Pee Paw in Uniform Circa 1918

Robert Joseph Landry, Sr. circa 1918 during World War I.

This is a photo that I’ve seen all of my life.  I remember my dad had several photos of his dad from World War I.  When I was young, I thought that World War II was ancient history.  That was back in 1965 or so, which was only twenty years or so after the fact.  So the idea of something as far back as World War I was unfathomable.  Same with the future – I always thought the year 2000 was so far in the future.  I never looked past that.

And now I think that a photo from 20 years ago is a recent photo.  That’s because according to my childhood self, I am unfathomably old!  World War I was fifty years earlier than my childhood, and now I’m older than that.  Oh how the years go by!  

The other thing that was notable about this photo was that it was one of the few ways I got to know my grandfather.  He died before I was born, so I never had any interactions with him.  So I relied on my dad and older family members to know things about him.

His name was Robert Joseph Landry, Sr.  Of course, he wasn’t born a Sr.  He became a Sr. in 1929 when my dad was born.  My grandfather went by the name Rob and sometimes Bob, so my dad was called Bobbie by his family.  My dad called his dad Papa, and the grandchildren knew him as Pee Paw.

Pee Paw was born on January 9, 1893, in Westlake, Louisiana, to 47-year- old Simon Alcide Joseph Landry and 45-year-old Marie Celeste Leveque.  He was the last of ten children born to this couple.  Though when Rob was born, only six of his older siblings were still alive.  He spent his whole childhood in Westlake.  He might have been like me and thought that his dad was so old.  After all, Alcide would have been in his fifties and he had fought in the Civil War.  And unlike me, I think he must have played a lot of baseball when he was growing up.  I do have a photo of Pee Paw as an infant, but there aren’t any of him playing games as a child.

But he must have played a lot, because when he was a young man he was a semi-professional baseball player.  I’ve shared photos of that before.  There are some really good ones of him from that age.  Then in 1917, at the age of 24, he joined the military to be part of the Great War.  He went to training at Camp Humphreys in Virginia.  I think that’s where this photo was taken some time around 1917 or 1918.  He never was deployed or involved in any battles.  The war ended in November 1918 and Robert Joseph Landry was discharged on December 4, 1918.