A Company of Heroes (25 page)

“We had the most normal life you could think of,” Marlene said. “We spent a lot of time on the bayous on little boats, fishing and crabbing. He stayed close to his parents and brothers and sisters, and we often visited. It was a very family-oriented way to grow up.”

Marlene noted that despite her dad’s lack of education, he was a brilliant man. “He could take plans and build a parking lot,” she said, “or figure out a blueprint faster than most engineers could. Those were skills he was just born with. He never had any formal training. It was always amazing that he could accomplish what he did.”

Grandson Kyle runs a construction business today. One of the contractors he works with has a lowboy trailer, a heavy-duty one pulled by a big rig. The contractor and Doc Roe built the trailer together years ago. It’s still on the road and going strong.

The Roe children remember few household rules growing up, other than being taught to be respectful, which their father always was, and that boys couldn’t hit girls. “Of course, Eugene [Jr.] was the baby,” Marlene said, “and with two older sisters, we aggravated him as only older sisters can do. But Daddy was always very strong about that—you do not hit your sisters no matter how much they irritate you.”

In the series, Doc Roe was shown smoking Lucky Strikes. That was authentic. Doc Roe smoked a couple packs of Lucky Strikes daily until the day he died. He liked to drink whiskey, too. “Mother and Daddy always drank Seagram’s Seven and Coke,” Marlene said. “It was always my job to make their highballs at night. I have no idea why that job fell to me, but that was my job.”

“He could be pretty traditional,” Eugene Jr. said. “For instance, he never wanted me to take typing in high school. He thought that was only for girls. It was the same way with band class. Real guys played football, he said. Only sissies played in the band.”

Eugene Jr. speculated that there were two times in his life he disappointed his father. Eugene Jr. did well in school (he was class valedictorian) and was given an opportunity to go to West Point on scholarship. The West Point opportunity was a real honor. Eugene Sr. had a great respect for the West Point grads he served with, and Eugene Jr. knew his father would have loved him to go to West Point. But a military career did not appeal to Eugene Jr., and he also wanted to stay closer to home.

The second time was after Eugene Jr. graduated from Louisiana State University, when he went to work for Exxon. “I think he really wanted me to take over his construction business,” Eugene Jr. said. “I remember him saying, ‘I don’t understand why an educated man would ever want to work for someone else.’ That was his view of independence—being able to stand on your own. He had worked himself up to running construction companies with the limited education he had. So he really valued a man starting and running his own business.”

Eugene Jr. noted that his father was pleased with him in other ways. “He was proud as a peacock that I made valedictorian. And we grew up sort of on a farm and always had cows and horses. I won quite a few trophies in horse shows, and he was always really proud of those trophies. He’d brag about me in front of other people. That’s how he showed it.”

The construction business is known for its seasonal ups and downs. Doc Roe experienced both. Sometimes he had more work than he knew what to do with. Sometimes, it was a bust. He went through bankruptcy, but at other times the money flowed in. When it did, Doc Roe was always generous with it. His grandsons remember as boys receiving hundred dollar bills at Christmastime, which seemed a fortune to them. Paw-Paw often bought them toys, too—bulldozers and tractors—things he could relate to.

“It was always a real adventure to go to his house,” said grandson Derek Tircuit. “He had dirt, chickens, dogs, and all this large equipment all over, backhoes and tractors. As a young boy, that was heaven. You could run around in the middle of nowhere and climb on stuff. It was an adventure. And we could do whatever we wanted to—that was Grandpa’s attitude toward us. If you want to go climb on a tractor, that was fine with him.”

The marriage between Vera and Doc Roe was mostly good, said the family, but pressures eventually took their toll. Vera went back to England to visit relatives every four or five years, but the lack of immediate family wore on her. “I remember traveling back to England several times with Mom,” Marlene said. “Maxine, age eight, Eugene Jr., eighteen months, and I, age six, went once. We flew on the old Pan Am planes and had to fly to Greenland first, then change planes to continue to England. It was hard for Mom to go back to England. She had to steel herself when she was away from her family. Then she saw them again, then she had to steel herself again to leave, never knowing when and if she’d be able to go back, or who would be alive when she did. It was always a mixed thing for her to go home. Telephone conversations were more difficult back then also. For many years there was no phone in the family home. We used to have to call England person-to-person and contact a nearby pub. Somebody in the pub would relay the message and go get the family member, who’d come back to the pub at the arranged time. That’s how mother would talk to her family.”

After twenty-seven years together, Doc Roe and Vera divorced. About five years later, Doc Roe remarried, but Vera never did. She kept her British citizenship, but never moved back to England. America was her new home now. Family ties were always cordial with Doc Roe’s new wife, as she played no part in the divorce.

Doc Roe was more of a teacher than perhaps he ever knew.

Kyle remembers once when he was thirteen, his grandfather bought a brand new pickup truck, a Ford F-250. Somebody came to the yard to get a load of dirt, and Grandpa told Kyle to go move his new truck. “I backed it right into a ditch and put a dent in the bumper,” Kyle said. “I figured he’d be really mad, but he just came over, looked at it, and said, ‘Oh well. It’s just the first dent in the truck, there’s probably plenty more to come.’ That’s always stayed with me.”

The experience also made a big impression on grandson Derek, who was there when it happened. “You could cause serious mayhem at Grandpa’s place, but it just didn’t matter to him,” Derek said. “He had this weird calm about him. When Kyle put the truck in the ditch, Grandpa got the backhoe and pulled it out. You think, if you’re a kid and you wreck some adult’s truck, it’s a pretty big deal. But with Grandpa, it wasn’t. There was no cussing or throwing things, no freaking out. He just hooked up a chain and got the job done. I attribute his strange peace to what he had been through—the war, the concentration camps—he had seen it all, and after the war every other experience paled by comparison. One of your buddies gets his legs blown off, that’s a problem. But a dented truck, in the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing.”

In spite of his calm demeanor, nobody messed with Doc Roe either. “Paw-Paw had been working on a car,” Kyle said. “It backfired and he was burned. While he was home recuperating, I went deer hunting on his property with some friends. I forgot to let my grandfather know we were on his land. He figured somebody was trespassing. When we finished hunting, Paw-Paw had closed and locked the gate on us. There he was on the front porch with gauze wrapped around his head and a shotgun in his hands, trying to figure out who was on his property. You didn’t mess with Paw-Paw.”

When Doc Roe retired from the construction business, he did side jobs, then bought a Western apparel and gear store, which later burned to the ground, then was rebuilt. Doc Roe took it all in stride.

“Probably the thing I remember most from him was his attitude that anything can be fixed, no matter how messed up it was,” Kyle said. “It didn’t matter if it was a stuck machine or a burnt store, his take was always, ‘Don’t worry about things. It’s all going to be okay.’ I’ve seen him go from being bankrupt to rolling in the money again. He chose to keep a positive attitude through both good times and bad.”

Doc Roe didn’t keep in touch with his Easy Company friends until later in life. After he retired, he enjoyed reconnecting with his old friends. “If you’d have asked him what part of his life he was proudest of, he would have said his service in the war,” Chris said.

In the early 1990s, Doc Roe contracted lung cancer and fought it for several years. “His chemo treatments were certainly not pleasant,” Marlene said. “He always bounced back, but then started going downhill and never really got up again. He was at home, under hospice. We were there with him at the end. He fell into a light coma and died peacefully, just stopped breathing.”

Kyle characterizes the last few months as “long, agonizing, and painful” for his grandfather. “It was really hard to see him go down little by little. The day he died it was like he had his old strength back. He was headstrong, wanting to get up and go to work that day. But his feet had swollen up and he couldn’t put his shoes on. That was tough.”

Doc Roe died December 30, 1998. The funeral was very plain and ordinary, a small, private ceremony, a tape recording of “Taps,” a flag-draped coffin.

Marlene noted that her father was never known to be religious, but after he had contracted cancer and knew he was going to die, a man came to visit him every once in a while who did Bible readings with him. “I think it helped Dad reconcile things with God,” she said. “I certainly hope he was at peace when he died.”

How would the family want Doc Roe remembered?

“He was just a good person,” Marlene said. “He treated people well. And I think that his service in World War II was something he was especially proud of. That’s what I’d want people to know about my dad.”

Things really hit home for Derek one day in 2001 on the trip to Normandy, in, of all places, the buffet line at lunch. He tells the story in his words:

 

 

 

First Sergeant Floyd “Tab” Talbert was born August 26, 1923, in Green-town, Indiana, a small community outside of Kokomo, where he grew up. He was the eldest of the seven of us children (five boys and two girls) born to Russell and Nellie Talbert. We had excellent parents. The bartering system became popular during the Depression, and our father often worked in return for goods such as coal. He was an electrician and did wiring jobs sometimes for a ton of coal. He planted large gardens (called “truck-patches”), and our mother canned, cold-packed, and dried food to set aside for the winter months. One task as a youngster was to assist our father in the gardens. We never went hungry and we never heard our parents complain.

Most children born in this era knew what it was to be taught to work hard at an early age. As the Talbert children grew, we all followed this tradition and were sought out by various area residents because of our reputation for being hard and conscientious workers. Tab did the usual lawn mowing and trimming that many young people did, bearing in mind that in those days the mowing equipment was not as sophisticated as today. You pushed the lawn mower with people-power and did the trimming with a pair of scissors. As Tab grew older he worked for various farmers during summers. This meant he had to rise early and either walk or ride a bike to the job site. Later, among other summer jobs, he was employed by a building contractor and did carpentry work and roofing. This was the era before child labor laws, and youths were often willing to work cheaply. It was not uncommon for young people to get involved in doing “man’s work” on a regular basis. Tab worked hard and became a very muscular young man.

Tab was an excellent athlete. He played on the baseball team and became an outstanding basketball player. He played four years of varsity ball and was noted for his long set shots.

After high school graduation, Tab worked for a short time at the Haynes Stellite Division of Union Carbide, located in Kokomo, Indiana. In August of 1942, he joined the Army and volunteered for the paratroopers. He went to Camp Toccoa, Georgia, and followed the rigorous training and then marched to Fort Benning, Georgia, for further parachute training.

Three of Tab’s brothers also served in the military. Max was attached to the 17th Airborne Division, I (Bob) served with the 11th Airborne Division, and Kenneth served in the “Big Red One,” named for the insignia of the First Infantry Division.