Eva Miers was born June 8, 1967

It wasn’t really just the blink of an eye between Bob Miers and my wedding in September of 1966 and the birth of daughter Eva in June of 1967, but it feels like it now looking back. Life between me and Bob was hectic and busy.  When we were first married in September of 1966, Bob and I lived with his parents in Lafayette.  Neither of us had many possessions, so we had all the space we needed in one of the Miers’ three bedrooms.  I started looking right away and found a rental for us in a big old house that had been divided in half, located across the street from the public library in downtown Lafayette.   We were not there for very long, though because when I rented the house, the landlady met only me.   She thought I was quiet and since I was married to someone who worked 7 day and was off 7, she was pretty sure we could afford the rent.  She hadn’t counted on my oldest brother coming to visit me and staying on permanently.  She hadn’t thought that Bob would have lots of friends over the whole time he was on shore or that we’d have lots of cooking outside and loud music and just horsing around.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was when my younger brother came to visit and Bob decided he could ride his motorcycle up over the cement porch and into the back door.  That didn’t work, but the commotion was enough to bring the landlady rushing over to find me in the kitchen doing dishes, one brother in back folding laundry, another brother playing poker with a friend and with Bob.  She angrily told me that I would need to find another place as soon as my month was up because I had too many men friends over to visit and she didn’t even know which of them was my husband.  I didn’t argue.  I don’t even remember her name, but I do remember that she was a kind lady.  I just started looking for a new place to live.

 Places to stay and Jobs to do and Appointments to Keep

I remembered White’s Real Estate, and Mr. White who had rented me an apartment when I was going to USL.  Once again he had a place and rented it to me.  His secretary remembered me well enough that when mail came for me she saved it and gave me a box of makeup and a lot of magazines and records that I had ordered and thought never came.  Our second house was a real house with a yard and a carport off Old Highway 90 almost in Scott.  I found out that I was pregnant.  My mother in law was a nurse, an LPN and she knew all the doctors in Lafayette and told me that the best one for females was Dr. Hoffpauir.  I went there and he started me on birth control when I first got married in September.  In October I didn’t have a period and Dr. Hoffpauir said not to worry but to wait five days and start taking my pill again.  In November again I didn’t have a period and the doctor said the same thing, but he made me an appointment to come in for a checkup.  I left a urine specimen and a few days later the doctor called to talk to me and tell me that I was not pregnant but asked me to let him know if I didn’t have a normal period in December.  I didn’t.  Back to the doctor, Hoffpauir checked me over again and this time told me that I was going to have a baby.  I asked why, since I had taken my pill regularly, did I get pregnant and he told me that ‘birth control pills don’t always work on everyone.”    I had been sending out job applications, so when I got back home I changed my resume to read that I was due to have a baby in late August and added that I would accept a job that was temporary.  Can you believe it, I got a job.  Caliste Monceaux’s tax preparation office wanted me to work there during their busy season until April 15^th.  The job was perfect!  I sat typing in a back room, never even seeing the public or having anyone see me.  I had taken typing the year before at USL and was really good at it.  Fast and accurate.  I do remember though, typing just numbers was something I had to learn.  Mrs. Manceaux told me that accuracy with the numbers was the most important thing, so I should start slow making sure the numbers were correct and work up my speed over time.  After tax season, I stayed on until May in order to type the quarterly business tax reports.  Bob had put in his application to go to work on an overseas drilling rig, but no jobs came through, so he was working offshore of Louisiana.  Every other week I would drive down to a heliport in Golden Meadow to take him to work or to bring him back home again.  Meanwhile it was starting to show that I was pregnant.  We drove a metallic blue Mustang, a fastback so no one seeing me behind the wheel could see that I was pregnant.  It was a great car!  I think he bought it with the money he’d earned working overseas the year before.    Bob and I decided that we should move out of Lafayette for a shorter drive to take him to work and a chance to live in other places and ‘see the world.’  We found a place in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, about an hour closer to Bob’s work.  We lived in what had once been the servant’s quarters on the lawn of a big old southern style mansion.  Our house had one big room  in front and across the back, was divided between a tiny little kitchen and a tiny little bathroom.  The big room was our bedroom, livingroom, den and dining room.   The kitchen had a fold out table against the back wall that was smaller than the desk we used as a dining table in the big room.  We only lived there for about a month and half of that month Bob was offshore working.  Our view was of the Gulf of Mexico.  We were so close we could just walk down to the water.  Our landlord lived in the bottom part of the ‘big house’.  He was a clock maker and his whole house was filled with clocks ticking and whirring and bonging and clanging.  His sister, our landlady lived in the upper part of the big house.  There was a huge cement staircase going up in the front of the house with a porch and pillars.  It was beautiful.  I spent lots of time visiting with them when Bob was offshore.  The landlady had shingles and didn’t come out much.  The landlord fed flying squirrels and had feeding stations in the trees in the yard.  He told me that he ran an ad in Popular Science for a DIY clock..two clocks, actually, one that went clockwise and the other a backward clock that ran counter clockwise.  When Bob came back from offshore his mother came down to visit us.  She spent a couple of nights and let us know that she very much wished we’d move back to Lafayette so that I could have a “proper” doctor looking after me during my pregnancy.  Bob went back offshore the next week, and the following week when he was back ashore we moved back to Lafayette.

 Surprise!

Since we didn’t have a place to live, and since we had not told anyone we were going to come back on the day that we arrived in Lafayette, Bob and I went by to surprise his friend Dukie.  Dukie invited us to spend the night and the two guys proceeded to party.  I went on to bed…and in the wee hours of the morning my water broke.  I didn’t know that was what had happened, so I described it to Bob, who told me to tell the doctor.  I called the hospital and talked to another doctor in the group my doctor was in, a Dr. Morgan and described again what had happened…and the doctor told me not to worry but to just hang on until 5 a.m. and call him back.  He said if I felt uncomfortable lying down that I could just stand up or go walking.  It never occurred to me that I should have told him that my baby was not due for another 8 weeks.  When I called back at five, Dr. Morgan asked me how far apart were my labor pains.  Was I in labor?  Bob apparently had been watching me closely enough to know the answer to that question and told me that I had been grimacing in pain about every ten minutes…so Dr. Morgan told me to come in to Lafayette General Hospital when the pains were five minutes apart….so that’s what we did.  I remember thinking that I was not going to have a baby and being irritated that the doctor would probably just check me over and send me back home.  I was wrong.  I got to the hospital at about 8 a.m. and by noon I had a baby girl.  I remember all of it.  In those days the doctors kept a mother in labor as long as possible before taking her to the delivery room.  While I was in the labor room they came in and gave me 4 pills to take and told me that the pills were to stop the labor and they’d be back in an hour to give 3 and an hour after that two.  Apparently they forgot to tell me that they had given up on stopping the labor and that they were going to deliver the baby.  If I’d known, maybe I would have asked for Dr. Hoffpauir to come, but I didn’t’ realize I was going to have a baby until they took me into the delivery room…and in those days they gave a patient gas so I was completely unconscious during the delivery.  When I woke up, my mother in law was there and Bob and I had a baby girl, but I could not see her because they had decided I needed to be catheterized because of something to do with the anesthetic and they told me that the baby was in an incubator.  Everyone told me that the baby was beautiful and just perfect.  Bob, though, told me that he had seen her right when she was delivered and that she was terrible looking, covered in blood and white powder and screaming at the top of her lungs.  My mother in law had gotten a pediatrician to come and care for her, a Dr. Pavy.  When he came to see me he told me that Eva weighed 4 lbs. and 8 oz…and that was not a bad weight for a ‘premie’.  He said he wanted her in the incubator even though she didn’t’ need oxygen and was breathing on her own.  He wanted her to be kept away from the other babies and he wanted to control her temperature and to gradually expose her to room temperature.  I was pretty sick for a couple of days and slept a lot.  I always asked about my baby, and the nurses would tell me stories about how she cried loud all the time and how she pushed on the walls of her incubator to turn herself over.  They said she had white blond hair and blue eyes and that she was strong and healthy. When I started feeling better and asking when I could see the baby they told me that I could go home at the end of four days, but that the baby could not go home until she weighed 5 pounds at least.  On my last day in the hospital, when they put me into a wheel chair to take me to the car to go home, I asked to go by and see my baby.  I thought she was beautiful, but I could not hold her.  I could only look through the glass and my poor little girl was not put with the rest of the babies …she was all alone in a different room.  It was a lot for a new mother to deal with and I was going to go home to live once again at my husband’s parents house.  At home, though, I used the time to get ready to bring a baby home, shopping and cleaning and washing.   The baby was tinier than the smallest of newborn clothes.  The little tee shirts they put on her in the hospital were too big and the diapers I got had to be cut in half so I could fold them small enough for her little bottom.

Back to normal?  What is normal?

They gave me birth certificate papers to fill out with her name and Bob and I talked about naming her after my mother or my grandmother and finally we decided to call her Eva …Ella Verna Anna…the initials of my mother, my favorite aunt and my grandmother.  It was a name Bob approved of because it was easy to say, even for a baby and it was short and she would have an easy time learning to write it later on.  Her middle name was the first two letters of Bob’s first name “Ro” and the last two of my middle name “ne” to spell Rone.  On the birth certificate Bob put an accent mark over top of the “o” and said it was because she was from Louisiana and the name should be pronounced “Renee”.  I don’t think the State of Louisiana ever put the mark onto her official name.  Eva didn’t like Rone and always pronounced it Renee.  Back at home, Irene’s step mother (Mammie who'd remarried a man named Mike and lived in New Orleans) came to visit and she helped me resize my own clothes and clothes for the baby.  She brought me some lifesize doll clothes that were the exact size I needed.  Twice a day I would go to the hospital and ‘visit’ Eva.  She got out of the incubator on the 5^th day, but her bed was usually as far as possible, sometimes even in another room away from the newborn babies because she was not newborn anymore.  I still could not hold her or touch her but I did watch how the nurses took care of her.  They sat in a rocking chair whenever they fed her, so I got a rocking chair in my room at home so that I could do everything as much like they had done it at the hospital as possible.  Eva was there for five weeks and had gained weight up to five pounds and 12 ounces before I was finally able to bring her home.  Still a “premie” at home though, I watched her eyebrows come in and her earlobes grow.  I remember how odd it was that her head was so tenuously connected to her body that she could have turned it around backwards.  I remember how often she needed to be fed, in the beginning every two hours, and how little she ate, the bottles I used held two ounces and sometimes she did not drink that much before she fell asleep.  I had to send away to Evenflo, the company that made the nipples for the bottles I bought because the holes were too big…and when Eva would try to eat, the milk would come out so fast it would run down her neck and get her clothes all wet.  When she would wake up, the first thing I would do was change her diaper, then I would hold her and sit in a rocking chair and feed her.  At first all she seemed to do was eat and sleep and I needed to be right by her side because she woke very often.  Later she started sleeping twice as long and drinking twice a much formula.  I was glad that Irene and Homer were there, though, because I was not used to going strong on so little sleep.  Bob was there every other week, too and he was a big help, the two of us learning how to give our tiny little girl a bath.  He sang to her a lot.  He worked hard to get the baby to smile…and she did smile at him, too.  By the time she was three months old Eva had progressed into your normal three month old baby.  When she was four months old Bob and I moved out into an apartment off the Abbeville highway behind Brown’s Thrift City.  Bob got hired to go overseas on a new rig being built in Port Arthur in Texas and he left to ride the rig overseas to it’s first location off the coast of Nigeria in mid October.  They told me that I would have to stay in the states for six months before I could join him, but when I talked to the company they said if I got all my shots and my passport I could go in December when the rig changed locations to Senegal in West Africa.

To be continued...

This part of the story of the grandfather of my grandchildren has been the hard to tell.  Bob Miers would be a great grandfather today.  The baby in this story, my daughter Eva, too is deceased.  Part of what makes this story hard to tell is that I am the only one who knows it.  Part of what makes this story hard to tell is that there are things that I don't want to remember.  When Eva was born, my own father was angry and sent me a card telling me that I had barely made it nine months before giving birth.  It had already been about a year since my Dad had spoken to me and he didn't speak to me again for another four years.  That is part of the story that I don't really want to tell.  Even though it is truth, it is far in the past and things changed over the years.  Another part of the story, Bob's mother was angry at me for much of the time that her son and I were married, specifically because I was so good at finding a house so that Bob and I could move out of hers.  She loved my baby and I know Eva loved her grandmother.  Some things are better left unsaid and problems between kids and their inlaws are pretty much normal.  My heart is broken that Eva has died, and depression takes over when I think that she isn't and won't ever be here again...and that, most of all makes this story hard for me to remember and to write down.  I try whenever I can to use names and places to bring a little recognition and curiosity to the minds of the reader, who, I expect, is my granddaughter who missed out on knowing her grandfather.  Now that her mother, too is gone, it is up to me.  And so, when I am able I will continue with the story of going overseas when Eva was but six months old...

THE MIERS FAMILY NAME

I am continuing with the story as I remember it about my my ex-late-husband, the father of my daughter, the grandfather of my grandchildren.  I said in a past post that he was an adopted child.  These things are what I remember I was told by him and his family during the fifteen years that he and I were married.

When Bob was a newborn, Irene said that Homer was a 'company man' superintendent over an oilfield and that she and he lived in oilfield housing in Silsbee, Texas.  They had an adopted son, named Homer Sidney Miers that hey called "Bunn", short for bunny because he had a thatch of soft white hair. Bunn had several wives, and when I met him in 1966 he was living in Las Vegas married to Pat.  Bunn and his first wife, I think her name was Jackie or Monty had a son named Butchie but as far as I know he had no other children.  Butchie lived in Nashville, Georgia.  I don't know what happened to any of that part of Bob's family.  Eva told me once that Bunn was there when Irene died but that years later she went to visit him where he'd lived on one of the streets off the Evangeline thruway in Lafayette and that his old house had been torn down. When Bunn was about four years old, Homer and Irene adopted a second baby.  

A doctor friend of Irene's who oversaw the home for unwed mothers and orphanage located at the Texas Women's College in Denton, Texas called her to let her know that there was a baby available because a 15-year old girl who was giving her baby up for adoption.  I think that means Bob's mother would have been born in about 1926 but I have no information about her. Irene told me that Homer could not go with her, so she drove from Silsbee to Denton alone to get the baby boy and bring the newborn back to his new home.  Irene said that she filled out the birth certificate before she left the orphanage and that she named the baby after Dr. Robert Bruce.  . 

Irene said that Homer had a twin brother I think his name was Floyd.   One time Bob and I drove to Daisietta and visited his wife named Flo. She had two children, Bob's cousins.  We stopped in Beaumont and visited his cousin Charles, and his sister Angela came over for a few minutes to meet Bob's new wife.  I see on my "find a grave" that a Florence Kathryn Miers of Liberty County is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Beaumont and I think she must have died.  

Homer was from Texarkana, TX and Bob and I went one time to visit the old 'homestead' which we thought we found from the address Homer had given us in southern Arkansas, but it was a tumbled down bare old shack and I don't know if I have any pictures of it.  I remember visiting with Bob's Aunt Drew in Texarkana but don't remember the names of the other Aunt or the Uncle who lived in Texarkana.  

I only little about Irene.  Her maiden name was Cupit and she was born in a little town in Mississippi. When she was just starting school, she said that her mother died and that her father remarried to a girl who was only fifteen, the same age as Irene's sister Christine.  I met Irene's stepmother when Eva was born.  They called her and her husband Mammie and Mike and they were from New Orleans.   Mammie had worked for years lining coffins with silk at a casket factory and she made some clothes for my newborn baby in the blink of an eye and she helped me resize my own clothes to make them fit after I had the baby Eva.  

I met Irene's sister, Bob's Auntie Chrissy once when he and I went to Union Church, Mississippi.  Her married name was Varnador and I remember meeting one of her sons, Rayford (I think was a "junior" and had his dad's name) who owned the one little store in the town of Union Church.  I met his teen aged children and his wife back in the mid 70's when Eva was in about the first grade.  Eva asked me about Rayford once and had me look in my journals from back in the day.  I thought she was going to try to find people who knew Irene, but she never told me anything more.  I remember telling her about meeting Irene's brother Tom Cupit and his wife Rosalee who lived in Beaumont.  I told her more about Irene's friends than her family because I'd helped Irene send out baby announcements to Alice and Howard Brock in Austin.  I sent letters to her friend Jo Boudreaux in Lake Charles and to another in Norman, Oklahoma named Maggie Thrailkill and she had a friend in Lafayette named Mary Foss. I remember Irene once telling me that her father had 13 kids, but I didn't meet any others.  Irene said that her oilfield 'family' was sometimes closer to her than her real family.  Irene told me stories about how wanting nothing more than to get out of Mississippi and that when Tom moved to Beaumont she did everything she could to be able to go stay with him and Rosalie until finally permission was granted.  Once, on a trip to Beaumont Irene and I went to a big old office building and Irene told me that when she was in her teens she was the elevator operator and that's where she met Homer because his oil company's main office was in that building and he rode the elevator and told her how beautiful she was whenever he got the chance.  Homer and Irene always seemed to be in love and she was very distraught when he died. After she sold the house she'd lived in for a quarter of a century on Rena Drive in Lafayette, she developed heart problems and Irene had open heart surgery and a heart valve bypass back in the day when it was a very new thing for a doctor to operate on a patient's heart.

I met Bob when he was 24 years old and I was 19.  Ours was not a love at first sight.  It was more like a curiosity about one another.  Bob was a good listener and asked me lots of questions about what it was like for me growing up.  He seemed to like hearing about my moving around from place to place.  Even though he was a man of few words, I liked listening to him tell me about growing up in Lafayette.  He showed me the house he lived in and the schools he went to and introduced me to lots of his friends.  He always made me feel like what he had to say was important because he didn't always have a lot to say. 

We married in 1966.  We drove to Orange Texas to get married because a 3 day wait was required after the blood tests were taken and the marriage license granted in Louisiana. Once the decision was made between us that we were going to get married, instead of waiting 3 days, we drove to Texas.  In Orange, the courthouse staff was happy to help us get the license and steer us toward a doctor who'd give us blood tests and they even helped with suggestions about what preachers might be available to perform a wedding ceremony. We were married in the First Methodist Church in Orange and the preacher's wife and the church secretary acted as witnesses.  We had not made many plans, so the honeymoon was a trip to Houston where Bob put in some applications to do oilfield work overseas and the wedding dinner was a trip to the White Castle.  We went by and visited my Aunt Denny and Uncle Narb in Houston though and got hugs and congratulations and we drank a toast to our new union.  Then it was back home to Lafayette, where we lived at Bob's parents' house while he looked for work and I looked for housing.