Who was Aubrey LaHaye?

"A Man of Many Affairs"

By now, some of you might be wondering who was Aubrey LaHaye, anyway?  Why would someone kill him?

In 2017, I set out on this project with the very same questions. Who was this oh-so-serious looking man, frowning out from the framed portrait on the wall at my grandparents’ house? Who was he before he answered the door on that last day? Before they found him in the bayou.

Once I started looking, started asking, the legacy of my great grandfather’s life flooded in, quietly drowning—if only for a moment—the overwhelming legacy of his death.

I started with the closest thing Evangeline Parish has to a history book: Robert Gahn’s The Opelousas Country with a History of Evangeline Parish (1972), in which Aubrey and his father John each get their own chapter. Gahn describes Aubrey as a “pioneer” and a “man of many affairs.”

The first of these affairs was farming. According to Gahn, Aubrey and his brother Elvin’s rice and cattle operation “LaHaye Brothers, Inc.” included at one time “one of the largest and finest herds of Black Angus registered bulls” in the state. As young men, the brothers started acquiring what would come to be hundreds and hundreds of acreage on the Mamou prairie, and were some of the first in Evangeline Parish to farm rice on a major scale. The success of this farm set up both Aubrey and Elvin as local leaders in agriculture early in their lives. It also made them rich.

The two brothers were great partners in part because of their compatibility—Elvin being more drawn to the farm operations, Aubrey the business. Like their father, who had built his own fortune from ventures in everything from road-building to mule trading to rice and cattle and personal loans, Aubrey had a natural knack for pulling coins out of his small town and its fertile soils. He could see, better than most, the potential in everything around him.

When I interviewed my grandfather Wayne about his dad, he told me: “He was a natural leader, so when something organized in town, he was often who was in charge of it.” Aubrey is remembered as political insofar as he was involved in many of the area’s decisions and always friends with the people in power. But the only office he ever actually ran for was the Evangeline Parish Police Jury in 1939. He was 27 years old, and remained part of the jury for twelve years—eleven of them as Vice President (almost always elected unanimously, according to newspaper records). Decades after he’d left that office, in 1972, Aubrey told newspaper columnist Frank J. Dietlein Jr. the following story:

“The other day I was riding with two of my grandchildren, and had the radio on in the auto. We were listening to a political speech that was coming on the radio. During the talk, one of my grandchildren asked me why I didn’t run for office. And I had to stop the car and explain to him that some people ran and some didn’t. ‘But why don’t you run?’ asked my grandson persistently. ‘Just place it this way,’ I told him. ‘I’d rather not run.’” 

Politics aside, Aubrey enjoyed lofty titles wherever he got involved with anything. Early on in my research, my grandmother Susan was able to produce a copy of Aubrey’s resume, updated shortly before he was killed, listing in typewriter print his accolades, words like “Board of Directors,” “Executive Committee,” “Chairman of the Board,” “President,” “Vice President”. (Notably, though, his “Personal” achievements are listed at the very top: “Married to the former Emily Deshotel of Vidrine. Father of three children, grandfather of thirteen children and great-grandfather of five children.”)

Aubrey LaHaye’s resume, dated (based on the number of grandchildren he quotes) to 1982, shortly before he was killed.

Wading through the metaphorical mountains of (mostly digital) newspaper articles written about the man, I was able to uncover some of the stories behind these roles. I discovered that not only was Aubrey part of (or President of) the Evangeline Parish Farm Bureau, the Rotary Club, and the Chamber of Commerce; he was a founding member of each, and frequently hosted the meetings for them in his own outdoor kitchen—called by some “the Country Club of Mamou”. In a phenomenon first noted by my grandfather but then confirmed by the archives, Aubrey historically joins a cadre of savant-like men of his generation in Evangeline Parish seemingly destined for greatness. Men who had great ideas, great ambition, and a great deal of money to invest. Leslie Ardoin, Percy Fontenot, Frank Savoy Jr., Paul Tate. Aubrey’s own brothers. Alongside them, Aubrey was a major investor in so many of the ventures of the growing town. But he also invested in individuals, most often in local farmers who needed help getting through the next season. This is no doubt what led to him, with only a high school education, becoming the first President of the Guaranty Bank of Mamou in 1950—a role he would hold for thirty-two years, until a month before he died. This is how he became Aubrey, the banker.

Aubrey’s reputation as a banker is legend itself: a man deemed frighteningly wise, leaning back in the leather chair in his office, round belly full of roast his wife cooked for lunch, smoking a cigar, always. He was a generous lender, who could famously judge a person’s integrity just by looking at them, and who rarely turned anyone down. Who believed in people—especially farmers—in a way that today’s rigid banking regulations would never allow. I could write another five thousand words on the stories I’ve been told of Aubrey’s generosity, of how he loaned to people who seemed hopeless—whose families have been thriving for generations ever since, all because of him. But instead, I’ll leave just one here, an account from his niece Faye, who worked with him at the bank for a time:

“There were not a lot of laws at that time, and it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t have followed them. Federal regulations, they didn’t have all of that. And when anybody came in the bank—and he could probably tell by their facial expressions, by their eyes and all—that they were sincere and that they would pay him back. You didn’t do all that paperwork at the time. Mostly farm loans. But every now and then a little poor man would come in, and Uncle Aubrey just ... knew that he would pay him back. He just trusted him. And sure enough, not very often did they not pay back. At that time, you just trusted people, and you respected people. And they would feel like ‘If Aubrey LaHaye was kind enough to loan me the money, I will definitely pay the bank back.’”

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In my search to discover the person that was Aubrey LaHaye, I’ve come across so many details, so many “fun facts” about his life.

I find the line in the Ville Platte Gazette, published so simply on June 6, 1931 under the headline, “Marriage Licenses”:  “Aubrey Lahaye, 18 to Emily Deshotels, 17 Evangeline.”

There’s the list of draft numbers assigned to Evangeline Parish men before World War II, his being 178, and the fact that when he wasn’t sent off to fight he led the local aluminum drive initiative—soliciting over 100,000 pounds of donated metal, which were dropped off at his house. His reward was a box of cigars.

There’s the claim that his home, the same one in which my Parrain and his wife now live, was the first brick home to ever be built in Evangeline Parish. And the article that tells how when the American folklorist and musicologist Harry Oster came to Mamou in 1957 and created some of the very first recordings of traditional Cajun music, he ate dinner at Aubrey’s home.

In these papers, I learn that even though he was named Mamou Man of the Year in 1973, Aubrey was more proud to receive the Silver Beaver Award from the Evangeline Parish Boy Scout Troop—to which he dedicated thousands of volunteer hours.

PawPaw Aubrey and MawMaw Emily, pictured with three grandsons: Marcel (left), Danny (middle), and Billy (right). As a father and grandfather, Aubrey was deeply involved in the local boy scout troop, and a leader in its fundraising and recruitment efforts.

And though I’ve only just scraped the surface here of the man’s life and achievements, I’m almost certain that many of my family members reading this, and reading Home of the Happy, will learn things about Aubrey they didn’t know before. Because what they remember most about Aubrey is that he was PawPaw. A fat old man in a suit who took them fishing with catalpa worms pulled from the tree, who broke open watermelons on his knee, who left silver dollars beside their cornbread and milk at dinner and barbecued chicken in a refrigerator laid down on its side. Who wore the scent of cigars on his skin, a cologne that still to this day conjures his memory in an instant.

“He was awesome he was just our country grandfather. But you know the typical banker. He had a suit and tie on. Everyday. And he smoked those cigars and he’d smoke them until they’d get really really tiny . . . And you’d go to his house, I’d go almost every day just in the afternoon. And if he was home, you’d open the door, and he was always sitting in his recliner with his big ash tray sitting on the stand. And you’d lean over and kiss him on the cheek.” —Dusty Miller, granddaughter

Aubrey in his signature pose, exactly as he has been described to me by almost all of his grandchildren: sitting in his recliner in the den, smoking a cigar.

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After death, it isn’t uncommon for a person’s story to loom larger than true life, for their best qualities to outshine every shadow, for their memory to gain a glow of sainthood. But for a man like Aubrey, with his weighty resume and his fifty years of features in the local paper, with his pile of testimonies to remarkable financial generosity and his sweet smokey grandfatherhood—all forever elevated by his overwhelming victimhood—it is ever more complicated to leech out any darkness in him. This is furthered by my greatest frustration with the man, and the story’s he’s left us to untangle: he is so silent. He wrote nothing down (often, not even banking records!). His words are almost entirely utterly unrecorded save for scraps, a smattering of newspaper quotes and the hazy conversations that remain in his descendants’ memories. Buried beneath the archives and the memories and the history, I’ve spent the past several years reaching, hopelessly, for something impossible to grasp, something devastatingly lost to time: Aubrey’s inner life. Who was he? As though this might hold the answers to the ever-unresolved question: Why would someone want to kill him?

“I don’t think there was one person in the world that I knew of that didn’t like him.” —Wayne LaHaye, son

Who was Aubrey LaHaye to you?

I know that many of my subscribers here are from Evangeline Parish, and possess their own memories of who my great grandfather was. Many of you have helped me piece him together for this book. I’d love to invite you to share your memories here in the comments, or if you’d prefer—by email. How did you know Aubrey LaHaye? Who was he to you? What do you remember of him? I look forward to reading your stories.