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Ovenia (Venie) Lillian Word de Montluzin
April 4, 1887-May 7, 1956
Ovenia (Venie) Lillian Word de Montluzin was the daughter of Lucius Napoleon Word and Mattie Tarver Word of Oxford and Water Valley, Mississippi, and was the fifth of seven sisters. Her family moved to Bay St. Louis when she was a teenager, and and 1905 she became one of the twelve members of the first graduating class at Bay High School.
She was only twenty-one in 1908 when she married Rene de Montluzin, Sr., a bachelor of forty-two, and entered his French family home (a large two-story house at 208 North Beach Boulevard, which eventually became the Bay Town Inn and which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina). She was a Protestant who spoke only English; and her mother-in-law, Reine, was a strong-minded Catholic matriarch of seventy-six who spoke only French. Reine had opposed the marriage at first, but Venie was an attentive, helpful, and loving daughter-in-law and soon won her affection.
Venie?s gentle, scholarly father-in-law, Ludovic Adrien de Montluzin, died the day after Christmas, 1909, and Reine, who had emigrated to America with him and had been his wife for sixty-two years, simply willed herself to die also, accomplishing this aim less than a month later. Therefore in January 1910 Venie suddenly found herself the mistress of the house, remaining so until her death in 1956. It was at first a daunting situation, especially since her husband?s brothers, Alfred and Roger, still lived at home, and for all three of them she had to learn to cook the French way. Her son and only child, Rene de Montluzin, Jr., was bom in September of that same year, 1910. Fortunately, Venie had a happy disposition and managed to cope successfully with every problem, even finding time to be an active member of the altar guild of Christ Episcopal Church and of the local Eastern Star chapter of the Masonic Lodge and to do beautiful needlework.
By the time Rene, Jr., entered college, the Great Depression of the 1930?s had set in. Venie?s husband had inherited his father?s pharmacy, L. A. de Montluzin Son drugstore, and he and she kept the business going through those extremely hard times. She once said that one night when they counted the day?s receipts, they realized that the drugstore had taken in only about S10 all day long. She told him not to worry; they didn?t owe anyone a penny, their stock was all paid for, they had a garden full of com and beans and tomatoes, and, thanks to the Bay, they had all the fish and crabs and shrimp and oysters they could eat. They would manage, she said. And they did.
Rene, Jr., graduated with honors from the Loyola School of Pharmacy in New Orleans in 1934 and took over the filling of prescriptions and the general running of the drugstore. The day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, however, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and was sent to the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. Once again his father and mother found the fate of the pharmacy resting on their shoulders alone. Rene, Sr., was then seventy-six years old, and Venie was fifty-four. She took care of him, waited on customers, kept the books, and preserved their wonderful old home. She created a kitchen in a back room of the drugstore and prepared many of their meals there, so that she would not have to leave her husband alone if the telephone rang or a customer came in while he was busy with a prescription. Only once did they have a holiday. They closed the store for a week and went to New York to meet Rene, Jr., who had accumulated a few days? leave, taking his fiancee, Emily Hosmer, with them. When