When I met Gail, the Fontenelles had just moved to the neighborhood.  I was maybe a junior in high school, so about 1970.  They were a big family and we were all just neighborhood kids and that’s when I first got to know her.  Then I became friends with Wayne and started spending a lot of time at their house and I was doing things with Gary and Wayne, like go to the lakefront and play football in the street.  And when I started spending time at the house, I would visit with her but she would spend a lot of time in her room studying - which was probably why she was Valedictorian of her high school class. I would see her from time to time when she had a job as a lifeguard in the summer at the neighborhood swim club called Paradise Manor.  So when she would walk home and walk down the street and sometimes we’d be playing basketball in the street, I’d go over and visit her a bit and I started liking her around that time. But we were just friends and visit and talk - my older brother actually took her out on a date first.  I can’t remember the first date … I want to say we went to a movie.  But the two things I remember that we did, we went to see the Godfather and then we went to my prom together.  We went to different high schools – she went to Chapelle, an all girls private school and I went to the public high school.  But Gail always studied and was much more academic than any of us, other than maybe Gary. 

 

She was just a kind, friendly, outgoing person with a great sense of humor.  She didn’t have a lot of friends.  She had this friend Karen Martello that was very close to her and she had another friend from the school whose name I think was Melainie.   She didn’t really do much other than go to school and work at the swim club and swim for exercise.  We’d go to this bar called the Maple Leaf on Oak Street.  She really loved to dance.  So then I just started spending a lot of time at the Fontenelles.  It was a really busy house.  Nona was busy trying to keep up with all the kids, and Roy wouldn’t get home until 6:30 or 7:00 p.m.  She helped Nona take care of Rene and ran errands for Ruth.  So we were dating by the end of Junior year and that went right on into Senior year and we started talking about college and she was talking about University of Southwestern Louisiana (in Lafayette - called ULL now) and I just decided to go there because I really didn’t have any school that I had chosen.  And we decided that we’d both get jobs as dorm counselors to save money because we’d get free room and board. 

 

She went to a Christian Retreat kind of thing before college and I went to Florida with some friends and when we came back we drove to Lafayette to go to this pre-orientation program because we were going to be dorm counselors and Gail stayed at the Bancroft dorm and Karen Martello was her roommate.  So Gail continued to spend quite a good amount of time studying.  She’d go to class and study, and then we’d meet for dinner at the cafeteria.  We’d hang around in the lobby of her dorm until 9 or 10 p.m. and I’d walk back to my dorm.  It was pretty segregated back then and limited visitation.  We didn’t go home that much, we usually stayed at college and did things like concerts or events or plays.  I remember going to see Steve Martin together.  My sense of humor was more dry and hers was more situational where something happened that was a funny interaction and she had this wonderful hearty laugh, and would laugh a lot.  She had a lot of compliments because she had her haircut like Dorothy Hammil, who was a famous figure skater.  I didn’t really like being a dorm counselor because you had to tell people to be quiet or enforce certain rules, but it was easier for her, she just had a way with people.

 

That first year was just a lot of time spent studying and we both liked intellectually engaging about the classes, and we had a couple of classes together.  And I think she had 4.0 – or MAY have made one B in French.  She studied hard and was very well prepared and had a good memory, but didn’t really stress about it.  As long as she was prepared she didn’t stress. 

 

We went home that summer and I want to say Gail went back to work at the swim pool to make money and I went to work for my mother’s cousins.  And Gary was home for the summer too, doing some kind of construction.  So we did a lot that summer going to movies and bars together.  And I think that’s when we started going to Rosie’s bar, which had really cool musical acts like Stevie Wonder we saw one time.  Gail really loved music.  My parents used to take a trip to Destin Florida every year in the summer and Gail would come.  Gail had a real good relationship with my family and she got along with everybody in general.  Because we were good students, we’d socialize with our teachers.  So there was a sociology professor who got a keg of beer and invite 20 students to his house every Friday night and he’d cook and we’d just hang out.  Then some point in college we met Tim Mahoney and his wife Coco and they had a kid.  They lived in an area of the school called Vet Village where the older guys at the school who had gone to Vietnam - so we’d go hang out with them there. That was all sophomore year. It was very happy times.  We felt like we lived in this little oasis that was very fun and very safe – we both got a lot of accolades and were having fun.  It was very rewarding to have success.  Sophomore year we moved off campus and Gail was rooming in a house with this girl named Sue – and I lived not very far away with this guy named Robbie Wood who was trying to do pre-med stuff.  We both had liberal political leanings at that point.  And then Junior Year, we decided that the housing arrangements had to change for some reason and we each had new roommates but basically Gail would come and live with me for a lot of the time.  Even though Gail was a really serious student she was very mellow.  And I was social and mellow.  We both enjoyed meeting people, going to parties, listen to records, have people over, talk about politics. 

 

Gail was also competitive because we took this bowling class together and she would definitely get competitive.  She was a very good athlete.  We played some tennis and she loved to swim. By that time, I want to say that Tim had graduated and gotten a nice house, so we started spending really a lot of time there.  We continued to go back to New Orleans in the summer during Junior and Senior year and Gail would work at the swim club.  

​

I remember when we were both nominated to be entered into the honor society (Phi Beta Kappa), but USL didn’t have a PBK chapter so the professors would nominate five people every year to be inductees and then they would pick one person.  And so we both got nominated - and then Gail won.  It was never a competition between us, it was always helping each other be successful and she was always very supportive.  In a lot of ways she changed me because I had been a very … I had always liked reading but I was never a great student at HS and she changed me because seeing the way she studied and being so focused really rubbed off on me. 

​

By senior year we started talking about ‘what next’ and Gail really wanted to go get a masters in Psychology so she was focused on that.  I think she was a TA her senior year in Psychology.   She wanted to get a masters and I wanted to go to Law School and so she took the GRE and applied to a bunch of different schools and I took the LSAT and applied to 3 or 4 schools.  Then she got into University of Tennessee and I got into LSU.  So there was a lot of angst that year because we had been together 6 years and this would be the first time we were apart and there was a lot of unknown.  So she went off to Tennessee and I went off to LSU and I roomed with her brother Wayne who was an undergrad.  I think I went one time to visit Gail in Knoxville and Wayne went with me.  We went skiing for the first time in Gatlinburg.  And then Gail got afraid and wouldn’t go down and then it started to get dark and we had to get the ski patrol guy to go get her down.  But she wouldn’t get embarrassed about that kind of thing – she laughed about it.  I think that year changed things a bit for us, where after that first year it seemed like the relationship was not going to continue, like it was going to end - with the time apart and the fact that we really hadn’t experienced anything else.  And we started having other relationships without telling each other that we were.  And I think we ultimately spent two years apart and she finished her masters. But in the end, I think Gail decided that she didn’t want to end the relationship – and decided that she was going to move to Baton Rouge and we would get married.  She was 24 and I was 23. Looking back on it, it felt like the world – and family - had decided that we should be a couple and that there wasn’t much choice in it.  And of course I loved her and part of me didn’t want to close our relationship.  But we had no money - my mother took Gail to get an engagement ring.  We had a wedding in New Orleans at the St. Matthews Church and a big party in Metairie.   So she moved to Baton Rouge and we got married and she initially got a job waitressing and then she got a job with the Baton Rouge city government – it was like a PR department for the city and she got a job with a famous olympian hurdler, I think his name was Willie Davenport.  The work didn’t have much to do with her degree.  Then I graduated law school and we went on a big trip with my family to Guadeloupe and I came back. Gail was still working with the city and I would study for the bar exam.  And we were going to go to France.  INITIALLY, we were going to go to New Orleans because I was going to be a law clerk with the LA Supreme Court but then I got the offer to do the program in France so we decided to do that and I got a job clerking for four months in Baton Rouge before we went to France.  At that point, we’d never been out of the country beside Guadeloupe.  So we went to France and went to my cousin Claude’s house where we were going to stay for a few weeks before we took a train to Aix-en-Provence.  I was close with Claude as a kid in Guadeloupe but hadn’t seen him since and they really took us in and we spent some weeks in Paris and they took us to parties.  And even though Gail only spoke a little french she was a total trooper about it.  My father arranged for an apartment for us in Aix-en-Provence and the apartment was on the 3rd floor and it was VERY small and because it was the top floor it had a slanted roof.  So we had a very small bedroom and bathroom and a tiny little living room.  But it was all kind of enchanting.  And then I started school and Gail was wondering what she was going to do.  And one of the teachers in my program needed a babysitter so Gail became the nanny of the kid while I was going to school.  And she was happy to have something to do.  She never seemed too lonely and we made friends quickly. We made friends with a guy who is best friends with Gary now whose name is Matt.  Matt was from Lawrence, Kansas originally but was in the same program and we ran into him at a bar.  He never went to any classes - just there to have a good time.  We went back to Paris for Christmas and I bought this rusted old Peugot 404 for about $200 and we drove that car back.  We’d go to Matt’s almost every night and play liar’s dice and drink cheap wine.  After a few months we decided that even though we liked living in town the apartment was too inconvenient so with some people in my program we found a place that was a little further away but much bigger. And we moved in there and met this Belgian guy named Theodore Aertz married to a beautiful woman named Hans, and they had a baby and Gail became friends with Hans, and I made friends with Theo and it was in their apartment that we watched the Miracle on Ice game on a fuzzy tv.  And we made friends in that apartment house.  Gail made friends pretty easily.  And then Roy and Nona came for a visit, and we took them to the places we like to go and we had a nice time.  Roy was a party guy, a very fun guy - and easy going.  Kind of a mix of Charlie and Johnny.  Tim and Coco also came to visit us because he had money at that point from the oil business, and we went to Paris and just had an incredible time staying in a hotel and eating picnics of baguettes and cheese on the river bank.

​

When it came close to the end of school, Theo bought a little resort area with a restaurant and bar and offered to pay our room and board if we went down there in the summer and helped in the place and in the restaurant and he’d pay us.  So we terminated our lease, moved to the south of France and stayed in this open room on mattresses and sleeping pads, and we’d stock the bar, sweep the place, play bartender - whatever there was to do there we did for about six weeks.  It was an adventure.  There were these rich kids who lived in this complex and there was a famous French actor who was in the original La Cage aux Folles, and he had a beautiful daughter who was probably about 17 or 18 but she was completely drugged out all the time, and she had this loser boyfriend who was really handsome– could have been a model – but they were no good, did nothing all day, woke up at 2 pm and would drink and do drugs and hang out, and I’d let them borrow my car to go to Marseille and this one time they took the car and came back and told me it had been stolen - sorry.  It was the only thing we had that had any value to it.  It was Bastille Day and we were coming back in a week to the US and there was a big Bastille day party and the restaurant was going to get money for this party and I told them to take out 200 francs to pay for the car.  And they were pissed and we came back to our room and they had ransacked it and taken our passports.  And Gail would just take it in stride.  I don’t remember her losing her temper over anything - ever.  She was always just kind of at peace with her life and fine with who she was. So then we had to go apply for new passports at the embassy and then we flew home soon after that.  While we were away, the professor she had been working with at Knoxville had gotten transferred to Rice – his name was Bill Howell.  He got offered a position at Rice and told Gail that he’d get her a full scholarship to come to Rice and finish her PhD.  So that was a great deal for her and we decided to go to Houston.  I didn’t have anything lined up anyways so it seemed like a good opportunity.  So we flew back to New Orleans from France and hang around for about a month.  And then my uncle Rene (Paul’s brother) gave me a green Buick that he didn’t use anymore and we took that car and rented a u-haul (we had nothing to our name) and literally just took some furniture from our rooms back at home, and my father lent me $2500 and we stopped on the way to Houston at Lafayette and stayed at Tim and Coco’s for a few days, and he lent me $5,000 and gave us a rocking chair. 

​

So we had driven to Houston and rented a place in the Montrose area which was a fairly bad part of town.  After being there for like a week, a guy came knocking at our door at 3 or 4 morning and this guy was talking crazy and asking for someone that didn’t live there and I finally talked him into leaving and Gail said, “Okay, we have to find an apartment somewhere in a better part of town.”  So we got an apartment in Allen House Apartments down on Allen Parkway for $500 a month, and Gail started school - and she’d go there early and stay late.  And she had to do a lot of lab-work back then doing these statistical analysis, so she’d go to where the big computers were, and I’d go to the U of H law library to work on my thesis for the program in France and work on my resume and look for jobs.  And around 5 or 6 p.m. I’d go to Rice to work out at the gym, we’d go get dinner with one of her classmates and then start over the next day.  And then there was a graduate student bar called Valhalla’s with 25 cent beers and one night I ran into a friend of mine from law school named Geoff Pike because he was dating a PhD student. We had been living there for 3 or 4 months and we were close to running out of money.  And he recommended me to a firm that his oil company used.  And that’s how I got my first job, making a $17,500 salary.  I bought a couple suits and started working.   We decided to move out of the apartment and get a house.  And then Matt, our friend from France, moved to Houston and rented the house next door to us.  Across the street was Amanda and her sister Abby and another girl in the same program.  And Abby started dating Matt without telling anybody.

 

Basically, at that point, Gail went to school for a long day and I worked a lot, too - went to work at 6:30 a.m. and went to the gym at 7 p.m. at night.  We basically just saw each other in the evening at that point.  We lived in that house for more than a year before moving to a house on Gramercy, still pretty close.  Gail got her master’s degree first and then it took another year and a half or so to get her PhD.  In Gramercy we just spent a lot of time hanging around Matt, and Amanda, and her sister.  Ruth came to help after Danielle was born and stayed for a few weeks with us.  When Danielle was a baby there was a MAJOR hurricane and we were sitting there freaking out about trees falling on the house and a tree actually fell on the car outside. 

Gail and Ruth had a very good relationship.  It wasn’t strained like it was with a lot of mothers where people try to tell you what to do.  And Gail was such a laid back person that nothing really bothered her much.  

 

Danielle’s birth had such a big impact on Gail.  She was completely devoted to Danielle.  She was really, really happy to have her in her life.  She nurtured her in a very loving way.  It just made her really happy.  Because before all she had was school and her achievements, and now she felt like she had something else that she could care strongly about.  It really didn’t seem to stress her out balancing Danielle with everything she was doing with school.  Gail started doing more work from home, we got some help from Ruth and I can’t really remember where else we got help.  

​

We weren’t actually trying for Danielle.  Gail suffered from endometriosis and we weren’t really trying and it just happened.  It was a blessing because it even helped a lot with that disease with her.  That’s also when we became closer friends with Amanda and Woody.  It was funny - we had this house that was right next to this water tower.  And we had this odd neighbor on the other side, at a guest house.  She was very quiet and kept to herself and then Wayne came and visited and ended up taking her out to dinner.  We had barely said a word to her and we were so surprised when we found out he was taking her out.

 

I remember - during the week Gail would be busy - and on the weekends I would take Danielle for long periods so that Gail could catch up on work.  I would take Danielle to work with me … I’d work on Saturdays and go for 4-5 hours.  Danielle wasn’t even a year a half old when Gail got pregnant with Lauren, and again we weren’t even trying.  

 

We’d had a neighbor - Bob something or other - who was a banker and lived three houses down where we would go and have dinner with him and his wife.  And he convinced us that we shouldn’t be renting and that it was a good time to buy in that neighborhood and so he arranged for us to get a loan and we ended up buying this house across from him.

 

Matt was friends with this guy Chris Nettles from Kansas and we’d end up hanging out with them on a lot of Friday and Saturday nights – they had young kids too, a daughter named Beth and son whose name escapes me. 

 

We were very happy when Gail got pregnant with Lauren again – we felt like we were young, starting a family and Danielle was going to have a sibling.  We were busy but it felt doable.  And Lauren came along and was also just a much easier baby then Danielle.  Danielle had to be rocked a lot and cried a lot and Lauren was just a much more peaceful baby.  But it was also just more time required – I would spend time taking care of Danielle when Gail was breastfeeding.  At that point, Gail was about a year away from finishing her PhD program.  The challenge was that she did have to go to a lab where the computers were to do the statistical analysis, so she would go there when I came home from work – and spend 3-4 hours and then come home at midnight.  I don’t remember it as a lot of discord between us, we just felt like “we have so much to do, we just need to get through it.”  Sometimes you just prop up the bottle on the pillow and go have dinner.  We didn’t have any family around us to help but the kids were really good kids - they weren’t big criers or complainers, they were kind of easy to take care of in a lot of ways.  Part of it was just that we had a really laid back lifestyle.  We were young too, Gail was 29 and I was 28 and I don’t really remember being really sleep deprived.  I would get up, iron a shirt, make some eggs, do the morning feeding, etc.  We really had a nice life - it was really a happy time.  

 

As Lauren became a year old, Gail became career focused.  She was done with her program.  I just think we … it became clear … for me … I wouldn’t have the person to support me that I wanted to have in my life.  And she was unhappy also but I don’t know why because we really didn’t … we were really still immature in a way because in a way we were still these 16 year olds.  And then all of a sudden we had this big reality slap in the face.  And I felt like I had a lot of demands on my career.  And Gail felt like she had a lot of demands on her career and that began to put a lot of stress on us.  The kids were a blessing but it was career related where we couldn’t find a way to balance each other’s careers.  Neither one of us wanted to be the one to put the career on the back seat.  By 1987, we were really starting to drift apart and became more selfish in our lives.  I remember that when we said it couldn’t work and I moved out and got an apartment.  It was really hard.  Really hard for the kids.  I think I saw them Tuesday, Thursdays, and Saturdays and I had two car seats in the back and I would have to run one in and leave the other one in the back seat, and they were probably confused about what was going on.  It was awful for them and just terrible that we had been selfish to put them in that position.  I think in a lot of ways Gail didn’t really want a divorce and I think I was probably the one pushing it more because I just didn’t see that she could provide the kind of support I wanted with the goals she had for herself. It was like we had a certain status when we got married and had these two kids and then our lives changed in terms of what we both wanted and we couldn’t be there for each other.  We lived that way for about 6-8 months, and then Gail said she was going to move to Colorado with the kids.  Which was a shock for me, but I think she felt like that was the best career move for her.  

​

We both started dating other people at that point and she started dating Chris Nettles.  Getting divorced was just an unpleasant time, negotiating all the time and everything.  I think Gail’s lawyer didn’t like me but we got the divorce signed and in no time she said she was going to uproot and take the kids and go to Colorado.  And at the time I thought she was doing it to hurt me, but in retrospect I think she was just trying to do what was best for her career.  And she had no feelings for me because she felt like I messed up her life and my feelings were not going to be a consideration. 

 

I only got to see the kids one time when she was in Colorado, when I flew to Boulder.  We’d try to talk on the phone but that was hard with the kids at that age.  And I bought them this specialized kind of correspondence thing where you could write to the kids.  And I went to Denver once for a long weekend and rented a hotel with an indoor pool, and it was nice but just felt really foreign in a way.  And then when she moved to Alaska with Chris, we just kind of lost touch - it was almost surreal.  I really didn’t want to acknowledge it or be a part of it.  I don’t think I saw the kids for a year until I flew there to take them on a ski trip in Colorado.  But I might be confusing that.  But I remember that was the trip where Lauren was too young to fly by herself and I told her she needed to say she was 6 but she was only 5.  And I said, “Just pretend it’s your birthday.” And she looked at me and thought about it for a while and said, “Well, that does mean I get presents?”  

 

But then some time after that, I wrote Gail a letter – I don’t know if it’s in her possessions - but I basically talked to her about how we had really loved each other and cared for each other and had these wonderful kids.  And that we were both good people and it was a shame that the kids couldn’t have us both in their lives because we had made these selfish decisions.  And was there a way that I could have them for a year?  And I think she was in a bad spot because she realized that this Chris Nettles guy was a really bad guy.  And realized it was a bad environment for her and the kids and she agreed that they could come stay with me for a year. Which, you know, was really a monumental decision on her part.  For me, it was phenomenal because I had missed the kids for like three years.  And it certainly complicated my life because I was so busy and I enrolled them in school and put them in the YMCA and had to use a lot of sitters but I think it was a happy time for me and for them, but they certainly missed her a lot.  And I think it was hard for her, and for the kids, and for me, really, until Catherine came into the picture.  Because I think it was like three or four years of not having a stable environment for them to fly back and forth.  But when Catherine was here and I think Gail had met Mark, things just got more stable for the kids.  I remember when I started dating Catherine and told her I had kids and wanted her to meet them, we went to Colorado to go skiing and so she could meet the kids.  And Catherine and I actually spent the night at Gail’s house with the kids before we flew back and Catherine was besides herself - she couldn’t believe that Gail was fine with that.  But I think that was a turning point for us. Like we had come full circle and we were going to be the best we could with each other from that point on, for the kids.  And things were much more harmonious.  

 

It’s really funny how we had these really dark times, but then it kind of came back and led to these really wonderful times.  Because Gail was a special person that way.  Because she really just cared about the kids and just wanted the best for them.  

 

It’s hard to talk to you about all these things.  But I think it’s important people know that Gail was just such a really nice and loving person who just really loved the kids and was as good a mom as someone can be.