Endless love: Raceland couple shares vows 6 times

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It began in a Raceland dance hall and spanned almost 60 years, the romance between a young, shy truck driver and the blushing daughter of an icehouse owner.


The marriage of Laurie Callais of Golden Meadow and the former Gertrude Crosby is in many ways not so different from those of many couples in the bayou country who cling to old-fashioned values of loyalty and putting family first. But their story bears telling because, when viewed in the context of all that is good in a world that often isn’t, there can be no denial that it is a source of inspiration swelling with the power of example, a fertile field of life lessons as appropriate today as a half-century ago.

It can be all these things for the patient reader willing to identify rather than compare, and there is no time better for its telling than this Valentine’s Day week. It is the story of a couple impacted by tragedy, but able through partnership and the strength of love to persevere.

Some explanation may be needed to avoid confusion on Laurie’s name. It was supposed to be “Larry,” a tribute to his father’s former Army sergeant. But language differences – his father only spoke French – coupled with spelling issues resulted in the name ending up as Laurie. He has always kept the name, because he knows who he is.


After a two-year stint in the Army – Laurie notes that he was drafted, therefore not a volunteer – he returned to Louisiana to make his way in the world.

“I was driving trucks for the Jefferson Truck line,” said Laurie, recalling the night in 1955 that he and a friend stopped at the dance hall called ”The Welcome Inn” while headed for Leeville. “We knew we would stay in Raceland all night, waiting for the next day to unload in Leeville. We saw these girls and thought we should dance with them.”

One of the girls had flowing blonde hair and she was just about the prettiest young lady Laurie had ever seen. Her name was Gertrude.


“We talked and I asked how did you come to the dance?” he said, noting that most of the conversation was in French. “She told me it was her brother would come and bring her and then bring her back home. She would go with her friends, because there was none close to the community where she was.”

MY JOLIE BLONDE

Soon the meetings at the dance hall became a ritual. Laurie would stop while en route to the Leeville terminus. They danced as Vin Bruce played and sang songs like “Dans La Louisianne” and “Fille De La Ville,” coming to realize that, growing up in south Lafourche as both had, they actually knew each other at around the age of seven.


“We used to go to Catechism together and we would stop at the ice house her daddy had. He would know how to use the faucet for us to drink, and then we would go back to school,” Laurie recalled. “We had to walk because they didn’t have no bus or nothing. With us older it was good, I knew her parents and knew she was from a good family. My dad and her dad was very good friends and that also brought us together.”

Nearly two years of courting led to a decision by the pair that they should marry, and on June 29, 1957 they did just that.

The wedding was celebrated on a Cut Off lawn, with live music and plenty of food, chicken and seafood and other delights with the tart scent of crab boil wafting over a crowd that danced and sang and joked.


The bride and groom danced to many songs, including the Cajun classic “Jolie Blonde.”

“We danced to that,” Laurie said. “She was my Jolie Blonde. My little blonde girl.”

BIRTHDAY VALENTINES


Married life proved to be everything the couple hoped for, by Laurie’s account. In 1960 Gertrude gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, whom they named Loretta.

Valentine’s Day was always special for the couple, but even more so because Gertrude’s birthday was Feb. 13, the day before.

“I knew I would have to buy her something for her birthday but for Valentine’s Day I would get nothing,” said Laurie. “She would keep the candy and wouldn’t give me a piece, and she would say ‘you have my heart.’”


It was a private joke between them that endured a lifetime.

Laurie had gotten work in the oilfield, which was long and hard but paid well.

With a child to raise, the job was ever more important and grateful for the paycheck from the Lafourche Well Company, which reworked existing wells. Laurie and the other men worked the hole itself, from a 94-foot tall free-standing derrick on a barge.


“My actual work was as a derrick man, to take care of the mud, take care of the engine, to check the mud weight to make sure the correct weight was there to hold the pressure on the well,” Laurie said. “When we worked on the job we would make sure we had something to back us up, another weight standing by in case what we had was not enough. Then everything was manual, it was done by hand. Today it is all hydraulic.”

DISASTER STRIKES

On July 5, 1961 Laurie and his fellow crewman were headed into the hole. The weather was turning bad.


“We had started going in the hole and then the weather started blowing and raining and I mean blowing,” Laurie recalled, explaining how it was necessary for him to climb the derrick. “I would latch onto a pipe and I would slap the pipe, the third joint I had to raise up to secure the other part. I was ready to put the pipe in, I pulled back a little bit again and then I pulled back, and had wrapped my pipe in the derrick. I was hanging onto the railing and got my feet on it, trying to make it to the ladder and then something hit me in the back and threw me across the derrick. I hit the other side and the wind was swirling and it picked me up. And then I was swirling, just my two fingers caught back into the rig. Then another twister came and had me hitting the side of the derrick, I was going up and down like a feather and then I fell out of the derrick. There was no way I could catch hold of nothing.”

Laurie hit the deck, quite literally, the drilling line wrapped around his arm.

Fellow crewmen later told Laurie that there was no stretcher. Confusion prevailed, and the other workers were not certain if he was alive or dead.


Laurie was dragged into the mudroom, lying on a broken-off piece of board. He had to wait for help or treatment, he said, because the boat that ferried workers to the site had gone fishing.

“After the weather subsided they did put me on a boat and took me to Port Sulfur,” said Laurie, who was then ferried to Touro Infirmary in New Orleans because of the degree of treatment he needed.

“I lost consciousness,” Laurie said. “A few days later I woke up and they told me where I was and the first thing I saw then was my wife Gertrude with my little daughter Loretta.”


Restricted by a full body cast, Laurie spent agonizing months in the hospital but Gertrude never left his side except as was necessary to care for the baby.

CRABS AND SATSUMAS

Once home, many more painful months of recovery were ahead, along with the financial nightmare of a breadwinner laid low. According to Laurie nobody from the company checked on his welfare or offered to look after his family, a bitter pill that he has trouble swallowing to this day. That the oilfield has undergone major change from that time to this is little comfort to him, and he wonders whether the people he once worked for even knew the degree of his suffering. Nobody has ever given him an answer.


“The next door neighbors, they would help me,” Laurie said. “They helped bring me outside. My wife had to go and work.”

The local grocery store told Gertrude she could have anything she needed.

“The store is open to you, they said,” recalls Laurie.


They told Gertrude she didn’t have to pay them back, but Gertrude vowed she would and she did.

Laurie’s Cajun princess was giving her soft hands the workout of a lifetime, for hours on end at a crab factory, to make sure the bills were paid.

“She would get the meat out of the crabs, out of the shells, so it could be shipped to different restaurants,” Laurie said. “In February she would pick satsumas, and then she would cut the oranges to sell at the stands.”


That his wife would work so hard and that he could not was a great source of pain. But the couple persevered.

“She helped me stay alive,” Laurie said of his wife.

Eventually Laurie got work as a security guard and held down several other jobs. But he would never achieve the financial success he had found on the barge.


SMOOTHER SAILING

In 1964 there was another baby, a boy they named Timmy. And eventually things settled down to something approaching normalcy.

In 1972, as the couple’s 15th wedding anniversary approached, they had a talk. They had been through so much together, perhaps it was time to create additional joy, to celebrate by renewing the vows they had made so long ago, to honor and cherish in sickness and health, because it was so obvious that is what occurred.


They had a ceremony, and then continued on for a spell in relative quiet. When their 25th anniversary arrived the couple renewed their vows again, in the church where it all started.

“It felt like the right thing for us to do,” Laurie said.

The couple was known by everyone in their neighborhood as inseparable. You never saw Laurie without Gertrude, except perhaps for his Knights of Columbus meetings or occasionally at the American Legion, where he held positions of rank.


So it was no surprise that when they celebrated their 50th anniversary there was another renewal of vows.

But there were some clouds on the horizon. This time it was Gertrude whose health – slowly – was failing.

So there was a renewal of vows on the 55th anniversary and then, just a year ago, with Gertrude knowing there might not be another opportunity for her to speak the words of dedication to her husband that were so sweet on her tongue, and he to speak his own to her, a decision was made.


“She asked me if I loved her and I told her yes I do. Then she says would you marry me again and I said I will,” Laurie said through tears. “Our daughter and son was there and wished us a happy anniversary. I said to Gertrude should we call the priest to renew our vows? She said no, that we did this so many times we don’t need the priest. If you want to marry me we don’t have to go through the ritual. We are going to do it ourselves. She said give me your ring and we will say the words.”

That was on June 29th. Less than a month later, on July 21st, Laurie’s Jolie Blonde joined the other departed relatives in heaven, and he is convinced she looks out for him from there to this very day.

This week marks the first Valentine’s Day Laurie has spent without his Jolie Blonde by his side. He has good moments and bad moments. But at all times he has warm and good memories for the woman he so much loved.


Laurie knows the world is a very changed place from what it was when he and Gertrude first married. But he also knows that the lessons, which come from making a life with someone you love, even when times are hard, don’t change.

So for everyone celebrating Valentine’s Day with someone they love and will spend a life with this year, Laurie has this advice.

“The boy and the girl, they can’t be one-sided, everything is something that you have to live with together,” Laurie said. “You cannot have your way and she cannot have her way. You compromise. If you want something and can’t afford it find a way to work around it. “


Laurie Callais looks at a wedding photo while speaking of his late wife, Gertrude, at their home in Cut Off last week. Married in 1957, the pair shaired their wedding vows six times, the final time at Thibodaux Regional Medical Center a month before she succummed to cancer.

JOHN DeSANTIS | TRI-PARISH TIMES