CATCHING UP
A MEMORY OF JAKE MESSINA
3/22/19
Hello. I’m Kirwin Drouet, Jake’s former
brother-in-law from 1969 till 1986 while I was married to Camille. Actually, that’s not right--I was his
brother-in-law until he took his last breath nine days ago. Once you’re in the Messina family, you can’t
get out! And I love it! Camille’s family and mine continue to enjoy
major holidays together to this day and I always saw Jakie and Frankie at
family events like baptisms, weddings and funerals. It’s an Italian thing!
I want to
give you my perspective on Jakie’s life from my personal experiences with him
and also from stories I heard from his family in those early years. Jakie was a small child growing up and it was
hard to get the level of attention he wanted with a big brother that was five
years older and an older sister that was the closest to him by 18 months but a
GIRL! He probably didn’t know where he
fit in! His big brother was a big guy
who picked on him some and was popular in school and his sister was a
GIRL! Anyway, Jakie survived his
position in the family hierarchy but he was determined to be noticed and CATCH
UP!
By high
school when I met him, Jakie was not setting the world on fire with his
scholastic abilities but he was getting bigger but not big enough to avoid
being picked on by Frankie. It’s a
brother thing. While still undersized,
Jakie was a good athlete and he put that talent to good use by being a pole
vaulter. He was very competitive in this
field event and medaled in the district.
He was being noticed and determined to CATCH UP with his siblings and
make his mark in the world.
By this
time, I was married to Camille and would see both Jakie and Frankie every
holiday and during vacations at Lake Arthur, the family retreat in
Louisiana. This lake house was built by
Jakie’s grandfather, G.I. Golden, who lived in Jennings, Louisiana. G. I. was a Dutchman and very successful
businessman and farmer in Jennings. I
met G.I. a couple of times and noticed that he was a self-made man with a
natural instinct for making money. Jakie’s
grandfather became a millionaire in the 1930’s during the Depression by being a
scrap metal dealer and selling the metal to the Japanese in their war efforts
in China and Korea before WWII. Street
smart guy who knew how to buy low and sell high and was not afraid of taking
risks. Sound familiar? Yep, this is the guy that Jakie was most like
in his family. He wasn’t the athlete
that his father was or memorized grammar like his English teacher mom. No, Jakie had that G.I. Golden gene that
enabled him to later on begin businesses, trade in various stocks and
commodities and be financially successful.
In short, he was able to CATCH UP!
And speaking
of CATCHING UP, I’ll never forget the time in the early seventies when we were
enjoying a Fourth of July week at the lake.
Camille and I were there with our son, Damon, and Frankie and Jakie was
there too. Again, almost like clockwork,
Frankie and Jakie began going at each other over some meaningless issue after
several adult beverages. Usually these
skirmishes ended harmlessly, and they moved on to other activities. But this time was different. Jakie was no longer the undersized kid with a
much bigger older brother. No, Jakie had
buffed up and had refined his fighting skills as a bouncer at the Black
Cat! This time the skirmish became a
full out battle with real blows being thrown.
While an impartial judge might have declared the fight a draw, suffice
it to say that Frankie never picked on Jakie again after that. In fact, in later years, Jakie would turn the
tables and playfully pick on Frankie in a loving kind of way that the family
loved. Jakie definitely CAUGHT UP in the
fighting department that day!
And speaking
of CATCHING UP, how about the fact that in 1977 he married the most beautiful
girl in the Golden Triangle—Renee! I’d
say he surely CAUGHT UP with all his peers on that day!
Visits to
Port Arthur during the Christmas holidays were especially exciting during the
seventies and eighties. Camille and I
were raising three children in Houston, but we always went to Port Arthur for
Christmas. Christmas eve was always
celebrated at my parents’ home and Christmas morning we waited for Santa at the
Messina’s home. This was the time that
invariably got interesting. Frankie and
Jakie had welcomed me into the family unconditionally and loved to do things
with their only brother-in-law! After
much drinking er celebrating during the day, the night would bring the
traditional “Let’s take a Ride” demand er request. I knew what that meant—the Messina boys and I
were about to go an Adventure! Now both
Jakie and Frankie were both known to be a little crazy at times and I was the
straight guy who like things “normal” and in their place. This made these Rides all the more
entertaining to Jakie and Frankie to see me squirm in some of these
situations. I’ll share two of them with
you.
The first
was the time that Jakie had purchased a Jeep.
Sounds normal enough so when he asked me to “Take a Ride” with him in
his new Jeep, I did not hesitate. I
should have known better. After a
relatively normal ride through Port Arthur, Jakie proceeded to a highway with
overpasses for several miles. He
immediately pulled off the highway, but I wasn’t sure what for. Was there trouble with the Jeep? Did a red light come on? Oh no.
Jakie was just preparing to show me what that Jeep could do! There was no exit where he pulled off the
road. But it was the perfect spot to
show me how the Jeep could travel almost vertically up the side of the
overpass! This was pre-seat belts, so I
was holding on for dear life! The louder
I told him to stop, the steeper he’d climb.
I think he had done this before without me so as to be sure he wouldn’t
lose his only brother-in-law, but I can’t swear to it. Anyway, we survived to tell other tales!
The second
story about a Ride that I took with Jakie was on a Christmas night in Port
Arthur. Some of Jakie’s high school
buddies had come over to the Messina’s home around 11pm in a pickup truck wanting
to go for a Ride! Some of you guys in
the audience may have been with us that night.
I, of course, agreed to go but I really didn’t know we were going rabbit
hunting that night! I’m certain that I
didn’t know we were going to do this rabbit hunting in the fields on Pleasure
Island! You have never hunted until you
ride in the back of a pickup using your headlights to spot the rabbits with the
drunk shooter waiving the shotgun at all of us in the back of the truck. I figured that if I made it out of this one
alive, I’d probably live to a ripe old age!
The rest of the story is that we proceeded to get a flat out there and
we had no tire tool to get the tire off.
Here we were, five or six white guys across the tracks on Pleasure
Island, stranded around 2 in the morning.
And wouldn’t you know it, we see a set of headlights coming towards Port
Arthur from Holly Beach and it was two black guys who stopped and loaned us their
tire tool! I said to myself when I got
home “never again” but I always seemed to forget the bad parts and agreed to go
on those Rides the next time Jakie or Frankie asked me.
All in all,
Jakie certainly CAUGHT UP in all the departments that counted. He had a lovely wife and two children that he
adored. He was a successful businessman,
an entrepreneur cut out of the same cloth as his grandfather, G.I. Golden. He was the life of the party and a little bit
crazy trying to CATCH UP with his need to be recognized. You either loved or hated Jakie—there was no
in between with him. All I know is that
he loved me, and I loved him back till he left this earth. He took all of us that knew him on one hell
of a Ride!
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