FIRST THINGS THAT COME TO MIND

Your mother always tells me that you most resemble me when you're angry. Presumably, she either tells you the same thing now or will begin doing so at some point. Eventually, this will make you curious about all of the interesting people you're related to who are so good at exhibiting anger. I hope that I can remember and write down a good set of anecdotes about them for you as time goes by. I would also like to think that you will one day be curious about me and my life, and so I'll share some of my own experiences, songs and articles with you from time to time.

You should know that your great-grandmother, born Gertrude Morland, known to her grandchildren as "Mamoo" for some reason, was a nurse, and that she and your great-grandfather met when he, Dr. John Gray Pou, on his first day of a new assignment by the Army to Schumpert Sanitarium in Shreveport, Louisiana to fight the 1918 flu epidemic, penned a medal on that certain nurse who had captured a German spy who was trying to poison the hospital's water supply by jabbing him into a closet with a convenient broom handle and locking him in. Dr. and Mrs. Pou remained together for the rest of their lives.

On the other side of your father's family, your Great Uncle Henry was in Shreveport one day in the early 1960s visiting his parents, Arthur Sr. and Mary Willis, and taking some time off from his job as a NASA physicist. Henry had been working long hours at the job of creating a powerful rocket fuel that would remain stable throughout a moon voyage, and was enjoying his vacation. One afternoon, he was on the front porch at his parents' house, 902 Prospect, featured several times in Louisiana Life and the first private residence in Shreveport with a bidet, watching Arthur, Jr., his younger brother and your grandfather, paint the front porch. Henry noticed that Arthur, Jr., who had a Masters' Degree in Chemistry among other diplomas, was mixing a metallic powder into the paint can.

Questioned by Henry, Arthur, Jr. explained that he was mixing scrap powdered aluminum acquired from a construction company with the paint to take advantage of aluminum's electrochemical properties to make the paint job last longer. Uncle Henry went back to Huntsville, Alabama, known in the early 1960s as "Rocket City" and added powdered aluminum to his rocket fuel. Getting to the moon was a tremendous job, requiring two of your ancestors.