1957

Mostly Cajun reminds us this morning that on this day in 1957, Hurricane Audrey roared ashore.

1957 – Hurricane Audrey kills 500 people in Louisiana and Texas. The number of deaths is an arbitrary figure. I was almost seven. Dad worked the night at the refinery, straight through the storm.

This is probably one of my earliest memories.  I was three years old at the time, and I recall Momma and Daddy being really concerned.  Dad was a telephone man, but I remember him being home shortly after the storm.  My memory is of him in the back yard, picking up shingles, throwing them over the back fence into the woods.  The same woods where I later hunted blackbirds with my pellet rifle.  Looking at the track map, our town was in the easterly sector, normally considered the worst spot in a hurricane.  Of course, any spot in a hurricane is a bad spot to be.

Those woods are long gone.  They're now an auto dealership.  Where our house sat is a Logan's restaurant.  The oak tree in the side patio of that Logan's sat in my cousin's front yard, and I climbed in it regularly.