By the year 1937, Mr. Bernard decided that he was going to retire from the dairy business. His sons wanted nothing to do with dairy farming, so he told daddy he was going to close the dairy and sell the property.  

At that time, Grandma and Grandpa Rogers lived in Morgan City on Federal Avenue. Daddy went there to find work. He got a job with the Norman Breaux Lumber Company. He stayed with Grandma and Grandpa for about two weeks while he worked there and then came home to get us.

We left the farm and went to live in Morgan City. Mr. Bernard helped move us. We used an old truck that he had for work around the farm. We had to cross the river on a ferry because there was no bridge.

Momma and Daddy rented a house on Duke Street from Mr. Jasper Napoli who along with his daughter, Grace, ran a grocery store on one corner of Duke Street. My memory of Grace is vivid because of an incident that occurred when we first moved there. My mother sent me to the store for something, I do not remember what. Unfortunately, in that town, there was a grocery store on every corner and Italian Americans ran it. I went to the store on the wrong corner and Grace saw me and gave me a tongue lashing for going to the wrong store. She emphasized that as long as we rented from them we they expected us to buy our groceries from them.

In those days, the oil industry had not yet come to Morgan City, a sleepy little port that fishermen sailed from to catch shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico, crab in the rivers, rake oysters in the oyster beds in the estuaries and catch fish in the lakes and rivers. Crawfish, the local delicacy, abounded in the swamps, especially in the Atchafalaya spillway north of the city. Located at the confluence of Bayou Teche and the Atchafalaya River, Morgan City is on the east bank and Berwick is on the west bank of the Atchafalaya about 20 miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico. Much of the commerce on the river was devoted to the shrimping and fishing industry. Many fur trappers and fur buyers lived in the city. Not far from Morgan City were swamps that abounded with mink and muskrat. Other major industries in Morgan City were the shell crusher and the lumber business.

Grandpa Rogers was working for the shell crusher in 1929, the year before my birth, broke his hip at work. This left him crippled. He hired a lawyer, sued and won a judgment of $500. He put the money in the bank in Morgan City not long before the stock market crashed in October of that year and the bank failed. He eventually got his money back, but in very small increments.

My father worked for a time in the shell crusher. Because the delta region of Louisiana that we lived in had no naturally occurring sand and gravel, crushed clamshells dug out of Lake Paloude northeast of Morgan City made a good substitute. There, for thousands of years, huge deposits of Paloude clamshells covered the bottom of the lake. The shell crusher crushed the shells and the business flourished for some 20 years. They dredged the shells and sent them to the crusher. There they were crushed between huge rollers and sent through a series of screens. The screens sifted the crushed shells into various sizes. The crushed shells provided for building materials in such things as concrete blocks, road paving concrete mixtures, etc. They also sold the fine grit to chicken farmers as an additive to chicken feed because it was a good source of calcium for the eggshells. Dropping the crushed clamshells on a series of gradually decreasing sized screens sifted the various grades of grit from the shells. Hard rubber balls were dropped on the screens where they bounced around, facilitating the sifting action. This was of interest to us as kids, because daddy would bring home some of the used balls after they had been worn down to baseball or golf ball size by the constant bouncing on the screens. We had a great deal of fun playing with the balls. The balls were made of natural rubber and were very hard. They were also very elastic and resilient and not to be used to play baseball. They remind me of the recent super balls that kids play with today. Anyway, it was not long before we had an accident playing baseball with the things and my brother Howard nearly lost one of his eyes. He had a brilliant mouse under his eye for about a week.

These were the days when three of my brothers and I could go to see a movie (At the Opera House or the Dixie Theatre), and share a bag of popcorn, all for a quarter. We could spend an entire afternoon watching the movie and shorts repeatedly. Our favorites, of course, were the cowboy movies.

 PART  TWO: FOURTH STREET

Clarence went to work for the A & S Grizzaffi Grocery store on the corner of Fourth Street and Brashear Avenue because Norman Breaux laid daddy off and things started to get tough. A few weeks later, daddy got a job at the shell crusher.

Two brothers Angelo and Sam Grizzaffi owned the store. Eventually, all of us except Cullen, Howard and Roy would wind up working for a period at that store. Cullen worked for the Standard Drug Store and Howard worked for Western Union. It was not long before we moved from Duke to Fourth Street.

We lived two blocks down Fourth Street from Grizzaffi’s store. There was another grocery store on the opposite corner of our block on Fourth owned by Italian Americans. I do not remember who owned the store, but convenience brought us to buy things from there occasionally. One of the things I remember about it is that there were freshly dressed chickens hanging from strings tied to the ceilings. During the hunting season, they had freshly dressed raccoon, possum and rabbit hung there. One of the reasons for this is that refrigeration was too expensive in those days. Use of refrigeration was out of the reach of most citizens.

Because of the cost of refrigeration, there was a central meat market located on Front Street on the waterfront. All of the butchers and meat cutters had their markets there. There was one central chill box shared by all of the merchants.

Clarence had saved up some money from his job at A & S Grizzaffi’s Grocery store and bought a radio that ran on batteries. For the first time I heard Roy Acuff singing "The Great Speckled Bird" and "The Wabash Cannon Ball" and many other songs. I learned to love to listen to the radio. There were the broadcast programs such as "Amos ‘n Andy" and "The Green Hornet", and there were the local stations, especially WWL in New Orleans had Henry Dupre and the Dawn Busters, a hilarious group. The station in New Orleans boasted about having a "50,000-watt clear channel station". The FCC controlled the power levels of all stations in the United States. Therefore, it was not so powerful because many of the Mexican stations along the border beamed their super powerful signals into the United States.

This interior photo of A&S Grizzaffi Grocery was made in the late 1930’s. Pictured left to right: Carlo Marino and Angelo Grizzaffi behind counter, Virginia Grizzaffi (Angelo’s daughter), Sam Grizzaffi, Tessie Rock (girl leaning on counter), in doorway: Mary Domino, Ginny Domino Grizzaffi (Sam’s wife) holding her daughter, Virgie; George Bergeron behind Joe Freia (Joe Freia is wearing boots), Luke Guarisco, Ben Marino behind Francis Grizzaffi, Angelo’s youngest daughter; Clarence Rogers and Olga Mae Falgout Plessala. The dog was named "Butch". There is an unknown person behind and hidden by Ben Marino (1)

While we lived on Fourth Street, we raised chickens. The Purina Feed Company had a promotional program where we could get the chicks free and then raise them. Since we did not have a car, we turned the garage in the back part of the yard into a chicken house.

It seems that the firecracker was destined to be the devil's plaything for us small boys. Every year around Christmas time we would have enough money saved up to buy firecrackers, which our inventive nature evolved into all sorts of devilish devices. We had a lot of fun blowing up cans. Put a firecracker on the ground, place a can over it so that the fuse stuck out enough to be able to light it and see the can go to the moon! However, this was the least of our inventions. The neighbors next door also raised chickens. We had an old bicycle that was broken and we had taken it apart. We used a cylindrical part of the steering column housing along with a rubber band to sling arrows. We cut the rubber band out of an old inner tube; tied it around the edge of the cylinder and used it to shoot an arrow. We made arrows from reeds that grew wild in the back yard. To tip the arrows we used a ball of mud with a firecracker forced into it. We would aim the arrow at the neighbors' yard, draw back the rubber band, light the fuse and fire the weapon. We bombarded those poor chickens with these missiles until we felt it was time for the neighbors to come home.

PART THREE: GREENWOOD STREET

It was some time before the war that we moved to our final address in Morgan City. The address was 607 Greenwood Street. You cannot find this address today because a pillar for Highway 90 that bridges across the city sits where the house once stood. We moved there sometime before World War II.

The house sat on a large lot with a big back yard. There was a big pecan tree in the center of the yard and closer to the house there were three fig trees. Back near the pecan tree was an outhouse, with two seats, just the thing you need for a growing family. We used that outhouse for several years until the owner put in a bathroom, running water and electricity in the house. He also buried a propane tank in the back yard and ran the necessary plumbing to the house so we could heat it with space propane heaters. A chinaberry tree grew in the front yard of the house near the road. The memory of the chinaberry tree is a fond one. That chinaberry tree not only provided sweet blossoms in the spring and shade during the summer, but also the ammunition for "pop guns."

Bunches of round, bright green non-edible berries replaced the blossoms when they fell from the chinaberry tree. Elderberry bushes grew in the side yard. The elderberry bushes had white blossoms in the spring followed by purple berries in the summer. The limbs were hollow. To make a gun you would cut a limb that was straight and about a foot long. The pithy core was just a bit smaller than the chinaberries. You would then push out the core with a strong rod or stick. After a couple of days of drying, the hollowed limb was ready for the fitting of a wooden staff. We whittled the staff out of a section of broom handle with four or five inches of it reserved for the handle and the rest whittled down to a shaft that just fit loosely into the hole in the hollow tube. Then we beat the end of the shaft with a hammer until it flayed out so that it had an airtight fit inside the tube. To load the gun you would force a chinaberry into the tube using the shaft and shove it about half way down the tube. Then you would force another chinaberry into the tube with the shaft and as you shoved it down the tube, the air pressure would build up. Now you were ready to fire. You just had to push the shaft against the berry until the first chinaberry would exit the front end of the tube at high speed and with a loud "pop". When we made our first popgun, mamma said, "You’ll put your eyes out with that!" Therefore, it was a covert operation after that. However, we had a lot of fun making them and having shootouts with each other. I do remember those days with a great deal of nostalgia. (2)

I was still going to school when rumblings of war began to disturb the Community, as well as the nation. I was only in seventh grade for about half a school year before I dropped out. During that time we were taught to march and the physical education program for the boys was oriented toward military training. To see if we would make good pilots, they would make us put a broomstick down on the gym floor and run around it to see how dizzy we would get. I always wound up listing to starboard.

As part of the war mobilization effort scrap drives were organized by each community. In Morgan City, each high school class went on scrap drives during the week, so scrap drives were going on just about every day. Every scrap of metal that wasn’t in use was collected and all of it was piled up in the schoolyard. Aluminum was the premium metal because they needed it to build warplanes and they just couldn’t get enough of it. Needless to say, we went into every back yard and garage in Morgan City and with the help of the residents collected a small mountain of scrap metal.

When World War II started, daddy got a job at the Chicago Bridge and Iron (CB&I) shipyard. Between 1941 and 1945, as its contribution to the World War II supply effort, CB&I built floating dry docks and landing ship tanks (LST’s) for the U.S. Navy at shipyards in Louisiana, California, Illinois and New York. They fabricated the floating dry-docks in a shipyard built along the Intracoastal Waterway east of Morgan City. The dry docks were towed across the Atlantic to England to maintain and repair ships. It was not long before men from the Defense Department were going around telling able-bodied men who were not in the service that they would have to work at the shipyard. Daddy worked there as a pipe fitter. Clarence, declared 4-F by the draft board, went to work there. At 75 cents an hour the pay was much better than at Grizzaffi’s where he was being paid $11.99 a week. Had he been paid $12.00, he would have had to pay income tax withholding. He worked as a welder at the shipyard. Clarence and daddy worked at the shipyard until the end of the war. (3)

Sometime before the war started, I got sick with a kidney infection. I was about 10 years old. I was out of school for several weeks. I remember that I spent a week in the hospital where they put me on a salt-free diet and fed me some awful tasting medicine. I went home and continued the salt-free diet and the medicine until one day my doctor, Doctor Fortenberry came to see how I was doing. He said to my mother, "Fry this boy some fatback and feed him. He doesn’t have to be on the diet or take the medicine anymore." On that day, I was the happiest little Cajun in the world.

However, that is when I made the biggest mistake in my life. It was a mistake that I would rue for many years. I look back on life and think of that event as a fork in the road, one at which I took a wrong turn. In my life, there would be many more forks in the road. I stayed around home and did not go back to school. I had an excuse; I had missed too many classes. My mother and father did not say no. However, after a few days mama told me that I would have to get a job and quit hanging around the house.

Therefore, I went to work at Grizzaffi’s store. I remember that it was about 1940 or 1941 when I was 10 or 11 and I was making $7.50 a week. My mother made it quite plain that I was to give her some of that money each week for my upkeep.

The store had a refrigerated meat case, but in the beginning they did not sell fresh meat from it. They used it to keep ham, bacon, bologna, salami and other preserved meats along with milk, butter and other dairy products.

The war brought with it food rationing and food stamps. It was my job at the store to paste the ration stamps in little booklets to submit to the rationing board. This was a not very rewarding occupation. All of the stores were under the watchful eye of the Office of Price Administration. One day there was a full-scale investigation of the Grizzaffi’s because they had marked the price on Hershey’s cocoa at 13 cents instead of 12 cents.

Sam and Angelo’s mother, Mrs. Grizzaffi, lived in a house next door. She had a marvelous collection of encyclopedia that she allowed me to read. I got a great deal of my education from them. I knew that I was intelligent, but it was not until I got into the army that I found out how much.

Notes: 

1. Picture courtesy of Clarence Rogers.

2. Chinaberry Wars By John G. Barnett taken from "Dispatches from Dreamsville" by Joe Murray, Cox News Service 06-14-00. Some words were used from this article to describe how a popgun was made.

3. Chicago Bridge & Iron web page: http://www.cbi-nv.com/history2.html

© Copyright 2000 Allen John Rogers

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