Jean and Eleanor wrote hundreds of letters during the war. We have them, but we have not read them. That may become part of this family project at some point. Jean had an active correspondence of letters and packages with his mother and brothers and sister. But he never felt that he could afford to visit them, and they must have been in the same position. Consequently, he never saw them again. However, he would receive music and newspapers on a weekly basis, and there was always French music in our house.

In 1969 I graduated from the University of Delaware, and I moved to Washington, DC that summer because I landed a job in the DC public schools as a social worker. My father died on December 29, 1969. On visits home, with Mom’s help, I spent hours and hours going through his papers. I envisioned that a book was possible, but the project has been on the back burner ever since. I did self-publish a booklet for the Coalition For Natural Stream Valleys annual banquet titled “Poems of Heritage”. This organization fought successfully to preserve the beautiful White Clay Creek area north of Newark, DE when a plan threatened to flood the lush forest valley to create a reservoir. Members of the Coalition, especially Dorothy Miller and Don Sharp, appreciated the poem that Jean Sadot wrote in 1967 to consecrate and preserve the area. Joachim Tourbier suggested that I set the poem to music. I told him that I did not think that it could be done because of the irregular syncopation patterns. To which he wisely retorted, “So do it!” So I did. Since 1980 I have performed the song at annual Newark Community Days and at the White Clay Creek State park itself. See “White Clay Creek”)

When our brother Joe Sadot died of an aneurism in 1978 at the age of 26, the family asked friends and relatives to donate money for a book of Joe’s writings and drawings in lieu of flowers that would only fade away. We lost a great musician and singer-songwriter as well as a brother with that untimely and unexpected death. In the months that followed we worked on the project and we finally delivered his book. We called it “Green Leaves” after one of his songs that had mortality as its theme. Jeanne worked on it from far off Colorado. It featured a cover by Marie Sadot. I was able to surprise the family with a CD of Joe’s songs as a Christmas present in 1999. It has 20 songs performed by Joe on either banjo or guitar, and also some piano. It is also titled “Green Leaves”. We donated a copy to the WVUD library. Occasionally, one of Joe’s songs gets aired on the University of Delaware radio station. This project was accomplished with the help of my best friend, Dean Banks. Dean is also the webmaster of this website, and was the recording engineer for some of my songs on my unreleased “Songs of the Seasons” CD, which features several of Jean and Joe’s poems set to music. I remain convinced that all of these materials deserve to be professionally published.

After my father died, I was determined to visit France and finally meet the family. I had the opportunity to talk with all of my uncles over good French wine and dinners in the year of 1971 when I made my first solo visit to France. I visited Uncle Victor and his wife Jeanne in Ablon, a suburb of Paris, and I made frequent excursions into the city. Sometimes I stayed at the apartment of Marie-France and Josette Sadot, daughters of Uncle Joseph. They arranged for me to meet other family members in Paris and Normandy. I met my cousin Michael in Paris only for a few minutes because he was about to leave on his own vacation. I visited Alexandre and his wife Suzanne in Chatallion on the Atlantic coast, not far from La Rochelle. I hitch-hiked from Paris to Normandy with my very attractive cousin Josette, which is probably why rides were so easy to get. In Normandy, I visited Lucien and Huguette at their house, and Joeseph and Marie-Thérèse at their farm. I briefly met my cousin Gilbert Sadot in Normandy, and my meeting with my father’s sister Marie was even more fleeting. She was working as a maid at someone’s house and I was allowed to have her come outside to meet me. She was happy to see me, but she cried the whole time as I tried to comfort her with hugs and thank yous. She kept saying how I reminded her of her little brother Jean, and how sad it was that she never got to see him again. Then she went back to work.

The following year I had sufficient funds saved from my job to fly my mother and brother Joseph to visit them all again. We actually flew into Amsterdam, Holland and then took a train into Paris. It was wonderful to see my mother and brother talking with their French relatives. I took a photo of “Ma Sadot” at Utah Beach, and that photo sits on my desk to this day.

In August of 1977 Jean-Pierre and Jean-Marie Sadot, sons of Uncle Victor and Aunt Jeanne, visited us in Newark, Delaware. Joe, Rob, and I took them to Washington DC, and to the Appalachian mountains in West Virginia. Joe became severely ill at that time, and had to cancel out on his plan to drive the cousins to Colorado to visit Jeanne and Marie, who were living there at the time. Rob took time off from work to be their tour-guide, and they really got to see a vast part of the USA, to get aquainted with Jeanne and Marie, and to see the beauty of that great mountain state.

The third voyage of American Sadots to France was in 1997. It had four participants, which I will list in order of age: myself, Jeanne, Rob, and Marie. Jeanne had recently had knee surgery, but she bravely did the whole voyage on crutches. This tour of family and historical reflection was made very effective by cousins Marie-France and Laurent Trac, her partner in life, and by Jean-Pierre and Jean-Marie, who acted as our main tour guides. They divided our tour into three sections: Paris first, then Muret, Toulouse, and the Pyrenées Mountains, and finally Normandy.

In Paris, Rob and I stayed with Jean-Marie in the suburan village of Corbeille-Essones while Jeanne and Marie stayed with Marie-France and Laurent. A night ride on one of the paqueboats down the River Seine is something we would recommend to anyone visiting Paris for the first time. You will fall in love with the grand old city, and you will see why it is called the “City of Light”. Along with the tourist bus ride, you can get yourself oriented and figure out what you want to visit. The Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysées and the Arc de Triomph, the Louvre Museum, Notre Dame, Montmartre and the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, the Left Bank cafés, and the Marché des Puces (flea markets) are all fascinating places! We only had a few dinners in Parisian restaurants because we were so often dinner guests with the family. By far the best dinner was at the home of Phillip and Thérèse, the eldest daughter of Uncle Joseph and Marie-Thérèse’s four children. We laughed and sang the evening away! And we met their daughter Christine for the first time.

It was a long, tough, all-night ride on the train for the four of us and Jean-Marie as we went from Paris to Toulouse in the south of France. But Jean-Pierre was there waiting on the platform to meet us in the dawn’s early light. Aunt Jeanne was beaming with smiles when we arrived at her house in the smaller town of Muret on the Garonne river. It had been fifteen years since I had seen her, and the rest of the family had never met her before. Unfortunately, Uncle Victor had recently passed away, and there were some tear-choked moments when his name came up in conversations. Jean-Pierre lived and worked nearby. He found out that we could meet a very special old lady who was still alive in the Pyrenées mountains. Jean-Pierre was still working by day, and the plan for his vacation would be the Normandy tour. So he arranged for us to rent a car and drive up with Jean-Marie to meet Madame Ossau. At this time she was age 90. She, along with her shepherd husband, had put our father and several other French soldiers up in their farm lodgings. It was a tearful moment for all of us. And we Americans realized that we may never have existed if not for this woman and her husbandd’s kindness and solidarity to Resistance fighters. Jean-Marie took a picture of this meeting, which is in the gallery section of this website. Her husband, who was no longer living, had been sent to a German prison camp in World War I. Consequently, they were very partisan in WWII as well. She said, “Pauvre Jean, Il était arrivée sans sous.” (Poor John, he arrived without a penny.) When Jeanne, Rob and Marie went to Toulouse, I took a little time to play some music and hang out with Aunt Jeanne. We would soon off to Normandy in Jean-Pierre’s Citroen automobile, which he and Jean-Marie outfitted with a rack on the roof to handle everyone’s belongings.

The trip to Normandy revealed the vast open countryside of France, as well as the might industrial and maritime sectors such as Bordeaux represents. It was another long haul. Our tour of Normandy included all of the churches and graves, the quaint sea towns and lighthouses, and some of the residences, that were the scenes of many family stories and memories. The old family farm of Joeseph and Marie-Therese is in rural Ancteville, Normandy, population about 100 or so. We had big feasts and wine toasts and lots of laughs at their table, and our cousin Josette was there to see us and to help her parents in their elderly state. We walked with Uncle Joseph in his garden on this 1997 visit. Marie-Theres treated us to an old style Norman French story, while Josette tried to relay it to us in her English. Later we American Sadots went with our French family to visit the museum and memorials at Utah and Omaha Beach where the American soldiers gave their lives for Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, and an end to five years of Nazi occupation. Rob Sadot was the video camera man throughout this visit, and he captured everything for us. See Jean-Henri Sadot’s In Normandy When Breezes Blow.

Another fond memory for all of us was our visit to cousin Joseph Pigault’s little house. It was a humble place and you could see that he had gone all out to please us, His table was set and full, and much of what he served came right out of his garden. We enjoyed the tour of his garden and comparing the French and English names for everything. He was also very amused at some of the old Cajun songs that I sang for him.

We had to visit Huguette, Lucien’s widow, in the hospital. She smiled at us, but in her condition she was not able to say much. Still we were happy to be at her side. Jeanne later made a quilt for her and sent it to her for a Christmas present.

Maybe we were trying to do too much in too little time. We managed to get a visit in to our cousin Gilbert and his wife Bernadette and all of their children and their partners in life. We got a great welcome there and a fine spread of food and beverages. I was please during this visit to be able to give everyone either a CD or a cassette tape of my Planète Folle Band’s new “Comin’ Home” CD. It would later be Gilbert who would get my music aired on France Bleu Contentin radio with a phone interview with me in French to go along with that. We went away wishing that we could have spent more time with so many of these people who are blood, but who we were just getting to know.

Rob and Tammy became involved in the Back-to-Back Student Exchange Program, and met many French people through that mechanism for international friendship. It is a program in which children ages 10 to 12 stay in the homes of each other’s families for three weeks. It is considered a total immersion program for learning the language of each country. Their daughter Rachel participated in the program by going to France for three years, and Tammy was the program coordinator for seven years. Tammy and Rachel were able to meet Marie-France, Josette, and Jean-Marie in France as they participated in this program. Apparently, the 911 event has made this program a thing of the past as parents are too afraid to send their children on airplanes now.

Rob and Tammy and their daughter Alexandria rang in the Millenium New Year’s Eve at the Eiffel Tower fireworks. Their daughter was only 8 years old on her first visit to France. They were able to spend a lot of time with relatives and take in a lot of the city on this trip.

Jean-Pierre and Jean-Marie visited us again in August of the year 2001. We took turns being their tour guides in an effort to deliver a well-thought out vacation tour such as the one they had arranged for us. Marie and I took them to Washington, DC where we strolled the mall, and visited a few of the Smithsonian Museum buildings. Then we went to Arlington National Cemetery.

The visit to the eternal flame at President John F. Kennedy’s grave was particularly moving. We stayed with Tammy’s sister Debbie and her husband Curt Moses in Lorton, Virginia, and we used the metro to get around. Curt and Debbie were terrific hosts in every way. They had us screaming with laughter one evening after dinner when Curt brought out his hat collection and we took turns trying them on and taking photos of each other. Rob and Tammy took Jean-Pierre and Jean-Marie to Philadelphia and to New York City to visit many historical places. On their way to the Statue of Liberty, they passed by the World Trade Center, which would be blown up just about 10 days later. It was eerie to receive their photos of the towers looming large in the background of their photos just a few weeks after that colossal event. We were grateful that they were not at that site when the disastrous attack or demolition occurred. We are all still waiting to find out what really happened during that ubsequently much manipulated event, which remains shrouded in as much mystery and national security secrecy as the JFK assassination.

There will be other visits and correspondences to write about. Hopefully, this Jean-Henri Sadot website will encourage these warm and wonderful family ties, and, as well, get some overdue recognition for the life and works of Jean-Henri Sadot. I’m sure that he would be pleased to know that his life and legacy are living on.

 

©2003 Jean-Henri Sadot Family
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