Pride and the star
September 9, 2015
Thibodaux half-cent sales tax increase heads to vote March 2016
September 10, 2015
Calvin “Captain Bab” Joseph Babin Jr. grew up working at his father’s store, Babin’s Grocery, in east Houma. Born in 1926, he was a child of the Great Depression.
When he was 16, he was working in the store with his parents, Calvin Sr. and Lorel Babin, when a beautiful young girl walked in with her parents.
“It was love at first sight for me,” said Rhea Marie Chauvin Babin, Calvin’s wife of 69 years. “I just fell in love with him that first time.”
Calvin was a quiet, soft-spoken and hard-working young man, and Rhea liked that about him.
Rhea was living with her brother and his wife and Calvin would come to hang out on their screened-in porch for hours every other day.
But it wasn’t Rhea’s brother Calvin was visiting.
“Later on, my brother told me that he wasn’t coming over to see him,” Rhea said. “He said he was coming to see me!”
Rhea’s mother was against the two dating at first – after all, Rhea was only 14 years old. Initially, Rhea and Calvin were allowed to go to the movies together, but only during the day and only if her brother chaperoned.
“When I went out, it was a ‘nono,’” Rhea said. “A girl did didn’t go herself too much with a young boy without a partner, you know.”
A year later, in 1943, Calvin joined the U.S. Navy and was shipped to the Pacific Theater of WWII. The young couple continued to communicate through letters during his tour of duty. Calvin operated amphibious landing craft as U.S. forces battled the Japanese from island to island.
He didn’t tell his family many details about his service. He once sent Rhea a photo of him with a bandage on his arm, but never explained what happened. There were also a couple months where he was stuck on an island and the only thing there to eat was pigeon soup. The experience ruined soup for the man forever and he would never again dip a spoon into broth.
Calvin eventually got off that island and when the war ended, he returned home.
Calvin and Rhea were married a year after his return in 1946. The couple welcomed their first of three children, Linda, the next year.
They later bore two sons, Larry and Lonnie.
The year they were married, Calvin decided to join the Houma Police Department. He spent five years with the department.
The family would take a vacation every summer in Tennessee. In 1951, they were dining in a Smokey Mountains restaurant when they ran into Terrebonne Parish Sheriff A.P. Prejean.
The sheriff told Calvin that he needed deputies and, thanks to the chance meeting in the Tennessee Mountains, Calvin decided to switch.
When Calvin arrived for his first day on the new job, Sheriff Prejean told him he needed a service revolver and a holster. Calvin didn’t have either.
“And the sheriff said to him, ‘Here, take mine,’” said Larry Babin, Calvin’s oldest son. The sheriff took his pearl-handled revolver with hand-carved inlays and the holster off his belt and handed it to his new deputy.
Calvin worked the night shift as a road deputy. He slept days and was a light sleeper, but the stoic, gentle man never complained if his children and their friends happened to wake him. Rhea would make him breakfast when he returned home in the morning, he would sleep and the family would sit down for dinner every day at 5:30 p.m. before Calvin headed off to work.
As a law enforcement officer, he was merciful. He tended to give people a chance to redeem themselves after their first offense.
Sometimes he would stop a drunk driver and give them a break – and a ride.
“He was so kindhearted, he always talked to them,” Rhea recalled. “He would tell them, ‘If you ever do this again, I’m gonna put you in jail. I’m going to give you a chance this time.’”
He would drive them home instead of to jail the first time, but he wouldn’t if it happened again.
“He had the best disposition that a police [officer], a human being, could have,” said current Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Jerry Larpenter. “He was a caring man for the people of our community. It didn’t matter if you were a victim or a suspect: He treated everyman with dignity and kindness.”
Calvin was Jerry’s first commanding officer when Larpenter joined the sheriff’s office. He described Calvin as a man who would stop at nothing to ensure his deputies made it home that day.
Calvin – “Captain Bab” as deputies called him – often had his rookie deputies draw a map of Terrebonne Parish to prove their way around.
He rarely stayed at headquarters. Calvin’s deputies were his top priority and “if they were out there, he was out there,” Rhea said.
“He didn’t like staying indoors. He liked being outside.”
Calvin never wanted to be sheriff, although he very well could have, because he believed the job was too political. He preferred the actual practice of law enforcement instead of the administration anyway, Rhea said.
Calvin retired from the sheriff’s department in 1981 and took up woodworking as a hobby. One of his pieces, a 3-foot wooden Uncle Sam holding an American flag, is on display at the Bayou Terrebonne Waterlife Museum.
“He was a man who loved people, his family, loved his job,” Sheriff Larpenter said. “He gave 200 percent to the sheriff’s office. He was a man that never looked at the clock.”
