Louis Azar

Louis's story

Some of the most precious memories of a father are the smallest ones. For Louis Azar’s daughter Deborah, one of those memories is of her dad shining her little dress shoes on a Saturday night.

“It was our special time to talk about the week ahead.”

A father, his little girl, and a pair of shoes. Such an ordinary moment, yet all these years later, she still carries it with her.

Louis grew up a Navy kid, with a childhood that took him to Guam, where he boxed and sometimes skipped school to explore the jungles where planes had gone down. The Navy was already part of his family’s story. His father, whom they called Pop, and his brother Pete both served. Louis remembered them coming home from a WESTPAC deployment aboard the USS Bradford in 1958.

In time, he followed them into service.

For more than 20 years, Louis served in the United States Navy. His years in uniform took him to Norfolk, San Diego, Hawaii, Guam, and Vietnam, where he served as a radioman. Later, he taught his own children Morse code, passing along a small piece of the world he had known. After retiring from the Navy, he continued working for the government.

His service was an important part of his life. The memories his family treasures also tell the story of the man who came home: a father who painted hopscotch in the carport of their house in Wahiawa, Hawaii, and who, years after they moved away, looked up that home and wrote to his children to tell them it had been torn down.

The house was gone. The memories of growing up there remained.

With his wife, Neri, Louis shared a family whose story lives on in photographs: Neri’s friends in the Philippines, her father Lolo, Christmases together, and a daughter named Neri Louise. Louis kept those pictures and wrote down who was in them. He loved his family’s history and wanted his mother’s and aunt’s recipes passed down to all his children.

He understood how much a family can hold in a photograph, a familiar name, or a recipe made again by another generation. He took the time to preserve those things, leaving his children pieces of their history they could keep.

There was deep sorrow in that history, too. Losing his son Jim broke Louis’s heart. On Jim’s birthday, Louis and Neri went to the Veterans Cemetery and placed a flag on his grave. They remembered their son together, carrying their love for him into the years he could no longer share.

Alongside that sorrow, Louis still had his humor. On Deborah’s birthday, he once wrote:

“I remember when I was 12 times older than you (I was 24). Now I am only 1-1/2 times older than you. You are catching up!”

His words still hold that familiar teasing warmth, the kind a daughter can read and almost hear in her father’s voice.

According to Deborah, Louis died from a service-related illness caused by Agent Orange. His family’s story carries that painful part of his service, along with their pride in the years he gave to his country.

When the time came, Louis was buried at sea, as he had always wanted.

“When we were kids he would say, ‘Just throw me out in the ocean.’ We would say, ‘No, daddy,’ and he would laugh,” Deborah remembers. “The last time I saw him, he showed me his dress uniform for his burial at sea.”

For a man who had grown up in a Navy family and spent more than two decades serving, the sea became his final resting place.

His family carries him in other places: in the photographs he carefully labeled, the recipes he wanted saved, the jokes they can still hear him telling, and the memory of a father shining his little girl’s shoes.

Those Saturday nights are long past. The love in them is still here.