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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 To 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. they called it the war effort 438 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...

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