Category Archives: Family History

December 26, 2016 · 2:18 pm

The BIG Bang

Two holidays (besides Christmas) hold great interest to us kids growing up. I am referring to July 4 and New Year. Bet ya can’t guess why?

“Fireworks,” you say?

Good guess. Explosive devices have magical charms for boys and probably a few girls, also. Nothing is more satisfying than a big bang and something being blown to smithereens. Yes, our parents allowed us to play with fireworks—unsupervised. Of course, prior to being released to go wreak havoc on the world, we got the usual lectures about the safe handling of fireworks followed by periodic reminders of their dangers via scare stories of some kid getting his fingers blown off. That barely slowed us down.

As kids we only had access to the usual over-the-counter verity of fireworks—oh but what fireworks they were. What you buy today pales in comparison to what we could get back in the fifties. I refer of course to the infamous, finger-removing M-80.

m-80

The M-80 was originally used by the military to simulate artillery fire (no. really its true), thus were way more potent than the run-of-the-mill Black Cat firecracker or even the more potent “Cherry bomb” or the similar in appearance “Silver King.” The only thing the Silver King and the M-80 shared was that both were small tubes of black powder about ¾” in diameter and 1.5’ long with the green fuse sticking out of the middle. The Silver King was silver, naturally, and the M-80 was colored a danger red. That’s because it contained more powder—and would take your finger off. The M-80 was said to contain 3 grams of black powder.

Today’s M-80 is a weak sister to its older brother thanks to government regulations and is not as potent as an old Silver King. That is because modern fireworks are limited to 50 milligrams of powder versus 200 mg or more before. Our M-80s more closely resembled a quarter stick of dynamite in explosive power—at least it seemed so to us—and evidently, also to the government.

We used the M-80’s potent explosive potential to blast all sorts of things into next week. Favorite targets were red ant hills, but you needed to get far away from the blast area or risk getting showered with a lot of only temporarily stunned red ants. When they recover from the blast, they are REALLY mad.

Once we built a mortar in the Lagasse’s key lot. The tube/barrel was some kind of pipe we found that empty beer cans fit in nicely. We stuck one end into the dirt and propped it up point skyward at about a 45 degree angle and dropped in a lit M-80 followed by a beer can—and BOOM—that can was sent to the other end of the key lot and almost to Williams Street. That lasted until our “mortar tube” succumbed to the potency of the M-80 and was blown apart. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

No problem. What can we blow up next?

Remember the old kitchen trash cans with the pop-open lid that opened by stepping on a little pedal on the base? Remember the removable can liners used in them? They were heavy gauge steel then—and great M-80 projectiles. Out on Sixth Street we lit an M-80 and dropped the can on top and hauled butt. BAM—that can was sent up above the tree tops, with kids scrambling in every direction to avoid the can’s re-entry into the atmosphere. A few more attempts at attaining orbit, and the can was a mangled mess that no longer fit in its outer shell. Re-entries were hard on the can—not to mention lift-off.

One of us got to go onto the ultimate explosive devices. Buck joined the Army, and they put him in combat engineers. He got to play with some really cool stuff like C-4 and det cord, which was a handy and quick way to cut down a tree. But Buck also got to play with the ultimate explosive device—nuclear weapons. No, I’m not kidding. He was in “atomic demolitions and munitions.” Only he never got to “light the fuse” on one, which is probably a good thing. He was stationed in Germany and when the “flag went up,” their job was to assemble some small nukes and blow bridges with them. They REALLY wanted those bridges to come down, didn’t they?

The rest of us were left to be content with ever more anemic government version M-80s and lecturing our kids on the safe handling of fireworks with periodic reminders of their dangers via scare stories of some kid getting his fingers blown off. As if…

1 Comment

Filed under Family History, Growing Up, Holidays, Kenner

Tagged as , ,

December 18, 2016 · 4:30 pm

Christmas Trees

christmas-tree

What is Christmas without a tree? When I was young we had only live trees of the spruce verity with short needles about ½ to ¾ inches long. And they had a fantastic smell, but they shed, and I mean shed a lot! I suspect they were actually cut sometime the previous May, because by the time we got them up and decorated a mere soft breeze would defoliate a branch. We fed them water, and they drank it like a camel preparing to cross the Sahara, but it did no discernable good. Obviously, all that dryness meant they were a fire hazard, but amazingly, I don’t recall any tree fires, although I am sure we had a few around Kenner.

Some of my friends and relations were on a different schedule, but it was always two weeks before Christmas when we put up the tree at my house. In those days the lights were the large bulb verity. The bulb was about the size of a thumb. And naturally, they burned out. That meant we spent the first hour or so of decorating dedicated to finding burned out bulbs and replacing them. Some of those lights were bubble lights with the “candle-like” tube of colored water above the base in which bubbles rose when they were turned on. Bubble lights were, and remain, my favorites.

The lights went on first careful we did not knock off any of the needles on the nearing-ready-for-defoliation branches. That was followed by the decorations. In those days, the decorations were brightly colored globes of some design made out of glass thin enough to crumble at the slightest provocation. Don’t even think about one surviving a drop on the floor. We also had some made to resemble birds with long bristle-like tails. These we clipped to the top of the branch, unless we wanted the dead bird effect, in which we clipped them to the bottom.

That was followed by the ubiquitous “icicles,” thin strips of a foil we draped over the branches to resemble (if you had a really good imagination) icicles hanging from the tree. Later these were made from some metalized thin vinyl material, which didn’t tarnish like the earlier real metal ones. True patrons of the icicle art form added them to the ends of the branches only a strand or two at a time. For me, that lasted all of about two or three branches, and I would look at the gazillion branches eagerly awaiting their custom draped icicles and decide another method was called for. By then I was getting bored with the tree-decorating thing, anyway. That called for “rapid-deployment.” That meant standing back and throwing handfuls of icicles at the tree letting them land where they may. My mother didn’t much care for that method.

In the early post-war years we carefully removed the icicles after Christmas and stored them for use next year. As we prospered, the old icicles became expendable (and tarnished) to be replaced the following year. What? Maybe a buck and a half cost total?

The tree was topped, in those days, with a spire of sorts made of the same fragile glass as the aforementioned decorations. I don’t recall very many angels up there.

In the mid-late fifties, various simulations of “snow” began to appear for decoration. The most effective came in an aerosol can. It took a true snow artist to get this stuff to look real. Mostly, it looked like lots of bird droppings on the branches and over-sprayed walls around the tree. I never much cared for it, although applying it was fun.

Around the same time, they started selling painted trees. We went several years with silver trees. But the Lagasse family across the street remained “true” to the Christmas tree spirit and bought only green painted trees. The green was so dark it was almost black (Goth tree?) and only vaguely resembled real tree color, but they seemed to like it. In addition to silver and green, you could get white or even pink (a popular color in the fifties but a sacrilege for a Christmas tree). The paint increased the flammability of the tree but helped hold the dry needles on—oh, for perhaps an extra day or so.

Flocked trees came after that, but only “rich people” bought those. Flocked was not allowed in our house by my tight-fisted father. One of his few wins over my mother.

With fragile trees and families full of rough and tumble boys, naturally, there were accidents. My cousin Bobby got a trampoline for Christmas one year and somehow Boo, his dad (Santa), managed to fit that assembled trampoline in the house more-or-less “under” the tree. Of course, you had to crawl under the trampoline to get to any of the other presents. Not patient enough to wait for Boo to disassemble the trampoline, move it outside, and reassemble it, Bobby, of course true to his nature, tried it out in the house. After he hit his head on the ceiling a few times, he did an unanticipated “dismount” and landed in the Christmas tree for a combined judges score of -1.2.

And defoliated the tree!

One year the day before Christmas Eve, the tree at Manard and Elton Lagasse’s house decided to “faint.” Clutching its little tree heart, it fell over dead—well, maybe it just realized it had been dead for months?

Defoliated!

I have no idea what happened, and Manard and Elton weren’t talking. Not a needle was left on that tree. All that remained were bare sticks grotesquely reaching out for water, and the presents under it were just a lumpy pile of needles. Henry Lagasse had to scramble and buy a new tree on Christmas Eve.

After Christmas when the spell of the Christmas tree had worn off, I used to enjoy running the branches between my finger and thumb and listen to the patter of needles hitting the floor. By the time we took the fire hazard down after New Years, most of the needles were on the floor. When MB finally dragged the dead carcass out the door, it left a trail of its remaining needles as a reminder of its glorious past. And out came the Hoover.

Then along came the ultimate answer to the tree defoliation problem—aluminum Christmas trees! No lights on these “high-tech” trees. Underneath you had a disk of rotating red, green, and blue gels that a light projected through and colored the highly reflective aluminum tree “needles.” But it wasn’t real and smelled like metal instead of pine. And that rotating/projecting colored light thingie always made an annoying squeaking sound as it turned, industrializing the whole Christmas mood. Some considered the aluminum tree the height of tree sacrilege, but my parents were the neighborhood trendsetters (Snork!), and we got one. Eventually my grandmother gave in and bought one, but no one else did that I recall. I think the Manards and the Lagasses secretly looked down their collective noses at our “apostate” Christmas tree.

For all their problems, it wasn’t Christmas without a tree. I remember only one Christmas without one, and that one was in 1968 at Lackland AFB in Texas when I was going through Air Force Basic Training. And it didn’t feel like Christmas that year, at all. Otherwise, I spent many hours lying on the sofa in the living room just staring at that tree with all the other lights off except the tree lights (even the aluminum tree / squeaking light projector years) and dreaming of what it would look like Christmas morning. It was the most beautiful sight in the entire world for a boy growing up in Kenner.

3 Comments

Filed under Family History, Holidays, Kenner

Tagged as , , ,

December 11, 2016 · 3:20 pm

Christmas

Growing up in Kenner in the fifties, Christmas was always a special time of the year for us as it must have been for most others growing up elsewhere. There was a “ritual” of sorts associated with the Christmas season. Each family had its own traditions and some got passed down to the next generation, but usually each generation has to establish their own. Back then in my family, we could count on the same series of events occurring every year without fail, and I began looking forward to them as early as Halloween, which for us kids “officially” kicked off the “holiday seasons.”

We kids looked forward to Christmas with the usual expectation of new toys and time off from school. We wrote our Christmas lists and letters to Santa long after we discovered the truth. We wanted to perpetuate the “gift gravy train” as long as we could get away with it.

2017-sixth

Depending on what day Christmas landed on, school let out the day before Christmas Eve and resumed the day after New Years Day. Christmas Eve was for me even bigger that Christmas itself. Christmas Eve was a big extended family night when everyone was having a party and exchanging gifts all over the neighborhood, and most of my extended family lived within easy walking distance, even if inebriated. On Christmas Eve we went first to my grandparent’s house on the corner of Sixth and Minor to exchange gifts. This exchange was among my grandparents, aunts, and cousins on my mother’s side. They always exchanged gifts on Christmas Eve. As I recall, those festivities kicked off at 7pm precisely.

This was followed by a visit to MB’s side of the family for a party at Boo and Margie’s house at the other end of the block. Sometime during the evening we paid a visit to Mary’s house. Mary was the black lady who cleaned my dad’s office and did light housework for the Manard clan. We took her gifts like a turkey or ham and Christmas “bonus” cash, a bottle of Seven Crown whisky and stayed long enough to share some Christmas cheer with her and her family.

After returning home, we retired late, and the kids went to sleep (not really), while our parents put out the toys from Santa. There was no way I was going to wait until Christmas morning to play with my stuff that Santa left. For weeks prior, I practiced creeping down the long hallway between our kitchen and the living room where the tree was set up. I discovered that certain boards of the wood floor in the hall of our elevated house creaked loudly when stepped on. After some experimenting, I discovered that if I hugged the walls during my creep down the hall, I made less noise, thus I was not likely to awaken my parents. That was probably overkill, as my parents slept like rocks after all that work, play, and the adult beverages they had consumed at the parties. There was little chance of me waking them, but the stealth was part of the fun and created a genuine adrenalin rush.

About an hour after they went to bed, I would make my first foray to see the goodies under the tree. Ninja-like I would silently roll out of my bed, pausing to see if the rustling of my sheets had aroused my parents. Getting no response, I stood and moved to the doorway, avoiding the center of the room and any creaking floorboards. Again, I paused to see if they had heard me. And again no “Lane, what are you doing?” issued forth from my parents bedroom. I then carefully slipped through the kitchen and into that treacherous hallway and hugged the wall to avoid those tattletale boards and took one careful step at a time toward the living room and my Christmas goodies. Upon arrival, I turned on only the tree lights and beheld a display of toys and gifts so carefully laid out such that the display would shame the window dresser at the Maison Blanche department store downtown. I examined each object with barely restrained glee, lest I wake my snoring parents, and was very careful to put each item back exactly as “Santa” had displayed it. Temporarily satisfied, I then snuck back to bed and tried to sleep. That didn’t work.

Within the hour, I made another ninja-assault on the Christmas tree. This time I not only examined my toys but also those of my sisters. Then back to bed again. This was a case of “wash, rinse and repeat” all night long. Needless to say, on Christmas Day I was very sleepy and went to bed early that night.

Christmas morning was a time to open the gifts of our immediate family and play with the new toys, but before we could really enjoy everything, it was hurry up and get dressed to have Christmas dinner at my grandparent’s house at noon, and they ALWAYS ate at noon! Since they were from central Louisiana (Point Coupee and LaSalle Parish), the fare was different from what was usually found on Christmas tables in New Orleans. We had the usual obligatory turkey, but instead of brown gravy made from the drippings served over the oyster dressing or dirty rice, we had white giblet gravy over white rice. The stuffing was cornbread instead of oyster dressing my wife made as part of our later Christmas meal traditions. The cranberry sauce was always that can shaped gelatinous glob, but I loved it and still do. Janis refuses to let me eat it today and makes her own cranberry sauce from fresh cranberries, and I must admit, it is actually better than the gelatinous glob. The wine was usually Mogen David Concord Grape and sweet enough to almost qualify as grape juice and induce instant tooth decay. But we ate like we hadn’t eaten in days.

That was a long time ago, and we do things a bit differently today. Even our traditions established during our young married life are gone with deceased parents and family members grown, married with kids of their own, and some living in another state. I miss those Christmas Times of long ago, but there comes a time when you have to let go and let the kids establish their own traditions.

Another thing I really wish I could bring back and enjoy today is my Aunt Ethel’s fruitcake. Every fall she and my mother would make fruitcakes a few weeks before Christmas, and she had a great fruitcake recipe! After baking they were liberally dribbled with bourbon whiskey and allowed to soak in the bourbon for a couple of weeks before eating. Man, they were good. I need to find that recipe.

In closing: To all of you reading this, I hope you have some Christmas Traditions you cherish, and most of all, I wish you a very Merry Christmas and remember “He is the reason for the season.”

NOTE: The image is a screen grab from Google Street View of the house I grew up in as it looks today.

8 Comments

Filed under Family History, Growing Up, Kenner

October 16, 2016 · 4:26 pm

Mr. Frank

One of the joys of growing up in Kenner was being a boy during the best time in history in what was possibly the best place in the world to grow up, Kenner. At least that’s what my cousin, Bobby, thinks. I tend to agree. In post war and prosperous America, we lived a carefree life that simply can’t be recreated today.

For us kids back then, summers were our favorite time of the year for obvious reasons, mainly because the dress code was so minimal, and we didn’t have to go to school. It was a time when we roamed the streets in our neighborhood with no fear, wearing only shorts, no shoes and no shirts—maybe sometimes a baseball cap. It was also the time Mr. Frank would pay us daily visits.

Mr. Frank was our local, roving, ice cream man. He was an over-weight, somewhat elderly man with a fatherly appearance, and wore a worn straw fedora to protect his balding head from the sun. Mr. Frank roamed the neighborhoods of Kenner on his little three-wheeled Cushman motor scooter ringing a hand bell and shouting out, “Ice cream! Get your ice cream!” (As if the bell hadn’t done the sales job already.) He sat in the back of his little scooter over the motor, and in front over the two front wheels was his dry ice cooled icebox filled with a veritable cornucopia of frozen delights for kids.

cushman

He sold the usual ice cream cups that came with a little wooden device for scooping the ice cream from the cup. That “scooping device” was a “spoon” in name only, being only a thin flat piece of wood cut in the shaped of a stubby spoon. Splinters in the lip were not unheard of.

His cooler also contained frozen bars of ice cream on a stick dipped in chocolate, ice cream sandwiches, which were two rectangular chocolate cookie slabs with a block of vanilla ice cream in between, and Dreamsicles—those bars of vanilla ice cream on a stick with a frozen orange sherbet coating, and ice cream cones with a chocolate topping and peanuts wrapped in paper you had to peel back. And, of course, he had the ubiquitous Popsicle in a variety of flavors to satisfy the tastes of any kid.

Mr. Frank rang his hand bell as he slowly motored through the neighborhoods of Kenner. Of course, with our super-tuned kid hearing, we heard that bell approaching when he was still five miles away. With a Pavlov’s dog-like response, we dropped everything we were doing and began an immediate and urgent assault on our parent’s pocket books.

“Can I have some money for ice cream, please, please?

Our parents were notorious foot-draggers when it came to such wild and extravagant expenditures of their hard-earned cash. (A Popsicle cost every bit of 5¢.) As Mr. Frank’s siren song and that clanging bell drew nearer, the pleading increased in tempo designed to break down even the most penny-pinching parent. “Please, hurry! I’m going to miss him!”

As Mr. Frank reached our street, our foot dragging parents finally gave in to our pleading and coughed up some cash. I’m convinced it was a conspiracy among them, because they all paid off at the same time. From every door on Sixth Street, frantic kids clutching nickels and dimes in their sweaty hands burst forth screaming “Mr. Frank! Mr. Frank, wait!

Not one to miss the big sales, Mr. Frank was, by then, exercising his favorite marketing ploy. He had slowed his scooter to a mere idling crawl, slow enough that it threatened to kill the sputtering motor on his scooter, and his bell ringing had gotten even more frantic.

And we assaulted him.

Then came decision time. “Do I want a popsicle or a Dreamsicle today? No. Um. Maybe an ice cream sandwich? I donno…?

And Mr. Frank smiled and waited patiently, knowing he was about to rake in the big bucks from all the kids gathered around his little scooter. When one of us finally made up our mind, Mr. Frank opened the hatch on the top of that cooler box. And the rest of us stared mystified at the dark yawning opening that was spilling out this mystical cloud of “smoke” from the dry ice. And it was just cloudy enough that we couldn’t see into that dark interior. But Mr. Frank could, either that or he had the location of the contents memorized, because he would reach in, his arm disappearing into that black, smoking hole, and always come up with the correct item. And BAM, with a puff of magic smoke, that door slammed shut again over that mysterious hole until someone else finally made up his mind.

The sales made, Mr. Frank pocketed his new-found wealth, mounted his Cushman, and motored down the street ringing his bell and shouting, “Ice cream! Ice cream! Get your ice cream!”

And we kids sought a place in the shade to enjoy our frozen treats and plan our next summer adventure.

 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

2 Comments

Filed under Family History, Growing Up, Kenner

Tagged as , ,

May 25, 2016 · 5:40 pm

Memorial Day 2016

To all the veterans out there, I offer my sincere thanks for your service.

I was born in 1944, during World War II. In the postwar years, every kid I knew had a family member who served in the military during WWII, most only their fathers, but a few mothers also served in the military. So fresh on everyone’s memory, WWII was a subject of great interest to us kids, especially the boys and no doubt many of the girls, as well. Some of the veterans we knew would (could) not talk about their experiences, but others did, and perhaps had a need to speak of what they went through. Some of the stories were of harrowing experiences, and some were funny.

My father was a doctor who served with the 5th Army in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and he loved to tell of his experiences, including his period he was the battalion surgeon with Darby’s Rangers, filling in for Darby’s wounded surgeon, or the time he was sent over to help the Germans get their hospitals better organized. Some of his stories were poignantly funny, like the time his father ordered a sleeping bag from Sears to be shipped to him overseas, and they accidentally shipped  a little red wagon instead. Sears made good on the sleeping bag and did a PR release on the story in the newspapers back home. The pic below is of him in his “sleeping bag.” The caption on the back reads, “A little cramped, a little hard, but an excellent sleeping bag. July 1943.”

Red Wagon

One of the most interesting stories was one told by my wife’s father, Bobby Cristina, of when he was shot down over Sicily. Bobby was a pilot and flew C-47s, which were the most advanced airliners of the prewar period, the Douglas DC3. Many airlines turned their DC3s over to Uncle Sam, and they became C-47 Skytrains, the workhorses of the war. They were such a great design and so easy to service, many are still in use in countries with limited repair resources.

C-37

It was on the night of the third day of the invasion of Sicily. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s British 8th Army was making headway up the east coast of Sicily but faced a daunting obstacle, the Simeto River. One bridge crossed it, the Primosole Bridge. Monty needed to capture that bridge intact to use to cross the Simeto, or his advance would be stalled until another could be built by engineers. British paratroopers of the 1st Parachute Brigade of the 1st Airborne Division were to be dropped around the bridge to capture it and hold it until Monty and the rest of the 8th Army arrived. One hundred and five American C-47 aircraft of the 60th, 62nd, and 64th Troop Carrier Groups, plus twelve British aircraft towing gliders were to carry the British paras to the objective in what was called Operation Fustian.

It did not go well.

The aircraft were routed right over the invasion fleet just offshore and were mistaken for Germans and fired upon by the Allies. This very situation had been encountered only a few days earlier on the first day of the invasion with similar disastrous results, something Bobby stood up in the briefing and pointed out. But he was told that would not happen again. But it did. Four aircraft were shot down, and nine were so badly damaged they had to return to North Africa.

Surviving aircraft formations had become disorganized, and the remaining force straggled over the coast for the drop zone (DZ). Lieutenant Cristina’s C-47 was one of them. He told me, “Lane, as we crossed the coast (in the dark), the tracers were coming up all around us. It looked like someone had stoked a fire sending embers up the chimney.” Tracer bullets have burning phosphorus in the base for the gunners to  see where the rounds are going. They are usually every fifth round, so for every one you see, there are at least four more you do not see. What the Allies were unaware of is that very day the Germans had brought in their 1st Parachute Division for the purpose of defending that bridge. Thirty-seven planes were shot down, and ten were so badly shot up with dead and wounded crews and paratroopers onboard they had to abort and return to Africa.

Nearly half of the assaulting force was lost—shot down or forced to abort because of damage!

Bobby’s plane was hit many times. Their radio operator was dead, and several paras were wounded as they approached the DZ, which was only a little ways inland. Bobby managed to find it and get his paratroopers out. All the while they were facing concentrated antiaircraft fire from the Germans. The op plan called for them to make a one-eighty degree turn after dropping the paratroopers and egress the same way they went in. Neither Bobby nor his copilot thought that was a very good idea under the circumstances and decided to keep going west and then head south for their base in North Africa.

While the aircraft was badly damaged, it was still airworthy—until it was hit in the nose by antiaircraft fire, which started a fire onboard. With that, they had to abandon the aircraft and bail out. They had dropped the paras at a low altitude and had slipped even lower when they were hit in the nose. Bobby ordered his copilot out while he managed the wounded C-47 with the cockpit filled with smoke and flames. He gave the copilot what he thought was enough time to get out, and since he figured he was very close to the ground, he pulled the nose of the aircraft up to gain some altitude before he jumped. He climbed out of his seat and put on his parachute, only to discover it didn’t fit. His copilot, a much shorter man, had grabbed the wrong parachute. Bobby squeezed his long and lanky frame into the very tight harness and headed for the rear door to bail out.

By then the plane had rolled over on its side and was headed for the deck as Bobby ran along the windows on the left side of the plane to the side door. There he found his crew chief with a head wound and out cold. Bobby pushed him out the side door, which then faced the ground, and pulled his rip cord as he did. Bobby dropped through the door right after him, and knowing he was very close to the ground, he pulled his own rip cord, risking getting his chute fouled on the tail of the plane.

He fell into the night, and his chute streamed overhead. After what seemed like an agonizingly long time, it finally blossomed and filled with air—violently stopping his free fall—just as his feet touched the ground. One second longer, and he would have splattered.

With his plane crashed and burning a few hundred yards away and Germans all around, he crawled on his belly in the dark and found a hay stack to hide in. After it got quiet, he crawled out and found his crew chief also crawling around on his belly. He had survived the jump and was conscious again. They hid in a bomb crater all day without water or food. By night their tongues were swollen, and they crawled on their bellies to a farm house where they sought aid for the crew chief’s head wound and Bobby’s burns. The Italian family offered to hide them from the Germans, but they refused, knowing if the Germans found them hiding the Americans, they would kill the whole family.

So they crawled west to get away from all the activity on the coast with plans to head south and the British lines when it was safer. They finally decided they were far enough inland to walk, and they did—right into an Italian patrol of fourteen men led by one officer. The two groups saw each other at the same time and froze. The Italian officer called out, “Germani?” Bobby replied, “(Expletive deleted) no! Americans!”

The much relieved Italians promptly surrendered to the much relieved Americans.

With prisoners in tow, they headed south and eventually reached British lines, turned in their prisoners and caught a ship back to North Africa. Bobby’s family back home had already been notified he was MIA (missing in action), but the Red Cross sent them a telegram telling them he was “safe somewhere in North Africa.”

Later after Sicily was secured, Bobby returned to the crash site. The pic below is of him standing on the wreckage of his C-47. The copilot who jumped with the wrong chute died. His chute didn’t open. Whether it malfunctioned, or he was too close to the ground and he failed to pull the rip cord in time, is unknown.

C47 Wreckage

Some of the British paratroopers landed as much as twelve miles from the DZ, but two companies managed to land close to the bridge and did take it—and held it for Montgomery.

Bobby was awarded the Purple Heart for his wounds and the Silver Star for his heroic actions that night when he attempted to save the life of his copilot and did save the life of his crew chief—plus taking fourteen Italian prisoners. And by the way, he was unarmed. He had left his pistol back in the barracks in North Africa.

1 Comment

Filed under Family History, War Stories

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

April 13, 2016 · 7:25 pm

Hearing Impaired.

I am hearing impaired and began wearing hearing aids in 2012. I was pretty much forced to by my job and my wife.

As for the job, I decided it was a bad idea to continue to complete meetings with clients and then have to ask my account executive what we just agreed to do.

Janis was another matter. I had to turn the TV up so loud it bothered her. Wearing TV headphones helped that. I could crank the volume up in the headphones, and she could listen through the speakers at normal levels. And by-the-way, she has the hearing of an Arctic Fox hunting for moles under three feet of snow.

That worked until I bought a new TV and later, Apple TV. Apple TV doesn’t go through the Dish Satellite DVR, which is what the headphones are plugged into. No problemo! I bought an audio system with six speakers, thinking I could plug my headphones into the TV, which silences the sound coming out of it, and Janis would listen through the nice six-speaker audio system, while I listen through the headphones.

One minor problem: The TV doesn’t have a headphone jack!

That means whenever we are watching something on Netflix through Apple TV, I have to crank the volume way up (nice bass!) and past Janis’ comfort level. Now I have to buy a new TV with a headphone jack.

“How did this hearing problem happen?” you ask.

Listening to loud rock music through headphones, gunfire without hearing protection, and listening to F-4 Phantom IIs take off on a daily basis while in the Air Force. The weather observation site where I worked was about fifty yards from and about halfway down the active runway. And that would be about where they “rotated,” meaning just as the front landing gear came off the ground and both engines were under full, screaming, flame-spitting, afterburner power. Yes, it was loud. Very loud! We were issued hearing protection, but I know of no observer who ever used them.

F-4 Take Off

When I mustered out in 1972 at Elmendorf AFB, Alaska, they did a full physical makeup to compare to when I had entered service four years earlier. I distinctly remember the audio tech commenting as he read my latest test compared it to the older one. “Boy, you have lost some hearing in the last four years.”

I was thinking, So what! I can hear fine. Just give me my discharge.

Well, I couldn’t hear fine, and it progressively got worse. I began to realize something was wrong when I was in bed at night and I could hear crickets chirping—in January! That is when I discovered those “chirping crickets” were tinnitus—hearing loss that is not recoverable.

Where am I going with this?

Some funny stories, of course.

Being hard of hearing has led to some humorous situations, usually the result of me attempting to “fill in the blanks” of what I just heard someone say. My brain hears a few words of a six-word sentence and “logically” supplies what the other words must be. Trouble is, my brain usually gets it wrong.

One such incident occurred in Baton Rouge while we were displaced because of Katrina. We were having dinner one night with my sister-in-law, Beth, and her husband, Sid. Beth had invited some of her realtor friends to join us. None of them had arrived when Beth and I got into an argument over something she said and I didn’t understand. Actually, it may have been several things I didn’t understand, and she got flustered over me guessing wrong or asking her to repeat what she said.

About then one of her friends arrived, and Beth did the introductions. When she got to me, still a bit flustered, she said, “This is my brother-in-law, Lane, and he is hard of hearing” But she said the “hard of hearing” part loud for emphasis.

The poor woman took Beth’s comment in an overly literal fashion. Extending her hand to me, she said in a very loud voice, carefully enunciating each word, “HI—I—AM—MARY—GLAD—TO—MEET—YOU.”

We all laughed—except the very confused Mary.

Another incident happened just the other night. Janis had met with a contractor about doing some work on our fireplace chimney, and she was briefing me on what he had said. She concluded her report with, “And he lives nearby.”

To which I responded, “I really don’t care what his sexual preferences are as long as he does good work.”

She looked at me like I had two heads. “WHAT?”

“You said he lives with a guy.”

She lost all control then. Between bouts of laughter and teary-eyed she yells at me, “I said ‘he LIVES NEARBY,’ not he lives with a guy.”

“Oh!”

This will not be the last of such stories. Standby for more…

1 Comment

Filed under Family History, Growing Up

Tagged as , ,

March 8, 2016 · 10:02 pm

Fire and Fireworks

Boys have a fascination with fire. The fact that we like to grill is an indication of that. One of the reasons I joined the Boy Scouts (Troop 176) was so I could play with fire. But I was attracted to fire long before that.

As kids in rural Kenner, we had plenty of opportunities to play with fire. We never missed an excuse to build a campfire in the Manard’s key lot and cook something, sometimes one of our fingers—ouch! Our parents always tried to discourage our fire building and cook outs in the key lot with a lame excuse, like the City of Kenner doesn’t allow fires.

“And? So what?” was our usual come back. What followed was about ten minutes of a half dozen kids badgering parents, who only wanted to be left alone and drink beer. “Oh, OK! But don’t come running to me with burnt fingers.”

And we had a one-match fire going within minutes. (Hint: gasoline helps.)

A favorite Boy Scout meal was foil stew. It was easy to prepare. You simply make a pouch out of some heavy duty foil (preferably) and fill it with chunks of meat, potatoes, carrots, and a little seasoning. Add just a small splash of water and seal it up real tight. (The water part became beer when we got older)

You get a good fire going and let it settle down to coals, spread those out and flop that pouch of foil-delicious on them, then add some more coals on top. Let that puppy cook for about 20 minutes and pull it off the fire.

Carefully slice the pouch open and peel back the sides to make a bowl—and dig in. I ate many a foil stew while in the Boy Scouts and with my boys on later camping or hunting trips.

Fire included fireworks, and in those days we had M-80s. If I had to guess, I would say an M-80 was close to a half a stick of dynamite! Well, it seemed like it, and was close enough you can’t get the “real” M-80s today. It is amazing we never blew fingers off, and yes, we did hold them, light-em-up and throw them, not advisable, especially with a “half-stick-o-dynamite” M-80.

Son and Margie Manard, Bobby and Melanie’s parents, had discarded a kitchen trash can. It was the kind made out of steel with a pop-up lid and a removable can insert for the garbage, also made out of heavy steel. It was in July when we had ready access to M-80s, and we decided to see how high an M-80 would propel that heavy steel, can insert. So, we got out in the middle of Sixth Street and flopped that can face down over a sizzling M-80. After which, we all ran for cover.

BOOM!!!

That can went straight up almost as high as the nearby trees were tall, forty feet or more! WOW! We gotta do that again! And we did; numerous more “agains,” until that can was all bloated looking and dented from M-80 detonations.

I was really into building plastic model airplanes, and another of my favorite uses for fireworks was to glue bottle rockets under the wings and make my plastic F-80 or P-51 fly. Trouble is, it never quite worked out like I expected. Getting the two bottle rockets, one on each wing, coordinated was something outside my skill set at eleven years old. My airplanes mostly went in circles as one rocket fired off before the other, and the in the opposite direction when the other finally lit up. Then the wings melted from the heat. That game got expensive, so I gave up.

This fascination with fire lasted even into my parenting period. I went on a father/son camping trip with my youngest son’s (Ryan) Scout troop. We stayed in the Group Camp Cabins at Fountainbleau State Park. Part of the weekend pitted the scouts against their dads in various scouting skills like first-aid, wilderness navigation, and, of course, fire building. The dads faced off against several teams of scouts on who could build a fire and get it going enough to burn through a thread stretched over the fire at eighteen inches above the ground. And we had to use flint and steel to start the fire. The scouts, not being clever like their devious dads, went the traditional route: first laid down some flammable material like dry leaves, then some kindling , then larger twigs, and finally some sticks.

In our scavenging through the woods for materials to build our fire, I discovered that dry Spanish Moss, the black stuff, burned like it was soaked in gasoline.

You know what’s coming.

With all our fires built and ready to fire up, the scouts looked questioningly at our mound of dry, black Spanish Moss, piled up high enough to almost touch the thread.

Ready, set, GO!

I struck flint to steel and FFOOOMMMPP! In a blaze of fiery glory, that thread disappeared in about three seconds flat.

We won.

Ah, the good old days. And I suddenly feel the need to fire up the Weber…

Leave a comment

Filed under Family History, Growing Up, Kenner

Tagged as , , , , ,

February 28, 2016 · 4:58 pm

Going Downtown

For us living in Kenner, even though “downtown” New Orleans was less than ten miles away, going “downtown” was somewhat akin to a trip to Jerusalem and held near religious significance. We made these trips maybe once a quarter.

We didn’t just hop in the car and head for Canal Street like we do today. This was more like an expedition, requiring careful preparation with a ritual-like execution.

First, it was expected to be an all day affair, leaving early in the morning and return about sundown.

And you dressed for the occasion.

That means the women wore nice dresses and fashionable shoes, usually heels. I was forced to forgo my shorts for nice trousers, a pressed shirt, and shoes and socks. And my hair was greased and combed.

My grandmother drove her Ford downtown. She ALWAYS had Fords; never knew her to own anything but Fords, and in the nearly thirty years of our shared time on earth, I can recall only three, and the first two had standard transmissions. We piled into her Ford and made the trip down Airline Highway to “downtown.”

She always parked in the same parking lot on the corner of Iberville and Burgundy. We then made a circuit of the stores on Canal Street, first the upriver side and then the downriver side. My favorite was Kress’ Five and Dime Department Store, which had a great toy selection. We usually ate lunch in the D.H. Holmes cafeteria and ended up back at the parking lot in the late afternoon loaded down with packages.

Many years later, when I started dating, one of our frequent destinations was downtown to one of the movie houses on Canal Street like the Joy, or the Saenger, or the Lowes, or the Orpheum on University Place, because they got the first run movies. In those days (late 1950s-early 60s), these dates required coats and ties for the men and nice dresses and heels for the ladies.

The Joy had a curving staircase to the balcony level (which was perfect for necking, BTW). One night, after the movie, when Janis and I were descending the stairs, I was not paying attention to my date as I should have been. As I made my way down the stairs, Janis, who was one step behind me, suddenly passed me on the way down. Trouble is she was bouncing down the stairs on her butt, skirt all in her face and high heels in the air. She reached the bottom before I could catch up to her.

That date did not end well.

But most other dates downtown did end well, usually for pizza at Gibby’s on North Rampart, but that’s another story.

Leave a comment

Filed under Family History, Growing Up, Kenner

Tagged as ,

February 13, 2016 · 12:51 pm

Playgrounds? What playgrounds?

I feel sorry for kids today. My son won’t let his daughter play outside alone, and they live in what most would consider a very safe neighborhood. It wasn’t like that back in the fifties, sixties and even later into the seventies. We came home from school, changed clothes, and disappeared into the neighborhood. Our parents never knew where we were, and we were never in any danger, except to ourselves, because of some of the stupid things we did. We sometimes stepped on a nail—tetanus shot. Cut a foot or hand on a piece of metal—tetanus shot. Burned a finger with a match or firecracker—tetanus shot. Fell in the ditch—tetanus shot. My dad dispensed so many tetanus shots and penicillin shots we were probably immune to every disease known to man. We lived through it, even thrived, and we certainly had fun, and our parents worried very little.

We never had any formal playgrounds. The whole world was our playground. Unless it was raining, we were outside. And we stayed outside, until it either got dark, or we were somehow rounded up by a parent.

Our homes had fairly large yards, but only rarely were they large enough to contain our activities. We needed and sought more room and more varied topography to play in—and, in Old Kenner back then, there was plenty of variety.

For organized sports, like football or baseball, we had at least two immediate choices. There was an open field on the corner of Sixth Street and Minor Street. It was plenty large enough for us to use for baseball and football until we grew old enough and strong enough that it became too confining and we risked putting a baseball through Mr. Giammalva’s window. No problem—when we needed larger, we had a whole city block to play in. Our Lady of Perpetual Help School now occupies that block. When we were growing up in Kenner, it was completely unoccupied by any permanent structure.

Kids love the woods, and we had plenty of wooded lots to choose from. When we were really young, we had Joe Lorio’s wooded lot between my grandmother’s house and the Manard’s house. It was small but large enough we could hide from parents and do kid stuff in it.

After that we had the Manard’s key lot behind the double belonging to the Manards and the Legasses. It was only lightly wooded but remote enough to be a wonderful playground. Next door was a huge (to us) wooded lot facing Williams Street. When we were old enough to be allowed machetes and hatchets we chopped down small trees in that lot and built forts in the Manard’s key lot.

On that aforementioned wooded lot on Williams, one year they went in and bulldozed most of the trees and pushed them into big piles and left them there like gracious gifts for us kids to play in. We scampered over those piles of trees with our hatchets and machetes and built even bigger forts to play army in.

Every summer the Lagasses would bring in a load of spillway dirt and dump it in their key lot, and they “allowed” us kids to level and distribute it for them. That process started with “dirt wars.” There was enough clay in the dirt we could make balls and throw them at each other like snowballs. And they hurt! Then we dug small tunnels and built little villages in it to play with our toy trucks and cars. At dusk, we all went home covered with river sand and tracked it into our respective houses. My mother hated those dirt piles! (I am still trying to figure out how they got that dump truck back there?)

On Minor Street near the IC tracks, two blocks from my home, was another wooded lot. Beside it was the closest thing we had to a creek in our little world, a nice deep ditch with flowing clear water containing small fish and crawfish.

Me, Manard, Joey 1953In the summer our “uniform of choice” was shorts—period—no shoes, no shirts. That was from the end of school in May until it started again in September. At the beginning of summer our feet were tender and very sensitive from a year confined to shoes, and our skin was pale white. By the end of summer our feet were so calloused we could run across the clamshell-covered streets and feel no pain, and we were nearly as dark as some of the African Americans in Kenner.

Doors were not locked unless you were leaving your house for an extended period of time. We slept with our windows open and an attic fan roaring in the hall drawing the “cool” night air in through the open windows.

We had no TV. The elderly Manards were the first to get a TV in our part of Kenner. (Why them, I have no idea?) We had one or two stations broadcasting only a few hours a day. It was a novelty for us kids, but outside was far more interesting.

People lived their leisure lives outside or at least semi-outside on screened porches. The Manards and Legasses living across the street were always on their front porch or in their small patio behind the house. My grandparents had a screened back porch and they spent as much time as they could out there in rocking chairs.

Life was so different back then (1950s-1960s), so much less stressful, and much more interesting for kids than playing on an iPad.

1 Comment

Filed under Family History, Growing Up, Kenner

Tagged as ,

February 3, 2016 · 8:36 pm

Jeepin’ – Boys and Toys

All of my childhood I wanted a Jeep. In high school, I dreamed of my first car being a Jeep, but alas, it was a ’57 Chevy, but that’s another story.

After college and four years in the Air Force, Janis and I settled back in NOLA on Jefferson Street. We had no money beyond what we needed, and the Lord supplied all our needs, but He had not supplied me with a Jeep.

Along about 1975, my buddy, Buck Roy bought a Toyota Land Cruiser, the old flat fender model, which was almost a Jeep. And then my sister bought a little red Jeep. That did it! I HAD to have a Jeep then and decided the Lord needed some help.

M38A1 Jeep R

Heath and our M38A1 after a trip to the Bonnet Carré one Saturday.

I found a very used, 1952, military surplus M38A1 Jeep for sale that had recently been freed from the Mississippi Army National Guard. It was so recently freed, it wasn’t even street legal, lacking some necessary lights. Top speed was 55mph. That was mainly because of the very low gearing in the axels. Its military 24 volt electrical system had been converted to 12 volt, and it did have a new soft top. Tires were almost new and in great condition, and it ran good. I bought it and commenced to make it street legal and eventually got a brake tag for it.

It did, however, have about 200 coats of OD paint on it. In case you have never been in the military, it works like this: “IG inspection coming up? Paint everything!” (Because nothing looks as good as something just painted.) That did help prevent rust. I eventually added a layer of my own when I camouflaged it using rust red primer, yellow primer, and flat black. I then added white pinstripes to accent the body panels. It actually looked cool. Well, I thought so.

Jeeps ain’t made for the road; they are made for the off-road, and the nearest such off-road was the Bonnet Carré Spillway west of NOLA. The fine silt sand in the Spillway could get past seals and eat bearings, so it was one of the worst places we could go play, but it was all we had. And we went running through every mud hole we could find to see who would get stuck. I am proud to say my little M38A1 never got stuck. Put that puppy in low range, first gear, and it would climb a greased flag pole.

Elder son, Heath, was about six then. Ryan was only a year old or so. Heath made more than a few trips to the Spillway with “Uncle Buck” and me, but poor Ryan was too young. On one trip, we got hooked up with some guys with their jacked-up, big-tired pickups, and they challenged us by running through stuff they figured would stop the little M38A1 or the Toyota. We fooled them.

One particularly hole of deep water, about a block long, nearly did us in, however. Heath and I dived in, and water came over the hood, but we puttered along with the fan blades of that little Hurricane Four Cylinder Engine slapping water and making fluttering sounds.

“Dad! We have water inside!

I looked over at Heath, and he had his feet up on the seat, and water was spilling in under the door. That was OK, because I had drain holes in the floor. Besides, we couldn’t stop or turn back. All we could do was plow ahead with the water rolling over the hood and hope the electrical system stayed dry long enough to get us through to dry land

It did. We climbed out with the engine sputtering and spitting. I revved it a few times to keep it running, and eventually it dried out enough to run smoothly.

The big-tired truckers shook their collective heads and said, “Never figured you would make it through that.”

That Jeep was my daily driver. I went to work in the city in it every day, and with no AC—and I was wearing a suit! We played in the Spillway on Saturday, and I spent Sunday under it, fixing what we broke. I loved that Jeep, but…

After a few years I was making enough to buy a new vehicle, and Janis near fainted when I announced I was buying a new 1978 Ford Bronco—four-wheel drive, of course. That was the first year they came out with the full size Bronco like the Chevy Blazer. I had one of those, too, a 1978 Chevy Blazer to be exact, but that was nearly twenty years later. Heath found that one in Texas.

The Jeep had to go.

The Bronco was a lot more comfortable—it had AC—and it became the vehicle we used for all family trips. Heath and I made many a deer hunt in that Bronco, sleeping in beds I made in the back. While I never got the little Jeep stuck, I managed to get that big heavy Bronco stuck bad enough it took two vehicles to pull it out one time. It was buried down to the tub, and the tires could find nothing to grab.

After the Bronco came the Jeep Cherokee Chief, also four-wheel drive. Made a bunch of deer hunts in that one too. After that no more four-wheel drive until the short-lived ‘78 Blazer mentioned above. It didn’t like humid Louisiana and quickly developed cancer. That was after it blew a head gasket on the way back from Alabama, and I had to have the heads rebuilt. I would have kept it if it had not developed the rust problem.

I figured I was maybe past having another four-wheel drive vehicle. The Spillway had long since been closed to such use, and I had given up deer hunting. But I had one last fling with a 2005 Chevy Crew Cab Z71, but I only used the four-wheel drive once when it mattered, and that was on I-20 on the way back from Abilene in a snow storm.

Both Heath and Ryan caught the Jeep bug, and both now have Jeeps. Heath’s is an older model that he is doing a body-off resto on, and Ryan’s is a newer model he has jacked up and put big rubber under it.

I have nothing now but a two-wheel drive Ford Crew Cab, but…I’ve been thinking of getting another M38A1, but one that someone has already restored.

Don’t tell Janis.

Leave a comment

Filed under Family History, Growing Up

Tagged as , ,