Local author's book tells stories of wartime childhood

BAYOU VISTA — Flavia Lancon is a widow in her 70s now. Her house is as tidy and comfortable as a well-crafted sentence. The prospect of a reporter dropping by sent her to the kitchen to bake a bread custard.
But there’s more to her than just the grandma thing.
Lancon also follows professional football and types National Football League trivia quizzes for her friends. She takes pride in being able to name all 32 NFL starting quarterbacks.
She seemed puzzled herself by the Saints’ 0-3 start.
“I’m going to take down my Saints wreath,” Lancon said in an interview last week. “Usually I leave it up all football season. I’m so discouraged.”
Her husband died suddenly in 2009, and football was something shared.
“Somebody said, ‘If Adrian could come back alive, what’s the first thing you would tell him?’” Lancon said. “I said, ‘The Saints won the Super Bowl!’”
Lancon is computer-savvy enough to figure out CreateSpace, Amazon’s self-publishing tool. She used CreateSpace to become a published author — self-published, it’s true, but her book was good enough to persuade some of the local library branches.
Her book is called “The Big War Across the Sea,” and it’s available on Amazon. It’s a collection of stories from Tri-City friends and relatives who were children during World War II.
“For years, when I’d get together with friends, we turned the conversation to our childhood,” Lancon said. “I’d ask them what they remember about living during World War II.
“Then I began to realize, as friends began to pass away, when we’re gone, there’s no one left alive who had memories of what everyday life was like. It impacted every facet of family life.”
Some of the stories tug at the heart. Others have a touch of humor, like Lancon’s own story, which revolves around the ration stamps families were required to use to buy sugar, butter, meat and other food.
“My story is that my mama had to go to the beauty shop,” Lancon said. “She sat me in a chair and told me to be a good little girl.
“Being a good little girl consisted of opening her purse, taking out the ration stamps and tearing them to pieces. So she had to go to the stamp office. She brought me in with the stamps, kind of like the culprit and the evidence, and the lady told her to watch me more carefully in the future and gave us some more stamps.”
Along the way, another common thread among the stories begins to reveal itself. Even in America, protected from European and Asian battlefields by two great oceans, World War II reached into every home and touched every life.
“The Korean War didn’t do that,” Lancon said. “The Vietnam War didn’t do that. This thing that’s been dragging on for 10 years didn’t do that.”
As they grappled with ration stamps, people lived with windshield stickers that determined how much gasoline they were allowed to buy. On the Gulf Coast, people were often under blackout conditions, a protection against the German submarines that lurked close to shore to attack oil tankers.
Lancon began collecting stories from the people she knew and, with an editor’s instinct, accepted no off-the-record information. All the stories in her book have the names attached.
One relative told her a story about a child who blabbed to the neighborhood about a cache of rationed food. But the relative didn’t want her name used.
“Then why did you tell me?” Lancon thought. “Was she in the witness protection program or something?”
Until she started her book, she’d written mostly for friends and family. Lancon has had six essays published in the Advocate’s Human Condition feature. She attended a writers workshop at Nicholls State and contributed a story about an imaginary meeting between Osama bin Laden and the prime minister of Pakistan.
She watched while the workshop leader chewed out her fellow workshop participants. Lancon was the last one to go into his office.
“He said, ‘You’re not what I expected,’” Lancon said. “‘I didn’t expect a story like that from a gray-haired grandma.’
“He didn’t make me angry or anything like some of the people coming out of his office.”
Lancon originally thought of her collection of World War II stories as an article for Acadiana Profile magazine. But she learned the magazine had been sold and was looking for a glitzier metropolitan image rather than nostalgia.
So, at the suggestion of a son-in-law who had used CreateSpace to publish a novel, she went about learning the Amazon tool’s requirements for formatting and submission. Along the way, another subject came up: money.
“The man at CreateSpace I’d been working with said I had to create a price,” Lancon said. “I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ He said, ‘No, you have to decide.’ I said, ‘How about $6?’ He said, ‘No, that’s too cheap. What about $10?’ I said, ‘What about $8?’”
So “The Big War Across The Sea” went live with all its stories about life here in the early 1940s.
Among them:
The young cousin who visited a grandmother’s camp and saw burned and injured sailors coming ashore after a German submarine attack.
The neighbors who pooled their sugar stamps so a young bride could have a wedding cake.
The department store where silk stockings, a rarity for civilians because silk was a war material, were kept under the counter for only the best customers.
The German prisoners of war who worked in the cane fields to replace the Louisiana men who had gone off to war.
The POW who returned long after the war, and asked a stranger if he knew where he might find the woman who, even though she was pregnant, had fixed big, delicious meals for the prisoners.
What the ex-POW didn’t know was that the stranger was the child whom the woman had been carrying.
The stories are presented in an easy-to-read form.
“The idea that other people would be interested, other than the people who contributed, would be foreign to me,” Lancon said. “And I made a little money. That’s kind of something I didn’t think about.”

This column was written by Bill Decker, managing editor of The Daily Review. Reach him at bdecker@daily-review.com.