 |
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY
by Allen John Rogers
CHAPTER THREE LIFE IN MORGAN CITY- PART TWO
John catching crawfish in March of 1949 (3)
This is a current photo of the Morgan City High School I went to. It is now known as Shannon Elementary.
The concrete structure in the foreground is the approach to the Huey P. Long Bridge. (1)
The school that I went to before I dropped out is a three story brick building on the north side of Brashear Avenue at the foot of the Huey P. Long Bridge. It is shown in the photo below and is currently called Shannon Elementary along with a companion structure. The companion structure just to the east of that building was built after the war.
One day when I was working at the hotel, as I was getting ready to return to work from lunch, mama asked me to put down the window in the kitchen because the weather looked like we would have a storm. I was putting down the window when I saw a brilliant blue flash and a loud boom. I looked up and saw a streak of fire in the wallpaper running all the way across the ceiling. I learned later that it was ball lightning. I heard my mother scream in the front of the house and ran there. I found her next to the front door lying on the floor and my two youngest brothers screaming next to her. I picked her up and put her on her bed, told the kids to be quite, went to the bathroom to get some spirits of ammonia to wake her up and came back. Using the ammonia I got her awake. Then I went out the back door and hooked up the water hose and came into the kitchen and sprayed the ceiling that was burning merrily by then. I wet everything including an alarm clock that we used in the kitchen.
When I had finished that, the enormity of what had happened hit me. I found that I could hardly hear anything and that scared me. I started to assess the damage and found that all of the electrical circuits were out, a socket where the radio was connected in my bedroom had exploded, the screen wire on the back porch had been punctured and an unconnected extension cord coiled and hung on a nail had been severed. I had made a radio antenna for my radio from one I had gotten from an automobile and attached to a bamboo pole that I used to as a staff to extend it well above the roof. I had rigged it up on top of the back porch. Part of the lightning bolt had been attracted to it and had been blown to bits and the bamboo staff that I had attached it to looked like a tan palm tree. The antenna had not been grounded except through the circuit that supplied electricity to the house and radio.
I went to the front of the house and found that part of the gable had been blown away. In the kitchen there was a hole about 4 inches in diameter above the window where the ball of lightning had entered. The bolt had been so powerful that a piece of wood from side of our house where the ball entered was stuck in the window screen of the house next door. Doctor Jacquet, who owned the house that we rented, came over to check us out and view the damage. I told him about my hearing. He examined me and he said that my hearing would come back in a day or two; it did. Being in the middle of the war, we had to wait for two months for the electrical circuits to be reinstalled. In the meantime we went back to using kerosene lamps for lighting.
The older part of Morgan City today, the north side of Greenwood Street is where the lower part of Highway 90
from Front Street to Sixth Street is now located (2)
The city of Morgan City for many years was called Brashear City. It carried that name during the Civil War. When Morgan built the railroad into Brashear City, the people were so impressed with the progress that it brought that they renamed it Morgan City. It was also called Tiger Island because the land resembled the head of a tiger. It was literally surrounded by water and swamps. On the west end of the city, Sixth Street ended at Mrs. Aucoin’s house (on the map shown above this point is at the upper corner of the "M" in Morgan City). A shell road ran from there to Lake Palourde. This road is now called Route 70 and goes north to Pierre Part and Interstate Highway 10. In the spring the area northeast of the end of Sixth Street would flood and be under a couple of feet of water. That area now has the Morgan City High School on it. I would to go there to catch crawfish. The water was just high enough for them to flourish. A pair of knee boots was sufficient to keep my feet dry. It was there that I was catching crawfish in the picture of me shown above.
Quite often in the spring the lower end of Morgan City near the railroad bridge would flood. The merchants had to do something because the flood was inevitable and they did do something about it. They built scaffolding in the high-ceilinged stores and put as much of the merchandise as possible up on it until the flood subsided. I remember one year that the water went all the way up to the post office on Second Street. It did not get into the post office because it was built on high ground.
To put this story in perspective, one has to understand the times we lived in. Louisiana in the 1930’s and 1940’s was a segregated society. During this time some states including Louisiana practiced, by law, an apartheid system many knew as the Jim Crow law, setting African Americans apart from Caucasians, denying them their constitutional rights. The hotels in this little town would not accept black people, although the laws did not specifically deny them the right to stay in hotels. White restaurants accepted black people only as carryout patrons and they had to go to the back of the restaurant to order and get their food. There were separate restroom facilities for whites and blacks in public institutions. There was a so-called "separate, but equal" school system. Of course it was far from equal. And of course, if you lived during those times, you knew that black people were forced to sit in the back of the bus and many black people were forced to live in separate parts of towns. All of this began to come apart when, in 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to practice segregation in nation's public schools.
With that perspective, we can return to life in the little town of Morgan City. Many black people lived in a section of town that was south of the railroad tracks and west of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. But, because Morgan City at that time was essentially a small island, there were also many black people living among the white people. Dr. Jacquet owned the house my father rented. He was a black man. We lived across the street from Mrs. Bordelon, widow of the late Reverend Bordelon who was the pastor of one of the black churches in Morgan City. Altogether, there were four black families living across the street from us. Two Italian families, two Cajun families and us lived in the block on our side of the street.
For a reason unknown to me, the northwest part of the town at that time was often referred to as "Clingsville" and a lot of poor people lived there.
One of the customs observed in Morgan City was the pledging of St. Joseph’s Altars every year on St. Joseph’s Day. A St. Joseph’s Altar is a large table covered with food of all kinds, in the center of which is a large framed picture or statue of St. Joseph. Nearly every Italian family in town would have a table. The altar would occupy practically the whole floor space of an ordinary room. Large loaves of Italian home made bread, in diverse shapes and forms, are placed in different sections of the table. Fruits and vegetables of every description, in season and out of season, practically cover it. You will find a great quantity of fish, but no meat is allowed. Italian pastries of all sorts add the finishing touch to the Altar. A priest will come in and bless the Altar. On the day of the feast, a small boy and a small girl are chosen to represent Jesus and Mary and an old man to represent St. Joseph. A procession to the Church, in stocking feet, takes place. Everyone goes to Mass and Communion. On the return home, the little ones representing Jesus and Mary enter and the doors of the house are shut. The old man depicting St. Joseph, walks around the house three times. At the end of each round he knocks on the door. Those within ask: "Who is there?" He responds: "A poor Man!" They retort: "There's nothing for you here." At the end of the third round, he is admitted and begins the distribution of food to the poor.
In Louisiana, the preparations are made, a priest is called in the day before and the Altar is blessed. Pious souls sit up, throughout the night, reciting Rosaries, Litanies and singing hymns. Nothing on the table is touched until the next day. Mass is heard and Communion received. Afterwards, food is given to the crowds who visit the Altars during the course of the day. Baskets and bags of food are sent to the poor and to friends of the families.
Mrs. Grizzaffi and her family would pledge a St. Joseph’s Altar and they would be busy for days making the food for the table. Neighbors and relatives would come in and help with the preparations. By St. Joseph’s day, the table was laid out and the people were invited to eat. Mrs. Grizzaffi had a particular fondness for me and she would save out a bag of a sweet pastry for me. The pastry that I loved so much was filled with a fig mixture. The fig mixture was rolled in the pastry dough and the filled dough was made into a ring. Slits were cut into the sides of the ring and the pastries were baked.
Today we think of the ballpoint pen as an everyday utility writing instrument. They are given away as advertisement media. I remember when the first ballpoints came out. They were produced by a company named Reynolds and were very expensive. I was still working in the store and one of the other clerks had bought one. He had to save up his money to do it, they cost $8.00 each in a day when that could be a weeks wages. They worked, but not very well, tending to leak ink.
Some time after the war I got into an argument with one of the bosses and quit working for Grizzaffi’s store. It was another fork in the road. I was 15 or 16 years old. I quit and went to work for a time as a dispatcher for a cab company. The company was called Boo’s Taxi and was owned by the Cutrera brothers. It was one of those jobs where I was to really observe life in that little town. Some of the drivers were ex-Rosie the Riveters who were gay. They wore male clothes and had male mannerisms. They would form bonds and get into domestic arguments just like married people. I found their relationships amusing. One of them was smart as a whip and could do crossword puzzles at blinding speed.
I already had a radio operator’s license, so I had no problem there. In those days there were not many people or businesses that owned two-way radios, so the FCC had a lot of time to police the airways. It was a federal offense to use obscene language on the airways. An occasional "damn" used accidentally by a driver or dispatcher could bring about legal action by the law. I had to remind the drivers about that every once in a while. Contrast that with what you hear on the radio and television today!
That job did not last long. It was even lower paying than the grocery store. One day I talked to Sam Grizzaffi who, along with Tony Freia ran the Royal Hotel on Brashear Avenue. He needed a man to run the hotel, so I got the job. It had fairly good pay, but like jobs of that kind, it was still near the bottom of the pay scale. I had to work from 7 o’clock in the morning to 7 o’clock at night for two weeks and for the next two weeks I had to work the opposite shift. It was a killer of a job; I never got enough sleep when I was working nights and dreaded the time when I had to shift.
While I was working there, the offshore drilling business began in earnest in the Gulf of Mexico. Daddy got a job, at first as a roustabout on a drilling rig and later as a cook on an offshore drilling platform. His last offshore job was as chief cook on the Magnolia drilling rig. He is shown in the picture below taken on the rig. Shortly after he died in October of 1972, I received a certificate naming him an offshore pioneer.
L-R: Mula (unknown first name), my father Harris Rogers, Ivy Theriot, Unknown Person
The hotel business picked up and a lot of the oilmen would live there. One company had a short wave radio put in the hotel lobby so that they could communicate with their operations offshore. I had an operators license so I could operate it for them. One day a major storm came up and one of the boats got into trouble. I talked to the captain until we lost contact with him. The boat did founder near one of the Mississippi outlet passes as they were trying to get back into the river, but miraculously all of the men were rescued. Some of them who lived in the hotel really had tales to tell.
One of my jobs was to run a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) that was used to operate the phone system in the hotel. I became friends with all of the long-distance operators in the area. Sometimes at night when all was quite we would have a roundtable discussion. It was a lot of fun because I could talk to the operators in all of the cities and find out what was going on there. Of course they were all women and I did date one of them who lived in Morgan City.
One day when I was working in the hotel the temperature dropped down to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. This was unheard of in my young life and was an extreme rarity this far south. The propane pipe carrying the gas into the house must have gotten moisture in it because it froze and mama could not run the space heaters to keep the house warm. She wound up in the bed with all of the covers she could find along with my two youngest brothers. I bought an electric radiant heater and brought it home but it just could not heat the room. They managed the problem by staying in bed. The next day the weather warmed up and the pipes thawed. It had gotten so cold in the house that the goldfish bowl with two goldfish in it was frozen solid.
1. Photo courtesy Mr. Joe Whiting: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/8201/my_city.htm Map courtesy: http://www.expedia.com/ Photo courtesy one of my brothers.© Copyright 2000 Allen John Rogers
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7
Page Design by Edmond Rogers
