Robert St. Pé

Robert St. Pé, 1945-2005

Angus Lind
Staff writer

Robert St. Pé lived for weekends and family gatherings -- everything from crawfish boils to barbecues. Whatever he and his sons brought home, whether it was from the water or the woods, they cooked at his house.

A heavy-equipment operator for a local pipe company for 25 years, and later a sheet metal worker and painter at Avondale shipyard, St. Pé was your typical Louisiana outdoorsman. When he wasn't hunting or fishing, he was going to every festival known to man.

"He'd call me and say, 'Meet me at the Alligator Festival,' or the Gumbo Festival, or whatever festival was that weekend," said his son, Lance St. Pé of Waggaman.

There was a reason for that.

"His family was from Chackbay -- he's French -- and wherever we'd go, whatever festival, he'd dance," said his son. "He never missed the Alligator Festival in Boutte or the Gumbo Festival in Chackbay."

A resident of Westwego who grew up in Marrero's Estelle area and married a land owner's daughter, Robert St. Pé and his buddies earlier in life enjoyed rebuilding and racing hot rods, such as '57 Chevys. He also hunted alligators.

"He was just a regular dad, and he was good at it," Lance St. Pé said. "We had your basic son-dad relationship. We hunted and fished together, me and my brother Dane.

"He was always with us when we played football as kids, and later on he always wanted to do something with his grandchildren."

Asbestos and emphysema finally took a toll on his body, and St. Pé was placed in a nursing home on Hayne Boulevard. He became depressed, his son said, because he could no longer do the things he loved to do so much with his family. He was placed on a ventilator and oxygen, and later on a feeding tube, life support that sustained him for 32 months.

As Katrina approached, St. Pé was transferred to Bywater Medical Clinic to ride out the storm. Police transported him through floodwater to Charity Hospital, where the loss of power shut down his ventilator.

"Within hours he should have died," said his son, but a nurse helped him breathe on his own.

On Sept. 1, he was airlifted out of Charity. He wound up in a Baton Rouge nursing home, increasingly distraught over his inability to locate his sons.

"The aides said he was devastated about the thought that he had lost his family and tried to crawl out to look for them," Lance said.

Lance said aides told him that when Hurricane Rita entered the Gulf, Robert St. Pé told his nurse that "he could not take it anymore and borrowed her marker and wrote his sons' full names on his arm."

That night, on Sept. 24, the doting dad who lived to dance and party, hunt and fish and barbecue with his family, died at age 60 of natural causes. Lance found him days later, after talking to an emergency room nurse and an ambulance driver who "recognized that funny last name."

Published in The Times-Picayune