Memoirs of a Cajun Boy

MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY

by Allen John Rogers

CHAPTER FIVE HOSPITAL AND REHABILITATION

I arrived at Camp Kilmer in late April 1953. My mustering out date was on or about 20 April 1953. I had to take my exit physical at Camp Kilmer and it was there that my next fork in the road appeared. Here I was, a seasoned veteran, having to peel potatoes and was busy at this job when I was called on the loudspeaker system and told to go back to the hospital. They told me there that they needed to take a full sized chest x-ray. They did so and shortly I was sent to an infirmary and isolated. I was told that I had tuberculosis (TB). When they said that, I was never more frightened in my life.

I was sent to the U.S. Army Hospital in Fort McClellan, Alabama aboard a hospital plane and placed in a hospital on the base. At first, the army doctors would not tell me how long I was to be there. They said that the only cure was bed rest. They did not give me any medication because they said that it was an inactive case. They said that bed rest for a year would be the only way I could be sure of a cure. So I spent a year flat on my back in a hospital bed. I was too frightened of the disease to do otherwise.

Although I was not incapacitated, I was confined to the hospital with the instructions to stay in the bed. Living in the hospital, I had everything done for me including being bathed by a nurse. I did not like being bathed by a nurse because I never felt clean, so I would sneak out at night and take a shower.

My case of TB was considered inactive. However, there were many in the hospital that had active cases and the daily routine for them was to get an injection of streptomycin. Streptomycin was the only cure for the disease in those days.

While I was there in Fort McClellan I had a visit from my father, my oldest brother Clarence and my brother Howard’s wife Mary. To visit me and not get contaminated, they had to wear long gowns and face masks. My two youngest brothers Ray and Roy came also, but they would not let them in the hospital. They came up to a window and I was able to talk to them.

While I was there, the Korean War ended and the hospital got a flood of patients who had upper respiratory diseases. Many of them had TB. The hospital did not have enough room, so it suddenly became crowded. But, the hospital accepted and treated all of them. For some time there were beds all over the room and out on the porches.

During that year I did a lot of things that I would not have done had I not been confined. For one thing, I had no place to spend my money so I had it sent home and my father put it into a bank account for me. I did a lot of reading and took a correspondence course in bookkeeping with the University of Michigan. After taking the course I decided that bookkeeping was not for me.

I had felt for some time that I could pass the General Educational Development (GED) test if I was given an opportunity to take it. Sometime during my stay in the army a friend who worked in the orderly room of one of our outfits told me that I was a smart guy. At first I thought it was an insult, but he explained that he had looked at my IQ tests and that mine was 130. I always knew that I was fairly intelligent, but had never had it measured. So I tucked that away in my memory for future reference.

In the army hospital I asked if I could take the GED test and they said that they would not administer it to me. After a couple of months with the army, I asked to be transferred to the care of the Veterans Administration (VA).

On 2 September 1953 the army put me on the Temporarily Disabled Retirement List (TDRL). They discharged me to the VA hospital in Alexandria, Louisiana. Being on the TDRL meant that I was still in the army, but temporarily retired because I was disabled. Alexandria was closer to home and I spent the rest of my year there. As soon as I got there I asked to take the GED test and they agreed. I took the test and passed with a 95 percentile. They told me that the score was one of the higher ones and asked me what I wanted to do. I said that I would like to go to college and they said they would prepare me for that.

Me on the left and two of my hospital mates in the VA hospital in Alexandria. The gentleman in the center was a watchmaker.

I was always interested in being a scientist or engineer, but I could not do anything about that because I was not educated enough to attempt a career in the hard sciences. For the first time in my life I felt that I had realized the path to a clear-cut goal. Suddenly, I could see the possibility of getting an education in science. From that moment on that was my goal. I resolved to do everything I could to get prepared to go to college, to successfully finish my education and to achieve that goal. This was the defining moment that decided how I would spend the rest of my working life.

While I was in the rehabilitation center I came down with the mumps. I had all of the symptoms of the mumps and it took me a couple of days to convince the nurses that I did indeed have the disease. It was on both sides. They put me in the infirmary and by that time I had a high fever. It was hot in the wooden building I was in because it was in the middle of summer. I decided to open a window located just above my head and in the struggle to get it open, it suddenly went up and jammed the middle finger of my left hand. It was very painful. They gave me a pan of warm water with Epsom slats to soak it in. The fingernail eventually got black and fell off. The doctors were concerned that because of the TB I could have complications, so they gave me an injection of a combination of streptomycin, the standard medication for TB, and penicillin. This caused me to come down with a very severe reaction. There were great welts on all of my joints and I could not move them. If I moved them I would feel like I had done hard labor all day. Here I was, 24 years old, fever and pain from the mumps, aggravated pain from the smashed finger and fearing for my life from the reaction to the antibiotics. Being young and vigorous, I survived.

When my year was up, my VA advisors said that in order to get back on my feet I should go to their rehabilitation center. They were right because after a year of having everything done for me, I was afraid to get out in the streets alone. The center was located at Swannanoa, North Carolina. They said that I could continue my studies there. Another fork in the road – I decided to go to the center.

At Swannanoa

On a Blue Ridge trip.

Enjoying the sunshine in Swannanoa

I went to the center in the spring of 1954. The center was like a private school. I took a set of preparatory classes there and by the time I left in the fall of that year, I was ready to go to college. I had already decided with the guidance of the doctors and the VA to go to an engineering school. I applied to LSU and Tulane but they would not accept me without a high school certificate. I would have to go to prep school to enter. So I applied to SLI in Lafayette, Louisiana and they accepted me based on my GED score. I did not know it at the time, but SLI was not an accredited school. They were preparing to seek accreditation. My application was too late for the first semester, so I had to wait until February of 1955 to start.

While I was in Swannanoa I asked for a leave of absence and I went by bus to visit my brother Cullen, his wife Ruth and their two children Linda and Helen who lived in Winterville, North Carolina at that time. They lived on a tobacco farm and were harvesting the crop and putting it in the tobacco barn when I got there. I helped them put the tobacco in the barn and generally enjoyed my visit.

I left Swannanoa in September of 1954. When I left the doctors told me that I would have to go to a VA center for a checkup every 6 months. The VA center in New Orleans was closer to where I lived, so I decided to go there for the checkups.

When I got home one of the first things I did was to buy a brand new car, a 1954 Ford Mainline. I used some of the money that I had put in the bank. It was the cheapest car that Ford made and I paid $2000 cash for it. It had no radio or heater, but I added those later. A friend of mine worked for the Ford agency in Morgan City and got the radio and the heater for me at wholesale and I put them in myself. I bought it because I would need it to go home on weekends, a distance of 70 miles on Highway 90.

My new 1954 Ford Mainline. I am in front of our house at 607 Greenwood Street. Mrs. Bordelon’s house is in the background across the street in the middle.

Being home for this period of time allowed me to get some recreation. My brother Ray, an avid fisherman, introduced me to bass fishing. I had never caught a large mouth bass in my life. He and I took the levee road and went to Stephenville and were fishing from the road in a small pond that fed off of the river. I was fishing for perch. He had a casting rod with a Hula Popper lure on it. He told me to cast it in the little pond and give it a few pops. I did and a large bass leaped out of the water, devoured the bait and started running with it. I did bring in the bass and from that time on I was as hooked as the bass. From then on, Ray and I spent a lot of time together hunting and fishing around the Morgan City area.

By the time I was accepted at SLI I had decided that I would major in electrical engineering and minor in mathematics. I went to college under a special VA law that provided tuition and supplies plus a monthly stipend of $75. They also paid me a decreasing disability that started at $180 a month decreasing to $67 a month. I would be paid the latter for the rest of my life. In those days one could live fairly well on $255 a month.

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