Month: September 2022

The Godmothers’ Godmothers of 1952

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I’m not so sure I like the title of my post this week, but it’s the best thing I could come up with for the unusual situation that it refers to.  1952 was the year that my parents were married, and I’ve posted stories related to that during the past two months.  (Meeting the Parents in 1952 and A Letter From Home in 1952)  Seventy years is an important milestone and even though my parents are no longer alive, I think it is appropriate to acknowledge such an important part of my own family history.

The other two posts talked about  the earlier part of 1952.  My parents – Bob Landry and Betty Lou Bucklin – got engaged and they went to their parents’ homes to meet their future in-laws.  My dad also joined the Air Force and went to basic training in Texas.  He would later be stationed at Edwards Air Force base in California.  They wrote letters to each other that they saved until some of their nosy children (my sister Jamie and I) found them and read them.  And we laughed and laughed at the sweet messages that they sent to each other.  This led to the letters disappearing, and for the most part never to be seen again.  I’ve shared the letters that we were able to find. (Love Letters Lost)

Well, one of the other things that happened that year was that my mom decided to become a Catholic.  I don’t know that this was a prerequisite for Daddy to marry her or not.  He had stopped dating her a while because she was a Methodist and the Landry family were devout Catholics.  But she was too irresistible to him and they started dating again and became engaged.  Maybe she decided to become Catholic because it was so important to him and he wanted to get married in the Catholic Church.

Sisters (and godmothers) Sylvia and Betty Lou Bucklin in the early 1950s.

So she went through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) or whatever the process was back then.  But she did not go through it alone.  Her older sister Sylvia had married Ronald Pilcher in February of 1951 and he was a Catholic also.  She must have decided to become Catholic as well, because my mom always talked about them going through the classes together.  Sylvia was married with a child in Lafayette at the time and mom was living at home with her parents in Hathaway. At least it looks like that from the pictures she sent her beau when he was away.  The photos of Betty Lou show her with her younger siblings on their parents’ property in Hathaway.

My mom must have gone to Lafayette to go through the process.  It’s the only thing that makes sense.  One of the things that happens is that those in the class are baptized if they have not been previously baptized.  Those who have been baptized in other faith (such as Methodist) are not rebaptized.  But they do make some of the same professions that are made during a baptism.  Usually there are godparents present who also profess to be an encouragement in the faith.  So in an unusual turn of events, Sylvia and Betty Lou were allowed to be each other’s godmother.  I never heard anything about godfathers when my mom talked about this part of her life.  She was always so tickled with the fact that Sylvia was her godmother and she was Sylvia’s.

This picture may have nothing to do with the RCIA or the process they went through.  I like it because they look so chummy in the photo.  Sisterly love.  I always think of the story of the mutual godmothers when I see it.  Now maybe you will too.

Alcide ‘Met the Elephant’ – WARNING – Graphic Content

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For some reason I was thinking about the other Van Landry out there.  I have a cousin with the same name as mine and I’ve never met him.  Thinking of that led me to thinking about our common ancestor Simon Alcide Joseph Landry.  He was known by the name Alcide.  Not that I ever knew him.  He died before my father was even born.  My dad was Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. and he was known by many people as Bob.  His father, of course, was RJL, Sr.  He was known as Rob. Rob was the son of Alcide.   So when I was thinking of what I would say to the other Van about our common ancestor, I remembered a story I read about Alcide from another cousin Thomas Richey.

Alcide Landry as an adult circa 1890 or so. I wish I had more than this one photo of him.

Thomas Richey (let’s call him TR) actually descends from Alcide’s older brother Trasimond.  I descend from both of the brothers.  TR wrote a book about the experiences of our great great grandfather Trasimond during the Civil War.  Trasimond and Alcide were from southern Louisiana, so they fought for the Confederacy.  The name of the book is “Tirailleurs” and it is about the Acadians of Company H who were mainly from Brusly, Louisiana.  Of course, the main ‘star’ of the book was Trasimond.  But there were several stories about Alcide as well.  I don’t know where TR got all of the amazing details that are in the book.  He quotes old letters, diaries, and other writings from the time.  I’d like to meet him one day.  I’ll be quoting some of his book in this post.

The story I was thinking about occurred in the early morning hours of August 16, 1864, eight miles from the center of Atlanta, Georgia.  Young Alcide was sleeping in the trenches when he was startled awake by the shout of “Attaque!”  It was a trench raid and Alcide grabbed his Bowie knife.  “He looked up to see a Yankee lieutenant with his saber blade crashing toward Alcide’s head.  Alcide raised his arm to protect himself, his knife deflecting the saber stroke into the dirt.  The Yankee officer aimed a pistol in his left hand at the young Rebel private.  Alcide swung the Bowie knife and crushed the Yankee’s left hand.  He then pulled back the knife and plunged it into the Yankee’s belly.”  The knife was buried in the spine of the Federal who slumped forward, dead.

“Alcide stood panting and pale.  Sweat poured into his eyes.  This was his birthday.  He was nineteen years old – and still alive… Alcide had ‘met the elephant.’  He was no longer a new recruit…for the longest time, Alcide stared at the Union officer’s dead face.  He wondered why this poor dead Yankee would want to kill him.  He felt saddened and guilty over the man’s death.”  He reached over and pulled the cap down over the dead Yankee’s eyes and thought, “Meilleur vous que moi.” (Better you than me.)

What an intense story!  I can’t imagine facing such a situation.  We mostly live in a very peaceful time.  But during the Civil War, things could get pretty brutal.  Since I descend from Alcide, I am very pleased with the outcome of the confrontation.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.  Like Alcide, I wonder about the story of the Yankee soldier’s life.  In this book told from the southern perspective, the Yankees are the anonymous others.  It reminds me of ‘Star Trek.’ When those unnamed characters with red shirts beamed down to the dangerous planet with Captain Kirk, you knew they weren’t going to last long.  Sure enough, the next scene would show some unforeseen threat take the life of the forever unknown crew member.

The Yankee soldier that Alcide killed shares that fate.  We don’t know who he was.  I don’t even know where he was from.  Could he have been from Massachusetts, where my mom’s Bucklin family lived for generations?  Or maybe he was from Pennsylvania, where her Phenice line was from?  I don’t think we’ll ever know.  I’m sure he was from a family, though.  There could be some other family historian looking at an old great uncle or cousin in their tree and wondering, “I wonder what ever happened to him?”  Oh, the woes of war.

Betty Lou: Pretty in Green

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Last week I mentioned that my mom and our next door neighbor were in the same graduating class from Hathaway.  I looked through my posts to find the photo of their Hathaway High School graduating Class of 1951.  But I didn’t find it.  I’ve never posted the photo before.  The group photo that I did post with both of them in it was a photo of the Hathaway Hornets basketball team from 1948.  So I thought I might post their graduation photo this week.

Betty Lou Bucklin (later Landry) in 1948 in Hathaway, Louisiana.

But then I came across this old photo.  I posted a similar photo of her two years ago.  She was wearing the same dress and her hair was similar, so I’m thinking it was from the same time.  The one I posted before was definitely a school photo that was taken in 1946.  So little Betty Lou Bucklin would have only been thirteen years old when this photo was taken.  She looks much more mature than that.  My mom in her later years wrote on the back of this photo that she was fifteen years old at the time. 

Oh, wait.  I just realized something.  I have a black and white version of this photo and it looks like it came from a textured photo.  My mom is actually wearing this same dress in a photo with her siblings that I’ve posted before.  The date of that photo was 1948, so that goes along with Mama’s writing on the back of the photo.  So she either took an individual photo with the photographer on the same day they took the family photo, or there is another version of that family photo out there.  Because it is not a crop of the family photo I have.  She has her head turned in that photo.

My mom must have liked this photo, too.  She had an 8 x 10 enlargement made of it.  I think she did that in the 70s when she was hand-tinting black and white photos.  There are two enlargements of her that I think she used to practice her skills.  So when I came across those photos last weekend, I thought it was time to make the dramatic combination of them and hopefully come up with something I could use as a post.  I liked the colors she used in the tinting, but it was cropped too much for my taste.  So I used the cropping from the black and white photo and the coloring from the hand-tinted photo.  I tried to stay true to the colors that she used.  But I also wanted to darken the background to give it a more dramatic look.

Of course I cleaned up the photo and sharpened it a little.  And Voila!  Here is the final result.  I am very pleased with it.  She looks so striking in the photo.  It’s a keeper.

Trees of My Youth

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No, I’m not talking about family trees.  I’m talking about trees – like the ones your find in the forest.  But these are not just any trees, they are trees associated with many memories from when I was young.  The main reason I’m talking about that is because I wanted to post a favorite photo from my childhood.  I actually thought I had posted it before.  But when I searched my postings, I didn’t find it.  I thought I may have posted a photo of the tree from the photo in one of the photos from my snow post from last year, but I didn’t post that one either.

The mimosa tree at 758 Lucy Street in Jennings, Louisiana, in May of 1967.

This is the photo I’m talking about.  Isn’t it great?  It’s a photo of me and two of my siblings in the mimosa tree at our home in Jennings in 1967.  We lived in the yellow house at 758 Lucy Street.  We had moved there in 1964.  Later we would put wood siding on the house, but at this time the house was still yellow.  Not that you can see it in this photo.  At first glance you notice our dog Princess at the base of the tree and me sitting in the tree above her.

But then you look closer and you can see my younger sister Jamie to the right and my older brother Al a little higher up on that same branch.  All six of us kids used to play up in that tree.  Even other kids from the neighborhood played in the tree.  One time we had a few too many people in the tree.  I was on a branch with one of my Minter neighbors and the branch cracked beneath us.

So many memories of that tree.  I remember talking with my brother Rob and his friend Celia Joe under that tree.  I remember my sister Jodie and her friend Pam speaking their secret language under that tree.  Now that I think about it, they may have been speaking pig Latin and I didn’t know what it was yet.  Karen, Jamie, and I (and maybe Al) used to climb up in the tree and pretend that the seed pods were money, so we collected as many as we could.  We were rich!

The Landry family in 1963 in Jennings, Louisiana.

One of my first memories associated with trees is from around 1963.  That’s when we lived out in the country!  Actually we lived just north of the I-10 in Jennings on Highway 26 in a two story house we rented for two years.  On the west property line near the house was a fig tree.  I’m not sure if it is the same fig tree you see in this photo which I have shared before.  But I remember a baby bird falling out of a nest in the tree and someone told me not to touch it.  If I would touch it, the mama bird would smell me on the bird and not want anything to do with her little baby bird anymore.  Something I believed without questioning for the longest time.   Birds are very devoted to their young, even if they do smell of stinky little boys.

I don’t have a photo of one of my favorite trees.  It was a tree my grandfather Bucklin had in his yard.  My grandfather Fred Bucklin was a nurseryman and one of his specialties was grafting.  He did that a lot with citrus trees.  He would graft the better tasting trees onto the hardier root stocks.  The tree that was my favorite was one that had several different citrus fruits on the same tree.  He had grafted parts of a lemon tree, a lime tree, a tangerine tree, and a grapefruit tree all on the same trunk.  I’m not exactly sure of the types of fruit, but I know there were four of them.  So it produced all four different fruits.  I always enjoyed eating those fresh citrus fruits from their trees out in the country in Hathaway.

Another memory that came up this week is associated with trees.  When we moved to Jennings in 1964, the neighbors to the east of us were the Theunissens.  The mother Carol was a fellow 1951 graduate of Hathaway with my mom Betty Lou Bucklin Landry.  They had some large tallow or china ball trees in their back yard.  I have a memory of them having a rope line from one tree to another and we were zip lining across the yard.  It’s a “memory” that I’m not sure is real.  Maybe one of the Theunissens will verify that one way or the other.  I’m very curious.

What I am sure of is that my brother Al and I helped the neighbors on the other side of us – the Hotards – build a clubhouse at the base of their big pine tree in the back yard.  No girls allowed!  I remember climbing that big pine tree, too.  What a mess!  You get that nasty pine sap on your hands and it is so difficult to get it off.  We had a few big oak trees in our yard through the years that I liked to climb as well.  No sap to worry about.  When I was older, I even climbed up there with my little 3-year-old niece Sarah.  We went far higher than we should have, though nothing bad happened. 

Before I go, I thought I’d mention the historic event that happened today.  Queen Elizabeth of England died after over 70 years of reign.  She lived to the ripe old age of 96 – a good long life.  Though I have made fun of devotees of the monarch through the years, I do think she was a respectable person.  She did a lot of positive things for the world. So I tip my hat to her.  And really, when people think back on this day, they are going to remember it as an end of an era because of her death.  Maybe my story about trees will come in a close second?!

Star Social Club Initial Ball of 1902

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That title seems like a mouthful, but it says what the topic of this post is pretty well.  The only thing it doesn’t tell you is that the event took place in Plaquemine, Louisiana.  To be a bit more accurate, it was in Crescent, Louisiana, a small community down the bayou from Plaquemine.  Someone posted some information about the Star Social Club on the Plaquemine Facebook group a few weeks ago.  I had to make a comment about it because my great grandfather Vincent Maximilian “Max” Patureau was one of the founding members of the club about 120 years ago.  My paternal grandmother Erie Patureau was just a young girl at the time.  She was one of Grampa Max and Gramma Marie Therese’s ten children at the time.

Invitation from 1902 to the home of Mr. V. M. Patureau

I wasn’t the only one who commented.  There were a few comments that were kind of interesting, but then I came across an amazing one.  It had this old invitation or ticket to the event from the initial ball for the Star Social Club in 1902.  That’s what you see here.  Of course I commented on this old piece of memorabilia with a reference to my very own Mr. V. M. Patureau.

Surprisingly, I heard back from the person in possession of the card and he said that he wanted to give it to me.  I told him I’d happily accept it!  He got it from a friend who found it in some of his old family papers.  I suppose the name V. M. Patureau didn’t mean as much to them as it does to me.  So I told him my address and now the invitation is mine.  Thanks, Mike C!

Article from the May 24, 1902, Weekly Iberville South.

Of course I had to look to see if I could find out the date of this “initial” ball.  Tommy Landry was my grandmother’s first cousin, and in his book about the Landry family, he had an invitation from a December 27, 1902, ball for the club.  So I figured the initial ball was probably from the year before.  After looking through that book, I looked at some old newspaper clippings that I had saved.  It didn’t take me long to find out the date.

In this newspaper article from the Iberville South in May 1902, it gives the date of the initial ball as May 24, 1902.  It, too, mentions that the event took place at the home of my great grandfather.  So it looks like there were two balls in 1902.  I don’t know if they had two balls every year or not.  I suppose it could be that they decided to have two that year because they had actually built the Star Club Hall during that year.  The invitation for the December ball says that it was in the hall.  I’m thinking it was newly completed and they wanted to celebrate that with a ball.  Why not?

But that first ball must have been special.  There probably was a bit of excitement in the air at the Patureau household that third week in May of 1902.  I’m pretty sure their house wasn’t very old at the time.  I saw some writing recently that talked about a large fire that destroyed all of the buildings on the Patureau homestead on March 18, 1900.  It’s a good thing the Patureau bed was with Max’s younger sister Victorine, or it might have been destroyed as well.

So the Patureau home was a newish two years old at most.  I wonder if little 7-year-old Erie Patureau was excited about having a ball occur at her childhood home?  It seems likely that she would have.  The event was the talk of the community.  It was in the local paper after all!  Besides the piece of the newspaper you see here, there was another reference to it on the same page.  It said that the Club would be entertaining that night and that  “No doubt the affair will be a pleasant one.”  I’m sure the family was making sure their home looked the very best for the event.  There was to be dancing and eating and socializing and much merriment.

It makes me think about the scene of the ball from “The Sound of Music.”  Not that the ball in little Crescent would be as grand as that one.  The main part I think about is when the children in the movie sing “So Long, Farewell” as they head off to bed.  I picture little Erie singing, “Adieu, to you, and you and you and you…”  I’m sure that did not happen, but I still think it must have been a memorable event from her childhood.

On left is the Patureau home and on the right is the Star Social Club Hall. I’m not sure who all the people are. This is looking south down Patureau Lane.