Owens Saw the
Goose Creek Light
in WWII

One of my favorite Goose Creek stories came out of New Guinea in World War II.

Before the war, William A. "Bill" Owens, the novelist and folklorist, taught at Robert E. Lee High School in Goose Creek, then part of the future consolidated city of Baytown. He mentioned "seeing the light of Goose Creek" in a note he wrote to Nettie Hurr, a member of the REL class of 1937. She had sent him an invitation to their 50-year reunion in 1987.

Owens wrote, "About Oct. 10, 1944, I landed at dusk in a Martin mariner on Lake Sentani in New Guinea. I shook. We got out of the plane and water and got in a jeep on a jungle road. In the darkness we came upon an emergency power station just lighting up.

"Suddenly the world was all right for me. A sign stood out in the glow: Goose, Creek, Texas, Power and Light. My love to the one who put it there and you all."

Now, perhaps you are wondering who in the wide, wide world of World War IIar II put up such a sign?

J.B. "Jug" Williams did, with the help of George "Moon" Mullens and Floyd Ciruti, all from the Baytown -- pardon me -- Goose Creek area. And what is more, the sign was portable.

By the time the war ended, the sign saying "Goose Creek, Texas" had traveled throughout the Philippines.

No one knows what became of it, but it was last seen on Luzon. If it is still somewhere out there, it surely would make a great souvenir.

Owens, who served in the intelligence branch of the U.S. Army, also discussed the Goose Creek sign in a story in the Texas Humanist magazine in the early 1980s He commented he felt at home when he saw the name Goose Creek, Texas, because he had taught in the Goose Creek district. "There is always this carrying with you a part of the past," he said.

In the note to Hurr, Owens had conveyed his regrets at not being able to attend the 50-year reunion. "Greetings to one and all," he wrote. "First to a boy named John, whom I shook in his seat till his teeth rattled and who after the war greeted me at the Night Hawk in Austin."

Owens in 1987 was living in Nyack, N.Y., where one of his neighbors was the actress, Helen Hayes. A novelist, folklorist and historian, he was retired from Columbia University where he taught English. He died in Nyack in 1990.

In addition to his collections of folklore and his four volumes of autobiography, Owens wrote several novels.

Owens also wrote Slave Mutiny: The Revolt of the Schooner Amistad (1953), which provided much of the material for a Steven Spielberg film, Amistad (1997).

When he was with the Extension Division of the University of Texas, he recorded folk songs from East Texas to the Mexican border and worked closely with Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb. His close relationship with the legendary literary trio led to his publishing Three Friends (1969), a collection of letters that Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb wrote to one another.

Born in the small northeast town of Pin Hook, the transplanted New Yorker treasured his years in Texas, including Goose Creek, Texas.

He felt at home here and -- once upon a time, for one brief a shining moment -- in war-weary New Guinea.


© Wanda Orton Baytown Sun Columnist
"Wandering" October 2, 2019 column