Oral History Transcript - Wilbur Hopson - January 29, 2008
Interview with Wilbur Hopson
Interviewer: Barbara Thibodeaux
Date of Interview: January 29, 2008
Location: San Marcos, TX
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Interviewee: Wilbur Hopson – A retired associate professor of chemistry at Texas State, Mr. Hopson received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and English in 1938 and his master’s in chemistry in 1958. During his undergraduate days, he was a member of Alpha and Omega, better known as the White Stars. Like several other members of the organization, he also worked for the National Youth Administration.
Topics: Southwest Texas State Teachers College: White Stars, Black Stars, College Training Detachment; National Youth Administration; chance meeting with Lyndon Johnson in Washington D.C..
BARBARA THIBODEAUX: This recording is part of the LBJ Centennial Celebration Oral History Project sponsored by Texas State University. Today is January 29, 2008. My name is Barbara Thibodeaux. I am interviewing Wilbur Hopson at San Marcos, Texas.
Mr. Hopson, even though you have agreed to the terms and conditions of the release pertaining to this interview in writing, will you also verbally acknowledge your acceptance with a yes or a no?
WILBUR HOPSON: Yes.
THIBODEAUX: Thank you very much.
As we talked about, most of our conversation will probably be about the White Stars and then with your association with the National Youth Administration, but I want to get some information. First of all, how did you come to Southwest Texas for your undergraduate degree?
HOPSON: My dad had made some money growing onions down south of Laredo, and he moved to San Marcos to put my older sister, Janie, and my older brothers, Leonard and Herschel, in school here. So I started here, I guess, in first grade or kindergarten, somewhere back there and then went to school here on through high school and college. And let’s see—some of this stuff is a little bit hazy because I try to go back all the way. But anyway, in between Papa ran out of money and went back to the farm. His health failed and then we moved back to San Marcos when I was a freshman in high school, and from then I went through high school and then into college here with one break. I spent a year—this was during the Depression, and during one year I spent working at B. Dailey and Sons Grocery Store in San Marcos, Texas to pay the grocery bill for one year.
But then went back to college and was recruited into the White Stars and had a very pleasant worthwhile association with all the good guys that were in there before and after my tenure. Also it was my first association with NYA [National Youth Administration] because I got an NYA job writing sports for the Bobcats, and I think I got $30 a month from the National Youth Administration, which was a pretty good amount of money back in those days.
THIBODEAUX: Were you aware of the Alpha and Omega, or the White Star fraternity when you came on campus when you first started at Southwest?
HOPSON: Well, not when I first started, I guess, but I was soon apprised of it. I must have joined them pretty soon after I got into college in ’34.
THIBODEAUX: What was the criteria to be selected as a White Star? Do you remember?
HOPSON: This sounds like blowing your own horn, but mainly it was well-liked students and good students and possible cannon fodder for the Black Star-White Star associations. Brooks Holt was editor of the Star, and he was a White Star, and he enlisted me as sports editor soon after I got to school, and then later on I ran for editor of the College Star. And one of the members—future members—ran against me, Walter Richter, and he beat me in that election by twenty-six votes, I think it was. I always told old Walter that if he hadn’t beat me in that election, he might not have wanted to go on and enter politics and became a state senator and things like that. But we were very good friends all our lives. I attributed the loss to Mary Kessler first running as a female for the editorship, and she got a hundred and twenty-six votes, and some of those would’ve been my votes, I feel sure. I feel like if she hadn’t entered, I’d have won that election but it no matter anyway.
After I got out of school, I started teaching in South San Antonio High School in ’38 and—as I talk kind of haltingly here, I don’t think I have Alzheimer’s. I asked my physician some time ago if I was developing Alzheimer’s, and he said, “No, you’re too old for that. People get that when they’re around sixty years of age. What you have is senile dementia.” I said, “Oh, well, that’s fine. Thank you for that.” (Both laugh) But anyway, it takes me a little while to go back and try to get some of these dates in here.
THIBODEAUX: You have a lot of information to sort through to go back that far.
HOPSON: But while I was teaching there, NYA was active in San Antonio rebuilding La Villita, which is one of their showplaces still over there and was one of our topnotch NYA projects. The boys asked me—let’s see, I believe Brooks Holt was in charge of—was manager of NYA in Bexar County, and he asked me if I’d like to have a job with them. He was an old White Star, and this is where it first started to—the tenuous effect of associations came into play for me because it carried a salary of $150 a month. And that was more than I was making teaching, so I joined the force there as a counselor—was the term—in personnel, worked there for a while, and then got a promotion to go to Robstown with a salary increase. Worked down there for a while with our Corpus Christi graduates, and from there I was promoted to personnel manager in Cuero at a residence center we had there. And got old Frank Donalson, who was a White Star, to come there to work for me. Stayed there with a good appreciation of the work we were doing trying to encourage young men to—and later girls—to learn various trades, welding and sheet metal work and things like that to get into the war effort, which was beginning to be felt. And it was there that the Pearl Harbor happening occurred while I was in Cuero.
A college training detachment for air force cadets started up on the hill at Southwest Texas Teacher’s College, and the director there asked me if I wouldn’t like to come help with the group teaching that CTD, College Training Detachment. And so I took the job. It was beginning to be apparent that the function that we had in preparing the nation for getting ready or getting into and handling the war effort was kind of diminishing because big type shipbuilders and places that like that, they were beginning to hire people to learn the trades and work for them while they were working. A lot of the people that we handled in NYA were going directly to work for these bigger employers. So anyway, I came up to the college and had a real enjoyable session there teaching these young men who were—it was sort of a holding pool for the air force training fields at Randolph and Kelly Field. Now, wait a minute—Randolph had already started or started a little later. Anyway, it was a good association with a lot of fine young fellows.
Then Cyril Wilkes, who was the director of that operation, and I decided we should get into the war effort a little more directly, so we went to Houston and volunteered in the navy. And we took our physicals, and they said for me to report for indoctrination in a few days, and told poor old Cyril that he had heart trouble and he couldn’t qualify. But he had a long rewarding career as a biology teacher at Southwest Texas. I think maybe the heart finally got him about fifty years later.
But anyway, that ended my association with NYA because—well, I got Frank Donalson into my job at Cuero when I left to come to San Marcos. But that was about the end of my association with NYA.
THIBODEAUX: Was that the end of the program? Did it end with World War II?
HOPSON: I’m not sure how long it went on, but the need for it apparently sort of was fulfilled or ended pretty soon after that, I think. I don’t recall what date it actually ended and it passed on into the Gary Job Corps type of thing that Lyndon started all over the nation to help young people after the war, of which here in San Marcos is one of the outstanding examples of that in the Gary Job Corps Center. But I never worked for them.
It was during or shortly before actually my time with the NYA, Bess and I got married in ’38, started the first of sixty-nine years of wonderful married life. I bring that up—it chokes me up a little because she just died about a month ago.
THIBODEAUX: Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.
HOPSON: But anyway, we were on kind of a honeymoon and one of our stops was in Washington, DC. And I was walking up those broad white steps leading up to the capitol one day and saw LBJ walking down those same steps about the midway. It was quite a distance over there. Well, I thought, well, the poor guy, he has people jumping him all time. I won’t do anything, and he looked over there and saw me and said—he walked over there to me and said, “Wilbur, how in the world are you? How are Herschel and Janie?” (laughs) and I think this is an example of his consummate ability as a politician, that he recognized me like that and when we had very little association personally before that day.
Well, I don’t know now. What are we—
THIBODEAUX: I’m going to ask you a couple of questions about the White Stars. A couple of things I could look up myself, but I just haven’t done it yet. As said in your bio that you were a Harris Blair, and I don’t know what that is.
HOPSON: Well, it’s sort of a male “literary” society, and we put quotes around that “literary” because we mainly just got together to have fun. It’s evolved into the Greek letter type of things that we have now.
THIBODEAUX: And you—I’m going to mispronounce this, so bear with me. And you were also a member of the Der Schiller Verein?
HOPSON: Der Schiller Verein.
THIBODEAUX: Boy, was I off base. Yes.
HOPSON: That was a German society. I took three years of German in college with the thought to possibly using it for work in advanced chemical research so on, and Schiller Verein was a bunch of people who took German and enjoyed it under Miss Lueders and Dean [Alfred] Nolle, and—and one reason I got in that club, I guess, Bess was in it. And we were in there for a couple of years.
THIBODEAUX: So y’all met on campus?
HOPSON: No. I knew her when I was working that year for B. Dailey and Sons. She and her father—and she was just an early teenager or maybe preteen—would take early morning walks, and I’d see them walking around the square while I’d be sweeping the front sidewalk preparatory for the day’s business, so I knew of her at that time. But then she was a year behind me in high school. I graduated from high school the year before she did, and we were just acquaintances in high school. She graduated from college a year before I did, which may tell you something. But anyway, I’d laid out a year and she finished in three years, and we got married when she was nineteen and I was twenty-one. We waited till I graduated from college and had a job. That’s the way we did things back in those days. And when she was nineteen she had already graduated from college and taught a year before we even got married.
THIBODEAUX: That is amazing. She was very motivated.
I have a couple more questions about the White Stars. Is there any special reason why they developed as a secret organization from the onset?
HOPSON: I think for some reason or other it was illegal to have any kind of—we had the Harris Blairs and all those things, but any kind of secret organization, it was frowned upon by all the powers that be. So it was started out as a secret organization and on up into the later years before it became widely known that there had been such a group. It still was to some extent. We had a sort of a frail part of our indoctrination was if anyone ever asked us if we were a White Star, we were immediately kicked out of the organization. And we say no or not, and that would automatically re-institute us when we said that. (laughs)
THIBODEAUX: How many White Stars were selected each year? Was there, like, a set amount?
HOPSON: No, it was just however many that showed up that the guys already in it seemed to think would be good material.
THIBODEAUX: It was interesting that, I think, over the years that it existed, there were only 120 members total.
HOPSON: Um hmm. Yeah, that was—it was from—
THIBODEAUX: (laughs) That’s the funniest meow.
HOPSON: Mother was a cat lover, and she had all kind of cats around here, and she made us promise to take care of them.
Now, what was that question? (laughs)
THIBODEAUX: (laughs) I almost forgot. We were talking about the small membership. There were, like, only 120 White Stars the whole time that it existed over, like, a twenty-year period.
HOPSON: Oh yeah. Well, that’s all we saw fit to take in during those years, and I think all of them are fine guys. I mean, we chose well. I don’t think we had any black sheep as such.
THIBODEAUX: As a member, what was required of you to remain in the White Stars besides just denying that you were a White Star?
HOPSON: Well, you helped out in campus politics, and if you were ever chosen to run for one of the campus jobs that you did the best you could to win it, and that you tried to see all the way through that the blanket tax was spread a little more evenly between the theater and the publications and the band and the glee club as well as athletics. We weren’t against athletics because some of us were athletes. But we just wanted those people that had been under-funded forever would get a little better share of money to help fund our activities. That was the main objective all the way through was to—as we saw it—was to get the college theater and debate and the band and the publications and all those things a little fairer shake of the allocation of the blanket tax money.
THIBODEAUX: The Black Stars never did come back, did they? It was pretty much White Star dominating campus politics after that?
HOPSON: They did, but they kind of over-dominated. I think White Stars’ initial success was mainly because the student body as a whole was kind of tired of the athletes running things. About the time—after a few years, I think the student body as a whole were kind of sick of the White Stars running things. It seemed the pendulum had swung.
THIBODEAUX: Since you returned to campus—in fact, when did you return to Southwest Texas to teach chemistry?
HOPSON: It was in the ‘50s.
THIBODEAUX: Were the White Stars still there on campus?
HOPSON: Not very much. After the war we sort of had some token operations, but there never did seem to be the need or that we didn’t feel there was the need that we’d felt in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.
THIBODEAUX: Did the White Star alumni—did they ever involve themselves with the White Stars students mentoring or socializing in any way? So once you left, you graduated, was there a connection with the White Stars students on campus?
HOPSON: We had our annual meetings where everybody got together somewhere, San Marcos, Austin, New Braunfels, and the members who were still students got to be with the old guys that were already out, and they formed friendships and associations that later showed up in job availability. But as far as actually mentoring them on campus, I don’t believe we did that much.
THIBODEAUX: I’m going to back up and just ask one question I forgot about the National Youth Association. You said that you worked as a sports editor for the Bobcats, but you were paid?
HOPSON: No, I was writing sports publicity for the Bobcats.
THIBODEAUX: And you were paid by the National Youth Association [Administration]?
HOPSON: That’s right.
THIBODEAUX: It seems kind of an unusual job to be paid by a federal organization. Was that special to Southwest Texas, or was there, like, a college program within the National Youth Association—or Administration?
HOPSON: I don’t know. We were allocated a certain amount of dollars for student help, and the administration at the college could say where those dollars went. And one of the places they put $30 a month was writing sports publicity for the Bobcats. And I had bylines on pre-game stories and post-game stories in the Austin American, San Antonio Express, Houston Post, and they were glad to get free writing, so they’d sometimes encourage us people that they weren’t having to pay by giving our stories a byline and on the sports page, and they puffed us up considerably.
THIBODEAUX: Did you have to qualify for those positions with NYA financially? I mean, did you have to prove that you did not have enough money to attend college without extra funds?
HOPSON: No, I don’t ever remember anything like that.
THIBODEAUX: So you could just apply?
HOPSON: Yeah. And it didn’t matter whether you were indigent or well-to-do.
THIBODEAUX: Well, that’s interesting. I’m sure it helped a lot of people finish college.
HOPSON: It wasn’t like a junior WPA and didn’t seem to be ever.
THIBODEAUX: Did President Johnson attend many of the alumni events?
HOPSON: No, he didn’t. He didn’t come to our annual meetings. We’d write him and invite him, and he’d send—we’d get a nice letter back why he couldn’t make it, but I don’t ever recall him being at a meeting after I graduated in ’38.
THIBODEAUX: Well, those are the questions that I have. Any other stories you have to share that I missed or any other information about the White Stars?
HOPSON: Well, it was certainly—it’s detailed here in old Roy Willbern’s book of how much they helped each other in obtaining jobs better than I can recall it. But it was certainly—you wouldn’t believe that when I left school teaching in ’39 or ’40 to go to work for NYA, I was leaving a job that was $105 a month and going to one that was $150 a month. I mean, that was a big jump in those days. It’s hard to believe this, but when I started teaching in South San, I made $88 a month for twelve months. They broke it up into twelve periods. I think it was a thousand and five or something a year. And on that—but things were different then. That’s not as bad as it sounds because Bess and I wound up buying a home. I think we paid $90 down, and then we paid $20 a month, which was some on the principal and the insurance, and we had plenty left over for groceries and visits to the opera and all sorts of things on that $88 a month, which we got a little raise. I taught out there two and a half years, I guess. I think I was up to $105 a month when I left.
THIBODEAUX: Well, Mr. Hopson, thank you very much. This has been a pleasure to talk with you. I appreciate it.