It was always easy to know when Louie Jacque was in the building, Just listen for the whistle. “He used to go into Harold and Paul Jewelers of Vallejo all the time and the owner just knew when Louie entered the store,” laughs Louie’s daughter, Cindy. “They never signed any contracts for anything because the owner knew when my father gave somebody his word, he was good for it.
He had earned it.” More than any whistle, the late Louie Jacque was respected for his actions. He fought in World War II and on the beaches of Normandy.
His experience there for D-Day plus 1, a particularly haunting one, was not brought up to Cindy and her brother Brad until later in his life. “He was kind of embarrassed about it,” Cindy said. “He always said that 90 percent of people that talked about the war probably weren’t there, because there was this understanding that people that actually fought in the war didn’t like discussing it.
We didn’t know as much about PTSD back then, you just came home and lived with it.” The 80th anniversary of D-Day is a difficult one for Cindy, who thinks of one moment in particular Louis experienced near the end of his life. “We were in a hospital room in intensive care and it’s a room with no windows,” Cindy said through tears.
“And all of a sudden all the memories come flooding back for him. He’s trying to get out of bed and he’s holding the side of the table and saying, ‘The war, the war, the war.’ That’s what he was seein.