PORT ARTHUR — Seated at the domino table in the Dr. Julius Blackburn and Helen Matthews Community Center, Port Arthur native Ronald Gordon tapped a yard stick on the table as he talked as if to punctuate his sentences.

“Port Arthur got a heck of a past,” he said. “But if you want a good place to live, you can’t find a better place than Port Arthur.”

Gordon did not think that the city would ever be like it was 40 years ago, but he’s not going anywhere. He likes it here.

“We had about four hurricanes in a row within five years,” he said, “and you just don’t recover from that kind of stuff overnight.”

The Dr. J.B. and Helen Matthews Community Center is located on West Rev. Ransom Howard Street just a few blocks away from City Hall, where Gordon expected to see some changes come May. The next election for the city will have some different faces jockeying for position on the council, but the only faces Gordon wanted to see were those who would be willing to work together to get things done.

“Everybody can’t know everything,” he said.

There is another election looming on the horizon, and Gordon was not ready to see a new face occupy the Oval Office just yet. He wanted to see what President Barack Obama would do if re-elected, and he planned to be at the polls as soon they opened Monday to make that a reality.

Rosa Allen, a retired bus driver and another Port Arthur native, would be at the polls when they opened, as well, but not to vote. She will be working the polls.

“I think Obama should have a second chance,” Allen said from her seat next to Gordon’s at the domino table. “Nobody knows but President Obama and God what he walked into. Nobody knows.

“He has been able to hold his head up and try to do what’s right, but there’s only so much you can do without Congress.”

Back at the domino table, Port Arthurian Ed Sylvester sat on the other side of Allen and echoed her sentiments in his low, deep drawl. While he was satisfied with Obama, he realized that the president had been continuously challenged by the Republicans in Congress during his term.

“Nobody wants to go along with him. Everything he comes up with, the Republicans, they knock it down,” he said. “They wouldn’t give the poor man a chance.”

But Port Arthur native Dee Dee Pillitere thought that the president had his chance. In fact, she was fresh out of chances, and she planned to vote for Mitt Romney this year.

“The other man, he’s had a chance, but I’m not blaming just him,” she said. “Right now, I’d like to have everybody who’s in office get voted out.”

Pillitere was not referring to the Democrats or the Republicans though. To her, party lines did not matter.

“I pick people,” she said. “I don’t pick because it’s the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.”

Pillitere’s priorities for this election were balancing the federal budget and national security. Congress needs to cut out the nonessentials in the budget because you cannot buy everything you want, she said.

And the only way she knew how to alter that was to vote for different people this term. That was why she said she intended to vote for Randy Weber, a Republican who faces Beaumont native and Democrat Nick Lampson for the U.S. Representative District 14 seat. Zach Grady of the Libertarian Party and Rhett Rosenquest Smith of the Green Party are candidates for District 14, as well.

“I try to vote for people who have the same thoughts as I do,” Pillitere said.

Gordon and Allen had someone else in mind who could help fix the country by sitting in the District 14 seat, which encompasses Jefferson and Galveston counties and part of Brazoria County. That person is Lampson.

“Everybody in this county knows about Nick,” Allen said. “His record speaks for him.”

Lampson was a teacher for many years and served as the Jefferson County popular vote registrar and tax assessor collector for nearly two decades. Jefferson County residents do not know really anything about Weber, Gordon said.

That was the point for Pillitere though. She was ready for a change.

Pillitere never realized that she identified with conservative values until 20 years ago, she said. Growing up in Jefferson County, she only knew of the Democratic Party because many offices ran unopposed. Now candidates are often Republicans because voters are slowly turning Republican, she said.

And Pillitere may be right about that. In 2010, Jefferson County voters who selected candidates by straight party tickets voted Democrat 53 percent and Republican 46 percent, according to the Jefferson County Clerk's website. That was a 9 percent increase from 2008 in the amount of voters who chose the Republican straight party ticket. In the 2008 election, 37 percent of voters chose the Republican Party ticket and 62 percent voted Democrat.

“The whole United States is having a lot of trouble right now,” Pillitere said. “We got to fix it.”

bcrum@panews.com