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was working, and I knew him from working at the Rigolets - he had a camp down there -and he come out there and he jtold me, ?Where you going from here?? I said, ?We going down on White?s Road to cut bushes.? He said, ?Wait here till I get back.? Well, I didn?t know where he was going, you know, so we go out there and dug the culvert. Later, Joe Jones was told by Tom that he wanted to put Poss on a road machine. I told him, I said, ?Mr. Tom, I have never run a road machine in my life. He said, ?Anybody can run a road machine, if you will work. One thing about you, I looked at you out there, and you work.? He said, ?You can be the best in the world, but if you don?t work, you just ain?t no good anyhow.? A man by the name of Dawsey - Cliff Dawsey - he was the road man, so I went up there that evening, I took the two fellows with me. I said that Joe sent me up there and for me to take the machine down below for six months and bring it up to you for six months. He said, ?No, Poss, you go ahead and take it, it?s a starvation anyhow; I don?t make nothing at it.? $650 a month is what he was paying me, so we loaded it up the diesel tank. You know what kind of a ? they had? One of these big old combines, a big tractor with dual wheels on it. It had little blades on it, about six feet. They didn?t have no ditches by the roads - they had never known what pulling a ditch was on a road - the roads was about six inches from the woods, so I said, I?m going to pull one of those wheels so that thing can get in them ditches. So when I pulled that dual wheel off, it had this axel sticking out about six or eight inches. So I was down in the ditch and there was a little cab on the tractor. I got about a mile down the ditch - there was a lot of stumps - the old axel kind of worked itself around the stump and went about four foot and there was little oak tree hanging over the road. The cab was about a foot inside that oak tree. I couldn?t go backwards, the stump had me, the axel had me, and I couldn?t go ahead in the cab. I got mad, and I just plugged right on and that little oak tree just took the cab and set it off. I said I don?t need no cab anyway. [Laughter] It ripped it right off, and about an hour after that, I was down in the ditch pulling and who come by but old man Joe - he passed me up, he didn?t recognize me. He come back and said, ?What happened to the cab?? I said, ? I had to take it off, Mr. Joe, I was hung up, but I wanted to pull ditches.? He said I ruined it and I said, no, I didn?t ruin it, it was in the way anyhow. And that?s how I started working for the county.
Guerin: You mentioned trapping. What did you trap?
LaFrance: Muskrats, mink, otters and at night we went shining alligators, to sell alligator skins. My wife could skin more rats - oh yeah! -she was raised there. She?d skin a rat in about three minutes. We had wire stretchers, and we?d hang them outside in the sun, right there by the marina.
Guerin: Where did you market them?
LaFrance: They had fellows come around buying. They?d buy and then bring them to New Orleans.
Guerin: What?s the biggest alligator you ever caught?
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