CityView Magazine

FEATURE us as we explore the history of the USO in Fayetteville and the Editor's Note: Join effects it has had on people here. All Because of the USO Part one of our three-part series celebrating the USO B BY BRYAN MIMS illy Joel and a gritty, down-on-its-luck steel town up North introduced me to the USO. It was just a song, a largely forgotten number seldom heard on the radio anymore. But the lyrics still loop through my head as clearly as they did at the end of 1982 when Al- lentown, that anthem of blue-collar America, played out on airwaves from sea to shining sea. "Well our fathers fought the Second World War Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore Met our mothers in the USO Asked them to dance Danced with them slow" For me, the USO was just a catchy acronym that happened to rhyme with "slow." I was young, and my appreciation for history was still well in the future. It's not as though I could have Googled "USO" back then – it was 1982. But over the years I have come to view the black-and-white snapshots of Bob Hope, Judy Garland and Jack Benny standing before great throngs of smiling G.I.'s at a USO Camp Show on some military base in some theater of war. I wondered how many of those G.I.'s actually met their wives in the USO, came home to work at Bethlehem Steel, and spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore. More than 40 years before Allentown played in my town, the United Service Or- ganizations – the USO – forged the soundtrack of America. As it happens, the USO did, in fact, beget many marriages that, in turn, begat our nation's Baby Boom. THE PIANO GIRL Zula Barton was still but a child herself in the summer of 1943. Or was it the spring of '43? "I don't remember," said the man who would always remember that unique name – Zula. "I was immature, just turned 16," recalled the girl with the unforgettable name. She was playing the piano that night, whatever night it was, at the old parsonage of Hay Street Unit- ed Methodist Church. The house had been converted into a hang-out for G.I.'s and came to be called the Soldiers Town Home. Here, G.I.'s could kick back, joke around, eat a sand- wich, eat a doughnut, read Life magazine, talk about girls, meet girls, fall in love with girls. In October 1943, the place would become the world's first USO Club. The USO brought together a variety of organizations such as the Salvation Army, the YMCA and the YWCA – to provide recreation, entertainment and creature comforts for the troops. And if CityViewNC.com | 53 Photography by Byron Jones

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