♂Floyd Amatus Delahorne

Floyd Amatus Delahorne (29 November 1922 – 10 February 2014) was a Louisiana-born aircraft mechanic and Second World War radio operator who, as a small boy, lived apart from his mother in a Catholic children’s home even though she was still alive, and who spent most of his working life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was the grandfather of the compiler of this family history.

Early life

Floyd was born at Butte La Rose, St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, the twin brother of Lloyd John Delahorne, born the same day; a 1941 newspaper notice calls the two “twins and youngest of the family.” As the youngest he was called “Bebe”; as an adult he was known as “Del” and, in Tulsa, as “F.A.”; Shefton was “Brother” and his sister Mary “Sis”.

An account of his early life that his wife, Ora, wrote down from his own recollections says that the family moved in 1925 to Simmesport, on the Atchafalaya. His father worked on a fish boat that bought fish and sold groceries on trips of five to seven days, and the family lived in a tar-paper house near the levee; his grandmother and another woman looked after the children part of the time. Floyd spoke only French when he started school there, and the teachers did not allow French in the classroom.

Their father, Jeffrey Delahorne, died when the twins were seven. Records disagree on the exact date, giving both 19 October 1929 and 29 November 1929, the latter of which would have been the boys’ own birthday; Ora’s account gives a third, 29 October 1929, and says that he was buried at Cecilia, on Bayou Teche. His mother had been living away from the family, and came back at the time of the death; Floyd remembered seeing the hearse arrive and thinking it was bringing “Mama’s things” back.

St. Mary’s Home

Their mother, Ida Serrette, was left a widow with five children. According to Ora’s account, in January 1930 the children were taken to St. Mary’s Home in Lafayette, a Catholic children’s home, driven there in the car of Raoul Billeaud, the man Ida was then living with and later married. Family accounts differ on why: one holds that Ida, newly widowed, could not afford to keep the children for a time; another, that she had a new partner. The census itself gives no reason, but by April 1930, some five months after her husband’s death, it recorded Ida as Billeaud’s wife, keeping house in Lafayette for him and four of his own children, with her eldest son Roosevelt.

In April 1930 the census taker recorded Floyd and Lloyd at the Home as “Floyd J.” and “Loyd J. Delehan.” They were not alone there: the same census page lists their elder sister Mary, as “Maria T.”, and, almost certainly, their brother Shefton, as “Joseph C.”, so four of Ida’s five children were in the Home, and only the eldest, Roosevelt, was living with her.

The Home had separate wings for girls and boys and a shared school; the children heard Mass every morning in the chapel, where Floyd served as an altar boy. The census lists Irish-born sisters at the Home; Ora names his teachers as Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word^W, among them a Sister Christine, with whom Floyd kept in touch for many years afterwards.

Crowley and Krotz Springs

He left the Home at about thirteen, in the seventh grade, after some five or six years there, and joined his mother, who had by then left Billeaud, at Crowley, Acadia Parish. Because he arrived late in the school year, St. Michael’s school there would not promote him, and his mother sent him to Krotz Springs, on the Atchafalaya, to live with his “Uncle Taylor and Aunt Lida”: Taylor Talley, his father’s elder half-brother, and his wife Alida. There he rowed his uncle’s skiff while his uncle ran his fish lines, and did the seventh grade.

Back in Crowley he finished the eighth grade at St. Michael’s, left school in the ninth, and kept two newspaper routes. By 1940 the family was together under Ida’s roof in Crowley, where Floyd, then seventeen, was working as a janitor’s helper; before enlisting he also worked for a plumber and a roofing company.

The war

Floyd left a short typed account of his war service, written some sixty years afterwards, which he opened by calling it “neither illustrious nor exemplary.”

Training

He joined the Army at Lafayette on 3 August 1940, before the United States entered the war, and was sworn in at Jackson, Mississippi. His enlistment papers record the Infantry and a term of service “for the Philippine Department” — a contract signed at the recruiting office, not a record of where he was sent.

He was posted instead to Fort Benning, Georgia, to Company E (light tanks) of the 68th Armored Regiment^W, 2nd Armored Division^W. After his training he became a regimental chaplain’s assistant with the rank of corporal, and held the post for about six months, until he was told that the division chaplain would never have a Catholic soldier as his assistant; he asked to leave, and went back to his company as a private.

He was then sent to the Armored Force School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, first to learn radio repair and later radio operating. In May 1942 he graduated as a radio operator after a fourteen-week course that trained men picked for their skill at Morse code to work radio sets from moving vehicles; by his own account he finished copying code at eighteen words a minute.

In June 1942 he was on maneuvers in Tennessee, and a Crowley newspaper column of 1967 recalling the news of twenty-five years earlier has him a corporal at Fort Benning again in July 1942, where his mother spent ten days visiting him. After training at Fort Bragg for the African campaign, he spent a month at Fort Dix in November and sailed from the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

North Africa

He landed at Casablanca on Christmas Eve 1942 as the second radio operator of an armored scout car, and trained in a cork forest outside Rabat before moving up towards the front of the Tunisian campaign^W.

Near Perregaux, Algeria, he was heating water to shave when the stove flared up and set the camouflage net alight, and his face, hands and back were burned when the burning net fell on him; the burns left no lasting scars. When the Army demanded that he pay for the net he refused, and although he was threatened with a court-martial none followed.

After two spells in hospital he was sent to a replacement depot, and from there to a quartermaster company at Oran, Algeria. That move took him from the armored force into the Quartermaster Corps. For about six months he worked as an interpreter to a French army quartermaster unit — the Army had assumed that a Louisiana Cajun spoke French, and he found his own very rusty, though the posting renewed it. He kept the French dictionary the unit was issued, and still had it on his shelves sixty years later.

He then spent more than a year as the main bookkeeper of a quartermaster clothing warehouse in Oran, a former wine-barrel repair shop, supplying the African and Italian theaters; a Texas newspaper in August 1943 reported him as a sergeant stationed in Africa.

Discharge

An inner-ear infection ended his service. Against his own wishes he was sent home from Oran, landing in the United States in November 1944. He was treated at McGuire General Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, and at Foster General Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, where his condition, recorded as chronic middle-ear and mastoid disease, was judged not correctable by surgery. He was discharged at Camp Shelby^W, Mississippi, on 25 January 1945, and four days later registered for the draft at Crowley as an unemployed civilian.

He listed his awards as the Good Conduct Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, the European–African–Middle Eastern Theater medal and a “Bronze Star for Tunisia Campaign”.

Marriage and career

After his discharge Floyd looked into a radio licence at the Federal Communications Commission office in New Orleans and applied to study under the G.I. Bill. While he waited for approval he trained as a railroad telegrapher in Crowley and worked the midnight shift at Iowa, Louisiana, and then at Franklin.

He spent thirteen months at a radio school in Port Arthur, Texas, living with his sister, and qualified for telegraph and telephone licences. After a job in Shreveport and work on a seismograph crew near Tyler, Texas, he heard from a former classmate that American Airlines was hiring radio operators.

The airline took him on on 25 September 1946, trained him in New York and sent him that October to Chicago, where it was based at Midway Airport. There he met Ora Emogene Walrath, a teletype operator for the airline; on Christmas Day 1946, before their evening shift, they went downtown to dinner and to see The Razor’s Edge. On Memorial Day weekend 1947 he travelled with her on the Great Northern’s Empire Builder^W to Willmar, Minnesota, to meet her family.

When the airline cut its radio staff in the winter of 1948 he chose a transfer to Tulsa rather than Washington, and Ora followed him there in May. They married on 26 June 1948 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he made his home for the rest of his life.

By 1950 he was working there as a radio repairman; he went on to spend thirty-six years with American Airlines as an aircraft mechanic, retiring in May 1983 as an electrical technician, a trade that grew directly out of the training he had received in the Army. A colleague remembered working beside “Del” for many years in the airline’s electronics instrument overhaul and repair shop, and laughing at his Cajun humor and accent. Raised a Catholic, he and Ora were for many years members of the Yale Avenue Presbyterian Church in Tulsa. They had three children, all living. Floyd died on 10 February 2014 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, aged 91, and Ora died five days later; her funeral was held at their church, according to her death notice in the Tulsa World.

Notes

His middle name is entered here as “Amatus” on family recollection; no primary record found so far gives more than the initial “A” — his WWII draft card, 1948 marriage license, Army enlistment record, and later federal death indexes all record only the initial.