Lake Dallas resident and World War II veteran Paul Hudgins, 88, is sharing his memories through picture books he writes and illustrates for his grandchildren.
“I’ve never watched TV without doing something,” he said. “I’d sit here and I’d draw the pictures, then I’d remember something.”
One night, he was in his living room listening to the TV and remembered something from when he was a child, so he drew it. Then he drew another picture, and another, until he wound up with about 85 drawings that he turned into a book about growing up during the Great Depression and the war years.
Drawn on Memory by Paul Hudgins by Adam Schrader
At that time, the Hudgins family lived in Fort Worth. His father had lost his job and the family had no money.
“It was a different world then,” Hudgins said. “Nobody had any money.”
Eventually, his father worked taking theater tickets in the segregated section of the Majestic Theater in Dallas until he was promoted to manager of the Fair Park Theater. Once he started that job, he was able to get the family back together and move to Oak Cliff.
His father had served on a destroyer in the Navy in World War I, so when Hudgins was in high school, he tried to enlist in the Navy but was rejected. Hudgins said the Navy gave all graduating senior boys a test in 1943 because the Navy needed pilots. Those who made a decent score were invited to join, sent to college and trained as pilots. They then owed the Navy five years of service.
“That sounded like a pretty good deal to me,” he said. “I got the second-highest score and everything was fine until I did the eye test.”
Hudgins had poor eyesight, and after both the Navy and the Army turned him down, he figured he would be a “4F” for the rest of the war, meaning that he was not qualified for service. After graduating high school at 17, he went on with his life and found work on a local horse farm.
When Hudgins turned 18, he registered for the draft as required, and to his surprise, he was sworn in to the Army. By that point in the war, his poor eyesight was not a limitation. He later served on a hospital train for Holocaust survivors and Russians who had been released from German prisoner of war camps.
In one of his printed stories, Hudgins recalls when he was home on furlough in the fall of 1944 to help care for his mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer.
“I said goodbye to my mother in the railway station in downtown Dallas to get processed to go back overseas,” he said.
He was assigned to a hospital train overseas and had just come back from a run when he learned that his mother had died, Hudgins said.
“I got a cable — she had been buried for a week by the time I got it,” he said.
After the war, Hudgins took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend Texas Christian University in the fall of 1946. He later transferred and graduated from what is now the University of North Texas.
During college, Hudgins started his first commercial art job in 1946, designing displays at the State Fair, working at the fairgrounds.
“I’m one of those lucky people that get paid to do something they like, but after the Vietnam War, you couldn’t walk the streets of Dallas without running into another commercial artist looking for a job,” he said. “I never got rich, but my kids always had shoes.”
Fine art found in ads, painter says by Adam Schrader
When he turned 70, he wasn’t making enough money as a commercial artist to support his horses, so he sold them and retired. Now, Hudgins has almost fully retired from art, but he said he still tries to pick it back up occasionally and has published a story about the last cattle drive in the area and a history of Snyder, Texas, where he lived for part of his childhood and again as an adult.
On Friday, Oct. 11, Hudgins was able to participate in Honor Flight. Honor Flight, a nonprofit organization created to honor America’s veterans, transports veterans to Washington, D.C., to visit and reflect at memorials.
“There have got to be some more of us [World War II veterans] out there but they probably don’t know about this,” Hudgins said. “I knew about this but I didn’t know how to get involved or if I was even eligible.”
His barber gave him the phone number of Denton businessman and veteran Andre “Frenchy” Rheault. Rheault walked him through the Honor Flight process. Every veteran who goes has to have a guardian, Hudgins said, and since his son has had some health problems and couldn’t go, he asked Rheault to accompany him.
“This trip was no different than the others I’ve been on, in that it was just incredible,” Rheault said. “Paul had a great time. We visited the memorials and he interacted with many people, a lot of World War II people and people just visiting the memorials at the same time we were. It meant the world to him.”
From the time, Hudgins found out about it, he was champing at the bit, ready to go.
“My favorite part was getting to know him better and an incident we had at the World War II memorial,” Rheault said.
Rheault, who served 20 years in the Air Force and is a Vietnam veteran, said that the interaction among the World War II vets is incredible.
“[Honor Flight] is very important, not just to me, but to the World War II veterans like Mr. Hudgins,” Rheault said. “From the first time I went, I could see what the effect was on them. It was just incredible and each veteran that I’ve taken said it was the greatest trip they’ve ever been on.”
“Frenchy is such a neat guy, he really is,” Hudgins said. “He was my guardian and he did it all for me. It kind of spoiled me.”
Lewisville/Flower Mound editor Adam Schrader can be reached at 214-773-8188 and on Twitter at @schrader_adam.
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