People Remembered: Howard Ladue: My Dad's Centennial--Born 100 Years Ago Today

Had my father lived beyond his 82 years, he’d have turned 100 today.  A century!

My Dad’s name was Howard William Ladue and he was born “on the farm,” on the Durand Road in Beekmantown, New York on January 2, 1912.  The “Howard “ in his name comes from some obscure, lost to history, surname on the Ladue side of the family; “William” was his father’s brother’s name.  There had been two brothers—William and Charles--both born in the 1880’s--who’d also been raised in Beekmantown. One brother, William, went off to medical school; Charles, Howard’s father, stayed on the farm.

Charles married a young woman in the farm neighborhood—Maude Boutillier, a.k.a. Butler.  Even today, the Butler Road, which runs perpendicular to the Durand Road, is a 21^st Century reminder of my grandmother’s family who’d settled that road in the mid 1800’s. 

In May of 1910, my grandparents, then in their 20’s and single-handedly working the farm, brought up from New York City a young Willie McGuth.  Willie was a product of the Great Catholic Protectory and had been trained in agrarian skills at the Westchester campus.  Not all boys had stellar experiences on the farms of New York State, but this young man did.  When my dad was born, Willie had been there two years and was, in all aspects, my grandparents’ son.  My father, and then his sister Katherine, born two years later, only knew Willie as their older brother. (Many, many years later, in the young years of the 21^st century, and in the twilight of my aunt’s life, when her mind would slip in and out of dementia, the memory of this fellow was so strong and so positive, that she said to me one day…”I always loved Willie.”  He was, and would always be, their older brother, and the love would flourish for more than ninety years.)

His sister, Catherine, was born in June of 1914 and his second sister, Margaret, was born in March of 1919.  All the children started school at the one room school house in Beekmantown.  They, along with their father and Willie, assisted in farm chores.  But my grandfather, seeing the future, moved them off the farm and into Plattsburgh so all three could have a sturdy Catholic education at St. John’s.

In 1992, just before my Dad’s 80^th birthday, I made a video for him.  “This is your life, Howard Ladue.”  One December’s day, I put Kay in front of the Beekmantown home, still standing and looking good 80 years later, where she narrated their life in that house.  The property extended past Route 11 and beyond the Tastee Freeze.  Route 11 wasn’t there then and the Durand Road was the only north-south passage in that corner of Clinton County that led to Plattsburgh.  They had fields of corn and, according to Kay, who still spoke, for some reason, in that peculiar French-Canadian-English patois, “We malked the cyous,” she happily told me.  Bill Ladue, her first cousin, and oldest son of Dr. William, Kay and Dad’s uncle, was with us, also.  “Tell him how we used to come spend the summers with you.”  Life on the farm stayed with my dad and my aunts, and all their cousins, until the end of their lives.  It was a happy place and an important part of their lives.

My father was fond of children, dogs, cats, michigans and hard candies.  He loved chimpanzees and clowns and shooting pool at the Elk’s Club.  He was what we call a “Regular Joe” and he fit in almost everywhere he went and with whomever he was with. He was easy going and easy to please. He liked just about everyone and everyone liked him. I never heard him say a bad word about anyone.  Never.  Once, I was complaining about someone we both knew.  “Dan,” he said.  “She’s a sick woman.”  And she was.  She had a debilitating muscular disease and was unwell all the time.  I try to remember that about him, and apply it to my life now, these many years later.

He was a great practical joker.  I will never forget Thanksgiving 1979.  The living room was full of company, mostly my friends.  The day before, a woman bearing Steve’s surname, very uncommon in the North Country, then or now, had been implicated in a robbery. 

“Steve, I see where your sister robbed the Grand Union.,” he said. 

Steve, knowing my Dad to be a practical joker, waited.

“She’s my wife,” responded Steve.  There was momentary silence.  My father’s turned to me, staring at me imploringly to get him out of this predicament.   Then all of us who really knew the story, started to laugh, uncontrollably.

My father never played another practical joke on Steve again.

When we were younger, he’d often ski with us. He still wore old, lace up boots that were strapped to dangerously old skis and more-dangerously-still bindings.  (Once, during that time, I was given a similar pair of skis for Christmas.  The following April, I broke my leg at Whiteface.  Two years later, a few days after Christmas, my brother, wearing the same skis, broke his leg.  Shortly before New Year’s Eve that year, he ceremoniously broke up the skis and fed them, sacrificially perhaps, into the fireplace.  From then on we had much safer skis and bindings.

When I was in middle school, and before I imagine, he smoked cigars, (in those days I gave him a box of Swisher Sweets every Christmas, marching myself into a pharmacy and buying them was I was as young as 12 years old) but my allergies to cigar smoke and the cloud it engendered in every room, and the Surgeon General’s exhortation to stop smoking, stopped that habit.

He loved to cane and the chairs he caned (almost all with a story of him and me traveling the summer back roads of Clinton and Essex counties, buying up beat up old wooden chairs, their cane come undone) are still in my home.  He’d buy them for $5.00, take them home, wait until autumn settled in, and happily refinished the chairs then caned them.  I can still see him in the living room, fireplace blazing.  Those chairs filled my parent’s home on Grace Avenue, then at the condo and finally, after my mother moved, at Lake Forest.  If my mother gave one away, it was to someone she loved deeply.  Each of my cousins has one now, and I have the rest.

My Dad loved warm weather.  During World War he chose to enlist in the Army.  He was trained as a radio specialist and was assigned to Honolulu, Hawaii, until 1945.  It forever changed his life.  Now that he’d known another reality, far different from the cold, lifeless winter reality he’d grown up with, he wanted to live in that warmth for the rest of his life.

The War ended, he came home, and married my mother, Rita Boyer, raised in the icy Adirondack town of Saranac Lake, New York. They were married at 8:00 a.m. on September 15, 1945.

My mother had come to Plattsburgh to study business then got a job as the bookkeeper at the new two-story Montgomery Ward on Margaret Street.  My Dad had a light trucking business that he’d purchased from one of his uncles and he would transport goods to the store on a frequent basis.  They became engaged, and then the War broke out.  When he enlisted, she broke off the engagement—not an unwise thing to do.  But sometime in 1945, probably through letters, they were re-engaged and set the date for their wedding.  My Dad looks handsome in his Army uniform and my mother is quite beautiful in a dress she bought in Albany.  He was 33 and she was 29.  After the wedding, they moved to Fort Dix, New Jersey where my Dad finished out his enlistment.

Life moved on after the War.  He finished his gig in the military and he and my mother moved back to Plattsburgh.  They lived on the north side of duplex his parents owned at 144 Oak Street.  He got a job on the Delaware and Hudson Railroad and some of my fondest memories of my dad on the days when I’d go to work with him. Sometime during the day, when the train passed through on its way to Plattsburgh, he’d put in the hands of someone on the train.  I’d ride in cabooses or engines or in coach.  My mother was always waiting for me when the train arrived.  To this day, I will always take a train over any other form of public transportation.

His dad, the grandfather I never knew, died in June of 1947, at 66.  I remember my dad’s 66^th birthday—1978.  I know he was reminiscing when he told me, a bit alarmingly, that he was now the same age his father was when he died.

I was born in March of 1949, when my Dad was 37 and my brother joined us three years later, in June of 1952.  Pictures from that time tell me my father, and mother, loved us.  Whenever he held either of us, it’s always with a smiling face.

But his years in Hawaii instilled within him a yearning for change, and shortly after my brother was born we all moved to Florida.  This was epic—then and in the annals of Ladue family lore and history.  This story has been told elsewhere; suffice to say that we moved back to Plattsburgh in the Fall of 1955.  As far as my mother was concerned, it was a shut book.  But not so for my father.

He returned to his old job—with the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, but he’d lost all his seniority when he left for Florida.  By the late 1950’s, train travel was fading fast.  He and my mother said a Novena to the Sacred Heart.  “It never failed us,” she’d often tell me.  They prayed for direction, and that direction came in the form of the purchase of the only answering service in Plattsburgh.  Plattsburgh Answering Service.  561-0800. The first switchboard, in the summer of 1961, was set up in the kitchen, and as the business grew, my parents built an addition onto their home, and, until they retired, my parents, worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

And then life settled into the routine I knew as a child and then a young man.  We skied in the winter and went to the beach and played golf in the summer.  Things my dad liked to do.  He’d bring my brother or I to New York City and we’d spend a weekend at my Aunt Sheila’s in Rego Park.  It was always a thrill to board the train at midnight then sleep in a Pullman Car.  When we arrived at Grand Central Station, we’d cross the street and eat breakfast at Horn and Hardet’s Automat.  Slip in a dime, open the small door, and take out a piece of pie or a sandwich. 

Dad would often get tickets for shows that were still broadcasting out of New York.  I have a very early memory of going to a live radio broadcast and then to a live television broadcast of The Howdy Doody Show.

My brother and I went through the grades at St. Peter’s School, then on to Mount Assumption Institute.  I graduated in 1967 and my brother three years later.

By 1976, when my mom was 60 and my dad was 64, they sold the answering service.  They were free at last to pursue other things.  The following winter they spent several months in Venice, Florida and then, in 1980, they bought a mobile home in Sarasota where they wintered until 1990.

By then the cancer that had taken his kidney in 1984 had metastasized on his lung.  It was time to return to Plattsburgh full time.  I know it must have broken his heart to sell the mobile home at the Buckingham Club and it must have broken his heart even more to return to the chill wind of long winter days.  But I never heard him complain.

On his 80^th birthday, January 2, 1992, video camera rolling, I casually chatted with my Dad about his life.  By then he’d had a stroke, a quadruple by-pass and was battling lung cancer.  “I’ve had a good life,” he told me.

I have thought often of that simple statement these past twenty years.  “I’ve had a good life.”  So simply said, yet so powerful.  Words to live by as I rapidly approach the twilight years I remember my parents living such a short time ago.

My dad died two years, almost to the date, later.  The cancer, which had slowly ebbed the life out of him, finally took its toll.  In December, 1994, I could see him failing.  My mother had asked me to come over one Sunday afternoon to sit with him while so she could go to a Christmas party.  He and I sat at the kitchen table.  As hard as it was, it was time to have a talk.

“It’s ok to go, Dad,” I told him. 

“Do you want me dead?” he asked.

“No, Dad.  Of course not.  But you’re tired and it’s ok to let go.  We’ll all be ok.  I will miss you terribly, but it’s ok to go.”

When my mother got home, I told her what I’d told him, and said that she, too, had to have that conversation, as hard as it might be,

Sometimes I think some people need permission to die.  I have no idea what they talked about.  But two weeks later, on the morning of Christmas Eve, my mother called and asked me if I would come over.  There was a change.  We called hospice.  Later, as twilight settled over Christmas Eve, his nurse calmly, and as empathetically as she could, said…”Your Dad’s going to die.  Not now, not this minute, but changes are occurring that tell us it will be within a few days.”

He lasted through Christmas and left us at 6:35 on the morning of December 26, 1994.   It was a brilliantly blue and sharp and bitterly cold early winter’s day.  I helped the Hospice nurse prepare his body while Mom and Steve stayed downstairs.  “I could never have done that,” said both Steve and my mother.  But to me it was a holy experience, and the last loving act I could do for my father.  It was a privilege.  (Sixteen years later I would pass this privilege on to Vicki, my sister-cousin, when it came time for my mother’s body to be prepared.  Vicki never talked about it, but I know, for her, it was an equally holy experience.)

It’s been seventeen years since my Dad’s been with me, and I miss him still.  I was fortunate, though, to have him for 45 years.  My cousin, in a Christmas letter to me, commented how lucky I was to have had my mother for as long as I did.  “Mine died when I was too young,” she wrote, “and I filled the void with my two aunts.”

And I was lucky.  I knew that then, and I know it now. 

I still miss my Dad, and probably always will, but that is the price all of us pay for loving someone.  His values live on and I often find myself quoting something I learned from him over the years.  (Once, in my twenties, I was complaining about some unexpected bill that had come my way.  I had a secure job, though, and his response is a response I still utter: “Just be grateful you have the money to pay for it.”

The dead do live on in us.  It’s a cliché, but it’s true.  My life is richer for having known Howard William Ladue, and I am grateful to have been his son.

Happy Birthday, Dad!                                                                                                                       Happy 100!