My parents were originally from the Call Junction, Bleakwood area, both near Kirbyville. My paternal grandfather died young, leaving a widow with 10 kids to raise. My dad was from about the middle of the age range and had to leave school in the 10th grade to help support the family. All the boys had to go to work early in life or the family would starve. My grandmother instilled a fierce pride in all her brood; that was about all they possessed, but they counted themselves fortunate in life. My dad drove log trucks and worked highway maintenance gangs up until the big depression hit. Jobs became very hard to get and keep and only part time work could be obtained. By that time, he was married to my mother and needed to find a full time job. They packed up and went to the gulf coast region where the oil refineries were beginning to boom.

Arriving in Port Arthur, they lived in a small out building that belonged to one of my dad’s brothers, who had preceded them to Port Arthur in a similar search for work. They had literally no possessions except the clothes on their backs. At nights they slept rolled up in a carpet on the floor. By day, my dad joined the gang of men waiting at the gates of the refineries for the foremen to select men to work for that day. By doing good work and being reliable, he began to be selected more and more and one day got a permanent job with the Gulf Oil Company. With this improved situation, they purchased a used house on 13th street in Port Arthur where my sister, brother and I were born.

Medicine was not very advanced back in the 1930’s, and my sister died at the age of 2 years with whooping cough. This was a severe blow to my parents, but they soldiered on and soon had another child, my brother. A few years later, I arrived. I contracted whooping cough also, and nearly died. I can’t remember if my brother was ever afflicted with the disease. I survived and grew up in old Port Arthur during some interesting times.

World War II was raging during my early years. My father was a stillman (head operator) by this time on a thermal cracking unit at the refinery, and over 40 years old, so he was exempted from military service with a critical occupation. My early memories of life in Port Arthur centers around the war time rationing of goods, the summer heat, our exclusive secret club, the “American Eagle Club”, and our homemade toys.

During the war years, rationing was accomplished by means of issuing rationing coupons. The ones I remember were small dime sized coupons made of some material that looked like cardboard laminated with some colored material. I think the color represented what product the coupon could be used to purchase, but I am not really sure. Maybe it represented some monetary value instead. This was not important to a very small boy who was sent to the nearby corner grocery store to buy our groceries. I concentrated hard on arriving at the store with the coupons, money, and the note my mother sent with me. The storeowner took care of the rest, loaded me up with the groceries and sent me on my way Back Home.

During this time, no air conditioning existed, even in public buildings. The summers could be extremely hot; my dad solved this problem by building us an attic fan with huge blades. This fan could move a lot of air and saved us many miserable nights. There was a problem, however. During the war, the first catalytic cracking units were installed at the Gulf and Texaco refineries to boost production of gasoline for the war effort. These early units had no provisions to control the exhaust of spent catalyst into the atmosphere. A cloud of black catalyst was continually blowing across Port Arthur. Our attic fan sucked the particles up into our window screens and soon plugged them up. We would frequently clean the screens but it was a losing battle. At night it would be so hot that many nights were spent sleeping on the hard wood floors just to keep cool. If you stayed in bed, the whole bed would turn into a pool of sweat.

In the early 1950’s, street construction was fairly unsophisticated. Raw asphalt was laid down and rock spread on top. The use of oxidized or air blown asphalt must have been unknown. Oxidation raises the melting point of the raw asphalt above that of the summer heat. Back then, the streets melted every summer. For a small barefoot boy, this severely limited his mobility. Crossing the street to reach a friend’s house was an ordeal of pain. The hot melted asphalt would stick to your feet and the loose rocks would too. Every crossing required a period of cleaning off your feet before continuing on. No thought was given to wearing shoes. That was sissy.

Mosquitoes were quite bad too. I remember that the city fought back at the mosquitoes by spraying them with insecticide every night. This choking cloud of gas would be sucked right into the house by the attic fan. During the war, my brother organized a secret club of the neighborhood boys. Its main purpose was to remain secret and exclusive (of girls, of course.) We used an old washhouse located in our back yard where my parents kept their old wringer type washing machine as our clubhouse. Actually, it was no secret to my parents who had to put up with a gang of small boys huddled in their washhouse pretending they were unseen by any others. We used a rudimentary set of parliamentary rules, took meaningless minutes, and generally acted important. We used to collect old military insignia, aircraft identification charts and anything else related to the war. Not much else was accomplished, but we felt important and exclusive.

Much of our time was spent making toys for ourselves. Slingshots were a preferred toy. We would saw out a yoke handle, cut rubber bands from old car inner tubes, and scrounge leather for the pouch from somewhere. We would spend a lot of time trying to shoot the songbirds, with little causality among the birds. Those that fell were not wasted though. We cleaned, cooked and ate them. Another preferred toy was the spinning top. My brother was given a wood lathe for one Christmas and a top industry was born. We would shape the top body on the lathe, drill a small hole in the tip and drive a nail into this hole. We would then sharpen the tip of the nail. Fighting with the tops was the purpose of all this industry. The idea was to set one top spinning then try to nail it with a second top, hopefully splitting the first top in two. Later yoyos were a fad. We made these on the lathe also. We made handles for bullwhips and toy guns too.

My local school was DeQueen Elementary School. This school was located at one end of De Queen Blvd. I used to walk to school alone, a distance of maybe a mile. There was no thought back then of sexual predators or gangs. My brother and I used to walk considerable distances about town completely unconcerned about safety. My problem was I could not stand to wear shoes. Every day, my mother would set me off with a good pair of shoes, and I would return in the evening without them. I had the same problem with glasses when a flu virus weakened my eyes. The school was a good one and I was in an advanced class with a lot of wealthy kids. At that age and at that time there were no snobbery or class distinctions. Many of my classmates were Jewish; I didn’t know what that meant and still don’t know what all the fuss is about. They were good people and very nice to me. That’s all that counted. None of the other kids ever teased me about my bare feet. Probably they were jealous.

Much of each summer and every weekend that my dad could get off we spent at our camp on Trout Creek. That was Heaven on Earth for small boys. But that’s another story.

Much later when I was a teen, my older brother, who had gotten quite wild, took me with him to some of the local cathouses that populated the slum areas of Port Arthur. This town was, along with Beaumont and Galveston, wide open for vices. All the local police were on the take and the town was wide open. This continued up until 1962 when a commission appointed by the state investigated the situation and closed most of it down. Many police officers and employees were exposed as corrupt, some of which were members of my mom’s church. She was shocked when several of her friends and Sunday school teachers were implicated. Later, her best friend was exposed as a former prostitute when she was arrested in a bar on Houston Av. drunk and disorderly and carrying a concealed firearm. My mother had never suspected any thing of the sort and was stunned by the revelation. Only impression it made on me was the fact that you can’t trust the outward appearances of anyone else no matter how much they thump the Bible.

My experiences in the cathouses were not too exciting. Having no money is a detriment to having a good time in such places. This did open my eyes to a lot of human nature that until that time, I was oblivious of and I did get to see more female bare skin than I had ever seen before. The experience did nothing to alleviate my basic shyness around girls and just made things hard on me.

By this age, puberty had engulfed me, and a new phase in my life began. My brother joined the army, taking the advice of a recruiting sergeant rather than that of our father’s. He was assured that he would rise to the rank of colonel by the end of his 3-year enlistment and I guess he wanted to believe it. Off he went, to basic, to a school, then to Japan where he stayed drunk for the remainder of the 3 years. I stayed home and went to school and graduated from college way before my brother who had to start all over again after leaving the army as a corporal.