Some of ’em had more money to spend, and that meant more bars to

432

they called it the war effort

visit and things, so I could say that it either went the Christian way or drinking and spending their paycheck. I know of quite a few families that their husband never did get home with any money, and, therefore, you had to help them. But it was just a time when there was more money than they’d had for a long time. [We] were always willing to help ’em, and, of course, always tried to help to get their father back on the road. But so oftentimes that’s something you don’t do. It’s something that even they couldn’t control. [We] would give them food and money. A lot of times they’d give ’em staples and can goods and things that way. Do you remember taking food out to families? Oh, yes! Boxes and boxes. They didn’t intend to [lose their money] when they stopped by, and these saloons would cash their checks for ’em. When they’d get home they didn’t have [any money], and a lot of ’em didn’t even remember spending their money. But their families had to live. Over in Riverside there was one family that I remember. It seems like there was eight of the children, and, of course, the boys would try to throw papers and things that way, but that was about the only support the mother had. Once in a while he would get home with enough to help her pay the utilities and things, but as far as enough to provide a living for the family, they just didn’t. He loved his family, but it was a weakness. He felt like he could drink a bottle of beer and that’d be it, but that was just the beginning. Were those hard days for the church? No. I’ll tell you, I believe during those times were happy days, churchwise, because the people were drawn together, and they pulled together. Like I said, our men came together and built our church. The women cooked the meals and brought [them] down to the church, and they [worked] all day, like on Saturday. It just pulled the people together. It was good days. When they’d come together they seemed to love each other and work together so good. You know, we were sitting here on the edge of Louisiana, and the air corps boys were at Lake Charles. They would come this far and buy their marriage license because there’s a waiting period over there. They’d buy their marriage license here and then come back and get married that night. They called my husband “Marrying Sam” [because] he had so many of the weddings. One night we had three weddings in one night. I kept two of the couples back in the dining area while he married one, and then I’d say, “Well, now it’s your time.” And this really happened.



433

Health, Education, and Welfare

it was siberia Howard Turner I was in the war three years—three years, four months, six days, and an hour and twenty minutes, to be exact. [Laughs] I was on four continents and about sixteen different countries on my two years and a half overseas. And then I crossed the United States from east to west four times and north to south four times. When we were first going overseas we traveled 18,000 miles going to Egypt. We had to go all the way around Africa and up through to the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to get there. We were getting away from the menace of submarines that were in the much-traveled areas. [We were on board] thirty-eight days. We were on a British ship and we were eating British rations, and they were pretty dang bad. They served two meals a day, and in the morning usually you got eggs and bread and coffee and maybe something else. The eggs were boiled, and you broke ’em until you found one that didn’t run and then you ate it. The eggs they had on there had been on cold storage since ’36 and that was ’42—six years. They were not the best that you could buy. They weren’t farm fresh, I’ll tell you. [Before the war] I was working at the post office at the window most of the time—stamp window. All the schools then were putting on stamp drives, and one of the biggest headaches we had was selling savings stamps. The schools would take up the money [and] bring it in in a box or pint jars or mayonnaise jars or anything else—coins of all denominations, none of ’em separated—and they’d tell me about what amount they had. Naturally, I did not have time to pour all that money out and count it at the time they brought it in. But amazingly it worked out very well, because they were within less than a dollar one way or the other. It would take sometimes two people two hours to count all that change in the afternoon. A lot of the new people coming in we had some problems with. They were used to an area that had not changed and service that we couldn’t perform. They came in with a chip on their shoulder. A lot of ’em didn’t want to come down here, and they were shipped here by their home offices and by the navy. It was Siberia. A lot of ’em really gave us a fit. We had one lady who was probably in her middle sixties and her husband was about the same age, but she was most unhappy about having to come to Orange. Her husband was a navy architect, and they sent him down here to watch out for the navy’s interest in the shipyard. They had had a big home in

434

they called it the war effort

Massachusetts, and they were put in one of these navy houses out here in Navy Addition. But she came down to the post office practically every day, and nothing was ever right. Everything was wrong. And I didn’t pay any attention to her. I just let her go ahead and have her say. Her husband died of a heart attack, and the next time she was in the office I expressed my sympathy. She said, “You are an amazing person.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Well, I’ve been so darn mean coming in here.” She said, “I know I have been a pain in the neck. I didn’t want to come to Orange and I was very unhappy about it.” And she said, “When my husband died the people of Orange could not have been any kinder. Everyone was kind. They helped us in every way they could.” And she said, “I’ve been so ashamed of myself ever since.” When I got back in ’44—I’d been overseas since October of ’42—I came back to Orange and spent fifteen days, and I was amazed at the changes that had taken place in that short length of time. [Of course], we all changed. We who were in the service changed as much as the others did. Some more. Some less. How would you describe the changes? Well, some of it was resentment. Came back and some of ’em that didn’t go had gotten wealthy, and a few had actually dodged the draft.18 They were few and far between, but there were some. The ones who were in the service knew about it, and they were rather resentful of that particular part of the bunch in the population. They also felt that they had worked for practically nothing and people here were drawing good salaries. When I got back home, for my three years’ work I had about $300. A bunch [of us] were sitting around and talking one day. One fellow’s name came up, and an ol’ boy said, “Well, I guess I’m getting a little bit mellow now.” He called the man’s name and said, “When I see him I don’t say there goes that draft-dodging son of a bitch anymore. I just say there goes that son of a bitch.” It was among a bunch of the old-timers who were raised here. We started a little club just to blow off steam, and you had to be a ex-serviceman, had to have served, and most of ’em had served overseas. We had a rule that nothing that we said in that meeting ever got out. Everybody spoke their mind just as exactly the way they felt, and they said it was just a place to blow off steam but we got to keep our steam where it belongs, among us. It was just something that happened at the time that we needed it.



Redneck, East Texas, and small town? Well, certainly East Texas, small town, and self-sufficient. There was the old WPA store where the very poor could

Health, Education, and Welfare

435

line up on the porch for free food in brown paper sacks, or they could go to the basement of the old courthouse for commodities and blue denim welfare clothes. Still, Orange had a long history of resisting outside government involvement. With the war, though, the sudden need for housing, schools, public assistance and services went well beyond the resources of the small community. Governmentfunded social workers, home economists, health inspectors, teachers, and other human services professionals became as essential as welders and shipfitters. Needs of the shipyards could not be addressed to the exclusion of those in the community. Everyone was aware of the crisis in housing and the schools, but many, if not most, citizens were unaware of other problems associated with the inflated population. Some of this might be attributed to contentment or indifference, but even though Orange was geographically small, people could be insulated by their own neighborhoods and circumstances. Most sections of old town, or even better parts of Riverside, might not be exposed to some of the problems the professionals saw. Not many could be expected to have Bess Schofield’s perspective. Working long hours in a set routine narrows one’s awareness. Bankers, for example, dealt with more of the white-collar workers, while grocers saw the blue-collars. Then, too, for some people, getting drunk, fighting, and tearing up property were not problem behaviors. That was normal. The schools were welfare as well as educational institutions. Teachers made home visits and heard children talk about their families. Although they might not have detailed knowledge of family goings-on, they had a better than average sense of home and neighborhood conditions. The schools obviously had their shortcomings, but they represented one of the better efforts to cope with the wartime conditions in Orange, their efforts at times limited by the professional and personal qualifications of some of the personnel they had little choice but to hire. There was the space shortage and the high teacher and student turnover. Therefore, many children did not get the attention they needed, academic or otherwise. Ninety-two first-graders in one room, albeit a large room with two teachers for only three months, placed both teachers and children at a disadvantage. Half-day classes were conducted for a time when the Riverside schools were opening, and even then class sizes would require two teachers. Some children, however, fared better than they would have had they not come to Orange. Hygiene, nutrition, and educational opportunities were often improved. People were not standing in line or elbowing one another to get in, and attendance did not increase proportionately with the population, but the churches experienced a surge of activity. The larger churches were often seen as sanctuaries for the old nesters, but all made some effort to reach out into the community. Churches distributed food, clothes, and money for rent, utilities, and emergencies. They visited and bussed in worshipers. In anxious times they were a source of support and closeness for many families and individuals.

436

they called it the war effort

Although “there were terrific stressful situations,” most people did not require the services of a mental health worker. In fact, apart from social workers, who were involved primarily in community work, mental health professionals were never mentioned. But a lot of people needed to get away and relax, to laugh. They needed the personal touch, someone to talk to and someone to listen. Fortunately, whether it be a hairdresser or minister or shipyard supervisor, those people were around.

USS Claxton, going home (August 22, 1945). Courtesy Howard C. Williams, M.D.

Conclusion: Like a Hybrid “If Orange had stayed the way it was, I think I would have been a different type of person. I would have been more—oh, the word they use a lot of times is provincial, I think. But that’s not the right word. No, I think it exposed this community to people from everywhere, and we met all kinds of people, high and low, good and bad. I think up to then Orange had pretty much stayed to itself, really. It was kind of here in this little backwater, just going its own little quiet way. But it was just like somebody opened the doors, and here came this flood of people and all these new and different things. It made an impression, and I think it wasn’t an all-bad one, either. I think Orange is a better place for it, because Orange had sort of grown inward over the years. Yes, I think it was for the better. You get an infusion of new blood, sort of. That’s what it is. It’s like a hybrid.” Florence Wingate

T

o recount one’s life and times is to reach for right words. There is a surplus of relevant images and expressions from which to draw, and although individuals from the same place and time will share many of these in describing common experiences, there will also be differences. Wartime Orange, Texas, was a new experience for everyone, hometowners and newcomers alike. Thousands of people “from a jillion different cultures” shared by occasion of chance this unlikely place and exceptional time, and what happened over those brief four years meant different things to different people. Orange, however, was not unique in this respect. As noted in the introduction, quality of life across the home front was variable and highly subjective, but there were areas of commonality among boomtowns. Many of the experiences in Orange could be expected to generally mirror those in other congested defense-industry areas.

438

they called it the war effort

Each resident of Orange who had lived there before World War II could vividly recall the population increase and swirl of people. But once these points were established, attitudes often began to diverge, even between a husband and wife. For some the population increase was an overnight phenomenon; for others it was gradual. Frank Smith commented, “It wasn’t like a flood at all . . . [but more] like compounding your interest. It eventually adds up.” Herman Wood described it like rising water that just came gradually, and for Anne Quigley it was comparable to “having a whole bunch of children, they just mostly come one at a time.” But for many natives, especially those only occasionally coming into town from more remote areas of the county, the influx of all the new people was sudden and overwhelming—“eye-popping.” To awaken one morning and unexpectedly see tents erected during the night on what had the day before been the vacant lot next door did not leave a gradual impression. A trailer lot could be filled overnight. What was an “empty hole, space” in Riverside might the next day find “three or four houses sitting there.” Early on, city officials were anticipating something big, something precipitate. Then, too, reactions to this press of people varied. Some liked living close; others did not. Even the most sociable and gregarious of new arrivers might find too much togetherness in some of the housing additions. If a fence post would stand still long enough, Lorena Padgett laughed and said she would have stood there and talked to it. But, she wanted more privacy for her family and small trailer than could be found in the trailer courts. There were those who decades later had an aversion to standing in a line. Lanier Nantz panicked if she had to stand behind five people. Clarence Parkhurst would walk away. “If they’re going to take my money they can take it, but they’re not going to make me stand up a long time to give it to ‘em.”1 Others, though, seemed to have escaped this inconvenience throughout the war years. By some accounts people were friendly and “marvelous,” but if you were a city father everyone seemed to stay in a bad humor. Merchants saw the downside of customer behavior; customers had their own take. Many of the newcomers wanted to remain in Orange following the end of the war; others could not get out of town soon enough. They could be the grandest years of your life or four years when life stood still. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Days remembered in one way sadly, in another way gladly. Judgments about topics like morals and stress were certain to differ. This variability in experience can be at least partially explained by a couple of factors. In the first place, the people themselves were inherently different. From the very beginning, individuals differ in temperament and

Conclusion: Like a Hybrid

439

disposition. Even the youngest among us vary in features like adaptability, intensity, and mood. In chapter 3 different personality traits can be detected as far back as those childhood years, and these traits seem to have persisted over the years—for almost half a century. The majority of the women who were willing to defy public opinion to work out in the yards had to be distinctive in some characteristics. The person who spent all his or her free time across the river was certainly different from the person who never ventured across the bridge. Whether a person was angry, extroverted, cynical, easygoing, or aggressive—to name a few traits—would surely have influenced his or her experiences. Jack Fuller attributed these predispositions to the “chemistry of their body.” Second, lives do not develop under bell jars. The word “ecology” comes from a root that means house or dwelling place, and in recent years an ecological model of human development has emphasized the interaction between person and environment. To understand what is happening to a person one must be aware of the transactions going on between that person and his or her “dwelling places.” People in Orange represented many different backgrounds, and in the community they continued to move in sundry contexts: families, neighborhoods, schools, places of work. Orange was more of a mosaic than a melting pot. There was an old town and a new town, and in new-town Riverside there were sections that were desirable and others that were rough, houses that were maintained and those in ruin. Simply because a female was a teacher did not mean her experiences were the same as those of other teachers. At Anderson School, teachers had more contact with old-town children and parents, whereas the three new elementary schools had all of the newcomers. French-speaking Cajuns from Calcasieu Parish socialized in a different circle from that of shipyard executives out of California. Even in the yards there were different environments. There would be more opportunities for various behaviors down in the dark hold of a ship than there would be outside on a slab or in one of the shops. Men and women worked in different crews with different reputations, and were supervised by leadermen with different expectations. The emotional tenor of a wife separated for over three years from her husband in combat had to be different from that of one spared this separation. Pastors Hogan and Kennedy looked out over different groups than did Pops and Slim and Mr. Buster. Tellers who cashed checks at the banks generally met a different class of worker than did grocers who cashed checks in their small stores. Maybe some of the native Orangeites were clannish, but the newcomers— adults and children alike—also tended to gravitate toward their own kind. What this suggests is rather obvious: the point from which any two

440

they called it the war effort

people observe the unfolding of events will vary. It is impossible to share the exact same perspective of another. The wartime migrants were “America’s new pioneers,” and like those overland travelers a hundred years earlier, the “trip was unique to each individual traveler, whose perception of it was largely dependent upon his or her expectations, preparations, constitution, traveling companions, luck and a multitude of related factors.”2 Writing about the women of that earlier migration, Maria Montoya notes: “Aside from their similar experience of traveling overland during the early 1860s, their worlds differed tremendously and consequently they experienced the trail in ways unique to their own personal situations.”3 Orange was many worlds that differed tremendously. Our own perceptions and attitudes can even change over time. “There is a quality in events,” Joseph Conrad wrote, “which is apprehended differently by different minds or even by the same mind at different times.”4 So given all the possible combinations of individual differences, cultural backgrounds, and wartime life spaces, the diversity of experience in a home front boomtown should not be surprising. In fact, the variability of human behavior in most circumstances is widely acknowledged. Classical physics proceeded on the premise that its subject matter was constant, but the behavioral and social sciences have generally followed a different tradition, assuming behavior to be intrinsically variable.5 Furthermore, under circumstances involving rapid social change, as was the case in Orange, it may be expected that individual behavior would become even more variable as new and unaccustomed attempts were made to cope with strange and fleeting situations. Nevertheless, “It’s odd . . . how our heavens seem to differ and yet are alike.”6 Orange was a shared experience; not a secluded retreat where thousands of people went their own quiet little way. Whether they were black or white, shipyard workers or sailors, from Lafayette or Los Angeles, people were drawn together in similar circumstances, and this made possible points of accord that transcended many of their differences. For one thing, everybody seemed to recognize that the situation in Orange was temporary. It was only for the duration. Lula Haley recalled seeing the cartoon of a little boy asking the question: “Dad, how long is duration?” “That’s what,” she scribbled in her folder of notes and memorabilia, “everyone wanted to know.” There was a sense of interruption and impermanence. A restiveness. Life was on hold. A frequently asked question was, “What will you do after the war?” It was Phyllis Roush’s “twilight zone time.” Government housing, hot beds, Riverside streets, roomers,

Conclusion: Like a Hybrid

441

military assignments, ration stamps, the war itself—none of these were expected to last. Some of the boys in high school were concerned that the war might be over before they had a chance to join the fray. Even the temporary could be but an interim. People moved out of temporary demountables, tents, and trailers into less temporary Riverside. After living in the motel in Beaumont, the Mallie Boyds and Don Shockleys moved into a “storage shed” and “fixed-up” barn out in the country near Orange. Next they were able to rent government trailers in town before finally settling in Navy Addition housing.7 Some of the construction with such a limited life expectancy did not even merit a coat of paint. They were little more than paper or cardboard houses. Houses built on sand, and “You know what they say about a house built on the sand.” Classrooms were in a constant state of flux for both students and teachers. Some people were only passing through. Others came not expecting to be in Orange for more than a few months, surely not long enough to put down roots. There was no need to mingle and try to make friends. Doing the family laundry in the sink was but a short-term inconvenience. Misconduct around town could be tolerated because it, too, was only temporary. Job training was brief. Paychecks might not last long enough to get home. Choice items on the grocer’s shelf were often gone the next day. New cars were hard to get, and that brand new Plymouth sitting in the showroom of Jackson Motor Company would not be there forever. Stepping up into the barber’s chair: “I want another one of them fast haircuts.” You ate in a hurry so someone else could have your place at the counter for an equally hurried meal. Workers were not long on the job. “I’d hire ten girls today and twelve would quit tomorrow.”8 There was the strain of “never knowing when you opened up in the morning if you were going to have sixteen or twelve or maybe seven people show up for work.”9 It puzzled Doug Briggs why coworkers at the cleaners kept asking if he’d be back. The explanation he received: “Well, nobody ain’t never stayed here.” Many figured life itself was short, a day-to-day existence, and the transience made for restlessness. There was a “get-it-while-you-can” mentality. Live one day at a time and “don’t miss nothing.” “Hurrah for today.” Tomorrow might not come, so revel in the present. Others were looking beyond the present, focusing on tomorrow because the past would then be restored and life could resume its course. “It was always this looking— tomorrow we’ll do this.”10 Many relationships were temporary: “I’ve always wondered what happened to her.”11 Separations were never intended to be forever. How ineffably poignant the unfulfilled expectation: “We talked about the things we’d do when he got back.”12 The war “heightened feel-

442

they called it the war effort

ings,” and Western Union telegram boys became fearful reminders that life is all too brief. For J. D. Stanfield, “one of the biggest lessons . . . was to enjoy your friendship” because you never knew when it was going to end. There was also agreement about it being a time of opportunity. Mary Lynn Weir suggested it was an opportune time for many children coming out of unquestionably disadvantaged backgrounds. Historian D’Ann Campbell notes that while employing women in heavy industrial work was a wartime necessity, “from the point of view of many women, it was a welcome opportunity.”13 “When Consolidated offers you a WARTIME job with a PEACETIME future,” one recruitment ad ran, “it is offering you an opportunity to take a vital part in the prosecution of America’s war effort.”14 It was opportunity not only for the present, but also for the future. In the words of Johnnie Talbert, the wartime work was a “good reckoning.” For some it was a “good war.” Almost no one, of course, wanted war, but the area was overdue a break. Many people had long since gone beyond being poor. They were “poor-poor.” More than one person acknowledged the grip that the Depression years still held on families, and although federal relief programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) provided some relief, there still was not nearly enough work. They certainly did not meet the desperate needs of East Texas blacks. Roy Wingate estimated unemployment in Orange at 60–70 percent. Black or white, people were grateful for just about any odd job, and Isaac Dupree was not the only one willing to pick moss or blackberries or figs. Countless men took advantage of every opportunity to get on the business end of a shovel for pay. Because it was an agricultural area, most people had food even though there was not much variety or appeal on the table— beans and rice, oatmeal, fried potatoes, water biscuits and syrup. Milk and mush. Ethel Burton could remember many times when she would have traded a chicken for a bowl of beans, because “I couldn’t afford to buy the beans and we did have the chickens.”15 There is conviction born of experience in the words of A. F. VanMeter: “If you don’t have a job there can be nothing for you. In my world you have to have a job. . . . You can’t do anything if you don’t have a job. You have to have that.” His words were simple but persuasive. With the war came work and an opening to move beyond a hand-to-mouth existence. The shipyards were referred to as “places of opportunity.” Of course, there was the money and the improved standard of living that money afforded, but also people had the chance to break out of restrictive backgrounds and to find new options. Many had “started near zero as far as skills were concerned,”

Conclusion: Like a Hybrid

443

but for the person who showed a willingness to learn, at last there was opportunity.16 There was now “a chance to do whatever you were capable of doing.”17 Never before had there been so many vocational classes to attend or so many openings for on-the-job training. But over and above job training there were other opportunities for selfenhancement. Before the war Julia Bacom was shy, Kate Roach withdrawn, George Craft timid, Jim Pruter naive, Fred Hanscom unchallenged, Peggy Garrett was sheltered, but each of these along with countless others was given responsibilities that fostered traits like confidence, self-assurance, and character. For Roy Jenkins, it was ambition. They astonished themselves as well as others with what they could do. Lanier Nantz acknowledged, “The fact that I could go out and earn a buck surprised me.” Opal Furlong astonished her friends because they couldn’t understand how she got the job. All she had ever done was teach piano. But men, women, and even children discovered, as did Aileen Noguess, that given the opportunity they could “take over a job and do a good job of it.” People felt needed, and as Alpha Burdine expressed it, “They felt like there was a place for them and there was a use to their life.” The consequence was a new sense of purpose, fulfillment, accomplishment, and above all, pride. And these were not transient feelings. Lorena Sweeney made it clear: “I was darn proud of myself . . . [and] I still feel good about it.” Vera Hopkins was another who was proud of herself, indisputably—“and I still am.” Then there was the change—lots of it—and it was fast, a veritable eruption. Turmoil, trauma, confusion—the world was turned upside down. “Just flopped it over.” For Pat Nolan it was a different world. Different times. “It was altogether different than what it had been. We’d just come out of a steep depression and everybody had money. We’s making money. Why that was the first money I’d made in years.” Dorothy Hare believed it was the start of the “fast times.” For Ted MacFarlane the social upheaval was like the rush of a violent current or whirlpool, a maelstrom. Harley Bass guessed “we made the remark many, many times, ‘We’ll be glad when the war is over and everything goes back to normal.’ And we were thinking about going back to a town of about 7,500.” Going back, though, was never to be. A community that had been sleepy and lazy and laid back was caught up in this cataract of change. An established, predictable way of life was gone. You used to know where a person would park the family car downtown every Saturday afternoon, but even the Saturday downtown ritual was lost. Come Sunday morning a stranger might be sitting in your pew. Some home folks just didn’t seem the same anymore as new personalities, airs, and “big misters” were in the making.

444

they called it the war effort

You could no longer depend on people going to bed at seven o’clock every night. You might not even know your neighbor, and natives actually started marrying these outsiders. People became more litigious and adversarial.18 Liability insurance became a way of life.19 The easygoing, casual way of doing business disappeared. “Brownie” Sloan recalled Higman Towing Company’s first contract with the Texas Company after years of informal business relations: Cap’n Hand was marine superintendent of the southern division of Texas Company. I never met him, and he’d call the office and say, “Sis, is the boy there?” That was Mr. Trimball—was the boy, see. “No, Cap’n Hand he isn’t. Can I do something for you?” “Well, we brought in a well down in Bayou Teche and we need some help.” So I said, “Well, let me get two barges on the way down there and they can serve as storage, and I’ll have Mr. Trimball call you as soon as I can locate him.” “Okay, Sis.” Well, Mr. Trimball’d call him and Cap’n Hand wanted to know, “How much you gonna charge me for coming there to Texas Company?” And Mr. Trimball would say, “Well, I don’t know Cap. Let us make two or three trips and I’ll come down and talk to you.” And that’s the way we’d start, see. And anyhow, during the war the first contract we sent to Cap’n Hand we sent [a] letter of apology with it—and the attorneys got together on that, I think. We apologized for having to send the contract for signature when we haven’t had it all these years. Of course, from there on you had contracts with everybody.20 Things were different, but what was especially hard to accept was a certain loss of identity and credibility. H. D. (Buddy) Cox Jr. put it this way: It might be that being a small town, everybody knowing everybody, your word was as good as your bond. You could get whatever you wanted. And that changed a heck of a lot, because all these strange people came in here and their word wasn’t as good as their bond. Where I may go down to a store and charge something or maybe write a check, they knew who I was! Later I had to tell a lot of ’em who I was, not that I was anybody [special] but that I was somebody that was dependable and the check was good.21 Many of the changes in Orange, of course, were being acted out in the rest of the country. Females, especially, were caught up in the transition even though few at the time could foresee how long these changes might last or how far-reaching they might become. Eddie Mae Scarbrough put it in perspective: “I doubt I was thinking at all about [the role of women changing], but if I had a thought I’m sure I thought it was kind of like an ad

Conclusion: Like a Hybrid

445

hoc committee.” But their dress became more casual and functional, their thinking more independent, and their behavior more assertive. Purdah, the conventional veil of female seclusion, was lifted. At the same time, families became more mobile and less tied to the traditions of a particular region and generation. With improved incomes and forty-hour work weeks, adults found time to relax and pursue leisure activities. They could be vigorous and youthful, and the notion of old age was increasingly reserved for later years. Because both parents were more likely in the workplace, children and youth came into more unsupervised and subsidized freedom. Peer group influence was increasingly consequential in the development of youth. Charges of permissiveness and indulgence were not uncommon. Attitudes about race relations catapulted into the open across the country, and Orange shuffled forward to dismantle decades of inequality. It was inevitable. Like merchant marine MacFarlane reaching the head of the gangplank, the question could not be evaded: “Can you handle that?” He could, as would most of the rest of the country, but with “considerable accommodation.” Black family income in America would more than double between 1939 and 1945, but earnings and employment opportunities would still fall far short of that of whites.22 With all the new people coming into Orange, though, there also came a new option for black citizens, the option “to step up their way of life.” The old status quo was no longer tenable. As Roy Jenkins put it: “I think it really give ’em a little spunk.”23 Related to all this change was the hybridization, the crossbreeding of ideas, values, and lifestyles. There was an infusion of new blood. Geneticists speak of heterosis or hybrid vigor, the increased potential for superior features frequently seen in crossbred animals or plants when compared with those produced by inbreeding. It was mentioned that many lives were enhanced by the opportunities in Orange, and most seemed to agree that the community was an improved, more vigorous, and vital place. But there were also casualties along the way: broken homes, alcoholism, grievous conflicts, impaired health, tragedies, and victimization of all sorts. More than one person returned home undone by a sense of defeat and failure. There was the young Arkansan who went back home because everything in Orange was so contrary to the rural life he had known in Arkansas. Eddie Mae Scarbrough spoke of a young teacher who abruptly left after only a couple of weeks because she could not cope with the rain. She did not tell anyone she was leaving; did not even finish unpacking her Model A. School officials received a letter from up in the country saying she would not be back. C. W. Waggoner too would have been long gone if only given the chance. Years later, he was finally on his way. The era predated much of our current understanding about the rela-

446

they called it the war effort

tionship between social change, stress, and maladjustment, so most people did not expect to be distressed by the circumstances they encountered. For some, the very concept of stress did not actively exist in their thinking. But what is noteworthy is that so many held up as well as they did—and thrived. They attributed their durability to their youthful heartiness and conditioning by hard times. After all, the Depression years had not been easy. There was also the temporary nature of the stresses, the super ordinate importance of winning the war, and the fact they worked such long hours. Many of these people simply did not have time to worry about the psychological quality of life. The support individuals got from one another also seemed to be an important resource. Whether they were shine boys hanging out together, families squeezed in a trailer court, a small congregation building their church, members of a tight-knit country western swing band, young girls venturing to Orange from Vermilion Parish, or workers in a shipyard crew, they shared this feeling of banding together and belonging. They had a group with whom they could huddle. There was also a certain reassurance that came from knowing you were a member of a much larger group that was involved in something so desperately important—the winning of a world war. Patriotism was unharnessed as never before. Despite advancing years, Ottomar (Otto) Brandt, father of Florence Wingate and Anne Quigley, expressed an attitude that would have been near unanimous: “I’ll work till it’s over, unless I die first.” Did moral behavior change? Nationwide, D’Ann Campbell concluded, there was a “general loosening of personal morals” that carried over into the postwar era.24 Undoubtedly, misbehavior in Orange was forced to the surface from the sheer pressure of numbers. There was hoarding, greed, draft dodging, drunkenness, promiscuity, black marketeering, gambling— lots of vices. The temporary conditions and the anonymity created by the masses set the stage for indulging in immoral temptations that might not otherwise have occurred, especially since so many were out from under customary sources of supervision and discipline. “Distance from home,” Stefan Zweig observed, “alters spiritual standards.”25 There was also an inclination on the part of some to attribute misconduct to the influence of the newcomers: “Look what they’re doing!” Maybe Jane Childress stated it best: “If there was anybody to be led astray, that was a good time to do it.” But she also acknowledged that if a lot of people’s morals went down, a lot of them might have improved. If there was deterioration of behavior, there was also amelioration. Distance from home may enhance as well as degrade behavior. Any number of families were inconvenienced by their willingness to open their homes to strangers, and while the rental income

Conclusion: Like a Hybrid

447

was no doubt helpful, for many there were other positive motivations. The war brought out the best in many people—a sense of caring and bonding. There was the simple gift of two pieces of bread spread with mayonnaise— and a quarter tucked inside. There was Aileen Noguess and her crew of shipyard workers passing around a Coke so everyone could have a sip—or a small piece of gum so everyone could enjoy a taste. There was Alpha Burdine, her mother, and her sister sharing a Hershey bar. A bunch of guys from Crowley shared their socks. Irma Overton gave up her bed to strangers so a husband and wife could sleep together over a weekend. Although he was little more than an acquaintance, a welder and his family took Mr. VanMeter with them to Orange and then shared their small trailer while he learned a trade. Enola Voss spoke of the closeness of families and of the feelings that found expression. We “let each other know more about how much we loved them at that time than we had before. We always knew we loved ’em, but we wouldn’t tell them. . . . The thought of them leaving and maybe not returning, what war really means and the reality of war, must make a person stop and think and make you feel like you want to let them know that you love them and how much they mean to you.” President Lincoln is known for his love of verse. William Herndon recounted receiving from Lincoln’s stepmother pages out of what must have been a crude book made and bound by a youthful Lincoln. On one page were scrawled lines that Herndon concluded were original with Lincoln. “Although a little irregular in metre,” Herndon wrote, “the sentiment would, I think, do credit to an older head.”26 Well, the verse would indeed do credit to an older head, one no less than that of Sir Isaac Watts (1674– 1748), Father of Hymnology. The sentiment, though, in Lincoln’s slightly altered copy, like Watts’ original, strikes a universal chord. Time, what an empty vapor ’tis, And days how swift they are: Swift as an Indian arrow---Fly on like a shooting star. The present moment just is here, Then slides away in haste, That we can never say they’re ours, But only say they’re past. “Inevitably,” Josiah Thompson maintains in his biography of Kierkegaard, “our lives slip away from us. We try to grasp actuality, but it seeps away.”27 In a similar vein four decades earlier, Charles Morgan wrote in

448

they called it the war effort

The Fountain: “In each instant of their lives, men die to that instant. It is not time that passes away from them but they who recede from the constancy, the immutability of time, so that when afterwards they look back upon themselves it is not themselves they see, not even—as it is customary to say—themselves as they formerly were, but strange ghosts made in their image with whom they have no communication.”28 There are occasions when each of us looks back on our own strange ghosts in far-removed times, and, indeed, the only communication is silence. But it was all so very real, so very much alive! As the individuals in this volume look back on those war years in Orange, many of their reflections may well take the form of hazy apparitions, “vague . . . impulses, wishes, and nostalgias.”29 The exhilaration has faded, the grief veiled by joys and sorrows of later years. The images must seem so very distant and elusive to former residents of Riverside who look out over the vacant expanse of those hundreds of acres, now stilled and silent, and try to visualize what once was their vibrant community of thousands. No trace remains. Vanished. Wiped away by the callous and indifferent hand of time. It would be like peering into thick coastal fog to drive up to the dead end of east Green Avenue and try to envision the long since dismantled bridge that spanned the river to good times in Louisiana. There is something surreal about standing at the corner of Third and Front and attempting to imagine thousands of shipyard workers rushing through the gates, or straining to recapture the harsh, reverberating sounds of heavy metal being forged into ships of war. It seems as if you should feel the ground tremor as the shuttle train slowly huffs and sighs its way to the yard. Those magnificent warships are gone. Honored shipways lie forgotten. And whatever happened to the breaking of early morning quiet by the thunderous drums and brassy bugles of drilling Bengal Guards? It is an experience much like Lula Haley’s description of the aura onboard a deactivated ship, abandoned and moored at dock: “A sort of hushed feeling seems to pervade the vessel, and one begins to imagine that something of the men is still there, that at any minute the stillness will be broken by some sort of sound—a voice calling out orders, the rattle of anchor chain, a boatswain whistle.” The memories are there, but all around reality contradicts the notion that the Orange war effort ever happened. For younger generations, it is something to be found only on the printed page. It is not uncommon today for people of that era to reminisce—and with emotion—about the Orange war effort. Nor is it a surprise to hear one who lived through those events reflecting with another: “Do you remember . . . ?” Perhaps Bruce McClelland’s recollection of one such exchange

Conclusion: Like a Hybrid

449

captures the sense of the time, both past and present: “I was talking to Mrs. Tilley the other day, and she said, ‘Bruce, you remember back in 1933 when you and Billy was playing football out there, how happy-go-lucky everybody was?’ I said, ‘I do, Mrs. Tilley.’ She said, ‘The war sure changed all that for a lot of people, didn’t it?’”

Epilogue The letterhead on the stationery reads: field artillery school fort sill, oklahoma Written with pen and ink in a legible, open style, it is a five-page document—his Last Will and Testament. Wishes are stated in proper legal language, while feelings for family and loved ones are expressed briefly in simple, personal terms. The affection is implicit, elaboration unnecessary. His estate he willed to his mother and father, and then he wrote the following: To the nature-lovers of the world I give, devise and bequeath the wonders of nature—the song of the birds, the quiet rustle of tall pines in the breeze, the smell of new mown hay, the glory of a full moon on a bay, the pleasure of an early morning walk—advising them to use these gifts to the fullest extent and to extract from them the utmost pleasure and enjoyment.

He was twenty-one when “at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, this eighth day of July, 1942” he signed his name— Donald Manley 2nd. Lt. F.A.

Afterword

I

n my view, we have long needed a richer account of the lives of the people of Southeast Texas as provided here through the skilled, interdisciplinary research and thoughtful interpretation of psychologistturned-historian Louis Fairchild. To Louis, my college classmate, perceptive Southeast Texan, and longtime friend, we owe a profound debt of gratitude for this historical work, They Called It the War Effort: Oral Histories from World War II Orange, Texas. The Nelda C. and H. J. Lutcher Stark Foundation of Orange and the Texas State Historical Association are also to be commended for their support in moving this expanded revision forward. The social history of Orange during wartime is now accessible and an integral part of the larger story of World War II on the American home front. The people’s voices we now “hear” through the pages of this book’s second, greatly revised edition constitute major contributions by both the interviewees and the researcher-author. In the preliminary to his World War I classic, Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden reminded us decades ago that “memory has her little ways,” but in the years between the releases of the two editions of this work, both scholarly and general reading audiences have accepted the use of memory in new approaches to older subjects. It is time for the personal stories and insights carried by the general public in Orange, Texas, to once again take center stage and inform us through what only personal narratives can provide. Like the interviewees for They Called It the War Effort, I felt the impact of World War II in my own life growing up in Southeast Texas. I grew up in the city of Beaumont. Located twenty-five miles west of Orange, Beaumont lay between Orange and sprawling Houston, which by that time was already the economically booming home of numerous corporate headquarters related to mineral extraction. It was humid, heavily industrialized Beaumont that I knew best in that region where Louisiana and Texas converge. We felt the effects of World War II in all three Beaumont residential neighborhoods my small nuclear family called home during those

454

they called it the war effort

years. My parents, Ogden (“Doc”) and Zola Broussard Charlton, had come back home to Beaumont shortly after the outbreak of war in the Pacific from a temporary business posting in Arkansas, where my father had been “loaned” to manage the local electric power company offices of several small towns. This sudden shift in employment plans was at least partly due to concern that my father was just young enough to be conscripted in a military draft, and he wanted my mother and me to be near his mother, Myrtle Faircloth Charlton, in nearby Silsbee, Texas, should the war scoop him up for duty. Although the military never called my father into military service during the forties, he served as a neighborhood captain in the Civil Defense organization that educated residents about possible enemy attacks from the air. When Dad donned the white CD helmet and allowed me to accompany him on evening rounds, he often had to remind a few of the residents along the streets that lowering their shades would dim their lights on a clear night ideal for bombing attacks. Even as an elementary schoolboy I realized the seriousness of the situation in a target city like Beaumont—as Orange was as well. The CD kept Southeast Texas safe, we were told, and the important oil refineries, shipyards, and other war-related facilities suffered no air attacks. We learned later that the port cities of Orange, Port Arthur, and Beaumont were also vulnerable to underwater attacks from submarines. However, as Orange navy veteran Conrad Manley notes in this book, most residents of Southeast Texas knew little of the confirmed submarine activity in the Gulf of Mexico until well after victory had been secured in 1945 and postwar decisions in Washington sounded an “all clear.” The people of Orange—like their Beaumont neighbors—stood strong and patriotic during those perilous times. The war effort and resulting industrialization made for closer ties and increased interdependence among Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange. In a few short years this trio of cities would become popularly known as “the Golden Triangle.” The World War II transformation of Orange and Southeast Texas should be seen from a national perspective as an integral part of the rapid economic changes that swept the land, especially in places where industrial capitalism was set to benefit from the outbreak of war. Unemployment— both a curse and a bane during the thirties—would now provide a large labor pool from the surplus of approximately 10 million people officially on the job market. Women, retired workers, and high school and college students added substantially more to this enormous labor pool. In places such as Orange, where shipbuilding and naval operations were ready to tap these citizens for assistance in meeting real threats to homeland security as

455

Afterword

well as manpower needs of the American military worldwide, this potential workforce was suddenly transformed into a source of domestic strength worthy of much merit and gratitude. The people of Orange more than met the call to duty when their nation summoned. Thomas L. Charlton Fort Worth, Texas

Appendixes Appendix 1

Orange 1944 We shall always remember the sights of Orange. The proud Sabine— Holding solemnly the hulls of unfinished ships, Orange ships, gray ships, yellow ships, Destroyers, DEs, and LCIs, Sailboats, motorboats, Coast Guard patrols, Houseboats, barges, and the old Caribbean, Resting ships from foreign ports. The shipyards at night like carnivals bright with lights, Casting a red glow in the eastern sky. Grasping cranes with giant arms hoisting heavy loads. • • • • • Riverside— Shelter for workmen and their families, Gray houses, frail houses, Like rows of matchboxes on a grocer’s shelf. Streets filled with water Whether the sun shines or it rains. Tiny yards of river sand, Tufts of sickly grass struggling for life. Cars parked endlessly on one-way streets, Traffic jams, The give and take of rushing cars, Wrecked cars, smashed fenders, Muddy cars, rusty cars, Naked-looking, tireless cars. • • • • •

458

they called it the war effort Downtown— Throngs of people hurrying endlessly, Worn-out taxis darting in and out, Crowded buses moving painfully, Lines in banks on payday, Crowds awaiting turns at shows and eating places, Eager women rushing after scarce goods The grocer just received. An over-crowded town Like an ant bed alive with too many ants. On every vacant lot Patched-up shacks and mildewed, homemade tents, Wheelless trailers, settled side by side, Built for three or four But sheltering six or eight. Lines strung from camp to camp Holding dingy wash, Leaving no place for children to play. • • • • • Old Orange— Weather-beaten palms near crowded schools, Delicate camellias, azaleas rare in front of stately mansions, Carriage houses, servants’ quarters, Hitching posts and iron fences, Spanish moss on ancient oaks, Magnolia trees and cypress. • • • • • We shall always remember the sounds of Orange. From the shipyards— The staccato rhythm of the riveting, The clanking of steel, the pounding of sledge hammers, A ship’s shrill whistle being tuned, The dismal wail of a fog horn Mingling with the cry of a sea gull, The groaning, snapping, cracking, splashing, When a ship slides down the ways. • • • • • In town— The terrifying scream of the sirens, The honking of the police department’s “trouble horn,” Jukeboxes carelessly jumbling jive,

Appendix 1

Bowling pins crashing in the alleys, Roller skates rumbling on the rink, The two-toned whistle of sailors When any girl passes by. The clatter of dishes in a crowded cafe, The shrill, impatient voice of a waitress, The cheerful chime of a cash register, The music of the Salvation Army band on Saturday night, The clicking of balls in the pool hall, The loud laughter of men. The blast of a finishing whistle, Laboring gasps from the shuttle train Straining with its load of grim-faced, grimy workers, The mumbling of voices and shuffling of feet, The roar of starting cars and the grinding of brakes, The discordant horns and the whistle of the guards, All sounds of the changing shift. Crowds drifting away as evening settles down, Tolling church bells, the symbol of peace and worship, The monotonous tapping of rain on the roof, The sigh of wind through the trees. • • • • • We shall always remember the people of Orange, Serious people, Laughing people, Dirty, greasy, tired people, Working people all. Men with helmets and lunch boxes, Well-dressed men from stores or banks, Doctors, tired and over-worked, Hurrying nurses, brisk and clean. Chattering, laughing boys and girls, Sailors wandering aimlessly, Soldiers crammed in convoy trucks, People speaking English queerly, French, Italian, Mexican. A blind beggar playing an accordion, A tamale man with his rickety cart, Drunk men from across the river, One-legged men on wooden stumps, Bandaged, injured workers.

459

460

they called it the war effort Red Cross volunteers in uniform, Women cab drivers and waitresses, Housewives burdened with groceries. Irritable bus drivers with their “Move back,” The shipyard worker saying “Get out of my way,” with his eyes, Teachers with the calm complaint, “Many more pupils than I had desks today.” Ministers, nuns, and Catholic Priests, Western Union messengers, Theater ushers and dime store clerks, Nursemaids and yard boys, Children who have never worked before Wearing aprons, Selling goods, Bearing loads. Old settlers, newcomers working all together. • • • • Crowded Orange— Sometimes noisy, ever busy and alive, Singing, laughing, praying, swearing, Working, sweating, pushing, rushing, Building, struggling, Always doing things.

•

Norma Scott Johnson was the teacher of the classes that composed this poem.

Appendix 2

Seeing, Remembering By Brent Manley Jr. (From the Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 25, 1992)

I

never met my Uncle Donald. He died before I was born—shot down in a plane in someone else’s country, a long way from his home in Texas. Now I, too, was a long way from home, standing on soil where the Battle of the Bulge was fought—where my uncle died—looking at the grave of Donald Manley. He is buried in a military cemetery near the little town of Hamm, just outside the city of Luxembourg in the country of Luxembourg. Besides his name, the simple white grave marker identified my uncle as a first lieutenant with the 40th Field Artillery Group. It says he was from Texas. And that he died Jan. 1, 1945. I stood there on that sunny spring day amid more than 5,000 other gravestones, including one for a man named George S. Patton, Jr., and I cried. For the uncle I never knew, for his brother, Grant—who was also killed during World War II, in the Pacific—and for my grandmother, who sent five sons off to war and had three return. It was more than that, though. As I looked around that cemetery, I wondered about all the other men and women buried there. To the left of Donald Manley lies Private David Wainwright, from Illinois, 95th Infantry Division. Died the same day my uncle did. Does anyone remember him? Did his nephew—or son, or daughter or sister—ever visit his grave here? Did anyone ever miss knowing him? Did someone think about his death and say, “It’s not fair”?

462

they called it the war effort

To the right: Tech. 4 Charles H. Probasco of New Jersey. Armored Field Artillery. Died Jan. 9, 1945. How did he die? What were his last thoughts? My uncle, who was 24, must have been feeling lucky on New Year’s Day, 1945, his last on earth. He was an artillery spotter, a soldier who flew in small, slow planes to survey enemy positions. On New Year’s Eve, he was shot down by a German fighter, but was unharmed and made his way back to his unit on foot. He went right back up the next day. As I stood in that cemetery, I was struck by the presence overhead of a small, light plane, circling as my uncle must have time and again, perhaps over that very spot. I walked along rows of gravestones, noting names, wondering who they were: a man named Torres from New Mexico, a Reagan from Tennessee, Muriel Ruby from Ohio. I hoped that, even after more than 40 years, someone remembered each of these heroes and heroines in some way. My parents found one way to do that when my mother had twin sons. They named them Donald and Grant. Besides the graves at Hamm, there is also a monument commemorating the Battle of the Bulge, fought in Belgium and Luxembourg. There are two massive stone walls with the names of soldiers who died but whose remains were not recovered. There is also a sanctuary, and visitors who go in are invited to pray. On the wall is inscribed a message: “Grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil and make no peace with oppression.” I believe my uncle and the other men and women who died in the Battle of the Bulge—81,000 Allied troops—undertook their mission with that grace. Embedded in the concrete floor outside the monuments at the cemetery is a message from the late President Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded the Allied troops in Europe during the war. His message reads: “All who shall hereafter live in freedom will be here reminded that to these men and their comrades we owe a debt to be paid with grateful remembrance of their sacrifices and with the high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live eternally.” The day my wife and I visited the cemetery, I noted many others there who weren’t speaking English. There were Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Belgians, even some Germans—all sharing a common feeling about war and the toll it takes. There were many tears. Before my visit to Hamm, Memorial Day was just another holiday. It

Appendix 2

463

wasn’t so personal. My father served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during World War II, but he came back. Before my visit, my Uncle Donald was mostly just a face in a picture at my grandmother’s house, a person fondly remembered but unknown to me. Now I’ve seen his resting place. And I miss him.

Appendix 3

I

Procedure

was born in Orange and spent most of my childhood and youth in southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana. On reading figures related to the significant population increase in Orange during World War II, I became interested in the impact of this increase and related community changes, as well as the war itself, on my family and other residents of the town. Eleven pilot interviews were conducted in 1986, and all but seven of the remaining interviews were completed in the summer of 1987. That summer a list of some sixty potential interviewees was suggested by Elaine Toal and R. H. (Bubba) Voss Jr., of the Orange County Historical Society, and approximately 50 percent of these people were eventually interviewed. A number of individuals responded to area newspaper articles about the project. Each person interviewed was, in turn, asked to suggest other names, and over two hundred individuals were finally interviewed. The interviews were generally structured around open-ended questions on topics related to the impact of the war years on the community, the individual, and his or her family and acquaintances. However, each interviewee was allowed to pursue points more relevant to his or her experience, and in many cases the information obtained was limited to this material. As noted in the Preface, the purpose of the interviews was to obtain a personal, subjective account of experience. Most of the interviews were conducted in homes, but others were recorded in facilities of Lamar University–Orange or at places of business. Four interviews and a portion of a fifth were recorded over the telephone. The material in the volume is edited, and editing primarily involved two processes. First, the interviews were abridged in order to permit a publication of reasonable length, and, second, comments related to the same topic were sometimes rearranged and grouped in order to facilitate clarity and readability. Questions asked were edited and, if possible, eliminated to make for a more uninterrupted, readable record. An attempt was made to preserve

466

they called it the war effort

not only information but manner of expression. Any changes or additions to the recorded comments knowingly made are printed in brackets. Unless indicated otherwise in the endnotes, tape recordings of all interviews and quotations by name are on file in the Orange Public Library.

Notes Notes to Preface to First Edition 1. W. M. Runyan, Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 244. 2. G. Wald, “Origin of Death,” in J. D. Roslansky (ed.), The End of Life (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1973), 19. 3. P. Hoban, “The loved one,” New York 23 (1990): 24–31.

Notes to Introduction 1. Roy Wingate, recorded interview with author. Orange, Texas, 20 July 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 2. Francis E. Merrill, Social Problems on the Home Front: A Study of War-Time Influences (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1948), 2. 3. Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American People, 1939–1945 (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc., 1973), 10. 4. William M. Tuttle Jr., “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 60. 5. Ibid., 57. 6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Total population of ten congested population areas: 1944, Series CA-1, No. 11 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1944). 7. A. M. Winkler, Home Front U.S.A.: America During World War II (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1986). 8. Representative works include: R. R. Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American Home Front, 1941–1945 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970); R. Polenberg, War and Society: The United States 1941–1945 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972); Perrett, Days of Sadness; C. Phillips, The 1940’s: Decade of Triumph and Trouble (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1975); J. M. Blum, V Was For Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Winkler, Home Front U.S.A. 9. G. D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 10. Perrett, Days of Sadness, 174. 11. Phillips, The 1940’s, 173. 12. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Civilian migration in the United States: December 1941, to March 1945, Series P-S, No. 5 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945). 13. Kelly, John, “John Kelly’s Washington: ‘Vicissitudes of Life in Small Texas Town are

468

Notes to pages xxvi–xxix

More Than Just Good Column Fodder,’” Washington Post, Apr. 29, 2009, B3. 14. Louis Dugas, “Foreword,” in Picturing Orange: A Pictorial History of Orange County, H. C. Williams, MD (ed.), (Orange, Tex.: Heritage House of Orange County Association, Inc., 2000). 15. Orange, Texas, from Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/ online/articles/OO/heo1.html. [Accessed June 12, 1910]. 16. Alonzo Craft Jr., recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 13, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. According to one report: “They had one street in Orange where the bank and everything was. You could drive up out in front of a store and honk your horn and say you wanted a spool of thread, and they’d bring it to your car. That’s what a small place it was.” 17. American Historical Publications, Texas Gazetteer (Wilmington, Del.: American Historical Publications, Inc., 1985), 290. 18. James Pruter, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 3, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 19. D. A. Pruter Jr., recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 3, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 20. “Brownie” Sloan, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 16, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 21. Iris Bowler, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 14, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 22. Beatrice Fuller, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 17, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 23. Frank Smith, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 4, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 24. Johnnie Talbert, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 1, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 25. Isaac Dupree, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 5, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 26. Jane Childers, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, June 28, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 27. Edgar A. Mowrer, Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of Our Time (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968), 46. 28. The idea of the boundaries of evil comes from Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Vintage Press, 2004), 349; Donald Miller, The Story of World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 29. 29. The author is indebted to various articles in the Orange Leader from this era that reported on the wartime build-up in Orange. Barbara McLellan went to work for Weaver Shipyards in 1950. She gave this historical perspective on the yard: “Weaver’s had several logbooks [and] records, and most of [the entries] in this one book dated from about 1912, -13, -15, -18 and along in those years where they were hauling out and working on the large four-masted schooners. You could tell how many days it was on the ways, and then there would be in another little book all the dimensions and a small drawing that showed you how to haul this vessel out and how to set the blocks under it so that they didn’t do any damage. I wrote in those books the same as some people wrote back in the 1913s. So you felt sort of strange that you wrote in the same books that people wrote in years and years and years ago.” Barbara McLellan, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 5, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library.

Notes to pages xxix–xxxii

469

30. Additional details on the Consolidated yard and its development, the destroyers, and other events in Orange during this period may be found in H. C. Williams, MD (ed.), Las Sabinis 15 ( July 1989): 3 (Orange, Tex.: Orange County Historical Society). 31. H. G. Chalkley, Captain, USNR, “History of the Office of the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S.N., Orange, Texas,” http://www.anahuactexasindependence.com/chalkley1. htm [Accessed June 4, 2010] 32. George Craft, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas. June 30, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 33. Alistair Cooke, The American Home Front: 1941–1942 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), 96. 34. Chalkley, “History of the Office,” 3. 35. “Drastic speed ordered in shipbuilding: Secretary Knox sends message to Commander Perry,” the Orange Leader, Dec. 10, 1941. 36. H. C. Williams, MD, Gateway to Texas (Austin: Wind River Press, 1986), 166. 37. Miller, Story of World War II, 49. 38. Chalkley, “History of the Office,” 1. 39. George Craft, recorded interview. 40. Cecile Rogers Gordon wrote: “The railroad track ran right in front of our house. The shuttle train came [through] every afternoon taking the 4 to 12 shift workers to Consolidated Steel & Levingston Shipyard[s]. The kids in the neighborhood got home from school in time to catch the Beaumont Journal newspapers that they threw out the windows to us before they got to work. Thus, it became the ‘paper train’ . . . then we’d resell the papers for a nickel and use our big earnings for ‘picture show’ money.” C. R. Gordon, personal communication, Nov. 3, 2010. 41. Arvela Morgan, personal communication, Oct. 13, 1992. 42. From “Orange 1944,” a poem composed by some 100 ninth-graders in three English classes, spring 1944. The Aulick was a Fletcher-class destroyer and its displacement on commissioning was 2,050 tons. 43. Orange was the only Texas city in which destroyers were constructed during WWII, and to date remains the only city in Texas to have built this ship. Stephanie Ball Rowland, “Navy Park Historic District,” http://www.anahuactexasindependence.com/np7.htm [Accessed June 4, 2010] 44. “Navy base closing marks end of era,” the Orange Leader, Dec. 28, 1975. 45. John Palm, “USS Weeden DE797,” http://www.ussweeden.org/weedhist.htm, 5 [Accessed June 4, 2010] 46. The housing shortage was not something new. It had been a problem as early as 1918 when Jewel Force had moved to Orange and was no better in 1924 when Marion Tilley arrived: “Oh, there was a terrible shortage of houses. Everybody owned their own home, like all small towns, and there was very few rent houses.” Marion Tilley, recorded interview with the author, July 4, 1987. Recording Orange Public Library. 47. Winston Estes, Homefront: A Novel (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1976), 62. 48. “Orange 1944.” 49. C.R. Gordon, personal communication. 50. Mrs. W. W. Kennedy, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 15, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 51. Chalkley, “History of the Office,” 4. 52. Mrs. Lance Wingate, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 13, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 53. Walter Toronjo, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 23, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library.

470

Notes to pages xxxii–xxxv

54. Herndon Bowler, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 9, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 55. C.T. MacFarlane, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 13, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 56. Russell King, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 12, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 57. Chalkley, “History of the Office,” 11. 58. Ibid. 59. Chalkley, “History of the Office,”, 4. 60. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 649. 61. Ibid., 779. 62. Otho Haunschild, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 2, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 63. James Heard, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 14, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 64. Phyllis Roush, recorded interview with the author. Amarillo, Texas, Nov. 10, 1988. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 65. Clarence Parkhurst, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 17, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 66. Vernon Peveto, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 18, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 67. Mary Alice Callahan, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 15, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 68. Geneve Paul, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 12, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 69. Deena Cox, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 30, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 70. Worley’s Orange City Directory, 1944 (Dallas: John F. Worley Directory Co., 1945). 71. Walter Prescott Webb, and H. Bailey Carroll, (eds.), Handbook of Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1952). The increase of people coming into Orange could be seen as early as 1940 and in different settings. Roy Wingate, for example, recalled that the Catholic Youth Organization had something like twelve members in 1939. The club began to grow until there were around 300 members in late 1940. R. Wingate, interview. 72. P. H. Butler, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 7, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 73. The Grant Manley School was renamed the Grant and Donald Manley School on the death of Donald Manley. 74. Lavern Premeaux, who worked for a time at Montgomery Ward and Company, said “fifty and sixty tents a day” would be ordered through the catalog. Tent communities were also erected outside of Orange. Lex Pinson visited his father in Nederland, Texas, where they had “just lines of tents out there that people were staying in.” Lavern Premeaux, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 6, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 75. David Journeay, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, August 1986. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 76. Henry Stanfield, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 30, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 77. Beds might also be wet. The author’s grandmother rented several beds to men. She complained about bed-wetting. The stresses of the day undoubtedly contributed to problems of enuresis.

471

Notes to pages xxxvi–1

78. L. S. Boyd, personal communication, July 8, 1992. Loretta Boyd and Joyce Shockley were sisters. 79. Kate Sparrow, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 16, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 80. Copeland Ward, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 27, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 81. “Orange 1944.” 82. Eddie Morris, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 28, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 83. Robert Clough, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 31, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 84. E. Morris, recorded interview. 85. Marian von Dohlen, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 18, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 86. Ibid. 87. Helen Manley, recorded interview with the author. Bay St. Louis, Mississippi (by telephone), Aug. 5, 1992. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 88. Julia Bacom, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 20, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 89. There were those who were profiting financially from the war and, therefore, wanted it to continue. Arthur Black heard from several people about an incident at the Grove. “One of the ladies high up in one of the [shipyards] got all drunk one night. She says, ‘I just hope this war never ends. We’re making more money than we ever made before.’ With that, one lady there that was attending that party just clobbered her with something she had.” Forrest Clough and Rudy Rougeau reported experiences with people wanting the war to continue. Arthur Black, recorded interview with the author. July 8, 1987. Tape recording Orange Public Library. 90. Helen Newman, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 3, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 91. C. H. Hogan, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 15, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 92. Bacom, recorded interview.

Notes to Chapter One 1. Conrad Manley moved to Orange in 1923 and remembered this impression: “There were a lot of houses—it was striking—that either had never been painted or it had been years since they were painted and badly needed repainting.” When Margie Burns moved to Orange in 1938, “I don’t suppose there was over a dozen painted houses here.” In 1939 Herman Wood bought a house that had not been painted since 1902. A contractor agreed to paint the house “with two coats of Kuhns’ paint—labor and material, for seventy-five dollars. Well, he wanted to welsh on that a little bit. He said, ‘That wood is sucking the paint out of the brush’”; Margie Burns, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Dec. 26, 1986. Tape recording, Orange Public Library; Herman Wood, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 19, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 2. Newcomers from other parts of the country probably thought they were someplace other than Siberia when they encountered the heat and humidity of Orange. Iris Bowler recalled, “One guy said that he’d never seen a Christmas without snow, and Christmas cards all have snow on the front of ’em.” Herndon added: “He sent a picture home standing in the front yard in a short-sleeve shirt—Christmas day—sent it back to Minnesota. His daddy told him he better load up and come home, that he’d done lost his mind walking around in

472

Notes to pages 1–14

short-sleeve shirts,” Herndon and Iris Bowler, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 9, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 3. J. Palm, “USS Weeden,” 5. 4. Minnie Pengelly, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 18, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 5. Frank Mepham, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 8, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 6. Williams, Gateway. 7. C. Ward, recorded interview. 8. Frank Hubert, recorded interview with the author. Bryan, Texas, Aug. 5, 1988. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 9. Conrad Manley: “One of the biggest impressions I have from when I was in grammar school in Orange was the Ku Klux Klan. I remember one night scared as hell—the Klan at that time wore masks. They were at the old baseball field, which had a high solid wood fence around it—another kid and I peeking through cracks scared to death one of ’em would catch us and do something awful to us. This was a night meeting when they burned the cross—I think at home plate—and all these white figures and flames in the dark. That was my only contact with them, but I was scared as I could be.” C. Manley, recorded interview. 10. The names Lutcher Stark and Edgar Brown represented the two most prominent families of wealth in Orange. 11. Bruce McClelland maintained that a lot of northerners had “never seen a rodeo. They went wild over horses and over saddles. They’d be dressed up like Tom Mix sitting in the stands. See, all they’d ever heard all their lives was a cowboy on every corner in Texas. That’s what they figured when they got to Texas, and everybody down here wore boots, spurs and everything, and they had to dress the part,” Bruce McClelland, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 27, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 12. This interview was based on three recorded telephone conversations with Mr. Manley in August 1992. However, because the technical quality of the first two recordings was so poor, these tapes are not on file in the Orange Public Library but remain in the possession of the author. 13. Brent Manley commented: “Actually, at the time it happened, which was immediately before Pearl Harbor, they thought it was an accident. But they learned later that—of course, the Philippines were crawling with fifth columnists and the plane was sabotaged.” In a letter to his mother in September of 1941 Grant wrote: “There have been rumors of possible sabotage to the airplanes and our guards have been redoubled.” In other letters to the family he was anticipating the arrival of new P-40s that were being delivered by ship. In a November 4 letter he wrote: “We are flying our new ships quite a bit these days and they are really sweet ships as far as maneuvers go but the motors are not too dependable.” There were references in other letters to engine failures. Brent Manley, recorded interview with the author. Bay St. Louis, Mississippi (by telephone), Aug. 5, 1992. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 14. Mr. Manley emphasized that his father was familiar with the suffering of war. This had helped prepare him for the deaths of his own sons. 15. Before he went to sea on the Indiana, Mr. Manley built and commanded for three years the antiaircraft gunnery school at Shell Beach, Louisiana. “We trained over 100,000 men, including 4,000 Russians.” B. Manley, personal communication, Aug. 29, 1992. 16. Conrad Manley said, “I think probably my mother hated to see Donald go [more] than the others of us who were older. Both my parents really leaned over backwards to avoid indicating any preference or liking for one child more than the other. I think it was just natural, at least for my mother, to favor Donald. He was her last one and youngest, and I think she feared for him more than any of us.” C. Manley, recorded interview.

Notes to pages 16–33

473

17. In her January 16, 1945, letter to her son and daughter-in-law, Connie (Conrad) and Ruth, Mrs. Manley wrote: “The children have kept us from thinking too much, when they are around.” Copy of letter in possession of author. 18. Walter McCarver stated: “Some of ’em [sailors] said they’d never seen a chicken. I had a bunch of chickens and cows back there. I thought that was funny. I thought everybody ought to have seen a chicken.” Lillie Bell agreed. “Some of those kids didn’t know what a rooster was. We had calves, and they’d come over to our house and look at those chickens and look at those calves just like kids in school.” Walter and Lillie Bell McCarver, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 27,1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 19. Dengue fever is actually a viral disease transmitted by mosquitoes. 20. It is reported that in the early years of the war ten counties in East Texas experienced losses in population of more than 30 percent. Ralph A. Wooster. Texas and Texans in World War II (Austin: Eakin Press, 2005), 83. 21. Estelle Clough’s “sister-in-law rented a room, and [the house] had this great big screen porch. One day a man came in there and wanted to force [the owner] to give him and his family room to live there. And he just made himself very obnoxious. He was just downright ugly about it. He told her, ‘There’s room out here for two or three beds.’” Forrest and Estelle Clough, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 26, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 22. Jim Pruter: “When I got on the train to go over to Houston to get my physical, I couldn’t understand why in the world Mother was bawling so. ‘What [are] you crying about?’ I said. ‘I’m just going to get my physical. I’m just going in the service.’ I mean it never entered my mind that I could get myself killed. I was just a naive little ol’ kid going into the service.” J. Pruter, interview. 23. Looking around on his brief pass through the city, Alistair Cooke observed, “A shipyard is in full steam on the Sabine. Hundreds of shining automobiles line the streets of Orange.” Cooke, American Home Front, 96. 24. Jim Pruter: “I’m not joking. I saw this for sure. There was a lady in that post office in July in a fur coat. This is the honest-to-goodness truth. I remember coming home and telling Mother. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d just bought it.” Mary Alice Callahan was “always shocked—you’d see a little, very, very modest home, almost a hovel, and a fine automobile sitting out in front. But you know, this is, I think, true sometimes of people that maybe don’t have very much and then all of a sudden they’ve got a lot. They probably weren’t new cars, but you might see a Cadillac sitting in front of a little two-room shack. Maybe that’s all they could find to live in, but they had a fine car. And who says they didn’t deserve it.” J. Pruter, interview. Callahan, interview. 25. Clyde Childers was another engineer to comment on the building of Riverside: “For the time they had to do it in, it was remarkable. I know the fellow that was in charge of it, and he took these ol’ boys from the country or anywhere else that he could get [them], and they laid out wood—they made it, in a manner of speaking, an assembly line. One guy’d do one thing all day long and that part of it would move on up, and as you went along that thing went up very rapidly. It surprised me. But the layout was terrible. They laid it out for the streets to drain everything, all the water, and if it rained, well, the streets would flood, but they would finally drain off. The rainwater would end up in the street and the street would be the ditch, really.” C. Childers, interview. Barbara McLellan’s father worked on the project. “It was like one day there’d be an empty hole, space, and the next day there’d be three or four houses sitting there. That’s how fast they were going up with ’em. They were throwing ’em up.” B. McLellan, interview. 26. In describing the black community Louis Dugas said, “I think a lot of people were like the old man I saw up at Marshall, [Texas], a couple of years ago. He had never been

474

Notes to pages 33–42

to Longview, which is like thirty or forty miles. He was sixty-five years old and had never gone that far, and I think we had a lot of people like that in Orange.” Louis Dugas Jr., recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 6, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 27. Mrs. Homer Stark noted that they still had rallies and concerts in Stark Park. “They had a lot of political rallies there, and in those years they used to get pretty hot. The politicians would get up and threatened this one and that one. The sheriff ’s campaign was what always more or less got out of hand. Someone would get up there and threatened another one—‘I’ll whip you with this barbed wire if I ever catch you on my property again.’ Those were the days that they talked like that.” Mrs. Homer Stark, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 15, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 28. One local beauty shop displayed this wartime ad: “Beauty for Morale.” 29. Frank Mepham said, “They got to where they were making money and they left their attitude somewhere. I don’t know where they left it, but they left it somewhere. It changed a lot of people. You can take an ordinary ol’ person and give him ten dollars in his pocket and he’s gone. He’s sitting in high cotton. In other words, friendship’s gone. I didn’t lose any friends, but a lot of people did. They got to making a little bit of money, and then, well, they’d forget their ol’ buddies and take off.” Mepham, interview. 30. Thomasine H. Carter was teaching a junior English class. “I was standing in front of the classroom, and they were listening to President Roosevelt when he declared war. Ovie [Broussard Jr.] was the one that I remember that spoke up and said, ‘Miss Howell, I’m going to quit school. I’m going into the army.’ I’ll just never forget that. He said that in front of the class. I don’t know exactly where it was that he was killed.” Thomasine Carter, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 29, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 31. Clara Wilson remembered that during the Depression “people went to church whether they had anything to wear or not. Everybody had the same thing and everybody was pretty poorly dressed, so you didn’t mind.” Clara Wilson, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 3, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 32. P. H. Butler recalled “some tremendous bingo games over there. By modern standards they might not be too big, but then they’d give away $10,000 on the last card of bingo on Saturday nights, and that was a lot of money in those days. They raffled off a Cadillac one night, and two women had split a card and won it. I don’t know who ended up with the Cadillac, but, anyhow, somebody said they cut it in half, and others said, nah, one of ’em flipped with the other one and one won it all. But they had a time over there. They had thousands of people. They had ’em all out in the yards, and speakers everywhere.” P. H. Butler, interview. 33. Ed White got orders to come to Orange in 1942. “[I had] never even heard of it. I had to get a map out to see where it was. All of us were getting orders at the same time to go to war, you know, and most of ’em did. And here I got orders to come to Orange, Texas. It ended up I was in charge of the city docks, seeing that the ships were outfitted with all the equipment and merchandise that they needed to go to war, ’cause when they left Orange, well, that’s where they were headed. It was very interesting [work], but I wanted to go to war. I wrote three letters requesting that I be sent overseas, but I never did get to go. It was just one of those things. They wanted me here and they didn’t approve my transfer, so—it didn’t bother me.” J. E. White Jr., recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 12, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. Following the war some of these sailors were nostalgic about Orange. After Barbara McLellan went to work at Weaver Shipyards in 1950, “It was surprising how many people came through. They were on a vacation or something like that, and they would come and

475

Notes to pages 43–58

want to see the shipyard and want to show their kids where they had caught their first ship or something like that. That went on a lot in the early part of the fifties. You’d have people come from all over the place that had been here during the war.” McLellan interview. 34. Henry Stanfield could recall in this era seeing cattle that had choked to death from mosquitoes having clogged their breathing passages. They would put cheesecloth over the nostrils of their horses to protect them. H. Stanfield, interview. 35. Diners were common at Georgia Singletary’s. “There were so many people down there in [one of the offices] that [they] couldn’t get to eat when they went out. We lived close enough that they could come to our house, and my mother and sister served them a noon meal. With our family we had about twelve people most every day. It was just like manna from heaven. They were so hungry for some home-cooked food, I guess. But they ate with us a long time.” Georgia Singletary, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 1, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 36. Mary Alice Callahan reported hearing what was, evidently, a popular retort from natives: “You know that road you came in on? It still leads out of town.” Callahan, interview. 37. Because her family lived close to the shipyards, Ms. Singletary could “hear an awful lot of noise. You could hear voices at night. If it was a quiet night you could hear ’em talking and see the lights flashing. Men would be on the ships or something and they’d be ‘hoing’ and ‘hiing’ to one another—‘Throw out a line’ or something like this. Naturally at night you could hear that ’cause there’s not a lot of street noises that would break it down, and if you’re sitting out on the porch or coming in late you’d hear it.” Singletary, interview.

Notes to Chapter Two 1. C. Ward, recorded interview. 2. V. Peveto, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 18, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 3. G. Craft, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 30, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 4. C. Childers, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 1, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 5. Mary Jo Craft said, “A lot of the people that came in had not been to Texas before, so they didn’t know just what they were expecting. One lady said, ‘I thought we were going to have orange trees all over the yard.’” Alonzo and Mary Jo Craft, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 13, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 6. An electric fan was a prized possession during the war years. Elva Richardson said, “I got an ol’ fan in there right now. A feller offered me about ten or twelve dollars [for it] during the war. A feller could offer me thirty-five dollars for that fan. Well, no! I wouldn’t sell him that fan for thirty-five dollars.” “Need it ourselves,” Myrtle added. Henry Stanfield remembered “a young boy here that every once in a while he’d get on a bender, and he went into one of our cafes here and he and the owner got it up about Mussolini, and it wound up into a fistfight. And I went out and picked him up. Didn’t have a bit of trouble picking him up. And from then on, every time he’d pass me on the street or I’d pass in the car he’d holler and want to know when we were going to put fans in our city jail down there.” Minnie Pengelly, “managed to get an ol’ fan and got it fixed, and, of course, we were crowded. We just had an apartment, a small place, and my son didn’t know it was there so he stepped on it or turned it over and broke it the first night. And you just couldn’t buy anything like that.” So, they had to do without. “Brownie” Sloan went to work for Higman Towing Company. Her office was in a building at the dock, extending over the river. Under her desk was a hole some two feet by three feet for “air conditioning” purposes. “They cut it out there so we’d get the cool air off

476

Notes to pages 60–86

the river.” Elva and Myrtle Richardson, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 18, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library, H. Stanfield, recorded interview; M. Pengelly, recorded interview; B. Sloan, recorded interview. 7. A group of men had, evidently, picked his car up (or “bounced” it) and then returned it to its space—only facing the opposite direction. 8. P. H. Butler commented: “I had my office close to the front door at one time, and it was also close to the front gate. I noticed that there was a lot of women out there on certain days. There’d be maybe thirty to fifty women out there to wait for ’em, meet ’em at the gate. So I asked one of the ladies in there, ‘What are they all out there for?’ She says, ‘They’re out there to get those paychecks before those men get across the river.’” P. H. Butler, recorded interview. 9. T. H. Holmes, and R. H. Rahe, “The Social Readjustment Scale,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 11 (1967): 213–218.

Notes to Chapter Three 1. J. T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan (New York: Vanguard Press 1932), 12–13. 2. E. H. Ramey, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 5, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 3. Mary Lynn Weir, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 17, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 4. The author’s mother was recruited to teach a second-grade class at Anderson School prior to the end of the 1943–1944 school year. She was told she was something like the eighth or ninth teacher the class had had that year. 5. L. Pinson, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 14, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 6. Weir, interview. 7. Lillian Hellman, Pentimento (New York: New American Library, 1973), 92. 8. Katherine Griggs was working downtown in her father’s bookstore. “[People began buying] more books than we had ever sold—more novels, inspirational books, some cookbooks—a few of the nicer books that had the colored illustrations. The main things were children’s books—the Hardy Boys series, the Nancy Drew series. There were, of course, the Bobbsey Twins, too. There were people coming down from other parts of the country, people that read. Orange at that time was not too much of a reading town, at least from what we could tell. There was a little library here, but people either were members of the book clubs or they went to Beaumont where they could get a bigger selection. But it just didn’t seem that Orange at that time was too much of a book-reading town.” Katherine Griggs, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 24 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 9. Mary Alice Callahan taught dance classes in Riverside. “The kind of children I’ve generally had have been well-behaved, well-trained children from the good homes. You couldn’t say, ‘Oh, they lived in Riverside; they were not high class.’ They could be. All kinds of people lived out there.” Callahan, recorded interview. 10. Lula Haley had written several articles about the war years for local newspapers. She gave the author a folder of WWII memorabilia and handwritten notes she had jotted down about those years. Included among these notes was her recollection about “going without hose in public the first time.” 11. According to Eddie Mae Scarbrough it rained nearly every day for the first month she was in Orange. “Many times I would not put on shoes and hose until I got across the street from where I lived, ’cause it was flooded all the time.” E. M. Scarbrough, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 9, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library.

Notes to pages 87–109

477

12. Mrs. Callahan could remember “more lasting things, what the Depression did to us than what the war years did. But, of course, one came on top of the other, and I think we were very grateful for what we had. After coming out of the Depression, maybe it made a distinct impression on us, because we had more.” Callahan, recorded interview. 13. Mrs. Homer Stark had been a personal friend of Mrs. K. A. (Teiko) Susuki for a number of years. She babysat with Kiki, and Mrs. Susuki “even loaned me an evening gown for my junior prom. She had made it herself—beautifully made.” Mrs. Stark was not in Orange when charges were brought against Mr. Susuki, but “I think Homer’s dad sent me the paper, and it had the article in there telling about Mr. Susuki, and they had already arrested him. They tell that they threw rocks and everything at the house, and then the next thing I knew they were gone. Oh, that really hurt me, because I liked her and she was so nice to me. They said he was a spy. He might have been, but that doesn’t change me about how I felt about ’em.” Mrs. H. Stark, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 18, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 14. Although Mr. Bergeron recalled this event as having occurred in 1948, it seems to have been fairly typical of the war years. Mr. LeBlanc cited a similar experience. 15. According to C. W. Waggoner, the sailors “were even lower than the drifters.” Waggoner, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug, 5, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 16. The race riot to which Mr. Waggoner referred occurred in 1943. The events surrounding the riot are examined in James S. Olson and Sharon Phair, “The Anatomy of a Race Riot: Beaumont, Texas, 1943,” Texana 11 ( January 1973): 64–72; James A Burran, “Violence in an ‘Arsenal of Democracy’: The Beaumont Race Riot, 1943,” East Texas Historical Journal (Spring 1976): 39–51. See also the Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Beaumont Riot of 1943,” http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/BB/jcbl.html [accessed September 29, 2008]. 17. Oyster shells are a common flexible road-base material in coastal towns like Orange. The shells are dredged from oyster beds off the Texas coast and brought inland by barge. The shells are basically gray when removed from the water, but exposure to air and sunlight bleaches them to a bright white. Traffic presses the shell into a tight, hard surface. Frank Mepham recalled, “There were no traffic cops. Had one cop that had a car, and that’s all there was. No nothing for speeding or anything else. In fact, they didn’t have anything but shell roads to drive on. You couldn’t speed too much.” Mepham, interview. 18. As noted earlier, Mrs. Callahan taught dance for the city during the war. “After they built Riverside and Navy Addition, there was very little for the children to do. Of course, no trees out in Riverside and no playgrounds as such, so the city hired me to go out one day a week to each place and teach classes. That was the city’s way of providing something for those children.” Callahan, interview. 19. Carlis Burdine rode “all over Riverside” selling newspapers. “I’ve got muscles on my legs today, and I always say that that’s the reason that I got ’em, from riding that bicycle through that water. There was no drainage out there and it rained every day. Those streets in the summer, winter, and fall stayed full, and there would be practically ice in those places out there. If you was delivering papers you didn’t worry about trying to go around it or jumping up on the sidewalk. You just rode through it.” Alpha and Carlis Burdine, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 3, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 20. A part of the problem, according to George Craft, was “[If ] you went to school nine months, you passed.” If a student did not satisfy the academic requirements the schools could not hold that student back, because there was no room. “A whole lot of kids up to the twelfth grade didn’t know [very much].” After the war they would come to the shipyard “to apply for a job, fill out a application—real simple. Hell, they can’t do it.” G. Craft, recorded interview.

478

Notes to pages 114–139

21. Dorothy Hare could “remember so many of my friends saying their folks were not home when they got home from school. I suppose I didn’t even think about them going home to an empty house or being, maybe, the head of the house from the time they got off from work till no telling when. So many of the children that I did go to school with I know went home to no one.” Dorothy Hare, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 29, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 22. As Kate Sparrow expressed it: “Moms had to go to work and leave their children at home, the big ones to take care of the little ones, and that was a problem because the big ones weren’t big enough. The big ones needed somebody to take care of them, and, yet, they had the little ones thrust upon them.” Kate Sparrow, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 16, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library, 23. Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War,” 149. 24. Ibid., 148. 25. Lula Strother Haley, “Haley’s Comments,” Opportunity Valley News, Feb. 14, 1979, 20.

Notes to Chapter Four 1. J. Pruter, recorded interview. 2. I. Bowler, recorded interview. 3. “The pride and joy of Orange, Texas is the wonderful girls’ school band,” Life 9 (October 14, 1940), 48–50. 4. Margaret Toal, “Girls in Orange had Cinderella story during Great Depression,” http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/local/girls_in_Orange_had_cinderella _story_ during_great_depression_04-10-09.html?showFullArticle=y [Accessed Aug. 26, 2010]. “They traveled the country on chartered buses and private trains. They had new luggage. They stayed in fancy hotels and ate fine meals. They wore custom-designed clothes. “If their smiles needed fixing, they got dental care. If their hair needed a permanent wave, they went to the beauty parlor. “All they had to do in return was work hard at marching, playing musical instruments, waving flags or twirling batons” (page 1). Sight and sound riveted the attention of spectators. The girls marched at “180 steps per minute to the sounds of drums, bugles and xylophones. They wore white skirts, measured from the ground up so they would appear even, along with a military-style jacket in orange with black trim. White boots were trimmed at the top with black patent leather” (page 2). 5. E. Kershner, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 7, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 6. Campbell notes that although students left high schools in record numbers during the war years, there were proportionally more teachers who quit than students. D’Ann Campbell, Women at War with America, 105. 7. W. Moore, recorded interview. 8. Ibid. 9. E. Stewart, recorded interview. 10. C. T. MacFarlane, recorded interview. 11. J. Pruter, recorded interview. 12. Estes, Homefront, 76. 13. This was, evidently, a common aspersion for unpopular stations. Arthur Black requested, and was granted on two occasions, the opportunity to return to Orange and be assigned to ships under construction there. “There’s an ol’ saying about sailors going into Norfolk, Virginia, ‘It’s the asshole of the universe.’ They’d come down here and—‘Black, you mean to tell me you’re from Orange and you’re going back? You know about Norfolk. Hell, Orange is worse.’” Arthur Black, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 8, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library.

479

Notes to pages 139–164

14. Frank Hubert could not recall a teachers’ lounge in any of the schools. “That was space that would have been too valuable. If it was, there was a class in there most of the day.” Hubert, recorded interview. 15. Dr. Couvillion’s father, like his son, was a dentist. As was the case with other medical services, dentistry was severely overburdened. Dr. P. V. Seastrunk had been seriously injured in an automobile accident and was forced to retire for a period of time. Vaughn Seastrunk said, “When all this boomed we built him an office back of our house and he practiced when he could. Guys would get off at night and things like that, [and] he’d go out and take care of ’em and help ’em out.” Dr. C. E. Jeter was the only black dentist in Orange. Mrs. Jeter commented that even though he practiced until he was eighty-nine years of age, “I think he had much of a strain during those [war] years.” Vaughn Seastrunk, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 17, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. Velma Jeter, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 16, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 16. Mary Jo Seastrunk recalled that “at that time some of the men had gotten out of the service and quite a few were back in high school working on their diplomas. Many of ’em had to be maybe nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. I suppose because they were more mature, possibly they didn’t have to go by quite as [many] regulations as the other high school students did. Maybe they didn’t go to homeroom and this kind of thing, but they were taking regular high school courses with the others.” Mary Jo Seastrunk, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 17, 1987. Tape recording Orange Public Library. 17. Emilee Stewart was one required to get a minor’s release before going to work. Had it not been for the war, “I may have been a real dull person. Maybe never had the opportunity to work, even.” She went on to observe: “I think the main things that jobs do—and it’s not necessarily what you learn, but to me it’s just your relationship with all of these other people that are out there. You learn just from talking with these, listening to these. It’s always amazed me, but you talk to people who have never worked out before and their imagination is entirely different from yours.” Stewart, recorded interview. 18. Campbell, Women at War with America, 226.

Notes to Chapter Five 1. D’Ann Campbell, Women at War with America, 72. 2. Clara Wilson commented, “Before the war a woman, if she got married, lost her job.” Ora Wood moved to Orange in 1938 as a home demonstration agent, “and in those days when you married, everything was over. You couldn’t hold your job.” Herman added: “That was part of the contract. My first wife was also a county home demonstration agent, and when we married she had to resign. At that time, prior to the war, there wasn’t enough jobs for men, and the public opinion was that women shouldn’t work in order to let the men have the chance to get a job.” Clara Wilson, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 3,1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library; Herman and Ora Wood, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 19, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 3. Cynthia Guidici, Women at War,” in 1941: Texas Goes To War, ed. James Ward Lee, Carolyn N. Barnes, Kent A. Bowman, and Laura Crow (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1991), 150. 4. Campbell, Women at War with America, 185. 5. Ibid., 224 6. Gus Harris remembered: “There was a lot of talk about these women a-working in that shipyard, I’ll tell you that—down there with the men. That was unheard of up until then. A woman stayed at home. But when that started, and when they went to hiring that lady, there’s a many a woman went down there. Now, they tell me some of ’em made extra good hands. Extra good. But they talked about those ladies working with those ol’ men back in

480

Notes to pages 164–197

there. There was a lot of talk about that. There was. Just a terrible whole lot. But that was the first time that we had any ladies doing anything much. Oh, working in the doctor’s office or the dry good stores and stuff like that. They stayed at home. They don’t any more though do they? Whew!  ” Gus Harris, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 6, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. Dorothy Hare was a teenager and saw “a lot of ’em in their hard hats and old clothes. But you know, I don’t know that I thought anything about it. I guess I just thought it was natural. You know how we used to make fun of everything. I can’t ever remember anybody making fun of ’em.” Patsy McKnight did not think “as a whole it was approved of. They were considered second-class citizens for having done that, and, yet, some of ’em were praised for their patriotism.” Almost all of the comments were that these females did a good job, whether it was welding, electrical work, or pipe bending. One assessment was very positive: “Shoot, they was good at what they were doing. They could do things that men didn’t know how to do.” Nevertheless, there was also the occasional feeling that “in general, they were just more or less in the way.” Hare, recorded interview. Patsy McKnight, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, June 30, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 7. Campbell, Women at War with America, 104. 8. Mowrer, Triumph and Turmoil, 45. 9. Families of service personnel were not the only ones vulnerable to the dreaded telegram. One of the recollections Mrs. Haley had jotted down related to “when a woman friend received one of those ‘I-regret-to-inform-you’ telegrams that told that her husband was lost when the tanker he was on was torpedoed by a German submarine in the Gulf.” Conrad Manley wrote: I don’t believe the people of Orange, or the Gulf coast in general, with a few exceptions, knew how close they were to the war zone. German submarines, after the fall of France in 1940, were gradually driven away from the British Isles into the midAtlantic and when the U.S. Navy started convoying England-bound ships halfway across the U-boats sought easier game in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. When I reported for duty to the Operations Office, 8ND in New Orleans in February 1942, the navy had only two combat ships in the entire area: an old World War I “four-piper” destroyer and a converted yacht without sub detection gear. As background, we had traded 40 of our old destroyers to the British in exchange for Caribbean air and naval bases to meet the U-boat threat when France collapsed and we had converted others, like the USS Manley, into fast Marine transports for our campaign westward across the Pacific. Ships, especially tankers, were being sunk just off the mouth of the Mississippi and our means of defense were pitiful. When a sub attacked off Southwest Pass, the nearest available bomber was at Ellington Field, Houston and required several hours to reach the scene of action. The situation in the central Gulf had grown so bad that river pilots refused to go out to bring ships over the bar because many were torpedoed when the vessels slowed for them to board and they left the ships before reaching open water. This threat didn’t end until blimps were brought into service patrolling the sea-lanes and small antisubmarine patrol and convoy escort ships . . . started coming off the ways by the scores. (C. Manley, personal communication, Aug. 10, 1992) 10. This is a combination of two separate interviews with Mrs. Pinson. 11. Ethel Burton, Mrs. Pinson’s mother, commented to the author that her daughter was better able to accept the reality of her loss once she received some of her husband’s personal

481

Notes to pages 198–213

effects. Beatrice Fuller’s comments in chapter 9 are relevant: “Before the funeral they would bring his belongings and they would present ’em to the family. Then they would be relieved to know that they did get something back. This is his. But the one that was the saddest is the one that got nothing back.” 12. Jack Couvillion’s parents rented a room in the garage to some “navy folk. They were real nice fellows, but they had a look of apprehension in their face that I didn’t like.” Jack Couvillion, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 2, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 13. W. Moore, recorded interview. 14. Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War,” 36. 15. Campbell, Women at War with America, 236.

Notes to Chapter 6 1. C. T. MacFarlane, recorded interview. 2. P. Garrett, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 7,1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 3. R. King, recorded interview; Frances Brown stated, “It just seems to me like the people here are a mixture of deep South and Southwest, and I don’t think you bump into that hardheaded bigotry around here. I mean, I don’t think it’s prevalent like you might find some other places. And when I say this, understand the blacks still did not have all their rights that they should have had.” Mrs. Lance Wingate encountered racial conflict on a trip to Philadelphia in 1943. “I couldn’t believe that up there in the north where people were supposed to be treated so equal—at least we were told they were—that there was all this potential trouble. Everything I’d ever read was how poorly we treated the black people and how up north they were equals and so forth. And they weren’t. I was just shocked to find out that that wasn’t so, and to this day I still think in lots of ways there’s a rapport between blacks and whites down here that you don’t find other places.” Frances Brown, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 8,1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. F. Wingate, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 12, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 4. E. Kelly Sr., recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 4, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 5. H. G. Chalkey, “The Orange Crate: A Handbook of Orange, Texas,” (Orange, Tex.: Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S. Navy, Autumn, 1945) 12–14. 6. R. Jenkins, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, August 1986. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. It was reported to the author that the signs designating colored and white restrooms are still visible under the abandoned shipways of the old Consolidated yard. 7. Russell King, recorded interview. 8. William H. Wilson, “Growing Up Black in East Texas: Some Twentieth-Century Experiences,” in Blacks in East Texas History: Selections from the East Texas Historical Journal, ed. by Bruce A Glasrud and Archie P. McDonald (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 150. 9. Ibid. 10. William Riley Davis, The Development and Present Status of Negro Education in East Texas (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1934), 137. 11. Taking in laundry was a source of income for many black families. According to one East Texas account, “Whites delivered their dirty laundry by the bundle . . . on Mondays. The mother and three children washed the clothes in a big black kettle set up under fruit trees in the back yard. Then they starched and ironed, using old-fashioned flatirons heated

482

Notes to pages 217–239

over a small portable charcoal furnace. On Thursdays the customers picked up their laundry, ‘washed and ironed and folded, for $1.50 per week.’” Wilson, “Growing Up Black in East Texas,” 148. 12. The man in the middle slept in the opposite direction from the ones on either side. In other words, his head was between two pair of feet! 13. Davis pointed out any number of issues that contributed to inferior black educational achievement, especially in the more rural East Texas black schools. Some of the issues would be interrelated. Inaccessibility, for example, would contribute to irregular attendance and tardiness. 1. Use of textbooks the state had not been using for several years. (78) 2. Inadequate library facilities. (78) 3. Inadequate equipment. (83) 4. Overcrowded schoolrooms. (83, 86) 5. Appropriation of Negro school funds to other than Negro schools. (83) 6. Not permitting black teachers to purchase, even with their own funds, instructional supplies or equipment. (83) 7. The use of churches and other unsuitable buildings for educational purposes. (83) 8. Inaccessibility of schools. (83, 86) 9. Tardiness. (86) 10. Irregular attendance. (89) 11. Abbreviated school terms. (89) 12. Employment in child labor. (89) 13. Lack of transportation. (89) W. R. Davis, Development and Present Status of Negro Education in East Texas. 14. This is a combination of two separate interviews with Mr. Johnson. 15. People who could not read or write needed assistance with the application forms. See comments of Jack Fuller in chapter 9. 16. Kate Sparrow was teaching when the war broke out. She recalled that incoming black children, evidently, “had not been exposed to as many things as the children in Orange, even though the children in Orange had not been exposed to too many things. These were children that seemed to have been on the farm or in low-lying areas, the red lands or something. Their conversation was different, their language. Instead of ‘Yes, Miss Sparrow’ or ‘Yes, teacher,’ they said ‘Wellum.’ And it was quite some time before we could get them to say ‘Yes, Miss Sparrow’ or ‘Yes, teacher’ or whatever. They said, ‘Wellum.’” K. Sparrow, recorded interview. 17. Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War,” 78. 18. Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War,” 175. 19. Campbell suggests four reasons black women had fewer employment opportunities than white women: (1) the fact that most blacks lived in the rural South, (2) their limited opportunities to get an education, (3) white women’s refusal to work alongside blacks, and (4) strict segregationist beliefs. Campbell, Women at War with America, 76. 20. Guidici, “Women at War,” 161.

Notes to Chapter Seven 1. I. Dupree, recorded interview. 2. Ibid. 3. Q. B. Culpepper, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, June 28, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 4. E. Stewart, recorded interview.

483

Notes to pages 239–273

5. Chalkley, “History of the Office,” 1. 6. Captain Chalkley commented on the obstacle to launching on schedule. “It was found that the shafting for this vessel could not be delivered in time to meet the launching date unless stringent methods were used to get the shafting to Orange. . . . Therefore, the Supervisor, with the contractor, arranged for a specially fitted flat car, having passenger wheels, to be spotted at the forge plant at Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. The shafting was loaded on this car. Arrangements were made to hook the car onto a passenger train and route it as a passenger express shipment via St. Louis to Orange where it arrived four days prior to launching. But the Aulick was launched on time.” Chalkley, “History of the Office,” 3–4. 7. Murray Spector suggested that a lot of people getting into trouble across the river were “probably drinking to try to relax a little.” He said, “It’s pressure. It’s just pressure.” M. Spector, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 19, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 8. Dominic Romano reported that there were a “great many practical jokes pulled. Some of ’em got rather out of hand. Some of ’em were pretty raunchy at times.” Practical joking was common in the shipyards. Julia Bacom was forewarned about jokesters. Clifford Weir spoke of a supervisor so inclined. D. Romano, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 5, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 9. A state mental hospital is located in Rusk, Texas. 10. Mrs. Smith said that a lot of the men would have been out the night before, drinking excessively. They would “come in the next day and forget to put goggles on.” Opal Smith, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 27, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 11. James Heard said he grew up working on machinery. “I used that monkey wrench for a teething ring.” Irene elaborated: “Well, I’ll tell you how little he was. Dad said he used to have to tie his ol’ Model T hood down with baling wire to keep him from getting under there and get all the wires, or whatever it had under there—drain all the oil out. Get under there and take the plug out.” James and Irene Heard, tape recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 14, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 12. More than one Orangeite, and newcomer, was offended by the “wanton” behavior they witnessed around them. Arthur Wilson reported that a group of female bank employees came to him complaining about the promiscuous activities of one of their coworkers. They said they were going to quit unless she was fired.

Notes to Chapter Eight 1. Williams, “Gateway,” 166. 2. Chalkley, “History of the Office,” 8. 3. Ibid., 5. Picket ships were radar-equipped and performed a sentinel function. 4. Ibid., 6. 5. According to Murray Spector, “The ol’ Show Boat was about the roughest place of all of ’em over there. I mean if people wanted to get in trouble they could get in trouble there. They even named some women around here—they called ’em ‘Show Boat.’ They had one woman here they called ‘Show Boat Ruby,’ and she was a terror.” M. Spector, recorded interview. 6. Most of the involvement between male and female workers evidently took place in more obscure places down in the ships. George Craft pointed out: “Look, the hold of a ship is thirty-five feet down—and dark.” Of course, many of the women had little patience with sexual harassment, as indicated in the introduction to this chapter. G. Craft, recorded interview. 7. The dice shooting was stopped because on one occasion the players, on the floor at the end of the car, locked the door to the coach. The conductor, who was coming through

484

Notes to pages 275–306

to collect tickets, had to stop the train, get off and go around to the other end of the coach. 8. Ships sailing to the Gulf of Mexico from Orange would pass through Port Arthur via the Intracostal Canal. 9. Mrs. Haley’s folder included the article she had started. 10. Mary Jo Seastrunk recalled that “Riverside was just full of people then, and we were required to make home visits. We had to visit the home of each girl we taught. I didn’t have a car, and I don’t remember exactly how I would get to Riverside. I know I took taxis sometime at my own expense. I rode a bicycle for a while, too. I had a map of Riverside and [would] walk around out there.” M. J. Seastrunk, recorded interview. 11. Like Riverside, the marsh had to be reclaimed before any final construction could begin. Herman Bowler recalled the site clearing for the shipyard. “It was nothing but a marsh with trees growing on it along the riverbank. They started pumping sand in and leveling it. Electricians started putting poles up for night work, and they started working around the clock preparing the site. The shops and the buildings followed and then the ways where they started laying the keels.” Herman Bowler, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 6, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 12. Carlton Harmon said, “You didn’t worry about your mother and daddy ’cause these people’s mother and daddy weren’t here. One thing I do remember, I realized when people had a lot of free time, a lot of money, and [were] away from their families they did things different than they did if you lived in a close-knit family. They kind of developed a I-don’tgive-a-damn attitude. Here’s a lot of young people making decisions they used to go ask their parents. They quit. They became men in a hurry.” Carlton Harmon, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 3, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 13. According to Clarence Parkhurst: “I do remember my boss telling us that they’re getting a man’s wages, and they’ve got to move these tanks with this oxygen and acetylene, or whatever it is they were using. He said, ‘That’s their job. It’s not yours. Let them handle it.’ ” Mrs. W. W. Kennedy remembered a female welder in their church who “had a flat going home. She was fussing about none of the men stopped to help her, and when one did stop he said, ‘Well lady, you take the men’s jobs, why can’t you do the men’s work and fix your tire?’” Clarence Parkhurst, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 17, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. Mrs. W.W. Kennedy, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 15, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 14. In August–September 1941, the country’s most extensive peacetime war exercises were conducted in Louisiana. The scope of the maneuvers eventually crossed the Sabine River and landed many soldiers in East Texas. Wooster, Texas and Texans, 13. 15. Mr. Morris had hold of the man’s free wrist, and was jerking his arm back and forth as a shield. As he stabbed at Mr. Morris he was also inadvertently cutting his own arm. 16. Walter McCarver said, “They had some rough times in them honky-tonks. Around ten-thirty or eleven o’clock you better watch out, because somebody’d steel you if you didn’t watch ’em. Ou yeah! There was a lot of cutting.” W. McCarver, recorded interview. 17. Gus Harris remembered when “they got to where you couldn’t drive a taxi from Orange over there. They stopped that. You couldn’t ride a taxi from here. You could ride to the river bridge in a taxi, but you couldn’t go across. And there was an ol’ boy [that] got him two or three surreys and horses, and he’d pick ’em up there on this side of the river and haul ’em over there. Now, that happened. I know. I sold him feed and harness and everything. He was just a-steady going and a-coming.” G. Harris, recorded interview. 18. At another level people were also proud of titles. Dick Terry commented “the utility companies gave you titles in place of pay in lots of instances.” Mavis Powell said, “Everybody had a title.” These titles later looked “pretty impressive on a resume.” Dick Terry, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 3, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public

Notes to pages 306–323

485

Library. Mavis Powell, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 27, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 19. John Wheeler observed: “Practically no one had fenders on their cars. They’s completely rusted out. Here come a car with good fenders—‘There’s a newcomer.’” John Wheeler, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas. July 23, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 20. Dominic Romano went through Consolidated one night on a tour. There was an “awful lot of noise. I could see people just walking around. They weren’t doing a thing. And there’s one particular man that I knew real well, a good friend of mine. That barn or warehouse where they were in must have been several hundred yards long—and maybe more than that. But I’d see him, he’d walk to one end, he’d pick up an object, he’d walk to the other end and lay it [down]. I know I was there for maybe several hours and that’s all he did. I didn’t see him do anything else. He told me that he didn’t have anything to do, but as long as he kept moving nobody would say anything to him.” D. Romano, recorded interview. 21. It was not just people in the Orange shipyards who were working hard. Late one night a group of men went over to a popular place in the red-light district of Beaumont. The door was closed, so one of the men asked why they weren’t doing any business. The response they got was, “Well, if you’d been to bed seventy to eighty times a night you’d be tired, too!” Murray Spector was in the wrecking and salvage business and making the rounds of various towns around Orange. “I was shipping scrap iron and I was keeping these plants cleaned out. I left my house at five-thirty every morning, and I [would get home in the evening] anywheres from eight o’clock till one o’clock. I did that for five years. My doctor friend in Beaumont says, ‘Murray, this is going to make you gray-headed.’ I said, ‘What the hell you talking about?’ He said, ‘That driving and fighting that traffic every day, especially between here and Orange.’” Mr. Spector went on to say, “A lot of people that I talked to and that I knew were getting drawn, and they were getting white headed. Absolutely getting white headed.” M. Spector, recorded interview. 22. According to Harley Bass, “I think we were all kind of wrapped up in the war. The boys that I ran around with, we were kind of wanting to go. Not that we wanted to go and kill people or get killed, but it was the patriotic thing to do. We felt like we needed to get in there for the total effort. Lots of people don’t feel like that in current days. Maybe they did a much better job of brainwashing us or making us think a total effort [was] needed, that it was a matter of survival. You had your rationing. Your toothpaste, stuff like that that came in lead tubes, you rolled all that up, and when you got through with it they’d have places to collect all that. Whether that was really needed in the total war effort or not, it made you feel like it. It made us feel like we were making a sacrifice here.” Harley Bass, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 12, 987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 23. Ike Peveto remembered: “A whole group’d be around there. Some of ’em never did shut up with their dirty jokes. Just made a mockery of it. That’s just the way they did it in the time of Jesus during his teaching. There was someone always condemning him. So the world hasn’t changed from what it was when Jesus was here all the way through. People still have their sinful ways.” Ike Peveto, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Oct. 6, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 24. V. Seastrunk, recorded interview. Mr. Seastrunk also observed, “I think our potential for building ships and planes and everything—my goodness gracious, the world didn’t think that we could turn things around and build as many ships and planes and get prepared like we did.” When Albert Adams was in the navy, “If we needed one truck we had five. If we needed one ship we had twelve. The people of this country worked and they produced, which they don’t know how to do now. They don’t know how to work, this bunch we got now.” A. Adams, recorded interview.

486

Notes to pages 323–361

25. It was stated over and again that there were some very capable people in the shipyards. After working in several restaurants, Arvela Morgan became the first female bus driver in Orange. Later she decided to go to Consolidated, where she became a pipefitter, learning on the job, in the machine shop. “The smartest man I have ever known [A. H. (Bob) Montagne] was my teacher,” she said. A. Morgan, personal communication, Oct. 13, 1992. 26. Chalkley, “History of the Office,” 5.

Notes to Chapter Nine 1. One of the memories Kate Roach had about Cash Drug was “somebody swinging on my stool waiting for me to get up so they could eat breakfast.” One downtown cafe solicited business with this patriotic advertisement: Protect them by doing your part Protect yourself by eating good foods Kate Roach, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 19, 1986. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 2. Arthur and Louise Wilson were interviewed separately, but for the purposes of publication their comments are combined. 3. “When Mr. Smith and I divorced in 1954 I got my family name back, von Dohlen.” Von Dohlen, recorded interview. 4. She gave the author a picture postcard of the Grove. On the back was printed the following: “the original grove dinner club, 3 Miles East of Orange, Texas in Louisiana on U.S. Highway No. 90. ‘The South’s Finest Dinner Club.’ Famous From Coast To Coast as a Meeting Place of Discriminating People. Dining and Dancing Nightly to the Music of Big Name Bands. Superb Food and Drinks.” 5. Harley Bass maintained: “You had two distinct phases of people. You had people that went down to First Presbyterian, First Baptist Church every Sunday and [were] just great— came here to really work. And you had the ones that would come out and brag about how two of ’em slept and one of ’em stayed watch and everything while they tried to see how little work they could do in the shipyard. Go across the river, fight, get drunk, and whatever. You really had some of the scum of the earth, but you had some real good people.” At the same time, there were those who were not so easily categorized. George Craft noted, “The churches were always full all the time. Maybe go to a nightclub on Saturday night and go to church the next Sunday morning.” H. Bass, recorded interview. 6. Marlin, Texas, was a community known for its hot springs and mineral baths. 7. Albert Adams said the shuttle train “was a regular [casino].” Carlton Harmon knew one fellow who “would come from Beaumont with his little hard hat and his lunch pail on payday, and on the way back they would shoot dice and gamble. He’d take all of ’em’s money he could get. That was his racket. He was a flimflam man. He worked at the shipyard just enough to keep from being drafted.” Red Moore’s home was close to the tracks, and his recollection was of men “hollering and loudmouth coming through.” Adams, recorded interview; W. Moore, recorded interview. 8. Bubba Voss was playing in a dance band. “A lot of the numbers had war themes to ’em, like, ‘I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen.’ And the ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ was one of ’em—and ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home.’ Well, that was from World War I but we also played it in World War II. Had a lot of that.” Enola added, “Of course, love songs pertaining to the war—‘Making Believe.’” “A lot of the tunes you’re hearing nowadays,” Bubba continued, “they called the big band sound, like ‘In the Mood’ and “Jersey Bounce.’ That was real popular during the war.” R. H. Voss Jr., recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 20, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 9. Barbara McLellan could remember going to the store and being told by her mother

487

Notes to pages 375–410

that if she lost the money that wasn’t so bad, “‘But don’t lose those stamps,’” ’cause that’s what you had to have to get the meat. McLellan, recorded interview. 10. Frank Mepham said, “I used to go over there all the time. We was over there every Friday and Saturday. It was something to go to. We wasn’t used to it, you know. It was more of a novelty to most of us—go over there and watch ’em shoot craps and drink a few beers and have a few drinks. [I] never gambled in my life. Went over there every night on weekends and never put a nickel on the gambling table.” Fred Bailey was another businessman who did not gamble when he went across the river. “You gamble enough with your life,” he said. F. Mepham, recorded interview. Fred Bailey, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 8, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 11. Inez Runnels helped out in her in-laws’ small grocery store. “Those ladies [would] come by the store in their hard hats and their rough-looking clothes, and they would be black and greasy or dirty.” But, as Elva Richardson noted, when they got “all prettied up and in a dress” they looked altogether different. Inez Runnels, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 12, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. E. Richardson, recorded interview. 12. A group of men who went to the red-light district in Beaumont found customers standing in line just as they would for everything else, and this was about two o’clock in the morning. Clarence Parkhurst “went in [a grocery store] one night [recently] and got a basket of groceries and started out. There was two lines, each of ’em about sixty feet long, a bunch of people in it. I took the frozen goods back and put ’em back in the shelves and left the rest of it, and I haven’t gone back in to shop again. So, did it affect me a little bit during the war? [Laughs] If they’re going to take my money they can take it, but they’re not going to make me stand up a long time to give it to ’em.” C. Parkhurst, recorded interview.

Notes to Chapter Ten 1. William Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War,” 63–64. 2. Although Mr. Wheeler moved to Orange in early 1946, his observations seem relevant to the war years. Herman Bowler returned from the service in 1945, and even then every conceivable place was filled with people. “Tarpaper houses [were] built out in the pine trees where they just wrapped paper around the tree to have a place to get in. I guess if it got bad enough they’d crawl in their cars, if it rained hard enough.” Herman Bowler, recorded interview. 3. Henry Stanfield observed that most of the calls were to “places where they could gather.” H. Stanfield, recorded interview. 4. Mr. Stanfield said, “We’ve had a couple of pretty rough customers where it would take maybe two or three policemen to subdue him without hurting him.” Tom Dorrell stated there were some “big huskies” in Orange “that were pretty rough riders themselves. They loved to go over there and get in fights, and they are known for it—they were at the time. They’d go over there and clean up. They loved to fight, I mean with their hands—to fistfight. They’d just go over there to fight.” H. Stanfield, recorded interview; Tom Dorrell, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 3, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 5. There were numerous references to violence during this period, but only one other person made reference to suicide. Tom Cockrell was called to the hospital on three separate occasions to talk with a man who was threatening suicide. Finally, on the third call, he said, “‘Listen, I’m your friend. You’re making a mistake about doing that. But, now, if that’s what you want to do, the quickest way you can do that is too slow.’ They never did send for me no more.” Tom Cockrell, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 8, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library.

488

Notes to pages 422–430

6. Mrs. Tilley remembered she wasn’t too happy when she moved to Orange in 1924. “I had lived over there in Slidell [Louisiana] for so many years, and in New Orleans, and it was an entirely different climate and attitude. Entirely different people. Their customs were different, and I missed my people at home, but I was supposed to live here. This was going to be my home, and so when you’re going to have to live someplace you’re going to have to make it comfortable. That’s the way I felt about it.” M. Tilley, recorded interview. 7. When Arvela Morgan was driving a city bus, every morning around 4:00 she had to walk some four miles to the bus barn. “Back then you could walk anywhere safely,” she said. A. Morgan, personal communication. 8. Mary Lynn Weir at one time had forty-five first graders at Tilley School. “I felt that it was not really that I was teaching them. I was attempting it, but it was like treading water all day. But things got better. That was only for six weeks.” M. L. Weir, recorded interview. 9. As noted in the introduction to chapter 3, there was also significant turnover among teachers. Theta Peveto observed: “The teacher turnover was enormous. They came into Orange with their husbands, and then the husbands would be drafted and they’d go back home and things like that, or the husband would decide he could get a better job somewhere else and he would go. And they’d give about one day’s notice.” Theta Peveto, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 18, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 10. Kate Roach remembered: “A lot of people went to the clubs across the river. The people in Orange were very much against schoolteachers—and that’s the part I know best—we were not allowed to go over there at all to any of these clubs. If we did we lost our job. That was in the beginning.” K. Roach, recorded interview. 11. Dave and Emma Lena Journeay were interviewed separately, but for purposes of publication their comments are combined. 12. Mrs. Homer Stark said their house caught fire, and “that’s when we really knew how big Orange had gotten. It took the fire truck so long to get from the fire station to our house, and you’re not far from anybody here in Orange. You’re pretty close. I guess it took ’em about thirty to forty-five minutes to get to the house because they were caught in shipyard traffic.” Traffic was heavy on Front Street where Frank Smith’s cleaning shop was located. “You could just stand in front of the shop and hear three or four or five bangs every day—some nut driving too fast and driving too close and the guy in front stopping. It was just a constant, mad scramble.” Mrs. H. Stark, recorded interview. Jack Fuller found “it was almost impossible to get anywhere uptown after one-thirty or two o’clock in the evening, because you had your evening shift coming in and your day shift getting off, and it’s twenty-two thousand people coming out of two shipyards right close together. After eight o’clock in the morning you could get around and do things uptown so the traffic wouldn’t be so heavy. But a parking place was hard to find.” Georgia Singletary’s mother “worried all the time because the traffic was so horrible in front of our house. We could never get our car in, and if we got it in we couldn’t get it out. People would park so bad, and finally they had to come down and put posters and haul ’em off to keep ’em from closing the driveway. We lived on Green Avenue and were about four blocks from the shipyard gate. The traffic problem was really astounding. You had to get up and get out early.” Jack Fuller, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 14, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. G. Singletary, recorded interview. 13. The design of Riverside was confusing to those not familiar with the street arrangement. It was “laid out in a fan shape. They couldn’t find their way about in Orange.” 14. Ethel Burton said Reverend Kennedy was “one minister on twenty-four-hour call—if anyone died [and] didn’t have anybody to bury them, somebody maybe that’d just come in or something. I remember one particular one. A little baby died, and he called me and asked me if I wouldn’t go to the funeral with he and his wife because they didn’t have anyone, and

489

Notes to pages 430–444

there was just the man and his wife and Mrs. Kennedy and me and the preacher.” E. Burton, recorded interview. 15. Grady Gallien explained: “I think that the way people worked back in those years— like myself, I think where I went to church a little bit more regularly before then that I got in the habit of not going because of the fact that I worked every Sunday morning. We would have to go out on Sunday morning and do a little work and straighten up and get in our milk, because dairies delivered that milk to you right along on Sundays just like they did every other day.” Grady Gallien, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 27, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 16. One of the sailors who was in the church at this time phones Mrs. Kennedy long distance every Christmas. This is his wife’s Christmas present to him. 17. Mrs. Kennedy remembered one little boy saying, after he had been baptized: “I just think I’ll swim around.” Mrs. W. W. Kennedy, recorded interview. 18. Minnie Pengelly noted that “after the war was over and some of the boys came back, well, they resented the fact that all the time that they were on that little ol’ bitty army pay the other people left here with their deferments had really made the money.” M. Pengelly, recorded interview.

Notes to Conclusion 1. C. Parkhurst, recorded interview. 2. John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 324. 3. Maria E. Montoya, “Introduction to the Bison Books Edition,” Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1862–1865, Vol. 8 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), v. 4. Joseph Conrad. Victory (New York: The Modern Library, 1915), 234. 5. M. Sidman, Tactics of Scientific Research (New York: Basic Books, 1960). 6. C. Morgan, The Fountain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), 50. 7. L. S. Boyd, personal communication. 8. H. Wood, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 19, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 9. F. Smith, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 4, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 10. R. King, recorded interview. 11. P. Roush, recorded interview. 12. B. Pinson, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, Aug. 10, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 13. Campbell, Women at War with America, 112. 14. “The Consolidated News,” Week Ending, July 21, 1945, 3 15. Ethel Burton, recorded interview. 16. J. Evans, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 16, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 17. F. Smith, recorded interview. 18. Louis Dugas Jr., could recall, “[T]here was a lot more litigation in what we call workers’ compensation than there ever had been. People would get hurt and would hire the lawyers locally to bring suit for them and file their claim. I remember that there were people who would get hurt on the job and the kids would come—show and tell doesn’t end in the third grade. It continues, because they would talk about their family or a relative or someone they knew having been hurt on the job and filing a lawsuit.” L. Dugas, recorded interview. 19. According to Lee Roy Boehme: “I remember talking to Mr. [M. L.] MacNamara after

490

Notes to pages 444–448

I went into the insurance agency. He said that [when we] began getting all these foreigners in there, as he called ’em, that’s when liability began an explosion. People had to begin buying liability insurance for their automobile. The ordinary man on the street did not carry [liability insurance] because, let’s just face it, they’re gonna sue somebody who they think is gonna have money. So generally, the merchants and people of means would have liability insurance, but the ordinary man on the street, that didn’t enter into his realm of life ’cause he wasn’t confronted with that. In other words, most people here, if they were involved in an accident, they repaired their own car unless it was so heavily damaged where somebody was clearly at fault. That was just a way of life. But when you get an influx of different peoples, that brought in some new thinking. A lot of people came in from other places where liability was a strict obeyance of the rules and regulations, state laws and whatever. Then they began pressing for suits in automobile accidents, home accidents, whatever the case might be.” L.R. Boehme, recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 20, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 20. Sloan, recorded interview. 21 H. D. Cox Jr., recorded interview with the author. Orange, Texas, July 30, 1987. Tape recording, Orange Public Library. 22. Campbell, Women at War with America, 218. 23. R. Jenkins, recorded interview. 24. Campbell, Women at War with America, 210. 25. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 184. 26. William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln (New York: Da Capo Press, 1942), 37. 27. Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 166. 28. Morgan, The Fountain, 49. 29. Farrell, Studs Lonigan, 12–13.

Index A Adams, Albert L. (Cowboy), Jr., 2–6, 163 adjustment, theories of, 69 air conditioning, makeshift, 475–476n6 aircraft production, shipbuilding industry compared to, xxx air crashes, at Clark Field, xiv, 8–9 alcohol, sneaking into workplace, 269 antiaircraft gunnery, 13–14 Army-Navy E flag, 265–266, 316–317 assembly line work, xxxiii–xxxiv, 284, 289–290 Atakapa Indians, xxvi B Bacom, Julia Wingate practical jokes, warning about, 170, 252, 483n8 telegrams dreaded by, xxxvii war impact on, 443 war work recalled by, 169–174 Bailey, Fred, 487n10 Bailey, Susan I., 49–50 band directors, 428–429 bank employees, 191, 263, 387–388, 483n12 bank tellers, 148–149 barbers, 62–65, 379–381 barns, shacks contrasted to, 396 Bass, Harley B., 139–141, 317, 443, 485n22 bathrooms, outdoor, 397–398 battleships, 24–25 Beaty, Fannye, 181–184 beauty parlors, 33–34, 369–370 bed-sharing, xxxv, 3, 59–60, 104, 160,

216–217, 422 bed-wetting, xxxv, 270n77 Beeson, Lois and Cecil R., 256–260 Bengal Guards, 4, 181, 448, 478n4 beggary, 39, 40 Bergeron, F. D. (Bill), 98–104 Bible, 194, 197 “Big Mamou” (song), 357 bingo games, 40 Black, Arthur end of war, attitudes concerning recalled by, xxxvii, 471n89 Orange, attitude concerning, 139, 478n13 black children language and general knowledge of, 227, 482n16 wartime recollections of, 223–225, 230–232 black employment applying for jobs, 226 occupational barriers, 206, 222 pay, 234 pay disparities, 221 pay raises, 215 prewar, 209, 236 wartime, 213–216, 217, 222, 227–228, 234–235, 237 blacks businesses owned by, 221 clothing, 214–215, 226, 227 as dentists, 152, 479n15 in Depression, 122–123 downtown, 225, 228, 236, 421 economic opportunities for, 219–220

492

they called it the war effort

education for, 207, 221, 229, 230–231, 237, 373 juvenile crime among, 114 migration of, 236 in military, 208, 209, 212, 220, 224–225, 235 mobility, limited prewar of, 33, 473– 474n26 prejudice against, 114, 221–222, 236 social change sought by, 220, 237 status of, 206–207, 210, 228, 229–230, 292–293, 421 violence against, 104 war, attitude concerning, 212 war impact on, 207, 210, 211, 212, 219–220, 223, 227–228, 229, 235–236, 237, 445 in war work, 208 whites, working with, 127 black women clothing, 207, 222, 226 job opportunities for, 206, 213–215, 220, 222–223, 228, 236, 237 blueprints, reading, 250, 375 Bockmon, Audrey, 21–22 Boehme, Lee Roy, 359–361 Booker T. Washington Recreation Hall, 206–207 bottling company workers, 376–379 Bowler, Herndon newcomers recalled by, 144 on Orange climate, 1, 471–472n2 Bowler, Iris high school years recalled by, 117 newcomers recalled by, 143–144 on Orange climate, 1, 471n2 Bowler, Laura and Herman, 313–315 Boyd, Mallie and Loretta, xxxv–xxxvi boys, clothing for, 121–122 Brandt, Ottomar (Otto), 446 Briggs, Douglas arrival in Orange, 236 career advancement barriers experienced by, 206 war years recalled by, 215–220, 441 Broussard, David J., 91–97 Broussard, Ovie, Jr., 35, 474n30 Brown, Edgar, 409

Brown, Frances, 206, 207, 481n3 Brown, Julia and Frances, 25–27 Brown family economic status of, 5, 122, 472n10 newcomer self-comparisons to, 58 Brown, Milton, 355 Brownwood Addition, 426 bums, laziness and family breakups among, 17 “Bundles for Britain,” xxx, 372 Burdine, Alpha, 447 arrival in Orange, 82–88 war impact on, 443 Burdine, Carlis arrival in Orange, 82–88 as paper carrier, 105, 477n19 Burns, A. F., 47–49 Burns, Margie, 1, 47–49, 471n1 Burrows, Mrs. Clifford, 410–412 Burton, Ethel, 194, 197, 442, 480–481n11, 488n14 businesses, war impact on, 346–347, 351, 354, 392–393 Butler, P. H. bingo games recalled by, 40, 474n32 on shipbuilding industry, xxxiv wives collecting men’s paychecks as recalled by, 64, 476n8 Butler, W. J. enlistment by, 41, 42 buying and selling, 155–156, 332–333 C Caffey, Anna J., 141–143 Caffey, William, 142, 143 Cajuns childhood contact with, 83 language and accent of, 95, 238 Callahan, Mary Alice dance classes taught by, 78, 105, 476n9, 477n18 on Depression versus war impact, 87, 477n12 husband’s work schedule, xxxiv local-newcomer interactions recalled by, 46, 475n36 Campbell, D’Ann on morals, 446

Index on war impact on women, 205 on women’s employment, 163 on women’s war work, 164 cars materials of construction, 149–150 possession of, 76–77 purchase of, 23, 24, 27, 151, 473n24 Riverside conditions effect on, 308 service and repairs of, 374 teenagers’ access to, 112, 125–126, 151 Carter, Thomasine H., 35, 474n30 Catholic Youth Organization, xxxiv, 470n71 cattle, mosquito protection for, 43, 475n34 Chalkley, Captain H. G., xxix–xxx, 239, 483n6 Charlton, Thomas L., ix–x, 453–455 Childers, Clyde Riverside construction recalled by, 29, 473n25 wartime work of, 253–254 Childers, Jane, xxviii, xxxv, 159–161, 446, 468n26 children awareness of war, 75–76, 77, 79, 80–82, 89, 92, 94, 113, 115–116 as babysitters, 115 black, 223–225, 227, 230–232, 482n16 with both parents working, 114, 278, 423 child care, 417–418 death of, 78 employment for, 90, 98–99, 101, 110 (see also paper carriers) mothering of, 205 war impact on, 38, 49, 71–72, 81, 87–88, 90–91, 94, 115–116, 270, 422–423 church attendance and religious activities, 19–20, 32, 38, 65 by blacks, 213, 235 childhood memories of, 67, 75, 80, 81, 103, 107 home visitations and public outreach, 406–407, 414, 430–431, 435 minister’s recollections, 413–414 rise in, 306, 349–350, 411–412 by sailors, 131 by shipyard managers, 260 teenage memories of, 149, 151 war casualties, 414–415

493 Churchill, Winston, 79–80 city people, ignorance of, 16–17 Civic Betterment League, 225–226 Civilian Conservation Corps, 209, 229, 355, 358, 446 civil rights activism, 237 Clark Field, air crashes at, xiv, 8–9 class consciousness among teenagers, 121–122 breakdown in, 7–8, 77, 370–371 childhood recollections of, 100–102 comments versus personal experience, 67 climate Orange versus elsewhere, 1, 471–472n2 rain, frequency of, 86–87, 105 Clough, Estelle, 375–376 sister-in-law, housing arrangements of, 21, 473n21 Clough, Forest H., xxxvii, 375–376, 471n89 Clough, Robert M., 79–82 Club Busters, 365–368 Cockrell, Tom, 62–65, 406, 487n5 Colburn, Monroe, 65, 66 Colburn, Mrs. Urty J. (Doris), 37–38 “colored people” (term), 114, 207 community, sense of, war impact on, 32 con artists, 155 Consolidated Steel Corporation assembly line work at, xxxiv awards, 266 black workers, 226 farmers at, 281 machinists at, 22 management, 239, 242, 253, 261 personal recollections of, 147 plant established, xxix plant protection, 315 segregation at, 207, 481n6 women workers at, 170, 173–174, 185 workers, others’ recollections of, 111, 140, 154 workers at, 410 working conditions at, 26, 154–155 workweek at, xxxii construction workers, blacks as, 208 contracts, postwar requirement of, 444 Cooke, Alistair

494 Orange, Texas, impressions of, xxix shipyard and cars noted by, 24, 473n23 Cooper, Sam death of, 193 military service of, 193 Couvillion, Jack sailors recalled by, 198, 481n12 war years recalled by, 151–153 cowboys, northern attitudes toward Texas and, 5, 472n11 Cox, Deena, xxxiv Cox, H. D. (Buddy), Jr., 444 Craft, Alonzo, Jr., 391–392 Craft, George, xxix, 443 Craft, Mary Jo, 55, 391–392, 475n5 crime rate, postwar, 233–234 crime rate, wartime. See also specific crime, e.g.: stealing concerns about, 40 employment, high offsetting, 409 increase in, 4 police work impacted by, 140–141 Culpepper, Naomi and Q. B., 304–306 cultures, exposure to different, 127–128 Curtis, Bettie J., 230–232 D Davis, Bette, xiv Davis, William Riley, 207 D-Day, recollections of, 75 deaths, war-related among blacks, 223 childhood recollections of, 113 community support following, 434 coping with, 194, 197, 203–204 fear of, xxxvii, 88 first from Orange, 198 of friends, 280 funeral establishments, 383–384 grieving over, 47, 51, 82, 354–355 news of, 157, 186, 200 non-military, 185, 186, 480n9 outlook affected by, 442 personal effects sent home following, 197, 480–481n11 recollections of, 21, 41, 137, 173, 245 resignation concerning, 49 soldiers’ personal effects, 197, 481n11

they called it the war effort teacher recollections of, 429 younger generation views concerning, 461–463 defense industries, employment opportunities in, 161, 169 defense-industry towns, xxvi degaussing, 250 dengue fever, 20, 473n19 dentistry, blacks in, 152, 230, 479n15 dentists, working conditions for, 152–153, 395 Deon, Viola C., 419–420 Depression attitudes shaped by, 62, 154, 248 effects, lingering of, 105 farming, impact on, 6 housing rentals during, 39 impact versus war impact, 87, 149, 446, 477n12 local attitudes concerning, 38 small town life in, 1, 4 unemployment and, xxviii, 91, 122, 138 war economy offsetting, 50, 99, 123, 135, 138, 145, 163, 168, 171, 247, 253–254, 300 destroyer escorts, 266 destroyers construction, Orange role in, xxxi, 41, 42, 208, 285, 469n43 description of, 304–305 design, mathematical calculations involved in, 240 launching of, 290 sea trials for, 243 dignity, universal appeal of, xix dinner clubs, 338–347 discipline postwar, relaxing of, 151 in schools, 72, 109, 151 divorce factors contributing to, 50 rise in, 229, 414 docking plan, 311 doctors first aid advice given by, 251 wartime working conditions of, 245 domestic workers, black family life, 222–223 postwar, 228 prewar, 236

495

Index status of, 230 wartime working conditions for, 213–215, 227, 232 white family relations with, 206 Dorrell, Tom on fighting across the river, 487n4 downtown blacks in, 225, 228, 236, 421 safety issues, 172 wartime versus postwar, 49 draft boards, 244 draft dodgers, 434 draftsmen, 253 drinking, 245, 252, 260, 297, 345, 406, 415, 432 drugstores, 368–370 drunkenness, 124, 249, 254, 483n10 drycleaners, blacks as, 215–216, 217 Dugas, Louis, Jr. black community described by, 33, 473–474n26 lawsuits recalled by, 444, 489n18 newcomers recalled by, 156–157 Dupree, Isaac, 238, 300–304 E eating habits, wartime, 240–241, 421 economic conditions, prewar, 88 economic conditions, wartime foreigner attitudes concerning U.S., 29–30 friendships, impact on, 34 gambling, 40 general, 4, 5 inflation, 33–34 personal experiences, 23, 24, 31–33, 286–287 revitalization, 50 educational system educational opportunities, increased, 306 segregation in, 207, 237 war impact on, 7–8, 94, 109, 158–159, 270, 424–425, 435, 441 Eisenhower, President Dwight, 253 electricians war years recalled by, 311–313 women as, 177–178 end of war

attitudes concerning, xxxvii, 32–33, 58, 76 childhood memories of, 91 life after, impressions of, 151 teenager attitudes concerning, 140 women’s attitudes concerning, 204 entertainment. See social life and entertainment (of soldiers); social life and entertainment (Orange and vicinity) ethnic and racial epithets, xix Evans, Barbara and James E., 239–244 evil without boundaries, xxviii F family life of blacks, 222–223 church assistance to families, 431–432 closeness, greater, 35 conflict, 99, 102, 103–104, 123–124 crowding effect on, 418 disruption of, 138, 427 family breakups, 4, 5–6, 17, 18–19, 34, 414 separations, 32 as source of support, 188, 189, 190 stresses on, 320 fans, electric, 58, 475n6 farmers as war workers, 281–284, 290, 291 Farmers’ Mercantile, 332–333 FBI, 267, 426–427 first aid work, 251, 254–255 Force, Mrs. H.P. ( Jewel) arrival of, xxxi, 42–43, 469n46 boarders taken in by, 43–44 interview of, xviii foreign navies, recollections of, 26 French families, recollections of, 73–74 friends, separation from, 78–79, 92, 441–442 frontier justice, 156, 236 Fuller, A. P. ( Jack), 52, 373–375, 439, 488n12 Fuller, Beatrice Burton, 197, 381–384, 481n11 funerals and funeral establishments, xxvii– xxviii, 381–384 Furlong, Opal, 45 G Gallien, Maureen and Grady, 362–364 gambling, wartime

496

they called it the war effort

gambling houses, 344 losses due to, 64, 219, 344–345 opportunities for, 136, 303, 357, 375 by shipyard workers, 249, 274–275 at Show Boat, 268–269 on trains, 273 winnings from, 40 garbage collection system, 408–409 Garlington, Mrs. B. E. (Iris), 1 Garrett, Peggy on family’s black housekeeper, 206 wartime changes recalled by, 145–146 gas, buying and selling of, 389–390 Gasow, Mrs. Paul, 46 GI Bill, 229 Goodyear, Floyd, 309–311 Gordon, Cecile Rogers housing construction recalled by, xxxii “paper train” recalled by, xxxi, 469n40 government assistance, 435 Grant and Donald Manley School, xxxv, 470n73 Griggs, Katherine, 78, 476n8 grocery trips, childhood recollections of, 86–87 Grooms, Lois and Charlie G., 318–320 guards (defense plants), 267–271 Guidici, Cynthia, 237 Gulf of Mexico, ships sunk in, 186, 480n9 gypsies, 17–18 H Hackberry Ramblers, 355 Haley, Lula, 440, 448 Aulick (ship) recalled by, xxxi, 275–276 on wartime apparel, 476n10 Halliburton, Grover, 112–114 hanky-panky (term), 84, 124, 204, 283, 293 Hanscom, Fred, 246–253, 443 hard hats, 247–248, 250, 251 hardships, xxxvi–xxxvii Hare, Dorothy on war’s impact, 443 on women’s wartime work, 164, 480n6 working parents, children of recalled by, 114, 478n21 Hare, Edna, xviii, 421–425 Harmon, Carlton

on conduct away from home, 289, 484n12 war years recalled by, 153–156 Harris, Gus, 164, 479–480n6 Haunschild, Otho on assembly line work, 287–290 on shipyard workers, xxxiii–xxxiv Heard, Irene, 281–284 Heard, James on assembly line work, xxxiv machinery, experience with, 257, 483n11 war work recalled by, 281–284 Hebert, Benita L., 174–176 Hellman, Lillian, 72 help-yourself laundries, 39–40 henhouses, living in, 227 Herndon, William, 447 Herrington, Leatha and Harold, xv–xvi, 29–30 high school memories of, 141–142, 143 moral standards and values in, 147–148 veterans in, 157 high school dropouts personal recollections of, 139 rise in, 117, 143, 478n6 high school students economic opportunities of, 117 employment for, 117–118, 132–133, 161, 254 military enlistments of, 429 reunions, 314–315 high-speed transports (APDs), 266 Higman Towing Company, 58, 444, 475–476n6 Hilliard, Ledia and W. B., 376–379 Hitler, Adolf, 151, 302 hoarding, 172 Hogan, Cleon homecoming of soldiers recalled by, xxxvii on ministry, 412–416 Hogan, Melba, 412–416 homecomings, xxxvii home-cooked food, 43–44 Hopkins, Vera Orange, attitude concerning, 1, 176–177 war impact on, 443 war work recalled by, 177–178, 266

497

Index hospital workers, 419–420 house carpenters, 309–310 houses and housing for blacks, 216–217, 221, 223, 226, 236, 237, 399–400 boom in, xxxi–xxxii construction of, 224 costs, rising of, 120 for defense workers, xxix dividing up of, 23–24 health conditions, 419 maintenance challenges, 407 for naval personnel, xxix painting need for, 1, 471n1 poor, 27, 473n24 postwar, 211 prewar shortage of, xxxi, 469n46 private citizen assistance with, 36, 65–66, 67, 113, 140, 159–160, 223, 226 rentals, Depression-era, 39 substandard, 394, 396 wartime shortage of, xxxi, xxxv–xxxvi, 21, 37, 41–42, 47, 50, 59–60, 68, 73, 94–95, 111, 128–129, 145–146, 226–227, 240, 302–303, 307, 319, 337, 394, 410–411, 425–426 housewives, 37–38, 164 Hubert, Frank Orange, impression of, 2 school crowding recalled by, 139, 479n14 war years recalled by, 428–430 Hubert, S. K., xviii, 379–381 hunger, prewar prevalence of, 39, 40 hygiene, personal, 57 I illiteracy, 257–259 industrial accidents, 137–138, 167, 180, 251–252, 265, 420 industrial health workers, 254–255 infidelity, 262, 279 inflation, 33–34, 259 integration, 154 Italian Americans, 39–41 J Japan, 127–128 Japanese Americans

discrimination against, 92, 94 friendships with, 91–94 internment of, 6–7 status of, 28 wartime recollections of, 6–7 Jenkins, Roy L., 229–230, 443, 445 Jeter, Dr. C. E., 152, 479n15 Jeter, Velma, 221–223 Johnson, Mario J. (Buster), 365–368 Johnson, Solomon, 225–227 “Jole Blon” (song), 355 Journeay, Emma Lena and Dave, 425–428 juvenile crime, 114 K Kelly, Earl, Sr., 208–212 Kennedy, David, xxxiii Kennedy, Mrs. W. W., 293, 430–432, 484n13 Kershner, Eleanor, 117, 158–159 Kierkegaard, Søren, 447 King, Billie, 290–294 King, Russell L. arrival in Orange, 52 war years recalled by, 290–294 Kishi, Taro wartime recollections of, 6–7 Knox, Frank, xxx Ku Klux Klan, 3, 472n9 L land economy, 16–20 Landrum, Valton, 361–362 Landry, Laquata and Ellis, 53–58 language barriers of war workers, xxxii laundry, taking in, 213 LeBlanc, Riley L., Sr., 89–91 Lee, Marion and J. F., 368–370 Leicht, Mary J. ( Jerri), 421–425 lemonade stands, 110 Leo Soileau and His Rhythm Boys, 355 letters from soldiers, xiii–xiv, 190–191 Levingston Shipbuilding Company accidents at, 137 awards, 266, 316–317 on eve of World War II, xxviii–xxix management, 239, 244, 247–248, 256, 257 pay at, 7 personal recollections of, 139–140

498

they called it the war effort

working conditions at, xxxiv, 301–302 liability insurance, 444 Life Histories and Psychobiography (Runyan), xviii–xix lifestyles, war impact on, 445 Light Crust Doughboys, 355 Lincoln, President Abraham, 447 Little Foxes (film), xiv locals, Orange, attitudes concerning, 1, 2 locks, houses without, 37, 146, 234 Louisiana, social life in, 208–209 Lutcher Stark Senior High School, xxxv M MacArthur, General Douglas, 219 MacFarlane, C. T., 119–128, 443 machinery, experience with, 257 machinists at Consolidated Steel Corporation, 22 safety issues, 251–252 women as, 86 makeup, 148, 171 Malloy, Ed, 247, 249 Manley, Brent, 13–15 antiaircraft gunnery teaching by, 13–14 enlistment by, xxxvii Manley, Brent, Jr., 461–463 Manley, Celestine and Rufus, Sr. concern for surviving sons, xxxvii sons’ deaths, attitude concerning, 11–13, 14–15, 16 Manley, Conrad, 8–13 enlistment by, xxxvii Ku Klux Klan recalled by, 3, 472n9 Orange, first impression of, 1, 471n1 Orange proximity to war zone, commentary on, 186, 480n9 Manley, Donald death of, xxxvii, 9, 11, 14–15, 16 nephew comments concerning, 461, 463 last will and testament of, 451 Manley, Grant Army Air Force experiences of, 8–9 biographical sketch, xiii–xv death of, xiii, xxxvii, 8, 13 nephew comments concerning, 461 Manley, Helen Marie, 14–15 Manley, Mrs. Rufus S., Jr. (Dorothy), 15–16

Manley, Rufus, Jr., xxxvii marriages, wartime, 23, 184, 185–186, 261–262 married women education pursued by, 194, 197 war work for, 176–178 work outside home proscribed for, 163, 479n2 Marshall, Texas, 84 Martell, Mary, 65–67 mass migration, xxv–xxvi mayor, wartime, 408–410 McCarver, Walter, 297, 484n16 McCarver, Walter and Lillie Bell, 16, 473n18 McClellan, E. Bruce, 5, 353–355, 448–449, 472n11 McGrory, Dorothy, 30–31 McKnight, Patsy, 164, 419–420, 480n6 McLamore, Jewel D., 369–370 McLellan, Barbara, 361, 486–487n9 Orange newcomer nostalgia recalled by, 42, 474–475n33 Riverside construction recalled by, 29, 473n25 as shipbuilding industry worker, xxix, 468n29 mechanics, blacks as, 234 medical services, working conditions in, 152, 479n15 Mephan, Frank, 1, 477n17 merchant marines as alternative to military service, 120 casualties in, 185 diversity, exposure to, 127 moral standards of personnel in, 141 Merrill, Francis, xxv metal work, 154–155 military draft attitudes concerning (young people), 134, 137, 143, 147, 244 attitudes concerning, generational differences in, 124–125 of blacks, 208, 209 deaths following, 354 deferments, 120, 248, 261, 299 manpower shortage due to, 164 of married men, 179, 193–194, 260, 280 military personnel, acts of violence by, 218–219

Index military service blacks’ attitudes concerning, 235 as escape, 360–361 family member attitudes concerning young people’s, 21–22, 137, 235 impact of, 134–135 married men in, 187, 188–189 personal accounts of, 24 shipyard worker departure for, 243 volunteering, 147 (restrictions on), 184–185, 297–298, 429 young people’s attitudes concerning, 119–120, 235, 317, 485n22 Miller, Donald, xxx minesweepers, xxix–xxx, 265 ministers, 412–416, 430–432 minor’s release, jobs requiring, 161 missing in action, 128, 137 Mississippi River, mouth of, ships sunk near, 186, 480n9 Mobile County, Alabama, population increase in, xxvi mobility, limited prewar, 33 money, impact of, 212, 219, 228–229, 234, 306, 349, 415 Moore, Betty and William (Red), 131–132 Moore, William (Red), 204 moral standards away from home, 141, 289 enforcement of, 3, 294 men and women working together, 204 postwar, 151 religion’s impact on, 143 war impact on, 22, 29, 114, 124, 126–127, 133–134, 160–161, 199–200, 260–261, 262, 282–283, 289, 346, 415, 446–447 at workplace, 263, 483n12 Morgan, Arvela, 323, 422, 486n25, 488n7 Morgan, Charles, 448 Morgan, Delbert, xxxi Morris, Avis and R. D. (Dale), 307–309 Morris, Eddie, 294–298, 484n15 mortality blacks’ attitudes concerning, 211–212 teenage attitudes concerning, 117, 137–138, 159 mosquitoes, housing problem and, 43 music and musicians, 355–359, 486n8

499 N Nacogdoches, Texas, childhood recollections of, 104–105 Nagai, Ken, 28–29 Nantz, Delbert, 244–245 Nantz, Lanier C., 244–246, 443 naval officers children of, 112 as Orange newcomers, 69 naval operations, 24–25 naval personnel. See also sailors arrival of, 135 black, 224–225 housing for, 221, 441 local attitudes concerning, 80, 126 Orange, attitudes concerning, 1 teachers, contact with, 81 Navy Department, women in, 270 Nelson, Mrs. Glen, 35–37 newcomers. See also Orange nativenewcomer relations adjustments required by, 69–70, 144, 410 arrival of, 135–136 blacks as, 210, 213, 220, 227, 230, 233, 236 blacks working for, 213 businesses affected by, 339–340 challenges faced by, 128–129 children as, 71–72, 82–91, 98–109 church attendance by, 38, 67, 80, 107, 260, 349–350, 411–41238, 413–414 from cities, 16–17, 53, 147 departure from Orange, 78–79, 445 economic opportunities for, 31, 33, 53, 83, 95, 106–107, 136, 153–154, 199, 233, 282, 290, 291, 361, 428 employment for, 52, 74, 87, 88, 373 employment opportunities for, 153, 301, 302 high school students as, 117 housing for, 274 impact and legacy of, 21, 26, 31, 124, 182–183, 192, 198, 445 Orange, attitudes concerning, 1–2, 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 139, 176–177, 199, 256–257, 262–263, 294, 433–434 Orange, preconceptions concerning, 55 postwar plans of, 438

500

they called it the war effort

from rural backgrounds, 53–58, 69 as strangers, 21, 23, 31, 48 stresses experienced by, 27 teenagers as, 120, 121, 141–143, 156–157 from working-class backgrounds, 69, 70 Newman, Elmer, 387–388 Newman, Helen, xxxvii, 387–388 “nigger” (term), xix, 114 nightclubs, 160 Noguess, Aileen, 164–168, 443, 447 Nolan, Otis P. (Pat), Sr., 271–275, 443 Norfolk, Virginia, Orange, Texas, compared to, 139, 478n13 north, race relations in, 206, 481n3 nurse’s aides, 372 O occupational deferments, 120, 248, 261 Office of the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, 239, 266 Orange, Texas artistic depictions of, 30–31 establishment and early history of, xxvi–xxvii pre-World War II, xxvii–xxviii “Orange 1944” (poem), xxxvi, 457–460 Orange Leader, 370, 371 Orange native-newcomer relations benefits to long-time residents, 8 children, 112 friendships, 60, 66, 67, 120, 121, 304 groups compared, 70 newcomers, native attitudes toward, 31, 36–37, 155, 170, 312–313, 314, 389, 426 tensions, 20–21, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 69, 80, 107, 121, 131, 139, 145, 171–172, 199, 262–263, 294, 361–362 overcrowding, 409 Overton, Irma, war years recalled by, 213–215, 447 P P-40, xiv–xv, 8, 9, 472n13 pace of life postwar, 48–49 wartime, 160 Padgett, Mrs. G. P. (Lorena)

Orange, recollections of, 59–62, 438 paper carriers, 94, 95, 97, 105, 108, 109, 477n19 “paper train,” xxx–xxxi parent-teacher conferences, 423–424 Parkhurst, Clarence, 320–322, 389, 487n12 on assembly line work, xxxiv on shipyard worker productivity, 265 on women shipyard workers, 293, 484n13 Parkhurst, Hazel, 320–322 patriotism, 129–130, 182, 183, 184, 265, 416, 446 Paul, Geneve on war impact on blacks, 207 war years recalled by, 233–236 Paul, Wickliff S., 233–236 Pearce, Dr. Wynne, 151, 245 Pearl Harbor attack air crash investigations suspended in wake of, 8, 9, 15 childhood recollections of, 112 economic changes following, 153 impact of, 169–170 Japanese American recollections of, 28 local response, official to, xxx military personnel impacted by, 280 navy decimated by, 252 newcomer influx following, 33 personal reactions to, 47, 55, 128, 185 shortages and lines following, 49 teenage recollections of, 151, 152 women’s recollections of, 187–188 Pengelly, Minnie, 1, 475n6 permisiveness, rise in, 31, 115, 445 Perrett, Geoffrey, xxv Perry Brothers, 334 Perry, E. B., 239 person and environment, interaction between, 439 Peveto, Dixie and Ike, 16–20 Peveto, Ike, 320, 485n23 Peveto, Theta, 269–271 Peveto, Vernon guard work recalled by, 267–269 recruiters recalled by, 53 Philadelphia racial conflict in, 206, 481n3

501

Index Philippines, xiii–xiv, xv Phillips, Captain Robert T., xiii, xv Pinson, Betty, 193–197 Pinson, Lex, xxxv, 470n74 Piper Cub, 9 police work, 140–141, 200, 400–402 political rallies, 33 “poor white trash” (term), 52 population growth anonymity in wake of, 158 blacks’ recollections of, 221, 223, 224, 227 challenges posed by, 408 health and social problems due to, 394–395 Orange, Texas versus elsewhere, xxvi prewar, 29 recollections of, 22–23, 94, 277 shipyard manager recollections of, 257 sources and statistics, xxxiv–xxxv town scenery impacted by, 159 population losses, Texas counties with, 21, 473n20 post office, 420, 433 postwar adjustment, xxxvii poverty, 53–55, 100–102 Powell, Joe M., 260–263 Powell, Mavis H., 260–263, 484n18 practical jokes, 170, 252, 483n8 prayer, 64, 75, 148, 164, 197, 235, 246 preaching at workplace, 320, 430 Premeaux, LaVern tent communities recalled by, xxxv, 470n74 war years recalled by, 187–192 president of U.S., respect for office of, 79 price gouging, campaign against, 386 Prince, Vernest O., 347–349 prisoners of war, release of, 58 Pruter, D. A. (Doug), Jr., xxvii Pruter, James ( Jim) enlistment by, 22, 473n22 small-town atmosphere recalled by, xxvii war impact on, 443 psychological quality of life, xxxvi–xxxvii, 446 PT boats, 208 public health, 394–395

public health workers, 402–408 Q Quigley, Anne Brandt, 370–372 Quotas, 292, 381–382, 393 R race relations among children, 231–232 biracial mingling, 154, 220 improvements, working for, 225–226, 237 positive aspects, 206, 235 postwar, 235–236 tensions, 114, 225–226 white and black status compared, 210, 228 in workplace, 292–293 race riots, 104, 114 Rach, Bessie and Frank B., Jr., 316–318 racial prejudice black recollections of, 221–222 childhood recollections of, 114 wartime overview of, 236 Ramey, Ethelaura Hare, xvi, 421–425 rats, 20–21 reading, 78, 476n8 libraries and, 78 war news, keeping up through, 113 Red Cross motor corps courses taught by, 36 nursing courses taught by, 372 women working for, 182 regionalism, overcoming, 130 relaxing, 347–349 religion. See also church attendance and religious activities; prayer moral standards guided by, 143 as source of comfort, 15–16, 64, 148, 194, 197, 203, 246 rescue tugboats, 301–302 Rhodes, Homer W. childhood war years recalled by, 223–225 Richardson, Elva fan shortage recalled by, 58, 475n6 war work recalled by, 277–278, 279–280 Richardson, Myrtle, 277, 278, 280 righteousness, 412–413

502

they called it the war effort

Ritter, Mary Etta and J. D., 420–421 Riverside childhood memories of, 73, 74, 76, 78, 82, 84, 85, 105–106, 111 construction of, 28–29, 83, 192 description of, xxxi–xxxii, 307–308, 418 design of, 426, 488n13 development of, 438 house interiors at, 56–57 housing prior to construction of, 3, 37 neighbors, relations between, 106, 274, 410–411 Orange native impressions of, 182 post-World War II, xviii residents, background of, 78 sanitation, 396–398 as temporary housing, 171 vanishing of, 448 Riverside Addition, xxxi Roach, Kate C., 7–8, 424, 443, 488n10 road conditions, 105, 147, 149–150 road construction, 233 Robinson, Lillian, 163, 184–187 rodeo, 5 Romano, Dominic, 252, 308, 384–386, 483n8, 483n20 Rommel, Erwin, 190 room sharing, xxxv–xxxvi Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 143 Rougeau, Rudy economic conditions, wartime recalled by, 31–33 end of war, attitudes concerning recalled by, xxxvii, 471n89 Roush, Phyllis Duke, 440 childhood recalled by, 71, 72–79 father’s work, xxxiv, 73, 74, 76 Runnels, Inez and Joe, 67–69 Runyan, William M., xviii–xix rural living conditions, prewar description of, 53–55, 84–85 economic aspects, 153–154 rural living conditions, wartime, 150 Russian sailors economic conditions, attiudes concerning U.S., 29–30 room and board payments, collecting from, 44

S sabotage of aircraft, 9, 472n13 safety engineers, 247–248, 250, 256 sailors. See also naval personnel black domestic workers cleaning up after, 214 children, contact with, 90–91, 96, 98 civilian contact with, 172–173, 198–199, 200, 203 girls dating of, attitudes concerning, 294 local attitudes concerning, 126, 131 teachers, contact with, 81, 113–114 war, apprehension concerning, 198 Savignano, Mrs. Len, 39–41 saving money, young people’s attitudes concerning, 134, 140 savings stamps, 433 Scarbrough, Eddie Mae on Orange climate, 86, 445, 476n11 on women’s roles, 444–445 Schofield, Bess, 394, 395, 402–408, 435 schools childhood memories of, 74–75 class consciousness in, 100–101, 107– 108, 121–122 construction of new, xxxv contact between, 7–8 crowding of, xxxv, 71–72, 82, 94, 107, 109, 277, 312 discipline in, 72, 109, 151 leadership of, 264 peer influences increasing in, 161 teenage memories of, 141–142, 143 welfare role of, 435 “scum of the earth” (term), 52 Sea Otter (ship), xxx Seastrunk, Mary Jo students’ home visits by, 278, 484n10 veterans in high school recalled by, 157, 479n16 Seastrunk, P. V., 152, 395, 479n15 segregation, 127, 206–207, 235 self-discipline away from home, 141 Selzer, Beulah, 311–313 Selzer, Raymond, 265, 311–313 separate but equal (concept), 207, 221 separations, wartime

Index black experience of, 235 coping with, 68, 164, 185, 186–187, 188, 189–191, 194, 205, 245, 441–442 morality breakdown following, 261 service stations, 373–375 17th Pursuit Squadron, xiii, xvn sexual harassment, 166–167, 173–174, 179, 204–205, 271, 279, 483n6 sexual mores, changes in, 29 sheet metal workers, women as, 175, 179, 181 shell roads, 105, 477n17 shipbuilding industry accidents, 137–138, 167, 180, 251–252, 265 awards, 265–266 family members in, 110, 111, 123 musical career as alternative to, 358–359 Orange involvement, publicizing of, 208 prewar buildup of, xxviii–xxix, xxx safety problems, 250–252 supporting industries, 160 wartime alternatives to, 182, 183 working conditions, 76, 81, 132–133, 137–138, 139–140, 241, 249–250, 271– 273, 308, 319–320, 321–322 in World War I, xxvii in World War II, xxxi, xxxii–xxxiv, 3, 32, 41, 42, 50 ships. See also ship name; type of ship christening of, 225, 259–260 demand for, 148, 199 launching of, 239, 259–260, 483n6 personalities of, 275–276 sea trials for, 243–244 sinking of, 25, 120, 186, 480n9 shipyard managers hiring of, 261 as Orange newcomers, 69 qualifications of, 264 role, importance of, 239 war impact on, 253, 254, 263 shipyards construction of, 284, 484n11 description of, 31 guarding, 135 nostalgia for, 48 “shipyard trash” (term), 52 shipyard workers

503 arrests of, 267 background of, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxiv, 3–4, 45, 53, 144, 154, 238, 241, 257–259, 277, 289, 303 blacks as, 208, 234–235, 237 economic opportunities for, 242, 243, 246–247, 248, 442–443 farmers as, 281–284 high school dropouts as, 139–140 high school students as, 254 military aspirations of, 24 newcomers as, 223, 233 productivity of, 241–242, 265, 289, 303, 323, 485n24 purchases made by, 27 students as part-time, 117–118, 132–133, 154 supervision of, 314 training for, 137, 239, 242, 248, 257–259, 271, 277, 291 transportation for, 273–274 women as, 45, 58, 86, 109, 129, 130, 144, 165–168, 170–174, 177–178, 179–181, 270–271, 319–320 Shockley, Don and Joyce, xxxv–xxxvi shoe rationing, 384–385 shoes, sale and repair of, 384–386 shoe-shining, 90, 98–99, 101 shortages and rationing businesses affected by, 335, 359–360, 391 Orange, newcomer attitudes influenced by, 47–48 overview of, 394–395 personal recollections of, 37, 68, 89–90, 168, 171 ration stamps, 361 Show Boat, 268–269, 275, 295, 344, 357 Sims, Josephine J., 20–21 Singletary, Georgia diners recalled by, 44, 475n35 shipyard noises recalled by, 49, 475n37 slapping jack, 267 Sloan, “Brownie” small-town atmosphere recalled by, xxvii workplace conditions experienced by, 58, 475–476n6 small town conditions, xxvii–xxviii

504

they called it the war effort

Smith, Alta Belle and Frank R., 349–353 Smith, Krista, xxvi Smith, Mrs. Sam. See von Dohlen, Marian Smith, Opal, 254–255 Smith, Sam, 338 smoking cigarette scarcity and, 37, 89–90 preaching against, 415 young people, attitudes concerning, 148 social change blacks seeking, 220, 237 generational attitudes, differing concerning, 127–128 leadership importance during period of, 263–264 stress and maladjustment related to, 446 total war link to, xxv social life and recreation (of soldiers) correspondence concerning, xiv lack of, 313 recollections of, 134 social life and recreation (Orange and vicinity) for blacks, 208–209, 211, 213, 217–218, 234, 235 businesses with a role in, 345–346 for children, 77–78, 81, 96–97, 102–103, 105, 113, 115, 213, 477n18 church role in, 38, 80, 235 going out at night, concerns about, 45, 172 moral standards and, 262 music, 355–359 newcomer effect on, 26 overview of, xxxvi prewar, 33 recollections of, 5, 18, 23, 76 segregation in, 206–207 for shipyard workers, 308–309 for teachers, 424 for teenagers, 118, 125–126, 149–151, 161 time, lacking for, 68, 77, 271, 313 war impact on, 7–8, 32, 39 for women, 172–173, 174, 176, 178, 185– 186, 190, 198–199 work-related, 252, 259–260 social mores, newcomer impact on, 145

social problems, 394–395 social relations and friendships barriers, breakdown in, 36–37 closeness, decreasing in, 48 economic opportunity effect on, 34 someone to talk to, 34–35, 431 wartime separations, coping with aid of, 189–190 way of life, learning through, 61 social revolution, World War II compared to, xxv Sokolski, Abe, 408 soldiers girls dating of, attitudes concerning, 294 mail received by, xv South (term), 206 Sparrow, Kate black children taught by, 227, 482n16 on children as babysitters, 115, 478n22 wartime atmosphere recalled by, xxxvi Spector, Murray Show Boat, commentary on, 269, 483n5 on work schedule toll on health, 317, 485n21 Stanfield, Henry cattle, mosquito impact recalled by, 43, 475n34 jails as sleeping quarters recalled by, xxxv Orange, attitude concerning, 1 Stanfield, J. D., 315–316, 442 Stark, Mrs. Homer house fire recalled by, 425, 488n12 Japanese American family, friendship with, 92, 477n13 newcomer self-comparisons to, 56 political rallies recalled by, 33, 474n27 Stark family economic status of, 5, 122, 472n10 newcomer self-comparisons to, 58 stealing, 48 Stephenson, Homer E., 408–410 Stewart, Emilee, xxxiv, 161, 479n17 Sticker, Lynda, 110–111 stockings, going without, 84 stoicism, 12–13 store employees, 262–264 storekeepers, 359–362

Index stresses absence of, 111, 159, 176, 318 business owner recollections of, 346 change as source of, 124 childhood recollections of, 87–88, 96, 102, 113 coping with, 252–253, 360–361 end of war, desire for, 32–33 newcomer experience of, 27 public health issues, 406 for shipyard workers, 243 social change, maladjustment and, 446 stress-related disorders, 255 in teachers, 423 term and concept, 61, 143, 149, 419–420 work-related, 152–153, 245–246, 249–250, 254, 279, 291–292, 361, 362, 385–386 sub chasers, xxix–xxx substitute teachers, 158 suicides, 406 Susuki, Kiki, 91–94 Susuki, Mrs. K. A. (Teiko), 92, 477n13 Sweeney, Lorena, 178–181, 443 T tailors, blacks as, 226, 227 Talbert, Elta Mae and Johnnie, 284–287, 442 teachers black women as, 228, 236 departure for military, 428–429 departure for other jobs, 36, 45, 117, 240, 241, 269–270, 305 departure from Orange, 445 pictures, use on job, 258 shortage of, 158 turnover among, 423, 488n9 war impact on, 81–82, 113–114, 420 war recollections of, 35–36, 227, 277, 278, 416–418, 421–425, 482n16 working conditions for, 139, 479n14 teenagers awareness of war, 120 population growth effect on, 158 supervision, reduced for, 158, 161 war, attitudes concerning, 118–119, 129, 148, 151–152, 161 war, effect on, 134–135, 138, 146, 159

505 telegrams attitudes concerning, 169 news carried through, 186 temporary nature of life black attitudes concerning, 211 childhood recollections of, 76 newcomers and, 441 overview of, 440–441 shipyard worker attitudes concerning, 292 war deaths and, 186 tent communities description of, xxxv, 37, 94–95, 111, 426, 470n74 food and supplies in, 87 gypsies in, 17 health conditions in, 419 inhabitant attitudes concerning, 82 living conditions in, 83–84, 101 Orange native impressions of, 182 Terry, Dick, 388–390, 484n18 Thompson, Josiah, 447 Thompson, L. O., 152 Tilley, Bill, death of, 198, 200, 203–204, 449 Tilley, Marion arrival in Orange, xxxi, 410, 469n46 on impact of war, 449 interview of, xviii, 198–204 separation and loss, dealing with, 164 Tillinghast, Rose and Charles, xxxi tires, condition of, 373–374 Titanic (ship), 276 toilets, outdoor, 397–398 tolerance, learning, 27, 78, 126, 127–128, 263 Toronjo, Juanita and Walter, Jr., 147–151 total war, social change resulting from, xxv trailers and trailer courts children in, 170 description of, 89, 302–303, 319 living conditions, 142 maintenance and repairs, 36 Orange native impressions of, 182 overview of, 65–66 possession, advantages of, 59, 60 sanitation, 20–21, 145 visits to, 110 transitional families, 49–50 transportation, wartime, 105, 147, 149–150

506

they called it the war effort

tree houses, xxxv, 41–42 tugboats, 301–302 Turner, Howard, 433–434 Tuttle, William M., Jr., xxv, 205, 236, 394 U unemployment, prewar blacks’ experience of, 209 childhood recollections of adult, 87, 88, 91 estimates, 442 overview of, xxviii shipbuilding industry as solution to, 253–254 teenage recollections of adult, 122, 138 women’s experience of, 163 WPA as alternative to, 153 USOs childhood recollections of, 96–97, 113 public health worker dealings with, 406 as safe recreation outlet, 371 teenage recollections of, 130 volunteers assisting at, 411 women at, 174, 185, 186, 199, 204 USS Aulick, xxxi, xlvi, 4, 239, 275 USS Claxton, 326, 436 USS Duncan, 325 USS Farquhar, 327 USS Murray, 326 USS Porter, 41 USS Ticonderoga, 41 USS Wickes, 347 V values examining, 159 postwar, 145 war impact on, 32, 133–134, 146, 199– 200, 248–249, 282–283, 289, 346, 445 VanMeter, A. F., 298–300, 442 venereal disease, 255 Verdun, Lorena, 227–229 veterans, education, pursuit by, 157 Vincent, Crawford, 355–359 violence blacks’ recollections of, 218–219 childhood recollections of, 98, 102

public health worker recollections of, 406 recollections (general), 4, 295–297 teenage recollections of, 136, 141 von Dohlen, Marian, xvii–xviii, 338–347 Voss, Enola, 33–35, 447 Voss, R. H. (Bubba), Jr., 33–35, 358, 486n8 W Waggoner, C. W. arrival in Orange, 52, 104 childhood wartime recollections of, 104–109 departure from Orange, 445 Wald, George, xix Ward, Copeland Orange, impression of, 2, 52 wartime activity level recalled by, xxxvi war games, 89 warships numbers built in Orange, 243, 323 wartime apparel, 84 wartime profits, attitudes concerning, xxxvii, 471n89 war work, 154–155. See also defense industries; shipbuilding industry war workers background of, 238 room and board for, 43–44 transportation for, xxx–xxxi war zone, Orange proximity to, 186, 480n9 washing machines, 68–69 Watts, Sir Isaac, 447 WAVES, 129, 130 Weaver Shipyards on eve of World War II, xxviii–xxix, xxx management, 239 women at, 129, 130 wooden ships built by, xxxiii workers at, 295, 310 Weir, Clifford, 252, 416–418, 483n8 Weir, Mary Lynn, 416–418 welders injuries and safety issues, 251, 254 managers supervising, 250 qualifications of, 285–286 supervisors, 258–259

507

Index training for, 252, 303–304 women as, 178–179, 181, 255, 293, 484n13 working conditions, 154, 299–300 Wheeler, John E., 308, 395–400, 485n19 White, J. E. (Ed), Jr. 42, 474n33 Williams, Alton, 400–402 Wills, Bob, 355 Wilson, Arthur, 263, 322, 337–338, 387, 483n12 Wilson, Clara church attire, depression-era recalled by, 38, 474n31 on women’s employment, 163, 479n2 Wilson, Louise, 337–338 Wingate, Mrs. Lance (Florence) Philadelphia racial conflict recalled by, 206, 481n3 war’s impact assessed by, 128–130, 437 Wingate, Roy Catholic Youth Organization growth recalled by, xxxiv, 470n71 unemployment estimated by, 442 war work and military service, 135–138 women clothing, 84, 171, 246–247, 256, 306, 425 enlistment by, 130 hardships faced by, 68 roles, attitudes concerning, 61, 148, 164, 204, 424–425, 444–445 skills, new learned by, 36 smoking by, 37 status of, 126–127, 130, 161–162 war, attitude concerning, 183 war impact on, 50, 163–164, 168, 173, 174, 183, 205, 229, 246 women’s employment guards (defense plants), 267–271

men and women working together, 204, 271, 278–279, 283, 316 pay versus men, 164–165, 176, 180 prewar, 161, 163 wartime (as bank tellers), 148–149, 263, 483n12 war work, 29, 45, 58, 61, 86, 87, 97, 109, 121, 127, 129, 130, 133, 144, 163, 164–176, 177–178, 179–181, 204, 255, 270–271, 278–279, 319–320 women workers, attitudes toward, 165–166, 175–176, 204, 293 women’s job termination at end of war, attitudes concerning, 87, 168, 204 upon marriage, 163, 479n2 Wood, Herman, 1, 322, 333–336, 471n1 Wood, Ora, 333–336 workers’ compensation claims, 444, 489n18 work ethic, 138 working class, xxxiii working people, pride of, 306 work schedules, wartime, xxxii, xxxiv, 128– 129, 139–140, 167–168, 183, 184, 234–235, 245, 253, 353–354, 360, 369–370, 386, 387, 427, 446 Works Progress Administration (WPA), xxviii, 153, 174, 182, 434–435, 442 World War I economic opportunities during, 29 shipbuilding industry in, xxvii World War II impact of, xxxviii, 212, 443–447, 448–449 U.S. entry into, 8–9 Z Zweig, Stefan, xxi, 446

The second edition of this justly praised book features more content and more interviews with a broad cross-section of the residents of Orange as they tell the story of the community’s rapid wartime transformation. “Everybody was busy with the war effort, they called it. . . . There wasn’t anything quite like the war. I don’t think there was anybody that was grown that lived through it [and] was not changed. I almost want to cry when I say that, ’cause there’s so much of memories— wonderful memories—and frightening.” —Anne Brandt Quigley, interviewed in They Called It the War Effort

P ra is e for t he First Edi ti on: “[I]n a class by itself . . . I cannot imagine a better primary and secondary source for the study of what people did and thought and felt on the home front during the Big War.” —Francis Edward Abernethy, Southwestern Historical Quarterly “[A]n outstanding work that belongs in every library and on the shelves of those interested in understanding our nation’s history.” —Ralph A. Wooster, Review of Texas Books “[O]ral history at its best.” —James R. Powell, Panhandle-Plains Historical Review “[A]n excellent ‘bottom up’ account of social change in a World War II boomtown.” —Ronald E. Marcello, Journal of American History “[R]anks among the very best documentaries in its portrayal of how American citizens viewed the war and responded to it.” —Allan Kent Powell, Historian, Utah State Historical Society

Texas State Historical Association, www.tshaonline.org