Memoirs of a Cajun Boy

MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY

by Allen John Rogers

CHAPTER SIX SOUTHWESTERN LOUISIANA INSTITUTE

When I finally walked on the SLI campus I had something of an inferiority complex. I felt that I was not as well prepared for college as all of these younger people who had had the benefit of 4 years of high school. I found later that I had nothing to fear. Many of those kids were not fully prepared for college - many had come to college to play.

One of my classes was in college algebra and the man who taught it prefaced the first day with the statement that he was going to flunk half of the class. The reason that he gave was that they would not study and would not be able to pass the tests. And that is just what happened. I was to learn later that all of the colleges in SLI were getting tougher because they were preparing for accreditation.

I spent my first two months in a dormitory, but I soon found that that was not for me. The kids who lived there were not seriously interested in an education. They were more interested in playing poker or Bourre' (also known as ‘booray’ or Louisiana Cajun poker). They would be playing until 2 o’clock in the morning. Most of these would flunk their first freshman semester. By the end of the first semester the formerly densely populated campus would be almost barren of freshman students.

I decided to move to a boarding house run by a Lebanese American family. I got room and board for a fixed rent that I could afford. I roomed for a while with a young man whose surname was Richard who was preparing for medical school. But living in a boarding house was not for me either. I did not like the food - mostly starches and beans, lentils and something called kibby. It was there that I began to have trouble with a duodenal ulcer. I cannot blame the food at the boarding house entirely because I still smoked cigarettes and drank coffee, both of which aggravated the problem. I found a very small apartment just off campus. A fellow named Walter who had lived in the boarding house and I rented the apartment for $40 a month and we split the rent. I liked it because I could cook my own food there and eat out when I wanted to.

It was during the time while Walter was rooming with me that he and I decided to build a boat that we could use to go fishing and hunting. He convinced me that he knew all there was to know about building boats, so we bought the materials and decided to build it in his back yard in Berwick. We set about building the boat one weekend and I soon found out that Walter was stretching the truth somewhat when he said that he knew how to build a boat. After it was apparent that the boat was not taking the proper shape, he finally said that he knew someone who was an expert boat builder and would enlist his aid. He brought an old man over and I guess he was thinking that the old man was going to do the work. However, the old man said that he would sit in the shade and tell us what it is we needed to do to get the boat built. This fellow really knew how to build a boat and presently we put it together following his instructions. Walter, who seemed to have girls follow him about quite a bit, got several of them to help us paint it. One of the girls was the daughter of a painter and it was from her that I learned the term "holiday" that meant a place that was missing paint. Needless to say the boat worked. I made a deal with Walter later on to buy his half of the boat and I bought a 12-horse outboard motor for it. Ray and I built a trailer to haul it around.

Walter left after a few months and Raymond Goulas, who was taking the same courses as I, joined me at the apartment. This was good because several of our classmates could meet with us at the apartment and study together. Studying together helped us bounce ideas off each other to solve problems.

In those days there were no computers or calculators that today’s students use. The school had one analog computer that I never saw. We used slide rules or as we called them "slip sticks" to do our calculations. We had to take a special course to learn how to use them. If you were good at the slide rule, you could get three-place accuracy. For more accuracy in finer calculations you could use 8-place logarithm tables. A mathematician friend of mine at the rehabilitation center gave me a catalog of 8-place logarithms that I treasured and used for many years.

But I was still on TDRL and during my first semester on campus I received orders from Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas to report for mustering out. So I took a few days off and drove to San Antonio to go before the board and it was there that I was mustered out on 20 April 1955 – four years after I was drafted.

I worked very hard at my studies and got straight A’s during that first semester. I did the same in my second semester except for one B and decided that I wanted to finish school as soon as possible because I was 26 years old; an old man compared to some of the other kids. I decided to take another fork in the road and go straight through by attending summer classes. This was not necessarily a good thing to do and I would not advise anyone to do so. Summer school is a lot tougher than the normal semester work. But I decided to tough it out and continued going to school all year long.

This is most of the EE Class of 1958. Left to right: Me, Carroll Wyble, Dudley Bertrand, Tom Guidry, Bill Lowery, Sonny Fontenot, Ray Goulas and Larry Guidry. We are installing a short wave antenna for a ham radio station on top of the engineering building at SLI. Picture taken by Professor Perada.

Shortly after the picture above was taken, we used the ham radio station and the antenna in the picture to listen to the radio signal from Sputnik 1 launched into orbit on 4 October 1957. It was the dawn of the space age. We brought the receiver down to the first floor and put it in the lobby so everyone could hear the signal it transmitted on 20.005 MHz. Man had never before heard a man-made radio signal from an object moving as fast as the orbiting Sputnik. We could detect the Doppler shift in the radio signal as the vehicle passed overhead.

Clarence and Cora Lee at wedding. Cora Lee’s sister Elsie Freeman Hebert and I are the two on the right.

My oldest brother got married on 4 August 1957. It was my junior year at SLI. They were married in the church in Berwick, Louisiana and I was the best man at his wedding to Cora Lee Freeman.

I had a study routine that kept me busy every school day. But, I went home every weekend. My brother Ray and I spent a lot of weekends hunting and fishing. He and I became quite close. There are a lot of fishing and hunting stories I could tell you, but I will relate only one or two. I was never really fond of snakes and I must tell you that my brother Clarence dislikes them so much that he will leave the room if he so much as sees one on TV. This is hardly a desirable trait in a land that breeds many snakes. But, back to the story, one day Ray and I decided to go walk the salt marshes hunting rabbits. So we grabbed our rifles and boots and got in the boat. Arriving at the marshes we got out of the boat, put on our boots and started walking. I should say we tried some walking because it is a very difficult walking on marsh. You tend to sink up to the knees a lot. So we headed to a ridge and climbed up on it. When we got up on top and looked down at the other side we saw two cottonmouth moccasins. I mean all I saw was their white mouths open wide with the fangs pointed in our general direction. Ray told me not to move, pointed his gun at one of them and blew his head off. The other one took off. I was cured of walking marshes.

I went squirrel hunting with brother Ray on the first day of a season. It was my first, and last, squirrel hunt. We took the boat to an island in time to get there before sunrise when the season would officially start. We picked out a place to wait on an oak ridge at the base of a tree. When sunrise came, it sounded like my old days on the army firing range. We weren’t the only ones who had come out to that island, it seemed like every hunter in the area was there. We bagged our limit and went home early. Somehow, I did not like the idea of hunting squirrels. I did not get as much enjoyment from that as I did with fishing.

Back at school I was doing very well. I was elected to the honorary engineering society and the mathematics society. At that time they did not have a Tau Beta Pi chapter at SLI. So I helped doing the groundwork for admission to the society. I had already qualified for membership.

I received my Batchelor of Science degree in electrical engineering degree on 25 May 1958, graduating cum laude. My friend Sonny Fontenot graduated first in the class and I was second.

Graduation: Clarence Rogers, Me, Harris Rogers

I had been interviewing for jobs before I graduated and could find nothing that I wanted. The jobs were somewhat scarce because we had a recession in the economy at that time and companies were firing engineers they had hired from last year’s class. The space era had dawned in October of the previous year and the defense establishment was gearing up to meet the challenge. The one offer I received, liked and accepted was from the Wright Air Development Center (WADC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. The position was as an electrical engineer with the Federal Civil Service and the pay was $4480.00 per year. An added incentive was that I would be promoted to GS-7 in one year. So, the next fork in my road took me to Ohio.

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