The Home Front, 1942–1945

WORLD War ii was good for us. In the months leading up to it, mother was working in a sawmill commissary in Kilgore for eleven dollars a week. But following the attack on Pearl Harbor, word quickly reached East Texas that the shipyards down in Houston were hiring and paying good money, and that there were plenty of jobs for all.

Mother and her younger brother, John Allen, decided to roll the dice. Within weeks our two families—mother and I, John Allen, his wife Doris, and their two kids, Roger and Gay—were installed in a small frame house on Common Street in a rundown section of Houston. The little house had two bedrooms: a small one for mother and me, and a larger one for Johnny and his brood. There was also a living room, bathroom, and kitchen. The kitchen came equipped with a stove and an icebox. Not a refrigerator, an icebox—for which an iceman had to deliver a big gray block of ice one or more times a week. I remember this icebox particularly well because Roger and I turned it over one night while wrestling on the kitchen floor. I remember the milk spilling out of it onto him and me, the general mess the icebox’s contents made on the linoleum-covered floor, and, most of all, the spanking we each got soon after the icebox had been placed upright again and the floor mopped up. I was six when this happened; Roger was five.

There were two big shipyards in Houston at the time. One was called simply Houston Shipyard and the other was called Brown Shipyard. Johnny went to work as a welder’s helper at Houston Shipyard and mother went to work as an “expediter” at Brown. They were each paid about forty dollars a week as I remember it, a huge improvement over the prevailing wage back up in Kilgore. Brown Shipyard was a war-time spinoff of Brown & Root Construction, whose owners would become in later years big financial backers of Lyndon Johnson. I’m still not sure what an expediter was, but I think it had something to do with making sure all the various parts required in building a ship got to the right place at the right time and in a suitable number—something like that.

They were making small, fast boats called destroyer escorts, or de’s, at Brown, and turning them out by the dozen. Somebody had to keep track of what was going on. And mother, with her high-school education, became one of the ones who did. A photographer for the Houston Chronicle newspaper came out to the shipyard one afternoon and took a picture of her seated up on a stack of de materials. She was holding a clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other and appeared to be checking off items destined to become part of yet another de. She looked perky and cute as could be—sort of a cross between Rosie the Riveter and a Hollywood glamour-gal—perched up there in her coveralls, her hardhat pushed back on her head. We kept a copy of that picture around the house for years afterward, but finally misplaced it in one of our many moves. I wish I still had it.

Most of my memories of Houston are sketchy and rather dim. It was many years ago and I was only six. I remember that there were several large boardinghouses across the street from us, and that they were two-story, frame, and in need of paint. I remember waiting out a hurricane in the front room of the little house on Common Street, watching roofing shingles being ripped off the boardinghouses across the way and being frightened by both the high wind and heavy rain, and by the fireballs off the electricity transformers that went rolling gaily down the street. I remember getting hit in the head by a rock on a playground, but I don’t remember who threw it, or why. I remember Roger, who had a quick temper, chasing me...