Consider this my birthday tribute to the father-in-law I never met.
Ambrose Fabian Vanhoof was born on this day, Dec. 10, in 1909. I didn’t know Fabian, but over the 49 years I’ve been married to Janet, the third of his and Myrt Vanhoof’s four daughters, I feel like I’ve grown to know and love him.
“Daddy loved baseball,” says Fabian’s second oldest daughter, Carol Wester, which indicates he was probably a great American. “When he played with several of his relatives on the French Unique semi-pro team, his buddies called him ‘Lefty.’ Daddy was born left-handed, but his teachers forced him to write with his right hand, and he developed a beautiful handwriting.”
There’s an iconic picture of the 1949 French Unique Cleaners team that has circulated around town and in the Town Talk newspaper for many years. Fabian is in there (top row, third from left) but it is remarkable because most of the team members are his relatives; more specifically, five brothers-in-law. His wife’s brothers on the team were Charles, Tom, Huey, Alfred and O’Hearn Mathews.
“His natural tendencies to his dominant left hand were made evident on the ball field,” continues Carol.
In a 1949 Town Talk story about French Unique halting a late rally to defeat Echo, the strapping 6-foot-2 Fabian, the first baseman, is credited with starting a critical double play, catching a fly ball by Kelly Mahfouz and throwing to second baseman Sam Cole to double off the baserunner. He also pinch-hit for Bubba Brasher in the eighth inning and belted a two-run double off the right field wall in a 5-2 victory.
The youngest of nine children, Fabian was the son of Augustine (a cotton farmer) and Mathilda Vanhoof, and he routinely made the honor roll during his elementary school years at St. Francis Xavier, the only Catholic school in Alexandria at the time. He also received awards on occasion for “gold medal for excellence” or for “best examination.”
Since he had an older sister who died shortly after birth, his mother was extra cautious with Fabian, says his oldest daughter Marilyn Joyner, noting Mathilda kept him out of school during the epidemic of 1918 so he wouldn’t get sick.
Fabian farmed and raised cattle while he was an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service for 34 years, eventually becoming the executive director for the Rapides Parish ASCS office. Keith Chapman of Woodworth, who succeeded him to that position, says he was beloved by those who worked with him.
“Daddy was always honest,” says Marilyn. “You knew that whatever he said had to be true. There were times when he would not answer, but if he answered, it was truth as he knew it. If he said he would do something, you knew that he would.”
A quiet man, he loved to read, his daughters all said. He didn’t have a lot of time to read, but he did so when he sat down to take a break from working at his office or in his prodigious garden, or fixing fence posts or plowing fields. Before he got a tractor, he did the plowing with his two mules, Dick and Dan.
“If he wasn’t reading a newspaper (including The Times Picayune on Sundays),” says Janet, an avid reader and a former editor of Forests and People magazine, “he would pick up a random encyclopedia or even the dictionary and start reading.”
Janet remembers that, as a youth, when she’d wake up on Saturday mornings in the summer, Fabian would already be plowing in the garden, where he grew corn, peas (usually purple hull), cushaw, tomatoes (and, oh, he loved tomatoes), bell peppers, eggplant and sometimes potatoes.
“Mama would give me a Mason jar with cold water to bring him because it was already so hot,” Janet says. “He would stop the mules, drink his water and maybe wipe his face that was already red in the sun. We would talk a bit and then he would go back to working ’til almost lunchtime.”
They lived in the “country” back then, on a two-lane road with a ditch on either side, which is now the bustling Jackson Street Extension. Fabian grew up there and eventually owned the home and surrounding acreage on Jackson Street Extension. That property was sold to Calvary Baptist Church years after he died.
Saturday afternoons, he’d often love to watch a big league baseball game on television. His youngest daughter, Susie Belgard, says his favorite team was the Baltimore Orioles during the time when they had Boog Powell, Brooks Robinson and Frank Robinson.
Susie says her soft-spoken, uncomplaining dad often told her she was the boy he never had, and when she played softball for Cabrini School, he attended the games with pride. When she was a freshman at Menard, he’d drive her and “a load of girls” to out-of-town games. He paid tuition to Catholic schools (Cabrini and Menard) for all four daughters.
He didn’t go to college, but Marilyn says he told her after she graduated from Northwestern State that if he had gone to college, he’d have majored in accounting, as she had done.
A man of devout faith with a keen analytical mind, he preached more by his actions than his words.
“Once when I dropped a thermometer and it broke,” Marilyn says, “he used this as a lesson in the properties of mercury, not a lecture on carelessness.”
Fabian, Marilyn says, was “a peaceful man, slow to anger and a great father.”
All these 115 years after he was born, I celebrate this common, yet uncommon man who was taken from us too soon by cancer. I would’ve loved to talk baseball with him and learn things from him and celebrate holidays and birthdays and special events with him.
Although I didn’t know him then, I know him now, and he was my kind of guy.