The Wells girls get their gumbo on...
Family roux lesson, Thanksgiving holiday, Chicago, 2016. My eldest daughter, Sara, above, left, who had flown in with her family from San Francisco, stirring the roux for a chicken-and-sausage gumbo that we dined on the day after Thanksgiving. Daughter, Becca, right, who had come in from Austin, Tx., and granddaughter, Zoe, watching the progress and also helping out. Inspired, Sara flew home and cooked her first solo gumbo the next week. Dad was over the moon. Meanwhile, that's Zoe at right taking her very first bite of gumbo with her dad, Iain Lake, supervising--and she ate the entire bowl!
Wells Family archives...
As my book says, gumbo was at least indirectly responsible for bringing my parents together. That's my mom, Bonnie Toups, at 17 just before she met my dad, William "Rex" Wells. Below is Rex as a young Marine signing autographs during a goodwill tour by the Marines in Australia about a year before World War II broke out. My parents met at a Cajun dance in Thibodaux while dad was on convalescence leave after three years of combat in the Pacific. Within six weeks they were married--a shock to both of their familes since they had known each other for such a short time. That's them above on their wedding day in Houma, La., in August of 1945.
Left, Anna Virginia "Maw-Maw" Toups circa 1969. When my father discovered that my mom--though she came from a gumbo-cooking family--actually couldn't cook gumbo herself, my grandmother saved the day by giving my mom gumbo-cooking lessons. Right, Lora "Granny Wells" and William Henry "Pop" Wells, aka Catfish Willie, in their later years...They lived with us for many years on the farm on Bayou Black. Granny was an excellent Southern fry cook. Below, the Wellses in hardscrabble Arkansas before they moved to Louisiana in 1936...
Bayou Black...
My Photoshop rendition of the farm as it looked circa 1959, and, below, a picture taken just before the house was demolished in 2018. The kindly new owners of the property allowed my brothers to tour the old place before the bulldozers came.
The reason we have almost no actual pictures of the place is that such as they existed most were destroyed in a flood in my parents' suburban home well after they moved from the farm on Bayou Black in 1968. Here are a couple that survive, circa 1959. Above the Wells brothers ,from left, Chris, Jerry (deceased), Pershing and Bob holding some of the catch from an offshore fishing trip. The old house is in the background. Right, the author holding two Atlantic spadefish.
