Pappy Landry on the Streetcar

This is a photo of my paternal grandfather Robert Joseph Landry, Sr.  He was known by friends and family as Rob or Uncle Rob.  His children called him Papa or Pappy.  But us grandchildren all knew him as Pee Paw.  (Though some of us spell it wrong – PePaw or some such thing.)  It was taken around 1924 in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Rob was born on Jan. 9, 1893, in Westlake, Louisiana, to Civil War veteran Simon Alcide Joseph Landry and Marie Celeste Leveque.  Alcide and Celeste were half 1st cousins once removed with a common ancestor of Joseph Ignatius Landry.  Both were born on plantations in slave-era southern Louisiana just before the Civil War.  They were married in 1868 in West Baton Rouge Parish, which is where they had grown up.  Their first child Marie Marguerite Carmelite (named after both grandmothers) Landry arrived in 1870.  They then had seven sons in a row.  The next daughter arrived around 1889, probably just before the family moved to the Westlake area.

I’m not really sure why the family moved to that area.  Probably for employment opportunities.  They weren’t the only ones in the family that moved there.  A few other families from the extended Landry, Leveque, and Bird families moved there.  I’m sure they moved there hoping for the best of everything, but sadly that was not to be.  Their oldest daughter Marguerite Carmelite died shortly after moving there.  She is buried in the Old Catholic Cemetery in Lake Charles.

It wasn’t long before our very own little Rob showed up and hopefully brought some joy to their lives.  He was the last child to be born to the couple.  His father Alcide was 47 at the time of his birth.  He was the baby of the family and the one closest in age to him was the only surviving sister Marie Therese (there’s that name again!) who was four years older than him.  When he was six years old, she died as well.  So after that he grew up as the youngest son of six or seven boys.  (I am not entirely sure of the number of sons in the family or if any died early.)

As you know from previous posts, he was fond of baseball and fishing and he was in World War I.  He also worked for Gulf States Utilities and one of the positions he held was that of streetcar conductor.  And that is who you see in this photo.  Rob as a young man starting out with a company that he would stay with for several years.  He had married his sweetheart Erie Patureau and they were starting a family of their own in Lake Charles.  He looks like a friendly and happy fellow.  I like that.