CHAPTER 1

College

College

In June of 1961, a boyfriend of my big sister Maggie came to pick me up from my home in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans to take me for a visit to a small college in southeast Louisiana. He was a star baseball player there, and I had just graduated from Holy Cross High School in New Orleans at which I was a very average baseball player. However, my whole life had revolved around baseball and I just wanted to continue doing what I loved. I was a little guy, five feet, six inches, 135 pounds, with a lot of hustle and drive. That was the start of one of the greatest and most fun times in my life.

In looking back, I remember that one day in my senior year of high school I had determined I was going to college. My family was blue collar, my dad and uncles worked on the railroad, and no one from my family had ever been to college. I recall telling my dad that I was going to college, and he said, “That’s great, but how do you intend to pay for it?” since I was one of nine children and the son of a railroad worker who had completed only the eighth grade.

I said, “I don’t know just yet, but I’ll figure it out.”

It didn’t dawn on me that I might not be able to do it. When you are young, you just don’t know about limitations. I ended up working that summer and saving all that I could, going to politicians and asking for grants to get enough money for the first semester. Now that I look back on it, I don’t think that the politicians actually gave me grants but just wrote me checks out of their own pockets.

My second semester, having made a good grade average, I applied for a National Defense Loan. At this small college at that time, the tuition, books rental, room and meal ticket was only about four hundred dollars, if I remember right.

So on that day I drove with my sister’s friend, Frank Misuraca, to Southeastern Louisiana College in Hammond, Louisiana, to check it out. I didn’t know anybody going there other than Frank and on the way he told me all about the school and the baseball team. He told me about the championships they had won and I don’t remember if he told me much about the academics. I didn’t know much about college, other than I was going to go to one and this one had a baseball team that I had a chance to play on.

When we got there, I was impressed; it was like a big high school. I had gone to an all-boy’s Catholic high school and my graduation class had only about 120 students. This small college had a total enrollment of about thirty-seven hundred at that time. It was in the country surrounded by pine trees, and a railroad track went right through the middle of town and on both sides of the track was a street with shops, restaurants, the train station with a diner called the Beanery and bars. I loved the small town atmosphere and I immediately felt at home.

Most of my friends from New Orleans who were going to college were going to go to Louisiana State University, but they had parents who were going to pay for it. As it turned out, I had a bunch of friends who went to SLC and most of them paid for their own education or paid for a large part of it.

I remember my first day standing in line for registration. I was standing next to another guy from New Orleans who was to become my roommate, my teammate and a very good friend. His name was Corky Barras, and he was one of the funniest people I have ever met. We spent a lot of time sitting on the bench together for the first two years and he was also one of the premier bench jockeys in the conference. Some of the crap he, Pete Freeman, and Joe Thomas would come up with drove the opposing teams nuts and me into hysterics.

Coach Pat Kennelly once told Corky that he had coached a lot of teams, but “You guys are the toughest bench jockeys on the other team that I’ve ever seen. Corky, you could give the Pope the red ass.”

Years later, when I was talking to my friend Bubby Winters who was a pitcher on that team, he recalled one time not being able to pitch to Corky, who was the catcher, because every time he looked at Corky’s grinning face through his catcher’s mask Bubby would start laughing to the point he couldn’t pitch. The coach had to come out to the mound to calm him down.

Getting back to registration day, Corky and another soon-to-be-friend, Tom Bruno, who was also from New Orleans, asked me what I was going to major in.

I said, “Major, what do you mean?”

They said, “You know, your main subject.”

I had never heard of that term before and obviously had never considered it, so I said, trying not to sound dumb, “I’m not sure. What are you guys going to major in?”

“Man, B.A., Business Administration is the thing, that’s what we are signing up for.”

“Yeah, I was leaning that way too,” I said. “So I guess I’ll go with you guys.”

Then they said, “What courses do you have scheduled?”

“Well, whatever you guys have will be OK for me.”

I never had that kind of stuff in high school; they just told you where to go. So here I was signing up for a curriculum that I didn’t have the slightest idea about. But business is what we were all going to do sooner or later, so why not.

Here I was “in college,” the first of my family to do so and I felt excited in anticipating a new adventure and a new life. However, I also had felt like that before and many times thereafter, like I was over my head and not ready for this. Later, when flying in the Marine Corps, we pilots had a term for it, “behind the power curve,” which meant that you were about to crash. I have always had this thing about pushing myself past my level of comfort and not knowing how I was going to handle a particular circumstance or accomplish what I was about to do. But I would end up doing it someway, somehow.

When I was in kindergarten and supposed to go to school with my older brother and sister, I’d get impatient and take off on my bike, crossing a boulevard and going about a mile by myself. My younger sisters, on the other hand, would have to be taken to school two blocks away by my mother. My taking off all by myself scared my mother to death, but I thought it was OK; I knew my way.

When I was in Little League, my dad took me the first day; then after that I rode my bike to practices and to games. And when I was about twelve years old I had a paper route. I hated Sunday mornings, because we had to get up at 5:00 AM and ride our bikes in the dark to throw our papers and finish up just after daybreak.

I remember a friend of mine Freddie Rapp and I would hunt for little turtles in the City Park, and then sell them for twenty-five cents to a pet store. One summer we made about forty dollars, big money for two twelve year olds. We also got caught by the police several times. When they caught us, they would confiscate our fishing nets, put our bikes in the trunk and take us to our homes. Thank God my dad wasn’t home, because I’d be in big trouble.

However, my mom, who was one of the sweetest and shyest people in the world, would be too embarrassed to come to the door, so she would send one of my sisters to meet the police. She would cover for me with my dad, who didn’t put up with any crap. My mom’s idea of discipline was to threaten us with a floppy terrycloth slipper that she would wave back and forth like she was going to spank us with it, but she never did. What a beautiful person she was. Marine DI she was not. My sisters would complain about my getting off so easy much of the time and she would remind them, “Ronnie made ‘A’s in religion.” You can imagine how well that went over with my siblings.

So I was again on my own, signing up for college and not knowing what I was really doing, just going with the flow and figuring it out as I went along.

I loved college from the very first day. I was on my own, paying for college by myself and not having to answer to anyone but myself. I don’t remember ever asking for much advice from my parents because they didn’t know much about college either. I just made up my mind what I wanted to do regarding college and did it. To my mom’s credit I thought she just trusted in me. However, it could have been that being a mom of nine children, she didn’t have much time to think about it. To my dad’s credit, he just expected I would handle it, because he was that kind of a person himself. He was to me the epitome of self-reliance, confidence and strength. Of course, no one would have mistaken him for a psychologist either. It was his way. Period. He was a very confident and self-reliant man, but he never really shared his inner feelings with his children.

The first day of classes was great; however, I was a little bit lost. I thought it was neat that you didn’t attend classes all day, going from one class to the next like in high school. You could hang out in the student union and meet people, play cards, or study until your next class then go have a beer afterwards. The prime spot or bar was the Brown Door, and since in Louisiana you could drink at eighteen years old in those days, that was definitely on my list of places to go. One thing that was very different was the fact that there were girls in my classes. I had gone to an all-boys Catholic high school and having girls in class for the first time since grade school was a bit distracting at first, but nice.

There was an excitement in the air and in me. It was all great, that is until test and term papers came around. But even test time was a whole new thing. The guys I hung out with in Business Administration would get together and study, or later on, spend most of their time “looking for the help.” Which meant they heard that someone had stolen the test or had last semester’s test. It really amazed me, because that went on for five years. If they would have spent that much time studying instead of looking for the test or trying to break into the teacher’s office, they would have all been on the dean’s list. Let me clarify that, the dean’s academic excellence list. A lot of us were on the dean’s list, but that was more like the “most wanted list.” Actually, several of the guys were very smart and made straight “As.”

One of my roommates, Ronnie Ratelat, had a great memory and just picked up everything in class. Hell, I never could focus long enough in most classes to pay that close of attention. If there was Ritalin back in those days I would have been a candidate. It was either that or I was too busy taking notes to listen and grasp what was being said by the instructor. Ronnie would start studying, get bored and go have a few beers. We would find him passed out with a book on his chest, and the next day he’d ace the test. I’d study for hours and get “Bs” and “Cs” and now and then an “A.”

Three of our gang were straight “A” students; the rest of us were pretty good students. We mostly lived together from the second year on for the whole four or five years. Most of us were paying our own way through school or paying part of our way, so even though we had a ball, we made sure we made passing grades.

None of us had much money, but we could always find enough for beer or partying. Where there is a will there is a way.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself, so let me get back to the beginning of my college career. It was September of 1961 at Southeastern Louisiana College in Hammond, Louisiana. I got acclimated to college life pretty fast. I was living in the one of the freshmen dorms and my roommate and I were at opposite ends of the spectrum. He was quiet, studious, smart, and very different from the people that I hung out with. But then, the people from New Orleans were a little different from the rest of the state anyway. We had a Brooklyn kind of accent with a southern drawl, the people in southwest Louisiana had a Cajun French accent and the rest of the state had a southern accent like Mississippi or Arkansas.

New Orleans was the biggest city in the state, with Baton Rouge, the capital, second biggest, and the rest of the towns were really big or small. But off course, Baton Rouge had LSU and the best looking girls in the state.

Anyway, back to my roommate: we were not on the same wavelength, and I hung out with the other guys in our suite. Four rooms all shared a bathroom in the center. To my pleasant surprise, Corky and Tom were my suitemates. Through them I met Danny Gleason, Billy Jewett, Jimmy Ames, Ronnie and a bunch of other guys from public schools in New Orleans. Their public school education was different from my catholic school education. But I knew most of them from the neighborhood or going to the same places in New Orleans. That was the beginning of our group. We had a great deal in common, being from the same area in New Orleans, putting ourselves through college and barely making ends meet. We were out to have a great time whenever we could, had very creative minds when it came to having fun and last of all, we were going to stay in school.

Corky became one of my best friends and we were both going out for the baseball team. Tom, Jimmy and Ronnie were very smart and Tom was a wiz in accounting. I didn’t have a clue about anything having to do with accounting, so I was always asking Tom for help. I hated accounting and changed my major to Industrial Technology the second semester mainly because of accounting and typing.

In typing class I was doing about thirty words a minute and the girl next to me was doing about two hundred it seemed. I was cursing more than I was typing. My baseball hands with my fingers shaped into slight claw-like digits just didn’t want to move fast enough over the typewriter keys, hence my frustration.

The rest of my first semester went along pretty good. I made OK grades and met some great people. Going to class with girls took a bit of getting used to because I found myself looking at them more than the professor. And after class there were all kinds of neat things to do: night beach parties down on the river, football games, drinking and partying at the Brown Door. Like I said, the Brown Door was the main hang-out bar for the college kids in Hammond. You could go there at night and party or during lunch time and bet the horses running at Fairgrounds in New Orleans, or just catch a few beers and a roast beef po-boy after classes.

The real partying for football was going to the games at LSU. My friend Danny Smith was there and would set me up with a date for the football games. The parting started about 4:00 PM on Saturday after everybody got out of classes and the game got started at 7:30 Saturday night. The party continued after the football game until the girls had to be back in their dorms at midnight. On one occasion my date got a little too drunk and missed curfew by a bit. The doors were closed so we drove to the back of the dorm, stood on the roof of my friend’s car and stuffed her through her dorm window with the help of her roommate.

Tiger Favret

Tiger Favret was my friend from Holy Cross High School. He was a year older than I, and his brother Bob and I were classmates in high school. Tiger had been to several colleges and finally ended up at Southeastern with the rest of us. Bob went to LSU.

One time we were partying before and after the game, drinking Bob’s roommate’s homemade blackberry wine. I got a little carried away and dove off the second floor balcony into the swimming pool while in my jockey shorts. I was lucky I didn’t break my neck because I scraped the bottom of the pool. When I came up from the bottom, the student monitor, who was an all American football player at LSU grabbed me and pulled me out of the pool. I think I shoved him or something else that really pissed him off. So as he was about to hammer the hell out my little five foot six body, my good big friend (six three, 230 pounds) Tiger Favret came up. Tiger happened to know the guy and saved my ass. For that matter, Tiger saved me a number of times while we were in college. If you are a little guy, it always helps to have a big friend. And I introduced him to his wife Linda Haney. Actually, I had a crush on her from the first time I met her, but when Tiger showed an interest in her, I just kept it to myself.

Tiger was my real buddy in college and we had some great times together. If you had ever met him you never forgot him. Seemed like everybody knew Tiger and Tiger knew everybody. It didn’t matter where we went, somebody would always know Tiger.

He was a piece of work. His given name was Lionel. I guess it was a cat thing, Lion-el, Tiger. He was already balding in college and looked about thirty-five; however, at fifty-five, he still looked the same. He was big and smart, from a well-off family, very confident and cocky. He also had the record, I think, for the most number of colleges attended. I think it was like four or five. Tiger could also drink more than anybody I knew. And me being half his size, I’d get hammered trying to keep up with him.

I rode back and forth to college, from New Orleans to Hammond, about an hour’s drive just about every weekend with Tiger in his Chevy Corvair. Towards the end of the week I’d be broke and borrow five dollars from Tiger, then pay him back the next Sunday, and then just borrow it again at the end of the week. This went on week after week until finally Tiger said, “Ronnie, keep the five dollars.”

We used to go to this dirt road bar down the street from the Brown Door called Toulouse. Believe me it had no commonality with the famous artist. It had sawdust on the floor, a back room where the local farmers and college students played a card game called “Bourre” or “Booray.” Booray was a south Louisiana card game like spades and poker combined where you tried to take the most tricks in a hand and thereby win the pot or avoid taking no tricks and match the pot. It’s a killer: you could be winning all night and then in one hand you would have to match the pot and get wiped out.

Emmett the bartender was a character also and a little naïve. Some of the guys would take advantage of him.

Tiger and I were drinking Jack Daniel’s black straight out of the bottle like the cowboys did. We were feeling our oats and he said that I could have the first punch to see if I could knock him off the bar stool, so I hit him hard, as hard as a guy five six and 135 pounds could, but I barely moved him.

Then he said, “OK, now it’s my turn.” Oh shit! I thought, this isn’t good, but if you are going to play cowboys, then you’ve got to man up. So he hit me—hard—and knocked me off the stool.

I got up and said, “OK, it’s my turn.” Well after about three times, I knew that I couldn’t knock him off and that soon I wasn’t going to be able to get up.

As we were walking out side by side, he put his arm around my shoulders and he knew that pissed me off. You know like, “Come here little buddy.” I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but a confrontation ensued and I hit him with one of those sidewalk chalkboard signs. Well, that pissed him off and he chased me all over. I ran down the street to the Brown Door and saw Linda, his future wife, and hid under her table. He came in looking for me and said that if he found me he was going to kick my little ass all over the place. I took that threat very seriously and stayed under the table until he left.

Linda was a very nice and pretty girl who had a very nice and pretty Corvette. Tiger and I borrowed it one time and drove it up to Baton Rouge to party with our buddies and his brother Bob at LSU. By the time we had finished partying and started back to Hammond forty miles down the road, the weather had gotten very foggy, to the point that we couldn’t see the edge to the road even though we were only driving about ten miles per hour. So I got out and sat on the right front fender and guided Tiger with hand signals following the edge of the highway all the way back to Hammond. It kind of goes with the saying that God protects drunks and idiots I guess.

Tiger had a neat car also. It was a 1961 Corvair, the car Ralph Nader made famous in his 1965 book Unsafe at any Speed. It had an air-cooled flat six-cylinder rear engine and a trunk in the front. We would put a case of beer in the front trunk and ice them down for the beach parties at the bridge on the Tickfaw River. It was like a giant ice cooler. We would cruise to Baton Rouge, New Orleans or on our way back to school with a beer and a long slender Marsh & Wheeling cigar. It was all so cool. I really loved Tiger; he was great and I knew if I was with him nobody was going to kick my ass too bad.

I looked up to him and admired his confidence. He had natural leadership qualities, which in my mind, were only rivaled by my other older and good friend Malcolm Bech.

Malcolm Bech

Malcolm was a few years older than I was, from the same neighborhood in New Orleans and had gone to school with my older brother and sister. He was a legend to us younger guys. We had heard stories of his fighting prowess and that he had never been beaten in a fight. He wasn’t mean and didn’t look to start fights—that would describe his little brother Bruce. Bruce was one fighting son of a gun. He was a nice guy until you messed with him. I think the only one that could beat Bruce was Malcolm, but Mal wouldn’t mess with Bruce because as Mal said, “If you beat Bruce, you have to keep fighting him until he finally beats you.” He never gave up and when Bruce got mad he would try to kill you.

Malcolm was almost what we called a “professional student.” He had been in college there for a long time. But that was because he was working his way through school. He was also tall, great looking and a very good athlete. He probably could have been a great college wide receiver, but Mal didn’t take any shit from anybody and that included the football coach who he didn’t have any respect for. He had gone to SLC on a track scholarship and was a championship javelin thrower. He had held the javelin record for this division level school until Terry Bradshaw of Louisiana Tech broke it several years later.

Mal didn’t date much, but when he did, it was the best looking girl on campus. He later married the school’s beauty queen, Jenna Hebert, had a bunch of kids, two of whom played football for LSU, and one for the New Orleans Saints.

I had great respect for Malcolm. I was proud to have him as a friend and we are still good friends. He also had that special leadership quality. Later, when I became a Marine Officer, I understood what those qualities were all about. We became roommates later in my second year and he was part of our gang or band of “merry men.”

At one time, Mal and his friend Big George lived in a tent on a friend’s farm. Malcolm drove a Triumph Tiger motorcycle to class which I thought was very cool. He didn’t go in for too much silliness, unless we got him drunk which wasn’t often. Another roommate of mine, Pat Reith was an instigator and would egg Malcolm on to do mischief. Pat would tell me that Malcolm was an Indian, and if we got him drunk he would go crazy and do wild things. I told Pat, that if that was so, we had better not get him drunk. But Pat said that it was more fun that way. I think Mal liked our craziness and enjoyed laughing at us, but I don’t think he was an Indian.

Malcolm Bech

Living Off Campus on Magnolia Street

As I mentioned, my first year I lived in the men’s freshmen dorm and in the Stadium Athletic Dorm. The second year, I moved off campus to a house on Magnolia Street with Pat Rieth who I had known since first grade and Malcolm Bech who I knew from the neighborhood in New Orleans. It was then that I met our other roommates: Ronnie Radelat, otherwise known as “Rattletrap”; Jerry LeBlanc, “Seagull”; and Ricky Davidson, “Ricky, Dicky Doo,” all from the New Orleans area. There were two other guys who were like our roommates, because they hung out with us and ate with us often. They were Hans Neilsen, “Fingers,” and Jimmy DeMoss, “Demis.” We would pretty much stay together for the rest of our time at SLC, with the exception of Ricky Davidson, who thought rightfully that we were too crazy and moved out.

Jerry LeBlanc “Seagull”

Jerry LeBlanc, “Seagull” or just “The Gull” got his name while on Spring Break in Panama City, Florida. He was drunk, passed out, lying on the beach, all wet when Malcolm saw him and said he looked like a dead seagull that had washed up on the sand. The name stuck.

The group trekked to Florida for Spring Break in Pat’s 1957 green airport limousine. It had eight doors and a big luggage rack on the roof. They had just cruised into town with a keg of beer on the roof when the cops stopped them. By the time my teammate Lamar and I got there after we finished our baseball game, they had already left to go back home. They went before the judge who asked each one how much money they had and fined each one accordingly leaving them just enough to get home.

In Hammond we lived in a two story four-plex house about a block from campus which was next to another four-plex that had some equally crazy guys living in it. Sam and Everett were our next door neighbors and between us we had some crazy parties held in the area between our houses and in the houses. This is when the insanity started at our rented house on Magnolia Street.

In our house, all of the guys were hunters. We all had shot guns, rifles and even bows and arrows. Our freezer always had some type of wild game in it such as ducks, fish, squirrels, quails, rabbits or some other game. We tried to arrange our class schedules during duck hunting season the best we could so as not to interfere with morning or evening hunting down in the Manchac swamp. Manchac was a big swamp on the west side of Lake Pontchartrain in between New Orleans and Hammond.

It was a great duck hunting area: teals in the early season, mallards and wood ducks in the winter.

We also hunted down below New Orleans towards the mouth of the Mississippi River where the river branches off into several gulf outlets. On some of our duck hunting trips down the river we would shine nutria at night, shoot them and sell them at the dock the next day for about one dollar apiece. This would pay for our hunting trip.

The nutria looks like a big rat or small beaver with webbed hind feet and big orange beaver like teeth. They are aquatic animals that eat vegetation and were introduced into Louisiana when they escaped from a fur farm in Louisiana in the 1930s. They multiplied greatly and became a nuisance, destroying vegetation and eroding levees. A couple of the guys found a nutria nest and got two baby nutrias from it. They were so small that both of them could fit in your shirt pocket. One of the tiny babies fell off the bar in Venice, Louisiana, and died; however, the other one was brought back to our house and became our pet. He grew into about a twelve pound rodent. We named him Moogins and he looked like a brown beaver with big webbed hind feet, big orange cutting teeth and a rat’s tail. Dogs wouldn’t even mess with him. He was a great pet and would climb up in the bed with Pat and sleep under his arm. One problem was we couldn’t house break him, and he left nutria droppings all over the house. We would feed him heads of lettuce, which he would eat sitting on his hind quarters. He’d pull off one leaf at a time and rotate it in his little hands and eat the leaf around the edge in a circular fashion. He would also sit on your foot and pull on your pants leg, show those big orange teeth and beg for food, while making his little nutria sounds.

Each one of us would take turns taking Moogins to our homes back in New Orleans whenever we all left for the weekend. I took him home to my parent’s house one weekend in a box while he was still little. My sisters were frightened of him and my dad was not too pleased with having a rat in the house.

One time, we decided that we would leave him in the off-campus house up at school while we all went home. We left him three heads of lettuce to eat; nutrias got their water from the vegetation they ate, and locked him in the bathroom. When we got back we found that he had eaten all the lettuce, eaten through the bathroom door, through the bedroom door and the kitchen door leading outside. To our dismay, we also learned that our elderly landlady had gone in the house to check on us and almost had a heart attack when she saw a twelve pound rat-looking creature run across the room.

Moogins died when he fell off the up-stairs balcony at one of our parties and he burst a gut hitting the ground. Poor Moogins, he was about fifteen pounds when he died.

On one of our early morning duck hunting trips in the Manchac swamp, we set out before sunrise in a couple groups of two in pirogues (a small flat bottom skiff-like boat pointed at both ends seating one or two people, common in south Louisiana) to a couple of different ponds. I was paired up with Ricky and we went as far as we could in the boat then waded through the swamp in the dark night to the pond. I went to one end and Ricky went further down to the other site.

I have to give you a little background on Ricky. He had poor eyesight, wore thick eyeglasses and I don’t think he had a lot of hunting experience. So there we were just before dawn in our hunting positions waiting for the sunrise and the ducks to start flying. All of a sudden I heard three shotgun blasts ring out “bang! bang! bang!” and someone shouted, “You son-of-a-bitch, you shot my decoys!” Evidently, Ricky didn’t want to wait for the sun to rise or to do the sporting thing of shooting the ducks in flight. He saw all these ducks on the pond and opened up on them. I think he sank a couple of them, much to the displeasure of the others hunters who had set out their decoys to attract ducks, not near-sighted hunters.

Friday Keg Parties

Alot of times we would have a keg of beer on a Friday afternoon after classes got over. Sam and Everett were our co-hosts usually. We would bring down chairs to the common area between the houses and have our party. One time Everett shouted up to Sam, who also lived on the second floor, to bring down something to sit on. All of a sudden the window opened and a couch came tumbling out the upstairs window. These parties got nuts and led to some crazy things, including a naked run down to and around the girl’s dormitory. Shoes were allowed.

As I said, all the guys had guns in the house, and Jerry had his “long-tong” ten-gauge shotgun. I don’t remember the circumstances leading up to the event, but I’m sure drinking was involved. It ended up with someone shooting out Sam and Everett’s window and they then returned the favor by storming our house, kicking open our door and shooting up the ceiling in our house while wearing cowboy boots, gun belts, hats, jockey shorts and nothing else.

Another time we wrapped Jerry up in a blanket and threw him through their window. We had broken out and replaced the windows so many times that we had written on most of the window sills the dimensions for easier replacement.

Another time someone noticed a squirrel up in the tree next to our house and we shot it out of the window. As I said, wild game was part of our diet and food budget. One of our neighbors heard the shot and called the cops on us. When they showed up we had hidden the gun and they wanted to search the house. We told them that they could have at it, but we were in the process of eating dinner and sat at the table and ate our dinner. They looked around a bit and left.

It was probably the people who lived behind us who called the cops on us with whom we had some differences from time to time. One of the parties was a crawfish party that had started outside but moved inside. We had the keg of beer and a wash tub full of crawfish in the living room. It was before there was much air conditioning and most of the old homes had window fans. Well, as we were eating the crawfish and discarding the shells, someone decided to get rid of the shells by throwing them out through the window fan. We all followed suit and the next day the side of the neighbor’s white house was covered with red crawfish shells and the yellow fat. It was not a pretty sight. It looked awful. We got in trouble for that also, and that might have been the final straw, because we got thrown out of the house on Magnolia Street by our landlady. She was quite justified in evicting us.

Dave Thomas

Another one of our zany cast of characters was a tall lanky guy from the New Orleans area named Dave Thomas. Dave was truly a funny guy and would do anything to make people laugh. He would go to the cafeteria at lunch or dinner time when it was busy as hell and in the act of opening the door, he would kick the bottom of the door and then grab his head like he had hit his head on the door. Of course everybody in the place would turn to look and he would stumble into the cafeteria holding his forehead and everybody who didn’t know Dave would think, “What a clumsy ass.” As I said, Dave would do anything for a laugh.

But my favorite Dave Thomas memory was when we had a double date to the Saenger Theater in downtown New Orleans. Back then, if you wanted to make it a special date to the movies you would go downtown to one of big theaters, the Loews or the Saenger, not to a local neighborhood movie. The Saenger was really nice; it looked more like an opera house then a movie theater. It had statues on the walls, elaborate architectural designs and thick carpet on the lobby floors and on the stairs. So there we were with our two dates and me wanting to impress mine since it was our first date together. As we walked out of the upstairs lobby and started down the stairs Dave trips, grabs for the banister, rolls down a few stairs, bounces up holding his elbow and knee with a look on his face like “How did that happen.” I had just told him five minutes before not to do any dumb Dave stuff that night. The girls were all concerned and saying, “Dave, are you OK?” He was acting all embarrassed and mildly sore, and I knew he had just pulled another Dave stunt. He did many more, but those were the ones that come to mind.

Our Magnolia Street apartment was also where I had my first sexual experience in college other than in the back seat of a car. There was an older lady, about thirty or so (I know, but I was just nineteen at the time) who lived below us in the house. She took a fancy to me and taught me a lot. When you are a nineteen-year old guy a thirty-year old woman was fantasy land. In the middle of the night, she would knock on the ceiling, which was a sign she wanted me to come down for “fun and games.” Man, it got so I was spending a lot of time down in her apartment and both my grade average and my baseball batting average went down.

My roommates were jealous and Ronnie wanted me to let him pretend that he was me, go down there in the dark and get some of that. He said that if she left the lights off, which she usually did, she wouldn’t know the difference. I wasn’t about to ruin a good thing, even if my grades and batting average had to suffer.

Cherry Street and Alac’s Place

When we got kicked out of Magnolia Street, we split up for the rest of the semester. I moved in with Corky, Tom, Danny, Billy and Jimmy in their place on Cherry Street. Pat, Ronnie, Jerry and Malcolm went somewhere else for the rest of the semester. Then the next semester we got back together; Pat, Ronnie, Seagull and I moved out into the country in one of three houses that farmers Sam and Kelly Alac had moved to their land outside of town.

When we moved to Alacs’ place in my third year of college, we lived in the middle house of the three. The Alacs had bought the three houses that were in the right-of-way of the new highway 55 being constructed and had moved them onto their land just outside of Hammond. The brothers spoke with a broken English Cajun accent; I don’t know what their native origin was but it seems they had come to Hammond from Simmesport, Louisiana, up the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge. Alac told us that his daughter was a telephone “mopa-rater in Simpoot.”

To the left side of us were some guys who were into parachuting. A couple of times we saw them jump out of a plane and parachute into the back yard which was a field. I swear one time I saw this guy parachute into the back yard with his school books under his arm. But you know how your memories play tricks on you after all that time. We didn’t have much contact with them and just kind of waved to them as we saw each other.

On the other side of us lived two English majors, Frank and Phillip. They were OK guys, but very different from our group and we messed with them quite often it seemed. Phillip was thought to be a pyromaniac who was kicked out of the dorm for setting the trash cans on fire. Frank was a smart guy and mild-mannered.

One time they had dates over at their house for dinner and we came up with the bright idea of launching an Indian attack on their house. We got our bows and arrows out, wrapped rags around the arrow heads, dipped them into kerosene, got into Hans’ Karmann Ghia and DeMoss’ convertible and drove around their house like the Indians did to the wagon trains. We had head bands with feathers and war paint all the while giving the ol’ Indian war whoop. As we drove by the front of the house we shot several flaming arrows into their front door. We were jumping up and down shouting our war whoop when Frank and Phillip came running out. Frank was pulling the flaming arrows out of the door and Phillip was in a trance-like state, rocking side to side looking at the fire, telling Frank to let it burn. Frank pulled them out and stepped on the flames and said some choice words to us. What a bunch of assholes we were.

Another time at our Friday evening beer time, we were shooting Seagull’s 10 gauge “long-tong” shotgun at the fast moving chimney swifts as they darted about catching insects. Frank and Phillip were tossing a football back and forth and just as Frank threw the football to Phillip, Seagull shouted “Pull” and Ronnie shot the football out of the air. It came down like a dead duck with a bunch of pellet holes in it. Who said guns and alcohol don’t mix.

Well that really pissed Frank and Phillip off and they got back at us over the weekend when we went home to New Orleans by throwing a brick through our window. I guess we deserved it. Window replacement was a common activity with us.

The evening time beer and shotgun thing continued on, especially at our Friday evening keg parties. We would all take turns trying to shoot the chimney swifts, which were very hard to hit. Drinking didn’t help your accuracy any, that’s for sure. When we got tired of that, we came up with a new idea involving the bow and arrows. We would all stand in a tight group with the bow shooter in the center; he would shoot a hunting arrow straight up into the air. We would all watch as the arrow went out of sight and wait for it to reach its apex and come back into sight heading downward. As soon as we saw the arrow we would run like hell away from the falling arrow. It was kind of like Russian roulette or maybe Indian roulette would be a better fit.

Most of the time the arrows would go off course or be blown off course and land away from us or in the roof of one of the houses. At one point the roof looked like a porcupine with all the arrows sticking up. That didn’t make the landlord very happy. He told us, “What’s a matter with you boys, you shoota arrows in my roof, you breaka my door? You boys from New Orleans are crazy.”

Someone, maybe it was DeMoss, got a baby yellow chick for Easter and he became our next pet. We called him Peep, because that is what he did, peeped all the time. We kept him in a box mainly, but once we had put him in the dirty clothes bin as a convenient enclosure. But to his misfortune, we forgot about him and someone threw some dirty clothes on top of him and he suffocated.

We were saddened by this and felt that we had to do something for Peep, so we decided to have a funeral for him. We didn’t have a church service and a procession of cars, but rather we had a military type service with armed guards and pallbearers. The armed guards all had shot guns or rifles, someone may have had a bow and arrow, followed the two pallbearers who held a pillowcase by the corners on which they carried Peep all the while stepping to Rufus Thomas’ song “Walking the Dog” being played on the record player.

The ceremony’s culmination was a twenty-one gun salute aimed at Frank and Phillip’s roof. Of course, we followed that with an Irish wake that included more drinking. Peep would have been proud if he could have seen his funeral, himself buried with military honors.

It seemed like guns were a big part of our activities and we used to sit on the couch in our living room and shoot at mice in our kitchen with our 22 rifle. It wasn’t exactly big game hunting, but it kept the mice population down.

We also had a naked run (tennis shoes permitted) down to the highway and back. I have no idea who came up with these crazy ideas, but they just seemed to come up in the middle of drinking and with general agreement that they were good ideas at the time.

During one of the keg events we were all partying and talking when we heard Ratelat shout from up on the roof. We looked up and there he was totally naked on top of the roof waving his arms and dancing around. That was not a pretty sight.

The landlord told us with his heavy accent, “You boys from New Orleans, you’ll must be smoking the stuff that make you crazy; you breaka my refigarator, you shoot arrows in my roof, you shoota my mule” (Jerry shot at the mule with a BB gun) “and you got Sleepin Jesus drunk. You boys got to go.”

Sleeping Jesus was this old black man who did odd jobs for the landlord and would clean up around the rent houses. One time he came by to clean up Saturday morning after one of our parties and we had some beer left in the keg, so we told him that he could have it. He hadn’t had any alcohol to drink in years and got drunk to the point the landlord found him passed out at our house. I have no idea where he got the name “Sleeping Jesus.”

So ended our stay at the house in the country; I still feel bad to this day because we were not good tenants and caused damage with all our drunken parties. From there we moved back to Cherry Street next to Corky’s crew. This is where the book’s title came from. It was where this crazy group from New Orleans got together.

Corky’s parents owned a drug store in Metairie, Louisiana which was a part of greater New Orleans. We would drop off Corky there and he would invite us in. When his mother wasn’t around he’d open up a big jar of barbiturates and tell us to grab a hand full to “study with” back at school.

The house on Cherry Street was very convenient, in walking distance to the bars downtown and about five minutes from school. It was a duplex with their crew on one side and our crew on the other.

Gas Balloons

It was there that we came up with idea of gas balloons. I don’t know who came up with the idea, but one of my pyrotechnically inclined buddies thought it would be a brilliant idea to fill balloons with natural gas send them aloft and ignite them with dynamite fuse. We developed a method of making the balloons out of the polyurethane bags that clothes came in from the cleaners. We would tape the top closed and fill them with natural gas from the gas line when we disconnected the bathroom heater. We would then tape the bottom closed and attach dynamite fuse to it, light the fuse and send it aloft. You could light up an entire city block when it ignited. Wow! It was an awesome spectacle. But it only ignited about fifty percent of the time. You had to burn through the plastic bag and get an oxygen and gas mixture to get ignition.

We had some interesting adventures with the gas balloons. Once we made a small test balloon and it went off in the house and made a nasty burn spot in the ceiling. Another time we let one go in front of our house and the wind took it into a big oak tree; it burnt the tree down and the fire department was called to put out the fire. We told them that a power line caused it. They mentioned that it was a telephone line and not a power line.

Another time we sent a big balloon aloft, it went off and made a huge fire in the sky. Someone told us that people called the police department and reported a UFO.

But our greatest balloon feat had to be at our homecoming game that year. We made a big balloon and two small test ones. The big balloon was as big around as your circled arms and about three feet high. We decorated it with green and gold crepe paper for our school’s colors. Hans, who we called “Fingers” for short, and I were chosen for the job of taking the balloons to the football game and getting them to float right down the middle of the field at half time and ignite.

We were chosen for the job because we were the only ones who didn’t have dates for the game. We loaded the two balloons in to Hans’ Volkswagen Karmann Ghia and headed to the football stadium. Damn, we were such dumb-asses; if the balloons had gone off in that car, there wouldn’t be a trace of us left.

We had the two small test balloons to check the wind direction and speed to find the right spot to launch them so that they would track down the middle of the football field. We timed the test balloons’ flight to determine how long it would take to reach the middle of the field and then cut the dynamite fuse to the proper length. If I remember right, dynamite fuse burnt at a rate of three feet per minute. To get a better chance of ignition, we also taped match heads at the end of the fuse and cut the fuse end on a slant to get a longer spit of fire.

We launched the first test balloon but it was way off, the wind taking it way off course. So we moved to a new spot behind the administration building which was directly north of the football field. We then sent the second one aloft and this time the test balloon went straight to the end zone. We timed it to when it made its way to about the thirty yard line and cut the fuse for the big one. We lit the fuse and let it go. It floated right to the end zone and down the middle of the football field with the green and gold crepe paper ribbons waving in the breeze and everyone watching it and saying, “What the hell is that?” The fuse burned down to the balloon at about the thirty yard line, but to our disappointment, and probably in everyone’s best interest, it didn’t ignite. The fuse just made a hole in the plastic bag and fell to the ground.

Wow, the whole stadium was watching it. Man, that would have been legendary; people would still be talking about it if it had gone off. People were talking about it over the campus as it was. Had it gone off, we probably would have been kicked out of school and maybe had jail time.

Hammond, Louisiana, was a small town surrounded by farms. In those days, you could go to the local hardware store and buy dynamite to blow up tree stumps, which we did. We blew up trees, fish in the river and any other thing we could find. The trees were just for fun, the fish we ate. I had a case of dynamite stored under my bed for a whole semester when we lived on Chestnut Street. Years later, Pat told me that he found some of the dynamite caps in his garage. Intelligence and doing dumb things are not always mutually exclusive of each other.

Hammond was also the strawberry capital of Louisiana and you could buy strawberries directly from the farmers. You could just pay the farmer and go pick your own berries during season, but you could also buy strawberry wine all year round. You would see the bottles of wine sitting on a fence post with a For Sale sign; not great wine but inexpensive. And as you know, in college, inexpensive was good.

The strawberries used to be protected from touching the ground by pine needles or straw placed around the plants, hence the name strawberries. This was also pine tree country so the straw was plentiful. At the time I went to school there the straw had been replaced with black plastic.

Years later Malcolm ran into Dean Harper, the Dean of Men when we attended SLC and asked him if we were a real pain in the ass. Surprisingly, he told Malcolm that the hardest thing for him to do when he would confront us on Monday morning after a wild weekend was to keep a straight face. He had to look stern, but he was amazed and looked forward to find out what new crap we had come up with. And we did come up with a lot of crazy stuff.

Chestnut Street

From Cherry Street for the next semester we moved to a house on Chestnut Street. It was a three bedroom house with a screened front porch. Corky, Danny, Tom, Jimmy, Billy and Corky’s brother Junior moved in next door. Man, that was a fun year. We did some outrageous stuff.

This is also when Leg moved in with us. Leg’s real name was Richie Cerise, but we called him Leg because he had an artificial leg. He had a stump below the knee that he would put a sock like cover on and slip the stump into the fiberglass lower leg and foot. He lost his leg when he was about ten years old trying to jump onto a moving train back in New Orleans. He slipped as he was trying to get on the train and the train’s wheel ran over his toes and cut them off. Gangrene set in and they had to cut his foot off. That didn’t stop the infection so they cut off his leg below the knee. The doctors told him that if that didn’t work they would have to take off his whole leg.

It didn’t bother him that we called him Leg, because he had it most of his life and he was one of the gang. To the contrary, he didn’t like it when people were too overly sensitive around him about his leg. He just thought of himself as more or less normal, so we treated him as more or less normal and were insensitive to him about his leg to the point that we screwed with him about it.

I remember when I first met him. It was the night before school started and I got to the house late that evening. Tiger Favret and I got sidetracked on the way to school and ending up covering some bars before he dropped me off at our new house on Chestnut Street. Pat and I had the front bedroom and Ronnie and Leg had the middle bedroom. The lights were off as I was making my way to the bathroom when I stumbled over something sticking out from under the one of the beds. I looked down, let out a startled, “Oh shit,” and jumped about a foot off the ground. I had tripped over a leg sticking out from the bed. Pat then said, “Oh that’s Leg’s leg,” and told me the story.

Leg was another New Orleans guy from the Lakeview neighborhood and Warren Easton High School like a bunch of the other guys. Ronnie, Malcolm, Tom, Jimmy and Danny were also from Warren Easton. They were mostly B.A. or Accounting majors and mostly all were in the KDT fraternity, the wildest fraternity on campus.

We were always messing with Leg. One time we painted his artificial leg with red stripes like a barber’s pole. Then another time we put it in the freezer and when Richie pulled it out of the freezer it was covered with ice. That really pissed him off, because he had to go to school on his crutches. But that wasn’t the worst thing we did to him; we cut some hair off our own arms and glued it to his prosthesis. We told him that it was to make it more like a real leg. That didn’t make him very happy either.

One of the funniest things to happen regarding Leg was when Malcolm had left his motorcycle at the house and Pat cranked it up to take it for a ride. Well, Leg wanted to go with him on the back of bike. As they were riding around, Pat rounded a corner close to the curb, Leg’s artificial leg’s foot slipped off the foot peg, hit the curb and knocked his leg off. So Leg was screaming, “Pat, stop, stop!” Pat asked him why, and he said, “I lost my leg.” So they had to go back and find his leg lying in the street.

However, the funniest thing that happened with Leg was when we were “crawfishing” in the Manchac swamp. We all had hip boots on and were wading in knee deep water with a soft mud bottom making our way back to the car. Pat and I were carrying the sack of crawfish and crawfish nets. Ronnie and Leg were following us. It was a tough going for Leg because he kept on getting his boot stuck in the mud for which Ronnie would berate him for slowing us down.

Ronnie had a foul mouth and little patience. Then Leg got his leg really stuck to the point that he couldn’t pull it out of the mud and called for Ronnie to help him get it unstuck. Ronnie said, “Leg, you’re a pain in the ass,” but went back to help him.

So here was the scene: Ronnie was behind Leg with his arms around Leg’s chest and both of them trying to extract Leg’s stuck boot out of the swamp mud. Ronnie said to Leg, “On three pull.”

“One, two, three, pull!”

Then all of a sudden they were both sitting in the swamp water up to their chests with Leg’s artificial leg clad in a torn hip boot sticking out of the swamp like a cypress knee.

Ronnie shouted at Leg, “Leg you crippled mother------.”

At that sight, Pat and I sat down in the swamp and laughed our asses off.

The Old Swamp Hermit

There was an old hermit that lived in a shack built on stilts in the swamp that had a long wooden walkway leading back to the road which we used as a base of operations for hunting. The shack was owned by a friend and hunting buddy, Freddie Kursh. The hermit had a mean-ass dog and somebody asked him what kind of dog it was. He replied, “Part spitz and part bitin’ son-of-a-bitch.” We agreed and gave the dog a wide berth. He also told us about catching frogs on the highway after a heavy rain.

Anyway, Leg was a great sport and a good roommate. He actually didn’t mind too much the crap that we gave him, it made him feel like he was just one of us, which he was. He and Ratelat argued like they were a married couple. Jerry “Seagull” and Malcolm were our other roommates.

We had a small arsenal in our house: shotguns, rifles, bows and arrows, and blow guns. As I mentioned earlier, we even had a case of dynamite that we kept under my bed to throw in the river and get fish or to blow up trees for the fun of it.

In New Orleans, most of us were Catholic, and back then you ate fish on Friday. We tried to be good boys and eat fish on Friday, but we probably lost a few heavenly points by blowing up the fish in the river to eat. Pole fishing just took too long.

In this refined fishing technique, we would station several guys downstream to catch the fish as they floated to the surface while a couple of guys upstream lit the dynamite and tossed it in the river. The concussion knocked out the fish and they floated up to be picked up by us. Fish for dinner. But it was just fun to see the dynamite explode in the river.

Blow Guns

Someone found some aluminum aircraft tubing and we decided to make blow guns out of them. We took a piece of coat hanger about six inches long, sharpened one end and put a foam stopper on the other end for the dart. We made the stopper out of the insulation that went around air conditioning pipes. The blow guns were about six feet long and pretty damn accurate. We painted a red bull’s eye on the wood weather boards on the front of the house on Chestnut Street and would stand across the street about forty feet away and put a number of darts in the target. We nailed a few squirrels with them also. It was a good diversion from all the intense studying that we did. (Tongue in cheek.)

A good afternoon would be drinking beer and blowing darts at the target on our house. About forty years later I went to Hammond and toured the neighborhood and the houses that we lived in and you could still see the small holes in the weather boards on the house made by the darts.

Jimmy DeMoss who we called “Demis” was our pyrotechnics guru and I think it was he who took the lowly blow gun to another level by putting a dynamite cap on the end of the dart to make it an explosive projectile. We tested it by shooting it at Corky’s and the boys’ house next door.

To our surprise, it went off on contact, blew a hole in the weather board on the side of the house and the sheet rock of the inside wall. Everybody inside came running out shouting, “What the f______ is going on!” We were all amazed and laughing at our new weapon or toy. I think it was Junior Barras who was studying close to the explosion when the hole was blown next to where he was sitting.

How we ever made it through college without killing ourselves or somebody else is amazing. God must have been looking out after us, ‘cause we sure the hell were not doing a good job of looking after ourselves.

Much later when I was talking to someone about having been in combat in Vietnam they said, “Man, you are lucky to come back in one piece.”

And I replied, “Well, I never got hit in Vietnam, but I got shot in the balls in college.”

No wonder I liked dropping bombs from an airplane, it was just a continuation of sorts of what we did in college. We also made pipe bombs in high school and blew them up out in the woods and once on the same 17th Street Canal levee that failed during Hurricane Katrina and flooded our Lakeview neighborhood in New Orleans. Our blowing a hole in the levee had nothing to do with it failing years later during the hurricane. I just wanted to make that clear.

This was before there was a terrorist threat and we were just having fun, not trying to hurt anyone.

Since we never had much money, we had to supplement our diet with other food sources that we shot, caught, trapped or whatever other method we might have used. We even shot a squirrel out of the tree with the blow gun.

At any one time we might have frogs, doves, ducks, squirrel, quail and even alligator in our freezer.

The Help

All the guys in the house next door were BA or Accounting majors including my two roommates Ronnie and Leg. As I had mentioned they were all in the same fraternity, KDT, which was mostly made up of New Orleans guys. It was a crazy scene whenever test time came around. These guys spent most of their time looking for “the help,” which was the answers to the test. “The help” might be last semester’s test, yesterday’s test answers or a copy of the test that someone stole from the professor’s office.

A couple of the guys, I won’t mention names, actually broke into the professor’s office the night before the test and got copies of the test. Man, that is ballsy.

Whenever you saw a whole bunch of cars at somebody’s house, you knew that they either had “the help” or there was a gang bang going on.

Homecoming

Homecomings were some pretty interesting times to say the least. Everybody got up for homecoming and many people got dates for the game, but I think I only had one homecoming date in all my five years. I think it was my junior year and it was quite memorable. I got shot with a BB gun and had to go to the hospital to have the BB removed.

After the homecoming parade I got to keep the papier-mâché lion’s head from the Industrial Tech Department’s float, which I had helped make. It was a pretty good likeness of a lion’s head. So I brought it home and put it on a table in the corner of our living room. After the football game most of the gang was at our place drinking Gipsy Rose wine out of a gallon jug. We had found some old 78 rpm records in an old house and proceeded to have a skeet shooting contest in the living room using a Benjamin Pump air rifle. We would pass the gun and the wine bottle around, someone would shout “pull!” and another guy would sail a record across the room and the guy with the gun would fire the BB gun at the record.

Of course this was very safe, because we were all trained professionals. Well, things were getting a little crazy and someone shot my lion’s head with an arrow. It pissed me off, seeing my lion with an arrow sticking in his eye. Then Casey Kilian decided to shot the lion’s head with the air rifle. I had a rotisserie rod in my hand and just instinctively shoved it in front of the lion’s head and said to Casey, “Don’t shoot it.” But he did exactly that and the BB ricocheted off the rod and hit me in the groin area. It stung and I admonished Casey that he could have hit me in the eye and went to my bedroom to check it out.

When I looked down I saw that there was a spot of blood and a hole in my khaki pants. I dropped my pants and immediately saw that I was shot in the scrotum and with more careful examination I felt the BB in my scrotum. Thank God that it did not hit me in the testicle, but I yelled to my roommate Pat that Casey had shot me in the balls. Well, I got sober real fast and told them to take me to the hospital emergency room.

The emergency room in the little town of Hammond, at 2:00 AM on Saturday night was nothing like New Orleans where there would be five gunshot wound victims and twenty other bleeding cases. There in Hammond we had to ring the bell for help and a young candy striper about seventeen years old came to see what we needed.

She said, “What’s wrong?”

My other roommate Ronnie answered in an intoxicated voice, “My roommate’s been shot in the balls.”

The young girl almost fainted when she heard that. I was now in grave pain. The nurse’s aid ran to get the doctor and this guy must have wanted to be a comedian or something because he thought it was rather humorous. I, on the other hand, didn’t see any humor in it at all.

I was put on the cold metal table with my privates exposed while my friends, still drunk, were having wheel chair races down the deserted halls of the hospital.

The Doc said, “I have been a surgeon for fifteen years and this is a first for me; it’s like one of those western movies. Nurse, get me a pan of hot water and give him a bullet to bite on.”

I didn’t find it in the least bit funny and my balls were hurting like hell.

Then the Doc came out with some big ass needle, and I asked, “What are you going to do with that?”

And he said, “Got to deaden it, son.”

“Holy shit Doc, that in itself will kill me.”

Anyway, he deadened it and made a slight incision and squeezed the BB out and gave it to me. I kept it for years and finally lost it.

When my mother heard the story, she wanted me to go to our family doctor to have him look at it and maybe get x-rays taken. I said, “Mom, we don’t want to x-ray that area of my body. That’s not a good idea. You could have a grandchild with two heads or something.”

The next day my balls were swollen up big time and one half of my scrotum was pink while the other half bruised deep purple. I had a difficult time walking because they were so sore and swollen to about twice their normal size. I kind of dragged one leg, like Chester in Gun Smoke, so as not to touch them while I was walking.

There was this fat girl at school that we called “Bright Light” who really liked me and when she heard what had happened she was all concerned and came up to me to see how I was doing. She wasn’t very bright, but was real sweet. I never knew her real name. But she asked how I was and I said I was OK.

Then she said, “No, I mean, how are you really doing?”

I said, “Oh, I’m OK, they put it in a cast, but it’s as hard as a rock.”

I couldn’t help putting a little humor in it.

There was a bunch of girls whose real names I never knew, just the names we gave them; actually I think Pat and Calvin gave them most of their names. There was Tons of Fun, a fat girl, Bright Light, who wasn’t very bright, The Manchac Maiden, I guess because she was from the Bayou Manchac area, One Sock, because she was doing some guy with one sock on when a couple of the other guys were watching, and Tic Toc. Tic Toc was a handicapped girl who was short, round and whose legs didn’t work very well, so that when she walked she waddled from side to side. You know “tic toc, tic toc” like a clock. I think that was another one of Pat’s names. One time years later when we were telling stories he said, “Did you hear that Tic Toc died?” I said, “No.” And he said “Yeah, her time ran out.”

Parties were always happening, mostly on Friday evenings, but we didn’t have very many quality girls come to our parties. I guess that was because of our reputation. One of the parties got crazy and the cops were sent to our house. Man, people were scattering all over, running out the back door, Reith and a girl were under the house hiding; it was crazy. This may have been the second or third time we had been visited by the cops.

For Christmas that year we had a Christmas pine tree we cut down in the woods and decorated it with rubbers and firecracker chasers, the kind that you would light on the ground and they would run all over whistling.

Spring Break was coming up and we were trying to find ways to get some money to go to Panama Beach, Florida. We usually went to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in Baton Rouge and sold our blood for extra money, but that was only about twenty-five dollars, so we needed other sources for money. Someone mentioned that if we could capture the “alligator in the lake at Zemurray Lodge” we could sell him to the Reptile Jungle and get money to pay for our trip.

The Reptile Jungle was a tourist attraction on the side of the highway that afforded people not from the area, for the price of admission, a chance to see snakes, turtles, alligators and other creatures of the swamps. Zemurray Lodge was a big estate that belonged to a rich lady who died and left it in her will to be made into a park. It had a big old house with a bunch of beautiful azalea bushes and a big lake surrounded by dense woods. The lake was off limits for fishing, but we would sneak in there anyway and fish. But the neat thing was that in that lake was a big old alligator; a big alligator that could be captured and sold to the Reptile Jungle for Spring Break cash.

I think this was another one of Reith’s ideas along with his co-conspirator, Calvin.

We decided to begin making plans to catch the alligator. Now, just the fact that we decided that this was a good idea had to mean that we were under the influence of alcohol or that we were crazy or both. Pat and Mal were biology majors and suggested that we might shoot the alligator with a dart that had some kind of sedative to knock it out. We could then tie it up and carry it off. This was an eight foot plus alligator we were talking about.

But anyway, it was Pat and Malcolm’s job, since they were biology majors, to find some kind of sedative from the biology lab and then we had to find a dart and method of delivery. We saw on those wild animal television shows how they sedated the animals with darts and then captured them. But Pat said that alligators had such a primitive neurological system that it might not work and they didn’t think that SLC’s biology lab had sedatives or darts. So that didn’t work out and we had to come up with a new plan.

So one night while drinking at the Brown Door, we decided that we would get into Zemurray Lake the back way through the dense woods and reconnoiter the situation and the alligator. The team was made up of Pat, Calvin, Demis and myself. We managed to get through the woods to the lake with cuts and bruises from the trees and underbrush.

DeMoss and I climbed up in a tree to spot the gator, and we could see him floating in the moonlight out in the middle of the lake. We devised a game plan whereby we would carry a two-man yellow life raft, a ten foot pole with a wire noose on it and a bunch of rope. The plan was for Pat and Calvin to stealthily paddle up to the sleeping alligator floating on the moonlit lake, place the noose around his snout and then pull him to shore where we would then tie him up and carry him out strapped under a pole. Kind of like you would see in a cartoon. Damn, here was a bunch of geniuses!

Some time later Pat and Calvin went to get the gator. They were in a two-man yellow rubber raft with a long pole and a long rope paddling towards the alligator. As they got to within about twenty feet of the beast, he gave a big splash with his mighty tail and submerged. But with that mighty switch of his tail, the plan changed from capture to retreat. Man, it looked like that rubber raft had a motor on it going full throttle in reverse. They were paddling so fast in reverse that they left a wake glittering in the moonlit water. Another brilliant plan gone to waste.

After that, we had no further plans for that alligator. However, we did shoot another alligator. We skinned it, cut it up, and ate it. But it was big, old, and tough. It was like trying to eat cotton with a fish or frog flavor. You would just chew and chew and chew on it, but you never could swallow it. I don’t think there was a farmer’s pond within twenty miles that we hadn’t tried to fish. DeMoss and Reith had them all spotted out.

One of the alligators that we shot—well, Pat shot—came out of the pond of a prominent oil company owner and years later Pat’s nephew was talking to the owner’s grandson who mentioned that his grandfather used to have an alligator in his pond and Pat’s kid said, “Yeah, my uncle Pat shot him.”

Pat’s picture with the gator

Summer Jobs

Iwas one of nine children and my folks couldn’t afford to send me to college, so I worked in the summer to send myself to college and support myself. I did this by working summer jobs, saving as much as I could and borrowing the rest from The National Defense Student Loan Program.

I worked one summer as a marble setter’s apprentice, putting in tiles, marble stiles in restrooms, fascia on buildings and marble floors and altars in churches. Another summer I spent on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico as a “roust-about,” and yet another summer at a chemical plant on the Mississippi River across from New Orleans.

The chemical plant job was a good job. I got the job from my neighbor across the street, Mr. Diaz, who was the plant manager. I, in turn, got my buddy Joe Henry hired since he got me the job with the marble company the previous year. The neat thing about this job was that the plant made 192 proof pure alcohol that was mixed with some other ingredients and then sold to companies like Listerine™ for mouth wash and stuff like that.

The plant was very regulated by the government. You had to get a government inspector to unlock the lock on a valve before it could be opened when pure alcohol was involved.

Product like molasses used to make alcohol would come in via railroad tank car and alcohol pure or denatured would go out via tank car. It was my and Joe’s job to unload the tank cars, clean them and fill them up.

Joe and I would have to clean out the railroad tank cars by getting down into them with a big air hose to dry out any moisture. In the middle of summer, it was not very comfortable inside of a tank car with a temperature of about 110 degrees. However, the other part of the job was to fill the cars with 192 proof alcohol. In the process, we would have to run sample bottles from the tank cars to the lab so that they could be tested for purity and moisture content. We would sit on top of the tank car and lower the bottles down by a string with a noose around the neck of the bottle, bring up a full bottle, put a cap on it and take it to the lab.

When we went to the lab to get a sample bottle, we would sneak out with a second bottle for us. By the end of summer Joe and I both had a gallon of 192 proof alcohol to take back to college. Proof is twice percent, so that was ninety-six percent alcohol. Man, talk about a party-maker; that was awesome. Our punch made with our special ingredient was intoxicating, to say the least.

President Kennedy

The tragic thing that happened in my third year was when President Kennedy was killed, November 22, 1963. Everyone remembers where they were when they got the word that the President was shot. I was walking across campus coming from class when someone came running by and shouted that the President had been shot. I ran to the dorm and we all gathered around the TV in the lobby to watch the event unfold.

President Kennedy was my first vote for president and it seemed everyone including me was devastated by his death. When Walter Cronkite reported that the President was dead, my eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t believe that this could happen in our country. But then after that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were also assassinated.

Sonny Costa

Another one of the wonderful characters of my college experience was Sonny Costa. Sonny was a big strong and tough guy, who wrestled in high school. We had both attended Holy Cross High School in New Orleans.

A traveling carnival had come to Hammond with an assortment of rides, games and side shows. They also had a muzzled baboon that the show promoters offered to anyone in the audience who would wrestle the baboon in a caged ring for the opportunity to win fifty dollars if you could stay in the ring with the baboon for a certain amount of time.

That was a lot of money back in our college days. The baboon’s manager would also take side bets on baboon or the challenger. We talked Sonny into wrestling the baboon and we all bet on him since he was a former wrestler and bigger than the baboon.

The much anticipated event started with Sonny entering the cage with the baboon, who was on the opposite side of the cage, but before Sonny could even get into a position to defend himself the baboon sprung from clear across the cage straight at Sonny’s throat. It scared the shit out of him and he responded by grabbing the baboon and throwing him against the cage wall, which put a big hurt on the animal who crumpled to the floor in a state of half-consciousness. The manger called a foul and disqualified Sonny and wouldn’t pay him the fifty dollars, at which time Sonny threatened to do the same to the manager if he didn’t pay him. I don’t remember much after that, but I think we had to leave the scene.

East Mary Street

The next year, which was my senior year or my final year, we moved into a house on East Mary Street. Our place was a nice old wood house, had a front porch and sat off the ground on two foot brick piers. It was about a block from a nice little park and about fifteen or so blocks from school.

One of the things I remember about our stay there was that at dinner time we would watch Amos and Andy reruns on television. That was some good stuff. The Kingfish and Andy kept us laughing throughout dinner. In one episode Andy was looking to beat the hell out of the Kingfish for some scam or other crap that the Kingfish had done to Andy. Kingfish was talking to J. Calhoun the lawyer about the legal ramifications of someone beating the hell out of someone else and Calhoun said that it depended upon who is the “beator” and who is the “beatee.”

It was a shame they were pulled off the air. I guess it wasn’t politically correct, but I didn’t see much difference between Amos and Andy and the later show, The Jeffersons.

Frogs on the Highway

One day while we were sitting on the porch having a beer and watching it rain someone said, “Hey, remember what the old hermit said about the first heavy rain after a long drought?”

This old hermit guy that lived in the Manchac swamp where we hunted told us that if we wanted to get some bull frogs we should come out on the old Hammond highway that runs through the swamp at night after the “first heavy rain” following a long drought. He said that we could just pick frogs up off the road then. “Yeah!” we said. “Let’s go get some frogs.” We could taste those frog legs already.

Boy, when we got there, there were frogs everywhere on the highway. Some had already been run over and squished on the road. The technique was to stop the car in front of the frogs with the headlights on the frogs, get out with a big oyster sack and walk around to the back of the frogs, being careful not to break the beam of the car’s headlights. The frogs were mesmerized by the headlights, and we would just pick them up and throw them into the sack. But as we would put one frog into the sack, another would jump out.

In no time we had a sack full of big bullfrogs in the car and a couple of them got out and were jumping all around in the car. It was a crazy scene with a car full of guys and frogs jumping all around as we tried to catch them and return them to the sack. We would catch one, put it back in the sack and another would jump out. We were all laughing our asses off and having a good time. Man, we ate frog legs for weeks after that.

This was the year that I had “the hots” for this tall girl named Cara. She was about five feet ten inches or so and I was only five six. She was a great-looking girl and was amazed that a short guy like me was interested in a tall girl like her. That was the first tall girl that I dated, but there were many more to follow. I love tall women. I remember one tall girl asking me if I was intimidated by the height difference and I replied, “Look, if I walk into a bar or restaurant with some tall good-looking girl and everybody turns to look at us, do you think they are thinking, ‘Look at that poor little guy with that tall good-looking woman?’”

Anyway, Cara and I had a few dates, but I had this fantasy of making love to her in my Renault Dalphine, which was a very small car in both length and width. I figured that I could open both back doors, having her head sticking out one side and her feet sticking out the other side. Girls were pretty straight-laced back then, this being before the advent of the Pill. So a lot of guys talked a good game, but to make it to home plate with girls back then, you usually had to be going steady or engaged in some cases. So my fantasy remained just that, a fantasy.

Renault Dalphine

With regards to my Renault Dauphine, we had some interesting times with it. It was sky blue with four doors and a piston on the top of the floor gear shift and I had paid three hundred dollars for it.

One time I walked out the front door of our house to go to class in the morning and to my surprise my car, the Renault, was up on the front porch about three feet off the ground. I had to run the three miles to school in order to make it to my class on time. When I got back home after classes, all my roommates were laughing their asses off at such a great prank.

I still can’t believe that Pat, Seagull and DeMoss were able to lift the car onto the porch. Pat was the biggest guy and he was only about five feet eight. Jerry and Jimmy were little guys like me.

Another time we were driving in the mud during a rain storm on what was the road base being built for the new highway. We were turning circles in the mud, knocking over construction barrels and just having a great time. The Renault had this big wrap-around front bumper to protect it.

We were actually on our way to “the Cowboys’ house.” The Cowboys were a group of guys from East Jefferson parish who were into cowboy stuff like horses and rodeo. That group included Dan DeBlanc, Farrell Fresh, Calvin Serpas and Don Dufore. Dan was a rodeo bull rider and ended up being a pilot in the Marine Corp like me while Farrell stayed with the rodeo circuit and ended up being a champion rodeo rider winning a number of titles.

Dan and I crossed paths in OCS and a couple of times in Vietnam. Don Dufore had gone to Holy Cross High School with me. Farrell was a small tough as hell guy who was a bronc rider in the rodeos with Dan.

The guys that we hung around with were for the most part from New Orleans and the surrounding area. We had the Lakeview guys who mainly went to Warren Eastern High and the Jefferson Parish guys that went to East Jefferson High.

Well anyway, back to the story; it was dark and raining like hell and I was driving like crazy all the while looking for the road to the cowboys’ house when Pat shouted out “turn here.” I turned, but to our surprise we turned onto a railroad track not the road. So there we were riding down the tracks going bump, bump, bump, bump! I think it screwed up my wheel alignment big time and we put a big dent in my fender. But like always, it was fun. Alcohol was probably involved again.

A block down the street on East Mary Street were two sisters, Patsy and Missy Noonan. Missy was one of the campus queens and was as nice as she was pretty.

I was closer to Patsy than I was to Missy and sometimes I would walk down to their place and visit. Patsy and I would go down to this park about a block away and sit on the swings and visit. It was very nice and so were they.

Baseball

Four of my five years at SLC I played on the baseball team and lettered in two of those four years. Our team won the Gulf States Conference baseball championship title four of those five years. It was great times and I loved playing baseball. It was my main focus, more perhaps than college itself.

In my freshman year I was doing great, having a ball and getting good grades, but the main thing on my mind was baseball. My life had revolved around baseball ever since I was eight years old. I couldn’t wait until the following semester and the start of baseball season. I must admit that I was nervous about going out and making the team. I was just an average high school ballplayer and not very big, but I couldn’t imagine not playing ball.

The first semester ended and I had passed all my subjects. And now it was the second semester and baseball tryouts were on. I was small, fast and played with a great amount of enthusiasm. Corky and I were both sweating making the team. He was a catcher and I played second base. We made the first two cuts and now it was the big “do or die day,” the final cut. We got called into the coach’s office and we were both tight as a drum. I was trying to prepare myself for the words, “Sorry, but we can’t use you.”

Coach Pat Kenelly called me into his office and I stood in front of his desk. Coach Pat was a very tall man, about six foot five, and very tough looking. He was also a football coach. For years I thought he was seven foot tall, which is another story I’ll tell later. So anyway, there I was standing in front of this big stern looking coach who had my life in his hands. He was sitting behind his desk stuffing chewing tobacco in his mouth with his size fifteen shoes resting on the desk. I could barely see over his feet.

I said, “Yes sir, did you want to see me, Coach?”

I thought that he was going to say, “Thank you for coming out, but we didn’t have a spot on the team for you.” I had never ever been cut from a team before.

Coach Pat with a stern face said, “Little Man,” (he always called me Little Man and never Ronnie, which was something I was very proud of), “I think you can help us with your glove and I like the way you hustle, but hell son, I’m gonna have to go the high school to find you a uniform.”

That was my first taste of his wonderful and funny dry wit. He would say some things in tense situations that would tear you up. But I had made the team and life was very good.

Once I had made the team, Coach Pat got me into the athletic dorm which was part of the football stadium. That was my second semester and it helped me out financially. Coach didn’t have but a few scholarships to work with and he would give out part scholarships to help the guys who needed it. I was putting myself through school without any help from home, so it was a big advantage.

It was great living with a bunch of jocks in the stadium dorm. There were free haircuts in the bathroom area, as we would give each other haircuts. From our dorm room we could open a window and climb out on the student union building’s roof and sunbathe. That was great plus the dorm was right in the middle of campus. I stayed there for that semester and then in my second year I moved off campus with the crew that I would be with for the rest of my time at Southeastern.

One time we were playing in a close game and all three of our very good outfielders had made errors by letting balls go through their legs. One guy, Jimmy Ruddick, was a left hander both throwing and hitting and the other guy, Billy Ladner, was a right hander but batted left handed. When they came off the field into the dugout, coach said, “Ruddick, you look like a monkey trying to f--- a football out there, and Ladner, you look like a right handed Ruddick.”

On the bench I would usually sit next to Corky at the end. We warmed a lot of bench that first year, and he was as funny as Coach Pat, but without that dry wit. Corky was a great bench jockey also and just flat funny with his comments and riding the other teams.

Corky, Pete Freeman and Joe Thomas were the great bench jockeys on our team and they would ride the other teams unmercifully. The other teams would say, “Hey man, what did we do to you?” And they would get on them even more. Coach Pat told Corky that he had coached a bunch of teams before, but none of them could compare with those guys for riding the other teams. Coach Pat told Corky one time that “he could give the Pope the red ass.”

My good friend Henry “Bubby” Winters, a pitcher, was warming up on the mound before the start of a game, throwing to Corky and every time he would look at Corky through his catcher’s mask he started laughing to the point that he couldn’t throw the baseball.

Coach came out and asked, “What’s the matter?”

Bubby said, “Coach, I can’t look at Corky behind that mask: he has a silly grin on his face and it breaks me up.”

Coach looked at Corky and told Bubby, “Yeah, I see what you mean, but you are out here to throw the ball.”

Years later, Henry and I met up in Houston, Texas, for the first time since college and we became best of friends and hung out together drinking and partying in the local bars. One time I told Henry that Coach Pat was the only seven-foot tall man I had ever met.

Henry said, “Ronnie, I’m six foot two and Coach Pat can’t be more than six four, six five at the most.”

I said that I would bet him five dollars that coach was seven foot.

So Henry said, “Let’s call him and see who wins the bet.”

Of course, we were in a bar drinking at the time so it didn’t enter our minds that it was 10 PM and Coach Pat, who would be in his seventies, would be in bed at the time.

Henry called information for Hammond, Louisiana, and got Coach’s phone number and we called him, the first time we had talked to him in twenty years or so.

When Coach Pat answered, Henry could hear his wife saying in the background, “Pat, who is calling at this hour?”

Henry said, “Coach, it’s Bubby Winters and Ronnie Boehm” (Bubby was what we all called Henry in high school and college).

He was happy to hear from us and Henry told him that we had a five dollar bet that I said he was seven-foot tall, but Henry said that he thought that coach was no more than six five.

Coach said, “Bubby, put The Little Man’s money in your pocket, ‘cause everybody looks seven-foot tall to him.”

Later on I was in my fifties and playing in a men’s senior baseball league in Houston and had hit my first home run in my whole life.

I told Henry, and he said, “Let’s call Coach Pat and tell him.”

Same scenario, we were in a bar drinking and called Coach.

He answered the phone and Henry said, “Coach, you won’t believe what Ronnie did.”

Coach Pat said, “Don’t tell me the Little Man went deep?”

Henry said, “Yes sir, he hit his first home run ever.”

Coach said, “It only took him fifty years; I guess miracles never cease.”

We had some real characters on those SLC teams. It was a small school and Coach Pat had very few scholarships to work with, so he gave them mostly to the pitchers and as I said before, he would split them up to help the guys who needed the money the most. If he had a good prospect with questionable academic skills, he would bring him in for the second semester in time for baseball and that way they couldn’t flunk-out and become ineligible before that baseball season was over. So it was with this one pitcher named Lou Poternostro from Istrouma High School in Baton Rouge.

On that team we had four guys from that same Istrouma High School team that was the 1961 Louisiana High School AAA State Championship runner-up team from Baton Rouge, and three guys from the Championship Jesuit High School team from New Orleans.

One day a professor called Coach Pat to tell him that one of his baseball players had only been to his class one time in the whole semester and that he wondered what happened to him. It was Lou, who was never going to be mistaken for a Rhodes’ Scholar. When coach asked Lou why he had not been to class, he told him he was claustrophobic and classes made him nervous. Lou was a good pitcher and a truly funny character and as you might suspect, he lasted only just one season.

Another character was Jim Reynolds, an outfielder and the son of the famous New York Yankee Hall of Fame pitcher, Alley Reynolds. He was also a hot-head with rabbit ears and could torque off in an instant. Once we were playing at LSU and the fans really got on him. They were calling him “Alley’s offspring” and that really pissed him off. In about the fifth inning or so he lost it and ran in from centerfield all the way up to the wall behind home plate and shot the whole stands “the bird” with both hands along with some choice words.

Well, that really got them going. It was in that same game I had started at second base for the first time and made three errors. I’d get to the ball, but would field the ball with stiff hands. I had a couple of hits in the game and stole a base. But after the game, Coach Pat told me, “It looks like you might help the team with your bat, but hell son, I’ve got to get those stiff wrists out of the infield.” Hence, I was now an outfielder and a bunch of the guys began calling me “SW,” short for stiff wrists.

Both of my roommates in the athletic dorm were tall guys who loved to screw around with me. Lamar Lebeau, our first baseman, was about six two and the best hitter on the team in both hitting average and home runs. Roy Baker was about six four, a tall lanky guy who played on the basketball team and was a pitcher on the baseball team.

One time I came home drunk and passed out on my bed. I was wearing shorts at the time, so they decided to use barber’s clippers on me and put a racing stripe up the side of my hairy legs. Then another time, just for the hell of it, they rolled me up in one of those thin striped mattresses that came off the bunk beds, taped it around and rolled me down a flight of stairs.

They were really good friends, but just liked to screw with me every now and again. But to get back at them, I put hot analgesic balm, a heating rub, in their jock straps. It worked well on muscles providing heat to the area applied. You can imagine how it felt in a jock strap. Well, that really pissed them off and they dumped me in the clothes bin in the locker room.

I loved playing baseball in college and I had a great deal of fun doing it. I had my share of screw-ups, too. We were playing at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, and the students there would sit on this four foot high brick wall along the first base line. I got a walk and was on first base taking a lead off base when I looked back at first. What I saw was a coed sitting on the fence with her legs open and that got my attention. It also got the pitcher’s attention, because he picked me off, another base-running jewel on my part. Coach also had some choice words for me.

The next day we went to the golf course in the morning, since our game was later that day and four of us, Corky, Ernie Knoblock, Pete Freeman and I teed it up. None of us had played golf very much and were not very accurate with our shots. Ernie could hit a baseball a mile and so too with the golf ball.

There were these two priests playing in front of us; Spring Hill was a Catholic Jesuit College, and we hit into them about three or four times. Each time, knowing proper course etiquette, we would shout “fore!” I guess on that last time we should have shouted “Sixteen!” As we came up to the next green, the priest said, “You boys play through so we can hit into you little bit.” They probably thought if these guys play baseball the way they play golf, our team should have no problem.

Another time we were playing at home against a team that was ranked just below us in the standings and I was starting in left field. I never paid much attention to the score and had to always ask the center fielder Earl Barron what the score was. There was a high pop up hit towards me just out of the infield over third base. As I came charging in to make the catch I had to run hard then come almost to a quick stop under the baseball, and when you do that you started running on your heels and that makes the ball look like it’s jumping up and down. The ball just tipped my glove, hit me in the forehead and then bounced about twenty feet away. I was looking all around and couldn’t find it. The third baseman retrieved it and made the play and as I was looking around, the trainer, Doc Morgan, came out and, being concerned about my having been hit in the head, asked me what the score was. “Hell Doc, I don’t know.” Then he asked me what inning it was. I never paid any attention to that detail either, and told him I didn’t know that either, so he thought I was knocked out on my feet and took me out of the game.

The next day we were playing the second game of a three game series and I didn’t get to start. I was mad because I had blown the play yesterday and thought that that was the reason I was on the bench. About the sixth inning, coach told me to get out in left field. Man, I was thrilled. I picked up my glove and took off running from the dugout towards the outfield. Just as I got twenty feet from the dugout, several guys called to me from the dugout and when I turned around about five batting helmets came sailing out the dugout with the chorus, “Take this, you might need it.”

I had a girlfriend named Patsy who loved to see me play ball, but she didn’t know much about baseball or the terms very well. She would say things like, “Are you all playing a double feature today?” And, “I love to see you with your little semi-circular legs (I had bowed legs) when you get off first base to run and then slip into second base. You look so cute.” Cute? I was a major threat to steal second base. Oh, well, I guess that would come under the eyes of the beholder heading.

Our starting catcher in my first year on the team was Roy Branhurst, who was a very good catcher, hit very well, had a great arm and ended up playing some pro ball. Roy also had a speech impediment and talked with a sort of lisp. One time during practice he was warming up a pitcher, and while in a crouched position behind home plate this big ass dog runs onto the field, runs up to Roy and pounces on him, knocking him down. So there is this big dog standing over Roy who is lying on his back and the dog is licking him on the face while Roy is saying in his impeded speech, “Det dis ton of a bitch off me.” And we were all laughing our asses off on the side; it was pretty funny.

I was fairly fast back then and a pretty good base runner. I had stolen a bunch of bases; however, one time I got a little careless and got picked off at third base. I dove back to the base but came up about six inches short and was tagged out. The out ended the inning and a rally. As I lay there, I could hear the thundering of Coach Pat’s big footsteps coming out of the dugout towards me. He got next to me, then he got down on his hands and knees and shouted in my face, “If you ever run on my bases again, it will be a cold day in hell.” So I sat way down on the other end of the bench for the next few games.

Another time he said that I must have glass in my stomach in order to see because I have my head so far up my ass.

Me stealing second base

Our right fielder in my first and second year was John Fred Gourrier from Baton Rouge who was about six four or five, played on the basketball team, and was the fastest guy on the team. John Fred was also famous, at least around Louisiana, as a singer who made hit record called “Judy in Disguise.” He was a very nice guy. After him, our right fielder was Ernie Knoblock who, along with my roommate Lamar, was one of the two best hitters on the team. He had a lot of power and very quick wrist.

He and Lamar, our first baseman, were in the top of our conference in home runs and runs batted in. Ernie loved to screw around with me during the games when I was playing second base by throwing knuckle balls to me from the outfield with men on base. The ball would come dancing all over the place to me and I’d have a moment of panic trying to catch it while worrying about missing it and letting a run score. He thought it was very amusing. He also had the best arm on the team, other than the pitches, and could throw a rocket from right field to any bag with good accuracy. He made some very impressive throw-outs from the outfield.

Our team, as I guess it was with most teams, had a cast of some real characters and odd balls. We had one slight-framed and not very tall pitcher who had a very large member if you know what I mean. He was too embarrassed to get dressed in the locker room, because he didn’t want anybody to see and laugh at him. Hell, the rest of us, if we had that kind of equipment, would be bragging and flashing that thing all around and being real proud. My roommate “The Gull” had the same kind of physical attributes, slight of frame, maybe five six, and big in the equipment area. One time, we bet these other guys that our guy Seagull had the biggest piece of equipment and they of course said that their guy had the biggest one. So we got together, put up some money and had an official measuring. Both guys pulled out their equipment and laid it on the table and we measured each guy. Seagull won “hands down” or dick down to be more precise. I don’t know if that is the right descriptive terminology to describe it, but you get the idea.

In my junior year, Coach Pat was replaced by Coach Tommy Bell and Coach Pat went back to coaching just football. Coach Bell liked me and my playing time increased.

My junior year on the team was the only year of my four years that we didn’t win the conference championship, but that was a pretty good run and a lot of fun.

SLC Baseball Team

The End of College

Recruited into the Navy, then the USMC

About mid-way through my final year in 1966, I was contemplating what I was going to do when I got out of college. I didn’t like the idea of just getting a job and staying in New Orleans and then there was the draft to think about. I guess I was looking for a little adventure in my life.

My military adventure all started when I saw the Navy recruiters driving onto campus in their white convertible with “FLY NAVY” written on the side in big letters. I thought to myself, “If you were a Navy pilot then you would have to carry a big stick to keep all the women off of you, ‘cause you would be so cool.” So I decided to go check it out.

I talked to this Navy Lieutenant about the Navy and flying and told him that I had never been flying even though I was in the Civil Air Patrol for a brief period when I was about fourteen years old. I was a senior in college and had never even been on a plane before.

He asked me if I would like to go flying with him the next day. I said, “Hell yeah, I would.” So he said to meet him at the Hammond Airport at such and such a time and he would give me a ride. I was so excited that I barely slept that night; I couldn’t wait for the next day.

The next day, I showed up at the airport a little early and very excited. The Lieutenant greeted me and asked if I was ready to go flying and I confirmed that I was. He gave a briefing on what we were to do; pre-flight, emergency stuff and communications between us, how to get in and out of the aircraft and so forth and so on.

As I walked up to the plane, my heart was racing. This wasn’t some civilian aircraft.; This was a Navy T-34 training aircraft with a slide back canopy and the U.S. star insignia painted on the side. He showed me how to climb up on the wing and then get into the back seat. When I slid into the seat and he began to fasten my seat belt, hook up my mike and put on my head set, I was just in heaven. He climbed into the front seat, got strapped in and did his cockpit pre-flight. When he clicked the mike and asked if I could hear him and was I all set, I thought to myself, “Wow, I’m really going to fly; this is great.”

He started the engine, contacted the tower, received taxi instructions and we began to taxi to the end of the runway. We held short on the runway, did a run up and got our takeoff clearance. It just kept on getting better every moment. When we taxied onto the runway and lined up looking down the centerline, I knew that this is what I wanted to do—fly airplanes.

He gave it the power and we began to roll, then we began to lift off the ground, my first time to fly. I watched as we climbed and the ground began to drop away. It was wonderful. We were off of the runway, then climbing above the trees and then coming up to the clouds. “Man,” I thought, “this is awesome.”

We leveled off at some altitude, maybe three or four thousand feet, and he did some banks with right and left turns, or as he said, “port and starboard.” Even that sounded really neat.

Then he asked if I wanted to take the controls.

“Yes, Sir,” I replied, trying to hide my excitement.

He said, “You’ve got it,” and I shook the stick indicating that I had the control of the aircraft as he had told me to do.

Then told me how to bank and get on the rudder pedals. He told me I was doing great and asked how I liked it so far.

I said, “Yes, Sir. I love it.”

He then said, “Well now we are going to see if you are really meant to be a pilot.”

He took back control of the aircraft, pulled the plane up into a climb and the beginnings of a loop. At the top of the loop, I was looking at the earth upside down under the top of my head with my feet bracing against the sky.

I said, “Sign me up Sir, this is what I want to do.”

He said, “Roger that.”

I took the flight test which was a two part test and passed it. I did well in one section but barely passed the second section which was the math part. I would always tighten up whenever I took a timed math test and that is what I did on this test also.

So I signed up with the Navy for pilot training and started going through all the application processes and security investigations. The recruiting officer said that all looked great and that I would probably leave for training shortly after my graduation in May, 1966.

Well, about one month before graduation, I got a letter from the Department of the Navy which said that they had changed the test criteria and that I now did not qualify because I didn’t have a passing grade on the second part of the test. They said that I would have to retake the test.

I retook the test and passed both sections with no problem this time, but I was told that I had to go through the entire application process all over again which took about six months.

About the same time, I got a letter from the Draft Board saying that I was to be drafted into the Army. So I went to see the Navy Recruiting Officer to find out what he could do for me in this situation. He said that he couldn’t do anything for me, that I had to go through the process again and that I would not be draft exempt while I did. So then I asked what else could I do? He then said that I could go talk to the Marines. I said, “The Marines? You have got to be crazy to go into the Marines.” And he said, “No, but it helps.”

I didn’t even know that the Marines flew airplanes. The recruiter said that they flew the same airplanes that the Navy did and that you went you through the same training with the Navy in Pensacola, Florida. You would in fact become a Naval Aviator, but a Marine pilot.

So I went to talk to the Marine recruiters down at the Federal Building on Canal Street in New Orleans. Well, once you go into a Marine recruiting office, you rarely leave without being signed up for the Marine Corps. They were great recruiters.

The recruiters that I met with were Captain Fanning who was a helicopter pilot and a Major that was an infantry officer. They said that I would make a great Marine officer and pilot, “Just sign here.” So I said that I would and that I couldn’t wait to go the OCS (Officer Candidate School) and Flight School.

They then said that if I were to be a real Marine officer I needed to go to TBS or The Basic School at Quantico, Virginia which was on the same base as OCS. I asked what TBS was and why I should go. They informed me that OCS just qualified you to be a Marine officer, but that TBS was where you learned how to be a Marine officer and then I would get to go to flight school.

I argued that I just wanted to go in on a Flight School contract and go to Pensacola like a couple of my friends were doing after OCS. At that time you could go to OCS and go straight to Pensacola for flight school on an aviation contract, but it turned out that now every Marine Officer went through The Basic School.

Captain Fanning and the Major insisted that I go through TBS and they talked me into it. This is where, in retrospect, I can see God’s plan working for me. When I was running up and down the hills in the snow in Quantico in January and practicing to be an infantry officer, I was cursing the recruiters and my stupidity for letting them talk me into this when my friends were already flying in Pensacola.

But it was just because of this at the end of TBS that I was selected to be one of the very first Marines to go through Air Force Flight School and that I was guaranteed jets. It turned out that all of the Marines going to Pensacola except for a very few at the top of the class who got jets were to get helicopters. I am sure that I would have gotten helicopters if I had gone to Pensacola. Not that being a helicopter pilot was a bad thing; they were the guys with the big balls, but I loved jets and it worked out great for me.

There was a saying going around about helicopter pilots—well actually there are a lot of sayings about helicopter pilots. One was “If your wings are moving faster than your fuselage, then that very fact means you are in an unsafe condition.”

Another one was “Having helicopter time on your flight record is like having VD on your health record.” My apologies to my buddies Steve Benckenstein, Tom Broderick and Dan DeBlanc. Hell, if you were a chopper pilot in Vietnam and hadn’t been shot up or shot down you couldn’t even get into the conversation. All those guys were heroes: just ask a Marine grunt who was extracted from a battlefield or medivaced when wounded.

So I signed up to be a Marine Officer; it was the best decision I ever made in my life, for it shaped who I am and for the rest of my life being a Marine was the proudest thing I’ve ever done. I graduated from Southeastern Louisiana College in May of 1966, but my Marine Corps OCS class was not to start until January of 1967. After graduation, I needed a job until I would leave for the Corps.

Waiting to Go into the Marine Corps

While waiting to go into the Marine Corps I continued to play baseball that summer along with my SLC teammate buddy Corky Barras and some other guys I knew from the New Orleans area. The team leader and coach was Jack Fleming, who ran the operations for his dad’s asphalt company. When Jack heard that I needed a temporary job until I left for the Marine Corps, he offered me a job with Fleming Asphalt Company.

My job was to drive a steam roller, or asphalt roller to be more correct, a tractor and do other odd jobs with the asphalt crew. The crew was made up of a foreman, three or four black laborers and myself. It could get quite amusing at times. One of the crew was a short guy like myself, about five six, named Frank, and another guy who was big and strong about six three who was built like a tight end by the name of Melp.

Frank spoke with a very thick black New Orleans accent and I sometimes had to get one of the other guys to interpret for me.

One day I asked Frank why they called the big guy Melp, because that wasn’t the name on his paycheck. Frank said to ask Melp where he lived, so I did and Melp said that he “lived up there on Melpa—aaa Melpa—aaa up dere around Magazine Street.” Melp couldn’t pronounce the street in New Orleans named Melpomene Avenue so everybody just called him Melp.

It was a living comedy working with these guys. Another time we were just starting to clear a lot overgrown with weeds and trees in order to construct a parking lot. I told Frank and Melp to go out and walk the lot to make sure there wasn’t anything hidden in the weeds that we didn’t want the bulldozer to destroy such as a fire plug or a gas line or something like that.

Melp said to me, “Aaa Mister Ronnie, I can’ts go out there in that lot ‘caus’ they got snakes in there.”

I said, “Melp, if there are any snakes out there they won’t hurt you and they are more afraid of you then you are of them.”

He said, “No sir, trust me I’m more afraid of them then they is of me.”

Frank nodded in agreement.

Then Melp said, “They got rattle snakes and ‘bow constructors’ out there.”

I then told him, laughing, that there are no rattle snakes or boa constrictors in New Orleans other than in the Audubon Park Zoo.

He said, “Yes sir, they do and that the ‘bow constructor’ is that big mean snake that hangs from a tree and when you walks by wraps around you, licks you slick and swallows you whole.”

So I sent two other guys into the lot. I couldn’t argue with reasoning like that.

Those guys were a constant source of amusement, but there was another guy that was the funniest of them all. He had the ability to make up words that fit perfectly to what he was trying to say, but just were not to be found in the dictionary. One time I was working on the asphalt roller that seemed to break down every other day. I got so frustrated that I hit the roller with a big monkey wrench and cursed it by saying, “They should have shit-canned this damn thing ten years ago.” And this guy says,” “Yeah, that do look pretty ageable alright.”

The summer and the months leading up to my leaving for the Marine Corps passed pretty fast, plus I met my sweetheart and future wife, Eileen, at a club down in the French Quarter. She was a pretty blonde and eighteen years old. I was twenty-three at the time.