They Called It the War Effort: Oral Histories from World War II Orange, Texas

1. This Is My Town

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 When 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- they called it the war effort 2 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...