New Year opportunity for new spiritual growth
January 5, 2016
Terrebonne watches river levels
January 5, 2016
Raymond Joseph Yakupzack was always doing something with knowledge. He was getting more of it, passing it along to whoever would listen or using it to rectify a problem.
He was born on Feb. 27, 1926, in New Iberia, the son of Noelie Breaux Yakupzack of New Iberia and Paul Yakupzack, a Polish immigrant. Raymond, or “Yak” as he was known, entered the working world young, delivering papers for a printer as a boy. According to Yak’s wife, Edwina Milsted Yakupzack, he carried lessons from that first job with him for the rest of his life.
“He was always very careful when he wrote letters; the printing had to be exactly right. He was always interested in the type of paper it was, and all that kind of thing,” Edwina said.
After graduating from St. Peters Catholic High School in 1942, Yak enlisted in the Navy to help the World War II effort. He served as a radio technician in the Pacific Theater, attached to the Army. He was part of one of the first landing parties following the two nuclear bombings. While he never second-guessed his country’s actions, Edwina said her husband was quite aware of the horror that was visited on the Japanese.
“He had seen it, how desolate it was. Of course, it was blocked off, they couldn’t get close to it. He said it was really, really terrible looking,” Edwina said.
Following the war, Yak continued pursuing his passion for electronics by studying electrical engineering at the Southwest Louisiana Institute, now known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. It was here that he and Edwina met each other.
According to Edwina, she and her friends would hitchhike the 20 miles back to New Iberia after classes ended. One day, her classes ended at noon. Edwina’s sister didn’t want her getting a ride by herself, and she knew Yak headed home around the same time. She arranged for them to hitchhike together, although the two weren’t the best at getting home.
“When I had him there as a companion, we’d never get a ride. When I went by myself, we’d have a ride in 10 minutes. With him, the bus passed us up!” Edwina said.
As both time and cars passed the two, a mutual affinity for cold ones warmed up each one to the other.
“So, he said, ‘You drink beer?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I drink beer,’ and that’s how we met. We did get a ride, eventually, about 7 o’clock,” Edwina said.
After 66 years of marriage, children Paul and Laura, four grandchildren and five-great grandchildren, that common ground seemed to have paid off. After graduation and marriage in 1949, the couple set up in Houma, where the husband worked for Schlumberger as an engineer. He worked with them until 1955, and in 1957 he set up Yak’s Electronic Services, letting him tinker with gadgets full-time.
However, his business did not reap massive rewards, but not for any lack of technical skill. Instead, it was Yak’s love for the theoretical that held back his bottom line, according to Edwina.
“You say, I’ll put in a new picture tube and fix it in 10 minutes and you’re back in business. No, Yak wanted to find out why the picture tube didn’t work,” Edwina said. “So, he would work for days and nights and everything, until he found the fine, little thing that was causing the problem, and he’d replace that.”
Raymond Saadi has known Edwina and her husband for the last 60 years through La Petit Theatre De Terrebonne. Raymond said that Yak’s love for fixing electronics and helping people extended to his friends, no questions asked.
“I don’t care what the situation was, what time of day, night, weekend, holidays. If you had a problem and you needed some help, you could call Yak and he’d be there for you. If I had stuff I couldn’t fix at my house, I could call Yak. He could fix almost anything,” Saadi said.
However, sometimes that helpfulness would pop up at the wrong times, such as when at a friend’s house. While the rest of the party was watching a television program, Yak would be oblivious to it, instead fretting about the technical aspects of the television itself. If the TV’s picture wasn’t quite right, Yak was not letting tact get in between him and the solution.
“Right in the middle of when you’re finding out who did it, Yak would jump up and screw around with it so you’d never find out who did it,” Edwina said.
Yak also worked with the City of Houma, managing the power and water plants and Waterworks District No. 1 for years. He took a brief break from local water to chase bigger engineering fish in the summer of 1961, trying to join Wernher von Braun’s rocket program with NASA.
While Yak got the job in Cape Canaveral, Florida, his heritage got in the way. As a first-generation American, he wasn’t granted security clearance, and was sent to work in the other location in Huntsville, Alabama. By the time he earned clearance, he decided he’d rather be back in Houma, so he and Edwina returned.
Yak eventually earned a Master of Business Administration in 1980 from Nicholls, where he also taught as a professor in the engineering technology department. His students would refer to their “firm, but fair” teacher’s tests as “Yak attacks,” and he reveled in the chance to impart knowledge to others. Between his love for technology and his limitless reading list, primarily books on World War II, Yak was always spouting off to someone about something.
“He was a character in a way, but he was very smart. He was erudite. He read a lot of books and remembered what he read. He could talk to you about almost any subject,” Saadi said.
At Yak and Edwina’s home, there are multiple floor-to-ceiling bookcases, carrying volumes from a wide range of topics. While Edwina, an English teacher, always had eyes for fiction, her spouse would make her an expert in whatever technical or historical topic he was focused on. Raymond Joseph Yakupzack died on Dec. 4, 2015. Edwina remembers her husband’s driven curiosity and desire to share fondly.
“Yak was a witty man,” his wife said. “He was strange in many ways. He was always fun. And he was always very knowledgeable.”
A Houma resident for the last 66 years, Raymond Joseph “Yak” Yakupzack would read anything he could get his hands on and fix any technological issue someone had. Raymond Yakupzack died at the age of 89 on Dec. 4.
