Category: Landry

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.

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!

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?!

When you read this post, you’ll see that it is another one about my dad’s side of the family.  This is the third one in a row, in fact.  I usually try to switch back and forth every week.  But last week I just had to post that photo of the Patureau family heirloom.  That was the bed that was brought from France in 1840 and is now in my home.  I finally got it fixed up and ready for viewing and couldn’t wait another week.  In addition to that, I knew that this week I was going to post this letter from August of 1952.  It was written exactly 70 years ago this week.  I’ll just have to believe my maternal relatives will be okay with that.  Besides, I’ve got a really good one planned for next week about my maternal grandmother’s family member.  Just you wait and see!

So this post is about another event that happened during the year of my parents’ wedding.  I’m pretty sure they got engaged around the beginning of 1952.  Sometime around that they met each other’s parents.  I wrote a post about that a month ago.  Then my dad went off to boot camp for the Air Force in June or July.  I posted a letter that his sister Frances and his mom Erie wrote to him in June of that year.  I never wrote anything about it.  In that letter they talk about Aunt Zim being ill.  I had to look it up to see if she had died that year.  She hadn’t, but her husband Uncle Joe died in June 1952.  That was Pee Paw’s brother.   I don’t know if my dad was able to go to that funeral or not.  I remember him speaking fondly about Uncle Joe and Aunt Zim.

While he was at training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, he got this letter from his mom.  Her name was Germaine Erie Patureau Landry.  Her friends knew her as Erie.  Her children knew her as Mama.  She was Mee Maw to me and my cousins.  She signs this letter as Mother.  I was looking through my family history stuff the other day and ran across this letter.  On the back of the envelope, it says that it was received August 19, 1952.  Mee Maw says in the letter that she started the letter on a Saturday and finished it on a Sunday.  I looked up an August 1952 calendar online and saw that the corresponding dates were August 16 and 17.  So I decided that I would write the post on the anniversary of the writing of the letter.  So that’s what I’m doing.

In the meantime, last Sunday I heard something on TV that is related to what the letter is about.  The report was about a case of polio in New York.  I’m sure that if any of my cousins read or saw the news about this polio case, they thought about or mentioned our Aunt Mildred.  She contracted polio in the first week of August 1952, she had fever for eight days, and she was completely paralyzed.  According to Mee Maw, “she was the most pitiful sight I have ever seen.  It made us all sick.  I couldn’t eat for three days…”  She was very concerned about her sweet daughter-in-law.

Mildred was married to my dad’s older brother Hubert.  They had an older brother named A. J. and he is mentioned in the letter.  A. J. was married to Margie.  Daddy also had an older sister named Marie.  She is not mentioned in this letter, but she is mentioned in the June letter.  They had recently moved back to Lake Charles, which is where the family lived.  Hubert and Mildred were the first ones to give Mee Maw and Pee Paw grandchildren – and my godmother Shirley never lets any of us forget it.  She is The First after all.   But Mildred needed specialized care, so she was sent to Foundation Hospital in Alexandria.  At night time she was put in an iron lung to help her with breathing so she could gain back some of her strength.  Hubert went up there to be with her.

So Mee Maw and other family members were helping out with their children.  After The First, Hubert and Mildred also had three sons by 1952.  She mentions Kenneth first, saying he is “too cute and says almost anything.”  But more importantly to my dad, little Kenneth would say “Bobbie” when he saw the fishing tackle.  My dad and grandfather liked to fish a lot back then.  Pee Paw was going to have vacation soon and he was going to spend time with A. J. “murdering” the fish.  She mentions that Shirley’s birthday is at the end of the month and we shouldn’t forget it.  Thanks for the reminder, Mee Maw!  She also talks about how Hugh B. is her “little shadow.”  I don’t think she was taking care of Dennis.  He was a newborn at the time.

That August was an eventful time in the life of the family.  Mildred would recover, but her legs would remain weakened by the polio.  She would either walk with assistance from Hubert or use a walker.  My mom was always impressed with the devotion that Hubert had for Mildred.  He would work tirelessly to help her exercise and keep her legs stretched so that she would have the most mobility possible.

My dad would continue with his training, though I’m sure at times he wished he could be with his family.  We know that he was looking forward to getting married later in the year.  He and my mom wrote sweet letters to each other during that time.  It’s nice to have these old letters to give a glimpse into what was going on all those years ago.  I’m glad they saved a few of them.

I’ve shared several photos of my paternal grandfather before.  I haven’t shared this one before and that kind of surprises me.  When I think of old photos of my grandfather during World War I, this is the first photo I think of.  Not because it is the best photo of him from that time period, but because it was the one that I was most familiar with when I was a kid.

My dad had this in his collection of old photos.  So when I put together a family photo album when I was in junior high school, this photo was one of the first ones to go into it.  My dad’s father was named Robert Joseph Landry when he was born on January 9, 1893.  His parents were Alcide Landry and Marie Celeste Leveque. 

We’ve looked at the Landry household during the 1900 Census.  That year, Rob was the youngest member of the household at 7 years old.  It also included his parents and his five older siblings – Elie, Seb, Joe, Louie, and Marie Therese.  There was an older sister named Lily that was born in 1870, but she had died in 1889.  That was before Rob was born, so he didn’t know her.  In a sad twist of fate, his sister Marie Therese also died at about the same age in 1909.  She was closest to Pee Paw in age, so he would have been close to her.  He later named his first daughter after her.  Actually, Mee Maw’s mother was Pee Paw’s first cousin and her name was also Marie Therese Landry.  She also died in 1909, so Aunt Marie was probably named for both of them.

But before all of that came to pass, Rob Landry grew up in the Landry household with four older brothers.  I don’t know if any of his brothers were in the military, but his father Alcide had been in the Civil War along with his brother Trasimond.  And even though Rob was interested in baseball and was pretty involved in the sport, he registered for the military on June 5, 1917.  He was stationed at Camp Lee in Virginia according to some of the photos I’ve seen.  I know that he ended up having some hearing loss because of the training with munitions.  I also know that he was at Camp Humphreys in August of 1918.  The war ended not long after that, but I don’t know if Pee Paw was let go because of the loss of hearing or if it was because of the war being over.

Oh, look, I found the discharge papers.  There is no mention of any disability, though I know I’ve heard that he had hearing loss as a result of military training.  It also says that he was at Camp Humphreys  in Virginia.  Camp Lee was another camp in Virginia during the Great War, and he may have been at both of them.  I’ve also seen a date of 1919 on some of the photos, but from this document that seems unlikely.  It says that he was discharged in December of 1918.

There’s one more thing.  Have you been able to figure out which one of the soldiers was my Pee Paw?  I probably should have told you from the beginning.  He is the soldier standing on the front row on the far right.  If you don’t know your left from your right, he’s the guy in the front with a smile on his face.

A few weeks ago I posted a photo of my mom as a child.  In that post I said that I couldn’t believe that I had never posted a photo of her as a child before.  The same could be said about my dad.  I’ve posted a few photos of an unidentified  Landry infant where it might have been him.  I usually say that I think it might be him, but the photos do represent the Landry children of that generation.  But I do have a photo – actually there are two of them – that is definitely of my dad.

This is Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. in 1929.  He was born on January 31, 1929, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and I don’t think he is older than a year in this photo.  Before you say anything, just know that this photo has been edited to make it look as good as I am capable at this time.  The photo is not in very good shape.

Actually I don’t even think that what I had to copy it from was a photo print.  I think it may have been photographic paper that had been exposed to light to capture the image, but it was somehow never processed to set the image for a print.  All I know is that there were these two ‘photos’ of my dad as a child in an envelop in the top dresser drawer in my parents’ room when we were growing up.  I remember looking at them from time to time, but my mom always warned me about exposing them to bright light or they would fade more.

As you can see the image has been damaged by the exposure to light.  Somehow it looks like there is a double image on it.  Thankfully that line does not go across my dad’s face in the photo.  His face is actually the clearest part of the photo, so you can see little Bobbie’s face with his pale eyes showing.  My dad had light blue eyes.  He was known as Bobbie when he was a kid.  As he got older, he acquired more names to identify himself – Bob, Pluto, Mr. Landry, Daddy, or Pappy.

But of course I went with Baby Bobbie for the name of the post.  It is a photo of my dad as a child, after all, and there is a ring to the title.  There is also a sense of mystery to the photo.  I wonder what he was peering at so intently all of those years ago?  For many mysteries I come across, I go searching for an answer.  This is not one of those mysteries.