'Two Wings and a Star'

Chester Baudoin served as St. Mary Parish Sheriff for 20 years.
And he became something of a legend in his own time, and thereafter.
Many remember the larger-than-life sheriff from his tenure of 1964-1984, a five-term run in law enforcement’s top job.
Chet Wallace, a resident of Marietta, Georgia, has just released a book on Sheriff Baudoin, “Two Wings and A Star: The Life and Times of Sheriff Chester Baudoin.” The former sheriff is a grandfather to Wallace, whose mother is Mary Jane Baudoin Wallace, otherwise known in the local area as Sissy Wallace.
“I had heard him tell stories about him being a sheriff and a law enforcement officer,” Wallace said. “I think the first time I tried to interview him in a professional stance was when I did an informative paper in high school for an English class. I decided to interview him, but just about his war years. Years later I went to college, in the late 90s, and it was at that point that I came up with this idea that I wanted to write a book about one of the most famous cases he worked on, the Mejia case in 1966.”
Roy Mejia was accused and convicted of killing a Berwick mother and her three children in April, 1966.
But then Wallace got busy with college, though he still hoped to document personal stories from Baudoin.
One he recalls is when his grandparents were married. “When he married my grandmother, they had planned to elope, and they did,” he said. “My grandfather at that point in time didn’t realize you had to have a marriage license or anything like that, so they had to go through this whole process to get the marriage license. And my grandmother wasn’t of age at the time either!”
He collected interviews and stories and personal recollections from his mother. Then he was speaking with Lafayette journalist Vince Marino, and mentioned that he was considering a book on the sheriff.
“Don’t talk about it, do it,” Marino urged.
“So that’s what I did,” Wallace said. “My grandfather had somebody keep binders of all the years he was in the sheriff’s department. By the time he passed away in 2003 he had those in his house and I decided to take all of them.”
He went through all those binders, paying attention especially to high-profile cases. “Some of the cases that my mother talked about I had trouble finding a lot of information in those binders so I couldn’t expand on those cases but mentioned them briefly in the book.”
He had already begun a book, “Stories of the Winecoff Fire,” based on the worst hotel fire in American history in 1946 in Atlanta, claiming 119 lives.
He began his book on Baudoin during that time, finishing the Winecoff book first and, in June, the story of his grandfather was published.
The book also covers Baudoin’s years as a Hump pilot in World War II. The Hump was the name given by Allied pilots in the Second World War to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains over which they flew military transport aircraft from India to China to resupply the Chinese war effort of Chiang Kai-shek and the units of the United States Army Air Forces (AAF) based in China. (Wikipedia)
“He was in the China, Burma, India theater and he flew gasoline to Chenault’s Flying Tigers in China,” Wallace said. “There’s a chapter dedicated to all those years. I quoted the paper I had written in high school and he told me other stories.”
Asked about a favorite story Baudoin told him, Wallace said, “When he was flying over The Hump, mostly they were night missions under the cover of the Japanese. He told me that he had a pilot, co-pilot and radio operator on the plane. The two pilots were in the cockpit and when they would fly at night, sometimes there would be thunderstorms.
“If both pilots were staring ahead at the same time when lighting would occur, right in front of their plane, both of them would be blinded.
“One of the pilots would keep their eyes closed while the other would keep their eyes open. When a rap of lightning occurred, the pilot that was looking would be blinded and he would nudge the other pilot to open his eyes, and the other pilot would close his eyes. So that way someone was always looking.”
When asked how he thinks his grandfather would have felt about the book, Wallace said, “I think he would have been proud of me. He was a very interesting man, and flamboyant, he liked the high life,” Wallace chuckled.
The book is available through Wallace directly, and on Amazon. See the Facebook page “Chester Baudoin” for more information.