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Page 4B, Thursday, June 8,1978, THE DONALDSONVILLE CHEIF
Mrs. Angela recalls
Summerof a by-gone day
BY JEANWIGGIN FEATURES EDITOR
It was May 15, 1902.
A young woman walked abstractedly around the room trying to think if she had remembered everything for the trip. The carriage would soon be brought around to take them to the train. It was time to wake up Angela.
The scene is a re-creation. But it could have been.
May 15 marked the annual exodus from the plantation home in Pain-courtville to the house in Waveland, and Mrs. Gus Guinchard, the former Angela Dugas, who spent 47 summers there, remembers it well.
. They just didn?t jump in a car and take off.
The horses, the cows, the chickens, the rabbits, were all loaded into a railroad car that the Texas & Pacific sided off on the plantation spur to accommodate the ark.
Also loaded on were tne sacks of flour, cornmeal, sugar-all the staples necessary for the children and grandchildren of Felix Dugas, the partriarch of the family.
Any produce that could be brought from the plantation store was included in the annual summer trek.
The eggs Mrs. Angela recalls carefully carrying home from the Waveland post office where they were shipped weekly from Paincourtville in a special metal container, returned each week for refill. The Paincourtville postmaster collected the postage on the family?s return in September.
One of the few items on the table purchased was fresh meat.
But fresh meat didn?t'' seem as important with the bounty of seafood to be caught.
Fishing and cool breezes were what brought the plantation owner and president of the Bank of Paincourtville to retire to Waveland.
He had originally considered Ocean Springs, Miss., but decided the distance was a little too great.
?Besides, Waveland is the coolest place on the coast because there are no islands to block the breeze,? offers Gene Guinchard, adding with a shrug, ?I don?t know but that?s what the family always said.?
Undoubtedly, Gene, one of the fourth generation to enjoy the Waveland house, agrees since he built his own summer place only two lots removed from the original Dugas home which came down in hurricane Camille.
If Ocean Springs was too far, it was still a two-day trek with a stop-over in Covington to travel ?over the lake,? Mrs. Angela says in the lingo of New Orleans Gulf Coast lovers, through New Orleanians are in fact only skirting the southeastern tip of Lake Pontchartrain.
Semantics aside, ?over the lake? was the place to be, with plantation folk favoring Waveland and city folk Pass Christian, according to Gene.
?The best days of our lives,? Mrs. Angela comments rapturously.
It is May 1912.
The train has arrived in Waveland. It has been a lovely, cooling trip through the piney woods of St. Tammany, thinks the young mother, with that marvelous ozone air drifting through the open windows of the train.
Angela can only think of the pier, the water and the sand. Moreover, this year she will start boarding at St. Joseph?s Academy and Waveland will be her home for the next four years.
Gene describes the pier which was the longest in Waveland and a point of pride with older generation Gulf Coast habitues.
First thing, says Gene, directly off the beach was a square enclosure with seats but no roof (that?s where the ladies said their rosaries in the
evening); in the center was the bathhouse (separate quarters for male and female); and at the very end, where the pier hit the channel, the platform to fish.
Ah, what crabs. They would ?bait the pier,? that is, place bait in the crab boxes which hung down by lines from the side railings.
A daily ritual, recalls Mrs. Angela, was for the entire clan, still in their bathing suits, to eat the day?s catch prior to their 1 p.m. midday dinner.
The entire clan by 1949, when the house was sold, included quite a number of descendents of Felix and Angela (Gianelloni) Dugas. There were Charles and Lucille (Guedry) Dugas and their daughter, Angela, and Clarence and Celine (Dugas) Savoie and their six children, Sartola, Adeline, Sabin, Felix, Charles and Mildred, plu.5 innumerable greatgrandchildren.
However, the home had grown over the years to accommodate as many as 30 people.
Situated on about eight acres, the home included in the early days a cowshed and a stable, later three euest houses and servants? quarters.
Angela lay in her iron bed pulled out to the middle of the room to catch every breeze that drifted in through the French doors which opened up to the porch. Secure under the mosquito netting, she thought about her futur'e days at St. Joseph?s and the carefree summer days which stretched ahead.
No ceiling fans were even necessary, remembers Mrs. Angela. In typical Gulf Coast fashion, the house was one room deep surrounded by porch. The master bedroom, at one. end of the house, according to Gene?s description, had 16 doors opening to porches on three sides. The house was built for cross ventilation with the multiple shutters pulled tight only in a storm. There were no shades, curtains or rugs to worry about in this idylic summer existence.
It may have been carefree and cool,. but not casual. Turn-of-the-century ritual was still observed.
Up early with a big breakfast at. eight. A choice of fried chicken, or meat. hash. Brits or rice. eees.
situated away from the house. One room boarded halfway up with the rest screened. The bed sat on a dais in the center of the room to catch every breeze.
The daily ritual was highlighted by exciting moments. When Felix Dugas had to charter a train with screens in order to pass through New Orleans during a yellow fever epidemic; when Charles Dugas was the first area resident to ?motor? over the lake around 1918; the big storm of 1915 which ripped down the old pier.
And there were lesser, but quite well remembered moments.
The once-a-season trips to Brown's Vinyard for a sip of scuppernong wine; that first-of-the-season taste of homemade fig ice cream; the cousins gathering on the beach to play cache-cache.
Gene remembers the trips across the Bay to the beach of Inn-by-the-Sea, a fashionable resort hotel in the 30?s, for picnics, trips to Gulfport to the ice-cream parlor; and going down tr, thp depot to watch the people get on
The simple pleasures of a bygone day are now all in the past. Gone forever are the house, the pier, the commuter trains, Brown?s Vinyard Inn-by-the-Sea.
What is left is even more precious-47 years of memories to cool the body and warm the heart.
Ji ??i.T-a'-'
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Miss Angela dressed for bathing
?11
Three young captains man the pier
June 7 -13,1978
from your neighborhood ASSOCIATED DRUGSfiSTS
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