Gay was 20 years my senior. By the time I was born, she was away at college and about to take her vows as a nun. This led to some confusion when I was young. I knew I had a sister named Gaynelle, I'd seen pictures of her as a child, but I was never sure what happened to her. However, my parents had this strange attachment to this nun named Sister Mary Carla. We used to drive all over the state to visit her. Those trips were big adventure for a young boy, not only because I got to see Sister Mary Carla, but because we usually did other things as well. There was the time we went to Jackson and visited the zoo, my first time ever. The highlight of the zoo was a giraffe spitting on me. Later, I fell asleep in the car and my parents left me in the car in the parking lot of the Alamo Plaza. It's always fun as a four year old to wake up alone in the back seat of a car in a vacant parking lot. I vividly recall sitting on her lap in Vicksburg and singing the Herman's Hermits song "Henry the Eighth". I also remember waiting around in a hospital all day while she was having an operation.
One special memory of Sister Mary Carla was when I was very young, maybe four or five, we went to the train station in New Orleans to pick her up and she gave me this little stuffed kangaroo as a present. It was made of some corduroy-like cloth and it had two joeys, one sticking out of the pouch and the other sitting on the tail. Over the years, the joey on the tail disappeared, but I still have that toy.
I think I was 9 or 10 when I came home from school and Sister Mary Carla was sitting in our living room, sans penguin suit, with some strange man named Harry. My mother was in the kitchen and it was had obvious she had been crying. I was too young to be part of the discussion that ensued, but from what I gathered Sister Mary Carla was leaving the convent to marry Harry. At first I didn't understand why this was upsetting my mother so much. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized why this upset her. You see my sister, in true Ladnier fashion, was cutting her ties to the convent with flourish. She wasn't leaving the convent to marry just any man; she was leaving the church to marry a divorced man! Of course to my mother, marrying a divorced man was not the type of thing a good Catholic girl, let alone a nun, would do. It took mom and dad a while to get over the shock and accept Harry, but it did eventually happen.
I believe it was the winter after they married, we packed up the station wagon and drove to Woodriver, Illinois to visit her and Harry for Thanksgiving. They were living in a trailer at the time. Gay was teaching high school math and Harry was worked at a company that repaired the tugs and barges that plowed the Mississippi River. It was our first chance to get to know Harry and it turned out that he was a pretty good guy. The only thing that ever bugged me about Harry was he had this habit of kicking me in the shin and asking, "Do you have your boots on?" It was supposed to be some sort of joke at his job. It didn't translate well to me.
A couple of years later, 1971 I believe it was, I was invited up to spend a few weeks with Gay and Harry. That was a great trip! By then, Gay and Harry had moved into a nice brick house in Alton, IL. To me it was a luxurious place, mainly because they had central air, something my father considered a waste of money, and because it was all brick. Among the highlights, I learned how to play pinochle; I started cussing; I got my first Grand Funk Railroad album; I took my first airplane trip; and I developed my first crush on an older woman, my sister's friend Lynn Mowery.
Gay and Harry had two things in their house that I tried to avoid. One was their dog, which was a Doberman/Labrador mix and the other was Harry's mother, who they called Granny - a more venomous person I've never met. Of the two, Granny had the worse bite. I tried to get along with her, because as a kid you were expected to respect the elderly, but Granny made it tough to do. She was one of those people with a hair-trigger temper. The least little thing might set her off. Another endearing quality of hers was her tolerance for blacks, or in her words, coons, niggers, and spooks. Even back home in Mississippi I never heard anyone as bad as her.
They did have two pets I could tolerate, their "talking" cat, Blanche, and their little dog, Poncho. Blanche would howl "Lemeeeowww" to be let outside, and if you listened closely you could hear "Let me out." Her other word was "Herroo," which sounded like hello. Poncho didn't talk but he was known to walk on his hind legs with a cigarette dangling from his mouth; something I'm sure PETA would frown upon.
Being the youngest, I don't know much about Gay's youth. I know she played basketball for St. John's High School, and that she used to go dancing at the Broadwater Beach Hotel. She told me that she met Robert Mitchum at the Broadwater. He told her he liked to come there because nobody made a big fuss over him like they did in Hollywood.