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Foreword to the First Edition World 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 they called it the war effort x 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...

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