Waco History Podcast Rogue Media Network

Numerous expressions exist about how much the devil loves to take advantage of the idle hands and minds of mortals. But while some people find trouble in their free time, or simply waste it, others use it in positive ways.
Frank Curre of Waco ended up with some downtime in June of 1945, when the escort carrier he was serving on was sent to the docks at San Francisco because of engine trouble. While the carrier was being overhauled, Curre took a step that would last forty-nine years:
"And I was standing on the fantail one day, and the skipper come down. We got to talking, and while we was talking, I said, ‘Man, I wish I could go do something I'd like to do.' He said, ‘What is it you'd like to do?' I said, ‘Well, I wouldn't do it earlier, but,' I said, ‘I'd like to go home and get married.' He said, ‘How you know she'll marry you?' I said, ‘Well, about three months ago I mailed her a letter and told her I didn't know when I'd get home, and it's a possibility I may not make it home. But if I get home again, we're getting married.' And I said, ‘I ain't had a negative reply yet, and I've received lots of letters.' So he give me—says, ‘Go up and tell the yeoman give you a ten-day emergency leave home.' Said, ‘You're going to have to fly.' So I flew home, we got married, and I took her back to San Francisco with us."
Madison Cooper Jr. used his spare time to knock everyone's socks off in Waco, as Mary McCall of Dallas explains:
"For years, in secret, he wrote a novel, a two-volume novel called Sironia, and, of course, a lot of people in Waco thought they recognized Waco (laughs) residents. He told me that it was strictly fictional. Well, I doubt that. I think writers probably write what they know about. And it became a best-seller. And, oh, he went to New York; he was interviewed. He really had a wonderful, exciting experience. And all of it was for the purpose of putting more money into his Cooper Foundation."
Baptist missionary John David Hopper, from the Baton Rouge area, served in Eastern Europe for nineteen years and learned multiple languages in order to talk with locals. Hopper recalls that, in his free time, he studied Esperanto, an international language created in the late 1800s to make communication possible between people who had no other language in common:
"I thought that's a great idea, so I became a member of the Esperanto Club. I met the Esperantists in Vienna and in Budapest and down in Bulgaria, and I had [a] good time. They always are friendly because you come in and you speak Esperanto with them, and they'll take you and show you their city. They'll invite you in their home. They have a meal. And I began to make Christian contacts as well.
"And I'm a radio amateur. I had my radio amateur's license in Vienna. So on Sunday afternoons their Esperanto group was on there from all over Europe and from South America, if the conditions were right. And we just talked to each other for an hour, an hour and a half, and knew each other by our first names, all in Esperanto.
"So that was just a fun thing. That wasn't serious. It was just a fun thing. And I still have my books, in literature and some world literature, all of it in Esperanto. I have an Esperanto Bible that I keep. And every once in a while, I'll pull it down and read a Psalm or read, you know, passage from that."
When—or if—free time presents itself, we should all consider doing something that will change the future for the better.

L. L. Zamenhof, creator of the Esperanto language.
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As the war in Europe was winding down in the spring of 1945, exhausted troops probably thought they were immune to being shocked. But knowledge of the atrocities committed in Nazi concentration camps was on the horizon. Nothing could have prepared them for that.
Hank Josephs of Corpus Christi served in Intelligence & Reconnaissance during the war and recalls checking out reports of a concentration camp near the town of Dachau in late April of '45:
"We got there, and the first thing we saw was a sign over the entrance which says, Work Will Make You Free, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei.' We went through the gate, and we shot a few Germans. They were escaping. I looked at the—at the prisoners in their striped garb, so filthy and decimated. One of them moved. And I went over to him, and he said, ‘Bist a Yid?' Are you Jewish? I said, ‘Ich bin a Yid.' I am Jewish. And then I told him, ‘Alles geet. Alles geet.' I speak a little Yiddish. ‘Alles geet. Alles geet.' All is good. All is good. And I opened my C ration and fed him a little soup. And I asked him what his name was. He said, ‘Meine namen ist Herman.' ‘Ich.' My name is Herman, too. He died two hours later in my arms."
Wilson Canafax of Fort Worth was a member of the 1110th Engineer Combat Group and heard about the Buchenwald concentration camp shortly after it was liberated. He decided to go see what it was and describes encountering a former inmate:
"Before I got to the front entrance, there was a young fellow, came up to me speaking perfect English. And he said, ‘I see you have a cross on your lapel. Are you a chaplain?' I said yes. He said, ‘Think you could do us a favor?' I said, ‘Well, I can try.' It turned out that this person talking to me was the young fellow Eliezer Wiesel, who's known better today as Elie Wiesel. And he said, ‘I'd like to take you through some parts of the camp here.' Went through the main entrance, and as you've heard the expression ‘dead men walking,' that's the way the people looked. I went to several of them, some who could speak English, and I'd talk a little bit with them."
Canafax explains he also led Jewish worship services, which was the second request of the young man:
"So many of them had—wanted nothing to do with religion, but those who were genuine in their faith and there was the opportunity to come to a worship service, they came. We got our carryalls, those big trucks, and put the people who could be carried in those things to a place where we could have a worship service. They had to be lifted on. They had to be carried on, crying. They never thought they'd be alive. And we had some little prayer books that were distributed among those that wanted them. And on one side of it was Hebrew, Hebrew prayers. The other side was English. So as they went through the service in Hebrew, then I could follow along in English itself. They cried. They shouted. When they got through, they just raising hands, sort of like our Pentecostals today raise their—they were just raising their hands in joy."
When the Nazi camps were liberated in Europe, Americans were encouraged to visit them, creating thousands of witnesses to this dark chapter of history.
This edition of Living Stories was made possible by a grant from the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission to the Institute for Oral History.

Josephs recalls the first time he entered the infamous gate into Dachau Concentration Camp.
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During cold weather, most people want to huddle inside around heat sources, but some jobs force people to brave the elements.
Waco businessman and historian Roger Conger delivered groceries for J. C. Crippen & Sons as a teenager in the 1920s. He recalls a winter delivery to Waco High English teacher Marie Leslie that can only be described as a learning experience:
"Her house was on the west side of North Eighteenth Street right across from Providence Hospital. And I pulled across the street to the wrong side of the street, it was. In other words, I was heading north, and it's a steep, downward hill there. And I pulled against the curb, and there was ice on the curbs that particular Saturday. Was a cold, cold day. I left my engine running, and I pulled the combination clutch release and brake of a Model T, which is to your left hand. I pulled that up and thought that I had locked the brakes. Left the engine running, went around to the back, got her order off, and went inside Miss Leslie's house and delivered her groceries. And when I came back out of her house, to my consternation, I couldn't see any truck. I hurried out to the curb, and I looked down the hill, and there was a filling station at the foot of the hill down there, and I saw a crowd of people around in this gasoline station. And with my box in my hand I ran down the hill and found that my truck, still loaded with Crippen groceries, had careened down this icy hill into that filling station, crashed into the back of an automobile that was getting some gasoline in it, and had thrown my load of groceries all over that end of Waco. (laughter)"
Fortunately, both the driver of the vehicle and Mr. Crippen were very understanding.
In the late thirties, George McDowell of Houston, a recent West Point graduate, was stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma with the 18th Field Artillery, a horse-drawn regiment. One of his assignments concerned a horse-drawn unit at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, the 12th Field Artillery, which was becoming motorized and had equipment and horses it no longer needed:
"Our battery was designated to drive down from Fort Sill to Fort Sam Houston, pick up 246 horses, 8 guns, and 16 wagons and march them overland back to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, right in the dead of winter. When we got down to Fort Sam Houston, we found out that half of these horses we were going to take back had never been in draft pulling a gun or wagon or anything. So after we left Fort Sam Houston, we—first day, we only made about sixteen miles; the next time, about twenty-four. And we were hitting about thirty to thirty-two miles a day. But we'd try to bivouac by three o'clock in the afternoon. But then it got below freezing at times, and we weren't sleeping worth a damn. And you didn't have sleeping bags in those days. You just wrapped up in blankets and other things like that and did the best you could. The horses were not taking that cold weather. So every morning we'd have a—almost a rodeo getting hitched up. It was dark, and daylight didn't come till about seven o'clock. And so that march taught me, I said, ‘Well, I sure don't want to go to war with horses.' (laughs)"
Shortly after this operation, McDowell was transferred to the army air corps as an ordnance officer and served in North Africa, Italy, and the Pentagon in World War II.

During a wintertime assignment, George McDowell saw firsthand the challenges of using horses in combat.
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Many memories from our youth are intertwined with those of school, the place where we were making friends and developing interests.
Waco native Helen Geltemeyer shares a treasured memory from her schooldays:
"My earliest memories of Bell's Hill is going to school, walking every morning and with our dog, Tex, following my sister and I and maybe my brother. And the dog would stand at the door of this far end, the east end of the school, and we'd say, Tex, go home! And he'd finally go home. Every day that dog went to school with us. And I loved that school because you could see one end to the other. And the floors were just so clean and nice, and we had such a good time. All my teachers were—seemed to be so lovely."
She recalls her older brother Ross and his friends:
"And a lot of them had donkeys around there across the street. My brother was one of them. They loved to take their donkey to school, Hardy Jones and he, to feed—they were under these mesquite trees. They'd go over there and water them. We thought that was so funny for them to get to do it. It was just for the fun and heck of it. (laughter) They finally quit that, but I always would beg my brother to let me sit on his donkey. And he'd let me sit, and all his boyfriends would be standing around."
Manuel Hernandez, whose family moved from Mexico when he was three years old, describes his school years at Mt. Carmel and Elm Mott and his struggle to learn English:
"The teacher's didn't want to travel to that school. One of them decide to stay the whole week, and they rent the room. It was a nice community. But I couldn't learn English because half of the kids were Mexican people, and the others were white. We get along okay, but we separate on, kind of, the language. That was my problem, that I couldn't learn the English language until I moved to Elm Mott, where it was only three Spanish people in the school. So we had to learn it. And I was already about eleven years old, and being in the first grade, it make you feel bad. Of course, we had some Czech people that had same problems I had because they were speaking at home Czech and English at school. So it was kind of combination of language."
Hernandez left the Elm Mott school during the early days of the Great Depression to find work and help his family financially. Geltemeyer eventually graduated from Waco High in the mid-thirties. Through the years, they carried with them the memories of those formative days in school.

A Southern 1920s classroom.
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Pawnbroking—or lending money on portable security—is one of the world's oldest professions. It can be traced back to Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire in the West and to China three thousand years ago in the East.
Hank Josephs of Corpus Christi remembers he got the idea to change his family's dry goods store into a pawn shop during WWII:
"Our sergeant would lend the guys five bucks on their watches, their service watches, and when they got paid two weeks later, they'd pay him back ten dollars. I said, ‘That's a hell of a deal. I want in on that deal.'"
Josephs recalls one of the more bizarre stories that came out of the shop:
"The one in which a guy walked in and said, ‘I want to borrow five bucks on my eye.' Had a prosthetic eye. Pulled it out of his head. He had gotten it in the service. He says, ‘I want five dollars; I need a—need a bottle of wine.' I loaned him five dollars on the wine. Some people came in later—he never did come back. People came in later and said, What's the strangest thing you ever took in? I pull out the box with the eye in it. I said, ‘Here,' and showed them the prosthetic eye, which was a beautiful brown eye with veins running through it. So we had some farmers come in and they had seen the eye, and they were looking for a wedding set. I told them, I say, if they bought the wedding set, I'd give them the eye. So sure enough they bought a wedding set, I gave them the eye, and that was the last of that."
Robert Cogswell of Austin explains a problem he had in the 1970s:
"I had this sophisticated instrument, but I was not a sophisticated guitar player. And I worried about my guitar. It was such a nice instrument that I didn't want it to get stolen. So I carried it with me a lot of the time, even when I was riding bicycles, and I was worried about it getting smashed or broken or damaged. It was an unhealthy relationship for a person who was already married. It was like I had this guitar on the side."
Cogswell describes finding a $15 answer to his dilemma hanging in a pawn shop:
"This Gretsch was made of something like three-eighths-inch plywood. It didn't pick up sound very well. In other words, it's a very quiet guitar, which is perfect for a person who can't play well."
He relates how he was a bit apprehensive at first to purchase it:
"I said, ‘This guitar is not the way it was when it was built. It's much better. The person who owned it really loved it because it's worn at this point, and it's worn at that point, and he has adjusted the nut and he's adjusted the strings so that they fit this guitar right. So that person loves this guitar, and I don't want to buy it out from under that person, if he's coming back to get it.' And he said, ‘No, you can buy this one. The guy who left that guitar has pawned it here five times. And he brought it in this time and said, "Okay, you can sell it this time because I'm taking this money straight to the bus station, and I'm going back home to Kentucky."'"
The recent economic slump has boosted business for pawn shops and has led to the appearance of online pawnbrokers. The industry has also been aided by popular TV shows like Pawn Stars.

Robert Cogswell found a guitar perfectly suited for his needs at a pawn shop.
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Some of the clearest memories from our youth usually include times we got in trouble.
Victor Newman of Waco grew up amidst cowboys in West Texas. In 1923, at the age of ten, he came to live at the recently opened Waco State Home. Newman explains how the home reacted to his cowboy ways:
"Well, every time I turned around, well, somebody would grab me up and give me a spanking because of something that I said. And so finally, well, one man there, he spanked me one day. He said, ‘Do you know why I spanked you?' I says, ‘Yeah, because you're bigger than I am.' He said no. He—but they realized the language I was using was what I had heard all my life out there on the ranch. I didn't know I was saying anything wrong."
Benny Martinez of Goliad recalls getting caught in his brief life of crime in the 1940s:
"I remember once, my brother and I were stealing watermelons—and that's something we country boys did. We used to go in the river here by the rail—where the train crossed, and we were naked as a jaybird. We'd go across the river, up the hill, and we'd go down and crawl in the grass, and go in and grab a couple of watermelons. And this man had hundreds of them. And we'd crawl back and get in the river and let them cool off, and then we'd break them open, you know, and we'd eat them. And the old man told my daddy, ‘Your boys are coming over and stealing my watermelons. They think I don't see them, but I see them.' ‘I'll take care of them.'
"'I don't want you boys going over there and stealing any—' ‘No, sir.' That put an end to that. My father put that strap on me once. One time he whipped me, and that was it. He made a believer out of me. I didn't want no more of that."
Waco native Helen Geltemeyer describes a scrape she, her youngest brother, and two of his friends got themselves into in the 1930s:
"One day my brother, oldest brother, had a brand new car—Ford. And I don't know why he left it at home, but Mama had gone to town shopping. And there that car sat, so my brother decided he wanted to go out to the lake, go swimming. That's before the big lake was built."
Interviewer: "Right, right."
"I said, ‘If you go, I'll tell on you. You'll have to let me go.' He called Bubby, and he called Allah B. And we picked them up on Twentieth and then right here on Seventeenth. He got his daddy's watch. Away we went out Twenty-fifth. And at Twenty-fifth and Maple, he was turning there, and he—wasn't very smart—we turned over. (laughter) Here I was barefooted with shorts, and I was screaming. I had Bubby's watch. And they said, Helen! Helen! You're stomping me! They let me out first. Bubby said, ‘Where's my daddy's watch?' I had it just aholding on to it. Anyway, we wrecked my brother's car. We finally got somebody to get us home, and my brother left town, and I had to face the consequences. He joined the circus. It had just been here. But he came home. He saw how easy it was. And these boys were good boys. We were just going to go swimming for a little while and come back. That's why we took the watch."
Stories of getting in trouble when we were little can make good icebreakers, for we all have them in common.

Benny Martinez remembers when his father found out he and his brother had been taking watermelons from a nearby patch.
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