♂Shefton Anthony Delahorne

Shefton Anthony Delahorne (1 July 1921 – 22 October 1999) was a Louisiana-born soldier and electronics technician who joined Crowley’s National Guard^W infantry company as a teenager, went to war with it when it was called into federal service in 1940, and was a sergeant in England in August 1943, when a Texas newspaper placed all four of his mother’s sons on four different fronts on the same day. He was the elder brother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014).

Early life

Shefton was born on 1 July 1921 at Breaux Bridge, St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, the second son of Jeffrey Delahorne (1899–1929) and Ida Serrette (1903–1990); he gave Breaux Bridge as his birthplace on his own draft registration, and his obituary called him a native of the town. His brothers were Roosevelt Joseph Delhorne, the eldest, and the twins Lloyd John and Floyd Amatus Delahorne, born in 1922, and he had a sister, Mary Sefhelia. His father died in 1929, and in the spring of 1930 the census listed his mother as the wife of Reauld Billeaud, though no record of their marriage has been found, with the eldest son in that household at Lafayette and the younger twins at St. Mary’s Home, a Catholic children’s home in the same town. Shefton was almost certainly there too: the census page lists, beside the twins and his twin sister Mary (“Maria T.”), a “Joseph C. Delehan” aged eight, his own age, and no other record places him that year. No record yet names him Joseph, so the identification rests on that page alone. By 1935 the family was together again at Crowley, Acadia Parish, and in the summer of 1939 his mother gave a party at her house on Eighth Street for his eighteenth birthday. The 1940 census found him, single, in her household there.

The Second World War

A Crowley newspaper feature of March 1942 on the four brothers in uniform recorded that Shefton “had been in the national guard since 1938,” which would have made him about seventeen when he joined. He served in Company I of the 156th Infantry^W, Louisiana National Guard, Crowley’s own company. The National Guard was called into federal service in the autumn of 1940; his Army record dates his own entry to 25 November 1940 and lists his source as the National Guard, his education as three years of high school and his civilian occupation as a bookkeeping machine operator. On 19 December 1940 the Crowley paper printed the company’s full roster of four officers and 104 enlisted men, “mobilized under federal orders since late November,” with Private Shefton Delahorne among them; the company left by special train the next night for Camp Blanding^W, Florida. By the spring of 1942 he was at Camp Bowie^W, Texas, where the Crowley papers placed him with the Dixie Division^W.

On 23 August 1943 the Beaumont Journal reported all four Delahorne brothers on a single date, on four different fronts: Lloyd a prisoner of the Japanese, Floyd a sergeant in Africa, Roosevelt a lieutenant at Pine Camp, New York, and Shefton a sergeant stationed in England. In May 1944 he was admitted to an Army hospital with chronic tonsillitis and returned to duty. By 29 August 1945, two weeks after the Japanese surrender, he was almost certainly out of the Army: he registered for the draft that day at Crowley, which bounds his discharge without dating it, giving his address as his mother’s house at 318 West Eighth Street and his employer as “unemployed,” the same pattern as his brothers’ registrations after their own discharges.

Marriage and later life

On 20 April 1946 Shefton married Lucy Dugas at St. Bernard, Louisiana. The couple settled in New Orleans, where the city directory of 1949 lists him, with his wife Lucy, as a technician with S & D Electronic Co., living at 3709 Beauvais. He made electronics his trade, and his obituary described him as a retired television technician. Lucy died on 26 March 1975 at Breaux Bridge, after a long illness, and was buried at Metairie. Shefton lived on in the New Orleans area, where a public-records index lists him in 1992, and later moved to Picayune, Pearl River County, Mississippi. He died at his home there on 22 October 1999, aged 78. His obituary described him as a United States Army veteran and a Catholic, named a daughter among his survivors, and listed his three brothers, Floyd, Lloyd and Roosevelt, all of whom outlived him.

Notes

He was a twin: a Crowley society column of July 1939 described the birthday party at his mother’s house as being in honor of “her twin son and daughter, Shefton and Sefhelia Delahorne,” turning eighteen on 1 July, and the 1950 census gives his sister Mary Sefhelia an age that fits. The 1940 census alone disagrees, entering her as ten years old. The date on which he actually joined the National Guard in 1938, and the date of his discharge, which fell between May 1944 and August 1945, have not been found. His wife’s two obituaries of 1975 name her husband as “Shelton.” The daughter named in his obituary does not appear in the family record, and his wife’s obituaries list no children; the records consulted do not show who her mother was.