Live oak trees surround the Orange Natatorium with gracefully twisting limbs. The city of Orange plans to turn the old indoor swimming pool into a recreation center with gymnasium. It won’t be the first recreation center on the site. If the ghosts of the past haunt the live oak trees, they will smell of gardenias and sound of Glenn Miller tunes.
The site was where the USO (United Service Organization) was built to give a bit of home to the thousands of sailors, soldiers and Marines passing through Orange during World War II.
Orange, with the help of local U.S. Representative Martin Dies, who lived at Seventh and Pine, helped the town get a large U.S. Navy shipyard as Europe began sinking into war. The Consolidated Steel yard, along with local shipyards Levingston and Weaver, drew big contracts to build destroyers, destroyer escorts, sea-faring tugboats, and other vessels to help the U.S. prepare, and later fight, for war.
Sailors had to come to Orange to pick up the vessels and sail them out. They were young men away from home and needed recreation, plus a place to feel comfortable. Even before the U.S. entered the war after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, construction on the USO hall had begun.
The dedication for the USO was held on January 28, 1942, some seven weeks after the attack. George Craft was the chairman of the dedication committee and his wife, Etta Mae Craft, would work many hours as a senior hostess.
The USO wasn’t only for the military. The local newspaper quoted E.W. Brown, Jr., president of Levingston Shipbuilding, praising “the work of the organization is raising the morale of war workers here.”
At the dedication, the Bengal Lancers boys band from the high school played and then the Bengal Debs, a dance band offshoot of the famed Bengal Guards girls drum and bugle corps at the high school, played for dancing. Both were sponsored by H.J. Lutcher Stark.
Local “girls,” fathers, mothers, and sisters found a place to socialize and help the lonesome sailors and military guys find a place to relax.
The late Julia Wingate Bacom was one of the girls who was a “junior hostess.” She once said the girls dressed up for dances and pinned gardenias, also known as Cape Jasmine, on their dresses. The flowers were plentiful in yards in the spring.
The “senior hostesses” were the older matrons. They included Mrs. C.M. Tilley and Mrs. Sam Manley, mothers whose sons were the first local “boys” killed in the way.
“We did it willingly because I loved to think that somewhere, somebody was being that kind to my husband,” Lillian Robison told Dr. Louis Fairchild in his book “They Called It the War Effort” on oral histories of Orange during the war.
Robison was a senior at Orange High School when the Pearl Harbor attacked occurred. Her boyfriend planned to immediately join the military. She talked him into waiting until he graduated from high school. They married in May 1942, two days after graduating. Within three months, he was gone.
She moved in with her parents, who lived two doors away from the USO. She served doughnuts, coffee, and sandwiches. But at first, she couldn’t dance, even though she loved to.
“Married women were not allowed to dance with soldiers or sailors unless they had their husband’s written permission,” she told Fairchild. Her husband came home on leave and signed her permission.
“That took care of a lot of lonely hours,” she said.
The rules were strict on the junior hostesses and the senior hostesses kept watch. “We were more formal, and everything at that time was still conducted very proper and we went by the rules,” Robison said.
Girls were not allowed to leave the USO with sailors or soldiers, but Robison admitted some did meet the young military men later.
A few of the local girls got married. And in at least one instance, one lost her husband as a casualty of war even before the marriage really began.
The USO was expansive and had several spacious rooms, including one large enough to be a gymnasium or ballroom. The club had a Reading Room for the men to peruse periodicals and newspapers, or write home to mom and dad, or they girl they left behind. Stationery and postcards were provided.
The USO stayed for a few years after the war, but later was turned into the National Guard Armory. Cypress Avenue, which now is a deadend to the driveway at the natatorium, cut all the way through to 16th Street until the early 1960s, when the old Orange Independent School District built a track.
The school district also ended up with the USO building and used it for different purposes, including as a seventh grade gym for girls and boys at Carr Junior High. The building had separate classrooms and showers for the students, along with the gym and access to the track.
By the late 1970s, the old USO club was demolished to make room for the natatorium.
Now, history is set to be made once again, as the pool is filled in and the skeleton of the building is turned into a recreation site.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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