Lola Anna Bernice Louveau was named after her grandmothers, Annie Mourot Louveau and Bernice DeRousse. I don’t know where the name Lola came from.
Growing up with five brothers and one younger sister, she was somewhat of a tomboy as a child, but grew up more refined than anyone I’ve known, including her mother whose speech, patience, and housekeeping could have used some improvement. However, the two of them got along very well and she learned her cooking and sewing skills from Grandma as well as the art of “making do” with very little.
Grandma’s maiden name was Beauvais, from the Beauvais St. Gemme family, whose family tree could be traced back to the Daughters of the American Revolution, I learned from research by a genealogist. Had Mom and Grandma known, they would not have been impressed. The “here and now,” day-to-day living was what was important in the bottom land by the Kaskaskia River (known as The Okaw by the locals).
Mom’s growing up years were spent helping at home, and she went to school for nine years, repeating the 8th grade in order to help the younger children as a teacher’s assistant. In her late teens, she also occasionally helped her married girlfriends, Gladys Burch DeRousse and Madge Tillman at their homes when they started their families. Much time, of course, was spent on cooking meals for a large family of men and nearly every Sunday there was drop-in company for dinner. On Saturdays, Mom would bake a cake for the Sunday meal, but when her brothers would come in from the fields, they’d beg for the cake to be cut for supper that same evening. Grandma would say, “Oh, let them have it. I’ll bake pies tomorrow morning, and the cake would be quickly demolished.
A lot of time would be spent sewing with Grandma. Everything was saved. Buttons were cut from worn garments, too long pant legs were cut off and saved, unworn pieces of a garment were cut out and salvaged before the item was discarded. They were not quilters, but pieces of material were sewn into warm bed covers for cold winters in a drafty farm house.
They never had many clothes and sometimes tried to make an old dress look a bit different. Like the time Grandma strung three strands of jet beads and attached them to an old dress. At a dance, while dancing with a neighbor man, the beads got caught on his shirt buttons. When the dance ended, they realized they were hung up. Not wanting to appear “too cozy,” Grandma yanked on the strands and beads scattered all over the floor.
Though Grandma and the men cussed like sailors, the Louveaus had a strong set of morals. Nothing of sex was ever mentioned and no inappropriate jokes were told around the women. One time a drunken guest made an unseemly remark and Grandpa locked him in the chicken house where he slept it off and then staggered home.
Mom and Grandma loved flowers and Grandma had her sons build a trellis along the front porch. The vines grew lush in the rich bottom soil, but then she decided a snake could lurk in there and she had them tear it all down.
Mom’s love for flowers continued. Through the years, she always had a garden, often started from seeds or cuttings from plants friends gave her.
A New Love
When Mom was about 19 years old, the Yallaly family moved from Ste. Genevieve County in Missouri, to Moro Island, Illinois, and attended the same church as the Louveaus, St. Leo’s. The new family of six sons and one daughter, was an attraction, of course, and caused much talk. The Yallaly siblings had lots to say about some of their fellow parishioners as well, and after Mass one Sunday, Jules Yallaly (who would become a priest) commented on one of the men’s flashy belt buckle with the initials G.H. What could that stand for? He decided on “Goofy Henry.” This story was told through the years and my brother, Merlin, and I, when irked with each other, would call one another the same name. Some years later, the one Yallaly daughter, Ruth, married into that family, the Hahns.
The Louveaus made up their own description of the Yallaly boys. One was the “rough one,” — Spruce because of his size and rugged appearance, and one the “slick one,” because he always kept himself neat and had a handsome appearance. He was the oldest and a Boyd, not a Yallaly, because his father died when he was just one year old. He was often away because he boarded with his grandparents and taught school in Missouri, but he and Mom grew to know one another when she worked as a hired girl for his mother.
In 1928, Mom married the “slick one.” Dad gave up his teaching job and he and Mom rented a farm (known as the Burch place) just off Moro Island and Merlin and I were born in 1929 and 1931. Sadly, that was the time of the Great Depression, and low yield corn crops barely covered the cost of seed and supplies. On top of that, lightening struck and killed Dad’s pair of plow mules, making farming no longer an option. But help came from an old friend in Minnith, Missouri.
The Boyd, Coffman, and Fields families had migrated together from Kentucky to Missouri and remained friends through the generations. My Dad, Adolph Boyd, Ralph Coffman, and Rudolph Fields were close friends. Near the end of World War I, Dad and Ralph were stationed at Cape Girardeau during the outbreak of the flu. Dad’s duties were mainly helping to care for the sick and dying. Ralph was very ill and was sent home to Minnith on the train. Dad found an extra blanket and a thermos of soup for Ralph’s journey home, and told him good bye, thinking he would never see him again. Ralph survived and years later sent word to Dad that the Minnith school needed a teacher and he had a house for the family to rent.
Happy years in the 1930s were spent there, and despite the Depression, Mom and Dad provided a good home and we had most everything we needed, including our dog, Maggie.
Keeping Company
When Merlin started school, with Dad as his teacher, my playmate was gone. I learned to play alone and entertain myself with the help of a family of kittens, Maggie, dolls, tea sets, and paper dolls, cut by Mom from the Sears catalog. In a root cellar, with a dirt roof covered with trumpet vine, I found small colored medicine bottles left by a former tenant and spent hours playing, pretending they were people. I always had a doll and before Christmas, Mom would hide it and Santa would bring her back with a new dress along with a new doll. One year, my old doll showed up on Christmas morning with new shoes made from the same leather-like material Mom had used to recover the seats in Dad’s car.
While I played, Mom was always nearby, but she had many chores. She raised chickens and guineas and tried to raise turkeys, which are difficult to keep because the hens tend to lay their eggs in a hidden nest in the woods instead of in the chicken house. When the turkey – an old hen – would head for the woods, Mom and I would sneak behind her at a distance and try to find the nest. Mom would put the eggs under a hen in the chicken house to hatch. I don’t remember her having much luck with turkeys.
Although she had plenty of work to get done before Dad and Merlin returned home, she spent lots of time with me and some afternoons we would walk to visit neighbors, all who lived about a mile away – Mr. and Mrs. Tobe Brown, Mrs. LeClare, Ralph Coffman’s mother, and of course, Ralph’s wife, Verna Coffman. She and Mom grew to be life-long friends and kept in touch through long letters throughout their lives.
On winter days when Dad and Merlin were at school, she would let the kitchen stove go out and we would stay in the warm living room. She read stories to me and taught me to read. For lunch we’d have home canned tomato juice and crackers and listen to our stories on the radio. I can’t recall the names of any of the stories, except one – Bachelor’s Children. The Bachelor was entrusted with being the guardian to the twin daughters of his former sergeant from his military days, after the sergeant suddenly died. In true soap opera fashion, the Bachelor falls in love with one of the young women. It sounds silly now, but some of the stories were sad and I would cry.
Just as she and Grandma sewed for their family, Mom sewed for us. She worked at a treadle sewing machine and would sing old Baptist hymns – The Old Rugged Cross, The Great Speckled Bird, That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine, etc. She sewed while I napped and on a rare occasion I would awaken from a nap with a Baby Ruth candy bar on my pillow.
One November, on Dad’s birthday, I helped stir the batter for his cake while he and Merlin were at school. But we had no candles! Mom gave me a dull kitchen knife and told me to go out and whittle some sticks for candles just to get me out of the way for a while. I found pretty quickly that was a lost cause. She knew all along what she would do and that was to cover toothpicks with pink crepe paper. I thought them beautiful.
After I was grown, I realized how hard it must have been for her to leave her family, home and friends for another state and strangers. In those early years in Missouri, when I was just a couple of years old, she had a baby girl who lived three days. Dad made the small casket and a cross, and she was buried at the church cemetery in Ozora. How hard that must have been on them as well as on her family back in Illinois.
Mom and Grandma kept in touch through long letters, and we visited her family on rare occasions, including some holidays. There was always love, laughter, and just plain silliness in that old Louveau home in the bottom land. Mom retained that strong sense of humor in good times and bad.
In the move to Minnith and later to Coffman, she got to know and love Dad’s Missouri relatives and friends. Our Sundays after Mass were spent at the home of Dad’s Aunt Rosie and Uncle Godfrey Kreitler, or they would come to ours. Many Sundays we visited his Aunts Angie and Ethel at the Yallaly home, or we’d visit with the Perrys. Aunt Lizzie Yallaly had married Gus Perry and had a big family so similar to the Louveaus that Dad claimed one could hardly tell the difference. Mom, of course, fit right in with the Perrys – Charlie, Jean, and Ada, and their cousin, Judith Rudloff, whose mother was a Yallaly.
Mom and Judith were kindred spirits, and though grown women, could fall helpless with giggles. Like the night we came out of the church hall at Ozora and got into the wrong car. (Merlin, a small child at the time, would have recognized the mistake immediately, but he had lingered inside with the men.) When an old German man with a thick accent came to get in his car, they laughed so hard they could barely climb out.
Mom was always gracious to others and had a lot of empathy.
When it was time for Merlin and me to make our First Communion, Merlin had to wear white pants and shirt and I needed a white dress and veil. Fabric was usually ordered from a Sears catalog, but Dad’s Aunt Maude Boyd Gegg had a white crepe dress from years ago and she offered it to Mom. Mom ripped it apart and made the dress and Aunt Maude was pleased and proud of the result. I was to borrow a veil from a school friend, Christine Gegg.
It was Ascension Thursday and when we arrived at church, a little girl from neighboring Staabtown, River Aux Vases, was there to make hers also. She had no mother, was raised by an elderly aunt, and instead of a veil, she had a white shoe string for a bow for her hair. When the friend’s family arrived with the veil, Mom rushed out to the car and said she could not allow me to wear the veil when the little girl had only a shoe string.
While still teaching, Dad agreed to manage the Coffman store and Post Office after his uncle died, a move Mom was very much against. She was concerned the store would take up much of their time and wouldn’t make any money during those hard times, and she was right. But the store had been built and run by Boyds and Dad felt it his duty. So, in addition to keeping house, Mom tended to the store and the Post Office.
When I was seven and ten years old, two more sisters were born and the youngest, Mary Lea, had many health problems. No food agreed with her and she was always sickly. Dad and Mom managed to raise her with love and the tenderest of care. She was very slow to learn, but attended special schools until she was 16. Mom taught her all she was capable of learning and often said it was one step forward and two steps back. She taught her to be dutiful, calm, and friendly and Mom claimed her greatest compliment came from her sister-in-law Dorothy when she said that Mary Lea was not spoiled.
Mom always made time for her family and continued to sew – wedding and bridesmaid dresses, suits, coats, and First Communion dresses for granddaughters. She always helped cheerfully, never stinting with her time, and was always patient.
In her last years, she claimed being in her 70s wasn’t bad, but the 80s were no fun at all. Her thick, silvery hair was always kept in a French roll, until arthritis made it too painful to put her hair up. She had her hair cut shorter to make it more manageable – she still looked beautiful.
One evening, at 88 years, she was sitting in her chair working on a crossword puzzle and Merlin noticed she was just waving her pencil back and forth. She had a stroke, was in a coma for two weeks until she died. Family members took turns staying with her day and night. One evening, daughter Jan was taking her turn, standing over Mom’s hospital bed praying the rosary with her eyes closed. On opening them she saw another rosary lying on the bed. None of us had lost our rosaries. It was December 12, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
On the day of Mom’s funeral, the Church of Ste. Genevieve was beautifully decorated with candles and greenery on each windowsill. Sunshine shone on the casket as the priest blessed it.
The women in our family have a motto hanging on our walls: Strong women, may we know them, may we raise them, may we be them.
Coffman Chronicles 