Memoirs of A Cajun Boy

MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY

by Allen John Rogers

CHAPTER SEVEN EPILOGUE

Before I left Louisiana I notified the VA Center in New Orleans that I was relocating to Ohio and asked them to send my records to the center in Cincinnati.

Shortly after I graduated, I drove to Ohio in my, by then, old Ford with Rex Farmer a fellow graduate who also had a job at the base. I was hired to work on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in the Wright Air Development Center (WADC) on 3 June 1958. At that time they were hiring engineers in large numbers. They put me on a bus when I reported for work and took me around the base. We stopped at various labs and were briefed on the work and if we saw a job we liked we could stop there. I stopped at the antenna research lab.

For housing, Rex and I got a room in a rooming house in Dayton during the first few months that I was there. After living in the rooming house in Dayton for a few months, I found a little apartment at 224 Pike Street in the city of New Carlisle north of Dayton. When I first moved there in the fall of 1958, I found it idyllic. It overlooked Honey Creek and satisfied my need for being in the country. Rex went to live somewhere else.

After I had been in Ohio for about a year, I became concerned that the VA had not sent any orders for me to report for my bi-annual x-ray and examination for tuberculosis. I wrote them a letter and they sent orders for me to go there. When I arrived I was ushered into a doctors office; I believe that his name was Goldberg. He asked me to sit down. I looked at the top of his desk and he had a pile of my records there. He said that these were all of my medical records and that he had read through them thoroughly. His next words hit me like a blast from a shotgun. He said that he had found nothing in the records that indicated in any way that I had had tuberculosis and nothing to indicate that I had it now. He said that the scars that appeared in my x-rays were not from TB but from pneumonia that I got when I caught the flu in Germany the winter before I was to muster out of the service. He said that there was no need for me to come to Cincinnati every six months to have examinations for something that I did not have.

Reflecting upon this revelation, I realized that it had been a good thing as well as a bad thing. On the one hand I was afforded an opportunity to get an education. The bad part of it was that I had been literally incarcerated for a year and a half for TB when I did not have it. I was afraid not to take the treatment. It did radically change the outcome of my life. I am grateful for having gotten an education. If I had gotten out when I was scheduled to I would have had poor prospects for a job without a high school education. In fact I really did not know where I was going to work when I was going through the mustering out process. I often wonder what would have happened to me if I had gotten out then.

Much of the work I did for the Air Force is classified. In general, working in the antenna research laboratory meant evaluating antennas built both in the labs and by contractors including production contractors as well as research contractors. It also meant monitoring research contracts with industry and with universities. Airplanes presented a very unusual environment for the propagation of microwaves. I found that working on microwave energy devices was very interesting and satisfying work.

One of my first tasks was to monitor a research contract with a professor at a university in Oklahoma. I reviewed the work that they had done over the past few years and found that the professor who was engaged in the work on the contract was just not performing. He had no basis for his research – he was doing what we called “cutting and trying” which means he was trying out various ideas randomly selected with no basis in science. I reported this to my supervisor and he sent me out there to tell them that we no longer could support the effort. The money allocated to that contract was awarded to another university research contract, this one at Ohio State University and I was given the job to monitor it. I did enjoy that work. However, the most satisfying work was installing and testing antennas on airplanes.

In the winter of 1958-1959 I went home for Christmas and New Years. At that time daddy was living in a trailer in Clarence’s back yard on River Road in Berwick. All of my brothers except Howard were there for the Christmas celebration. The picture below was taken at that time.

I left WADC in March of 1961 and went to work at the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC), also on WPAFB. I went there because they offered me a promotion and I was dissatisfied with the management in the laboratory. I was to spend the rest of my career working there.

I had been at ATIC for a few weeks when I received word that my brother Ray was gravely ill. He had terminal cancer. I took leave to go home to be with him in his last days. He died on 14 April 1961. To me it was devastating. His passing affected me as much as, or more than my mother’s death. In the past seven years, he and I had grown very close. Ray was only 22 years old when he died. He had been married on 31 January 1959 to Earline Tourera and they had a daughter named Belinda who was only five and a half months old at the time of his death.

Belinda Marie Rogers

From the time she was in her teens until her death at 26 years old on 23 November 1986 Belinda fought cancer. After Ray’s death, Earline remarried to Ronnie Grizzaffi, the son of Frank Grizzaffi and a friend of Ray’s and mine

I had an extra bedroom in my apartment in New Carlisle and in 1964 my father came to live with me. Although I knew he would have been happier in Louisiana, I was very glad to have him with me and I believed that he could be happy there with me. Having been a cook much of his life he was very good at it and he did our meals during the workday and we would go out to eat on weekends. We got along very well and he was reasonably content living with me. I had not been this close to my dad in my life and I really got to know him better.

However, during the time I lived there a developer built subdivision between New Carlisle and the base where I worked and the commute to work every day became much more than I could handle. So, in October of 1965 we moved to city of Fairborn next to the part of the base where I worked. We lived in an apartment at 17 Vanderbilt Drive for about a year and moved to another, better apartment at 1453 N. Broad Street the next year.

My father and I lived there until he died of cancer on 9 October 1972. This was another devastating blow to me. He had told me that he wanted to be buried next to mama in the Franklin, Louisiana cemetery. So, I made arrangements with a local funeral home, Trostel-Chapman, to have his body flown home. The morning after my father died, Ted Chapman took my father’s body and I to the Cincinnati airport. We flew to New Orleans where an ambulance picked up my father’s body and me and drove us to Morgan City. He was buried next to mama in the Franklin cemetery as he wished.

Unknown to me at the time, the father of my wife-to-be, Phyllis Jean Dailey, had died on 30 June 1972. Phyllis sold her home and came to live at one of the apartments at 1453 N. Broad Street after she had stayed in another apartment complex for about a year. I had known Phyllis for several years because she worked in the same building that I did. When she came to live in the apartment, we became better acquainted.

Ray’s daughter Belinda married Kent St. Germain on 10 February 1979. I flew to Morgan City to be at the wedding. It was one of the largest and most beautiful weddings I have ever seen.

When I returned to my apartment in Fairborn the weather was very cold; around 15 degrees. I was cleaning up my apartment and went to put some garbage into a garbage can. On my return, I slipped on some ice in the driveway. I slipped over backwards and hit the back of my head on the blacktop. I saw a lot of stars. For the next week my head hurt. I went to see my doctor complaining about how much my head hurt. He looked in my eyes, ears, nose and throat, had some x-rays taken and told me that there was nothing wrong with me.

Over the next couple of weeks I started to have problems with my head that I cannot describe. I did continue to work, but I told my boss about what had happened. I worked at a computer console and if I spent any length of time at it I would suffer a spell, I cannot describe it, and almost pass out. Finally, after several weeks of this, I told my boss one Thursday that I was going to see my doctor and would not come back to work until I resolved what was wrong with me. I went back to see my doctor and he sent me to the Greene County hospital to have a series of tests including more x-rays on the following Monday. Over the weekend, I had a couple of episodes where I lost control of my left arm and left leg. This was all very terrifying and being alone made it even more so. At the hospital on Monday, I had completed two tests and was going back to the waiting room when I collapsed in the hallway. By the way, if you want to get immediate attention in a hospital, fall on the floor.

They admitted me to the hospital and my doctor came in later and told me that the position of the tiny pineal gland at the back of the brain had moved between x-rays taken several weeks apart. This indicated that there was pressure on the brain. He made arrangements for me to see a neurosurgeon in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Dayton. Unlike Greene County Hospital, St. Elizabeth’s had a CAT scan machine. The CAT scan machine was a relatively new and there were not many hospitals that could afford one. Dr. Jose Duarte, the neurosurgeon, conducted a CAT scan analysis of my head. Within a few minutes he knew that I had a subdural hematoma - a blood clot on my brain covering most of the right side. He wanted to operate right away, but had to wait until the next day for an operating room.

Left to right: Cora Lee, Phyllis, John and Clarence

Phyllis, who had taken me in her car from Greene County to St. Elizabeth’s called my oldest brother, Clarence and told him. He got in touch with my other brothers and told them what had happened to me. They decided that it was best not to come to Ohio to see me. They did send a potted corn plant that Phyllis took home and kept for me until I got out of the hospital.

At one o’clock on the afternoon of the next day Dr. Duarte began the operation. I do not remember anything about the operation, but I learned later that it lasted 6 hours. Phyllis and Mr. Getty, my supervisor at work, waited in the hospital all of that six hours. I remember waking up in the recovery room. I remember that to test for brain damage I solved some math equations in my mind. As far as I could tell the brain was still working well.

After the operation I was in the intensive care unit (ICU) for 48 hours and then went to the extensive care unit for the rest of my stay in the hospital. The worst experience for me, apart from the operation itself, was the ICU stay. Every half-hour a nurse would wake me up and run me through a series of checks to see if I was all right. She would ask me what day it was, what time it was, who was the president and would make me squeeze her hand. This was to make sure that all of my faculties were intact. They kept logs of all fluids that entered my body and all fluids that left. I was thirsty all of the time and I hated it. They kept me dry like that to prevent my brain from swelling due to the trauma of the operation.

Dr. Duarte had promised that he would let me out of the hospital before Easter and he did let me out on Good Friday. I was glad to be out of the hospital. I had to return to his office a couple of times after the initial stay for postoperative exams. On my last visit I asked him when I could go back to work. He told me that I was not to go back to work for at least two months and gave me a letter to that effect. He told me that I should get away from where I lived for as much of that time as possible - go on vacation.

I had saved up more than enough sick leave at work and in talking to my brother Jim, I found out that he had a condominium on Lake Conroe in Texas that he only used occasionally on weekends. The condominium complex was called April Sound. He said that I could stay there as long as I wanted. After he told me some more about it, I decided to go there.

All of the time I had been in the hospital, Phyllis had been taking care of my apartment and me. I realized at that time what a caring and generous person she was. So, I asked her to come with me to Texas. She did and we had a marvelous time down there. The condo was more that I could have wanted. Jim loaned me his car for a while and later I rented one so we could get around. Phyllis and I fell in love with each other and Texas and were to see a lot more of each other and Texas in the future. After enjoying this idyllic existence for some time, Phyllis ran out of leave time and had to come back to Ohio. I took her to the airport, kissed her and put her on the plane.

When I finally returned to Ohio, Phyllis picked me up at the airport. We have been together ever since.

I moved into a condominium townhouse at 2123 Wellington court in Fairborn on 3 August 1979. I proposed to Phyllis shortly thereafter and she accepted.

Phyllis and I got married on Friday, 7 September 1979 in Sacred Heart Catholic Church in New Carlisle, Ohio. We had planned the wedding so that Clarence could be my best man on his birthday when he and his family visited us in that week.

In November of 1981, Phyllis retired from work. I retired in 1986. In 1991 we moved to our current home in Springfield.

Our wedding picture

My story has come to and end. I hope you enjoyed it.

FINIS

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