I worked for several pharmacies from Lafayette to the west over to Morgan City to the east over the next couple of years. In 1969 I was working for Russell Hebert in Bayou Vista as I planned to open my own pharmacy in Centerville. I had a couple of problems that needed to be resolved before opening a store of my own. First of all, I had no money to speak of, and secondly I had to talk someone into building a building that I could lease.
I saved empty bottles from Russell's store so that I could buy 30 of most of the products that I needed to get started. Hollis Sandridge agreed to erect a building that I could lease from him. The location was right on US Hwy 90, and on a portion of the property that Captain Thoville Smith had subdivided
years before. Gerald Roy owned a pharmacy in Baldwin, Louisiana, which is six miles to the
west of Franklin. Centerville is six miles east of Franklin, so we were not really direct competitors. He had bought an old pharmacy in Baldwin several years prior to my opening, and he had the advantage of a physician located just behind his pharmacy. Centerville had not had a doctor for at least 75 years, and no medical facility had operated there since that time. Everyone said that I was crazy to even try to make a stab at
"pioneering" a pharmacy in such a small, close nit community. Twenty-three and one half years later, I found out that they were correct all along! Gerald did not think it was so crazy, because I took all the empty bottles to his store and bought about $6,000 worth of prescription drugs from him.
He loaned me another $3,000 in cash and with my $1,000 I was ready to open for business.
The first year in Centerville was shaky at best! Most people did not want to sever their relationships with the stores in Franklin, and they were afraid to extricate themselves from these relationships in order to establish one with me.
The first six months, I actually lived in the store. I had a shower and a sofa, and I ate out anyway, so I did not need to rent an apartment. A few of my old friends came over shortly after I opened for business, but the vast majority waited out that year to see if I was going to stay. I think the second year I actually did about three times more business than I did in the first year! So with a great deal of patience, things began to pay off as more and more time elapsed. I was even able to pay Gerald back with 8% interest in just under three years. Without his help, however, I would never have been able to get the doors open! There was no way in the world that any bank would even think twice about such an arrangement!
As I said, I remarried, and after living in the store for six months that blessed event occurred! This marriage lasted twelve years, and thanks to Clomid (Clomiphene Citrate) we had twin girls and then another single birth. All three children were girls. Cynthia and I worked together, and played together, and lived together for ten of the twelve years that we were married. Many marriages in that part of the country endured because of men working offshore 7 on and 7 off! This was more like being married for twenty or twenty-five years!
I would probably have remained in that relationship far longer as I was quite happy doing what I was doing in pharmacy, and fishing every weekend with my old buddy Captain Smith. However, after ten years of working together, Cynthia became restless. My brother and I set his bride and mine up in a
gift shop. We all had high expectations, but the business was a flop. It did, however, serve as a good front for some serious fooling around! I was never actually told the whole truth, but I pretty well know what went on at that time. It was, however, quite a shock to me when I went home to an empty house one night! I had a couple of pretty rough years, and had it not been for Joan coming into my life near the end of that two year period, who knows?
The previous years had been very kind to me, and I must say here that I enjoyed what time I had in Centerville, Louisiana. The people there were good to us, and we were able to prosper financially. I had built a store of my own, four apartments, and a new home on Bayou Teche. It's a real shame that Joan and I did not have the opportunity to spend those years together. When she came along, it took all that each of us could make just to make ends meet! The Summer of my life was fading, and Fall was rapidly approaching!
It seems ironic now, Joan was raised in Franklin, as was I, but I did not know her because she is nine years younger than I am. I knew her oldest sister, but I had no idea she even existed back then. The real irony is that she was hired by the pathologist at Franklin Foundation Hospital. Joan has a Masters Degree in Microbiology, and Harvey Sykes hired her to enhance the credentials of his personnel at the hospital. I served as a commissioner on the board at FFH for ten or twelve years. The irony is that I devoted many an hour trying to figure out if and how Harvey set Brent Allain up for a medical malpractice suit! After an extensive hearing, he finally resigned his position at FFH, and subsequently died suddenly in Arizona. Cause of death was listed as a massive coronary, however everyone who knew him suspected that AIDS was the real cause.
Joan and I met in September of 1982, and we were married in March of 1983. She had two children from a previous marriage, and I had the three girls from my marriage to "Cissi". Joan and I both worked very hard to integrate the two sets of kids, but the mother of my three children could not handle the loss of control. It's a real shame, but we have not had any contact with them in years.
Scott was born in October of 1985 and Kaci was born in May of 1987. It was in February of 1987 that I was forced to have back surgery. The surgery left me bedridden for a period of five months. I was fortunate enough to find a young pharmacist, Ross Mestayer, from New Iberia, LA. to run my pharmacy for the entire five-month period. Ross did a very good job, and things were in good order upon my return that summer. Things were pretty typical for my life, insured when I did not need it and no insurance when I absolutely had to have it! Price tag for the back, $40,000!
Business continued to be fairly stable until about 1990. This is when the oil and gas companies and the carbon black companies began directing their retirees and their employees into mail-order pharmacy programs. Then in late August of 1992, along came Hurricane Andrew! This would prove to be the Grand Daddy of all hurricanes to us! Every eye on the gulf coast was fixed on the giant storm as it roared across the Florida peninsula and flattened everything in it's path. The storm then crossed over Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico. Once the storm was in the gulf and it began to bear down on the Louisiana Coast, everyone became real nervous, and then came the order to evacuate as it approached the Central Louisiana Coast! I really don't think people would have taken the warning so seriously were it not for what it had done to Florida first. Nearly everyone took the evacuation notice seriously and got out of Dodge! We went all the way up to Alexandria before we were able to find accommodations. Reports of damage were quite disturbing, and I was extremely eager to get back home as soon as the storm began moving inland. I left Joan and the kids in Alexandria, and went back to Centerville
the day before they were able to get back home. I remember driving adjacent to power lines that looked as though they would fall over onto the road way at any given moment. When I finally arrived at home, I could not believe my eyes!
Our home was located on about four acres with about sixty large Live Oaks on the place. There was debris six feet deep everywhere! I had one pecan tree that had been about 100 feet tall that was laying flat on the ground, and oak branches were piled up everywhere! One large limb came down upon the electric line leading to the weather head on the house. The second floor wall was pulled away from the basic structure, and the garage was a twisted mess! The driveway was about 300 feet long, and my neighbor's pine trees were covering the drive to where I could barely even see the house itself!
I called Joan and told her to prepare for the worst! That night I slept alone in the house. There was an eerie calm that blanketed the entire area. There was no electricity, and no one even had a generator hooked up yet, and nobody had even so much as cranked up a chain saw. The sugar cane lay flat and twisted in the fields like I had never seen before!
When Joan and the kids got back home the following day, we just held one another, cried for a short time, and rolled up our sleeves to get right to work! It was late August, and the temperature and humidity were oppressive at the very least! We were not to regain electricity for nearly a month, and we became accustomed to bathing in cold water stored in plastic jugs, or just skinny-dipping in the bayou if the opportunity presented itself. We had "block parties" as each family would cook for the neighborhood by emptying out our frozen food. We ate fairly well, and everyone cooked all of their food so that none was wasted. It's awfully nice to have neighbors in times such as this! We worked on cleaning up our place for six solid months, and the property value was cut in half.
Fortunately the store did not sustain anything more than minor damage. The roof needed to be replaced and a few other minor things, but all in all it fared very well. The house, of course was quite another story! State Farm came in right away and tried to get me to sign off on at $15.000 claim. I took the money, but I refused to sign a release. There was so much hidden damage that only God knew what all was wrong. All of the trees were not insured unless they actually fell over and did actual damage to the house. I think I spent about $15,000 on tree surgery alone!
State Farm sent a structural engineer to the house two months after the storm to conduct and investigation, and write up a report. He spent the day in the garage attic, and when he finished he told me that because of the way the house was built, It allowed to storm to do the damage! What a crock of shit, if no one had ever built on the coast, and then there would not have been any claims at all! They would not talk, and they tried to force me into binding arbitration. I hired my own structural engineer, and he just looked around, and said this is all storm damage. My engineer later told me that he was working on another family's home that was insured by State Farm, and they were trying to push them into binding arbitration also. He also informed me that the judge in this case was to be the engineer who had written the report on my house!
I recall while giving a deposition on my case, State Farm's lawyer asked me how much I had paid the engineer that I had hired. I quickly told him that I did not think that was any of his business, and I then asked him how much State Farm was paying him to depose me! He immediately wanted things to stop the proceedings and talk off the record!
It was four years before I finally settled the claim, but I still never got anything close to what I should have! I don't buy insurance from State Farm anymore, and I doubt very seriously that the situation will change in this lifetime! Forgiveness does not come to me very often, and I think this is one of those grudges that I will take to my grave!
Many businesses closed after Hurricane Andrew, and the entire area was forced to accept relocation. My business was declining rapidly, and I can remember sitting in my office in the spring of 1993 agonizing about the future, and for the first time in my life I remember thinking. "I don't know what in the hell I am going to do"!
