Carmen retired from the store and became a full-time mother. Lance worked long days and nights and was often absent, but Carmen kept the home together and doted on her three children. She disapproved of her husband’s ventures into the darker world, but they seldom discussed his clubs. The money was good and they had more than most on the Point. Complaining would have no effect. Lance was old-school, his father was from the old country; the man ruled the house with an iron fist and the woman raised the kids. Carmen accepted her role with a quiet steadiness.
Perhaps their happiest moments were at the baseball parks. Young Hugh became a dominant player as an eight-year-old and improved each year. During the annual draft, every coach wanted him as the top pick. When he was ten, he was chosen for the twelve-year-old league, a rarity. His only equal was his friend Keith Rudy.
Chapter 4
The Rudy clan had been on the Point almost as long as the Malcos. Somewhere amidst the paperwork in the New Orleans Customs House, Rudic became Rudy, not a common American name but more digestible than anything from Croatia.
Keith’s father, Jesse Rudy, was born in 1924, and like all the other kids, grew up around the canneries and shrimp boats. The day after his eighteenth birthday, he joined the navy and was sent to fight in the Pacific. Hundreds of boys from the Point were at war and the tight community offered countless prayers. Daily Mass was packed. Letters from the troops were read aloud to friends and discussed by their fathers over beers, and their mothers at knitting clubs. In November of 1943, the war came home when the Bonovich family got the knock on the door. Harry, a marine, had been killed at Guadalcanal, the first death for the Point, and only the fourth from Harrison County. The neighbors grieved and helped in a hundred ways, as the dark cloud of war hung even heavier. Two months later the second boy was killed.
Jesse served on a destroyer with the Pacific Fleet. He was wounded in October 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when his ship took a direct hit from a kamikaze dive bomber. He was pulled from the sea with severe burns over both legs. Two months later he arrived at the naval hospital in San Francisco where he was treated by good doctors and no shortage of pretty, young nurses.
A romance blossomed, and when he was discharged in the spring of 1945, he returned to the Coast with two fragile legs, a duffel with all of his assets, and a nineteen-year-old bride. Agnes was a farm girl from Kansas who followed Jesse back home with great anxiety. She had never been to the Deep South and harbored all the usual stereotypes: shoeless sharecroppers, toothless hillbillies, Jim Crow cruelties, and so on, but she was madly in love with Jesse. They rented a house on the Point and went to work. Agnes was hired as a nurse at Keesler as Jesse hustled from one dead-end job to another. His physical limitations prevented him from even part-time work on a shrimp boat, much to his relief.
To her surprise, Agnes quickly embraced life on the Coast. She loved the tightness of the immigrant communities and was welcomed without reservation or bias. Her Anglo-Protestant background was brushed aside. After eighty years in the country, intermarrying amongst the ethnic groups was common and accepted. Agnes enjoyed the dances and parties, an occasional drink, and the large family gatherings. Life in rural Kansas had been much quieter, and drier.
In 1946, Congress provided funding for the GI Bill and thousands of young veterans could suddenly afford higher education. Jesse enrolled at a junior college and took every history course offered. His dream was to teach American history to high school students. His unspoken dream was to become a learned professor and lecture at a university.
Starting a family was not in the plans, but postwar America was proving to be a fertile land. Keith was born in April of 1948 at Keesler, where the veterans and their families received free medical services.
Twenty-eight days later, Hugh Malco was born on the same wing. Their families knew each other from the immigrant cliques on the Point, and their fathers were friendly, though not close.
Five months after Keith arrived, Jesse and Agnes surprised his family with the news that they were going away to study. Or, at least Jesse would study. The nearest four-year school was the state teachers college seventy-five miles north in Hattiesburg. They would be gone for a couple of years and then return. His would be the first college degree in the Rudic/Rudy family, and his parents were rightfully proud. He and Agnes packed their belongings, along with Keith, into their 1938 Mercury and headed north on Highway 49. They rented a tiny student apartment on campus, and within two days Agnes had a job as a nurse with a group of doctors. They juggled her work schedule with his classes and managed to avoid paying babysitters for little Keith. Jesse took as many classes as possible and breezed through his studies.