The question of how the 2nd century grave marker of the Roman sailor made its way into the backyard of a New Orleans shotgun house has been answered. All it took was for the news story to reach the previous homeowner, Erin Scott O’Brien, who had sold the house to the current owners in 2018. She’s the one who placed the tablet in the yard, but she had no idea that it was a 1900-year-old Roman gravestone, or even that it was an antique.
She got the tablet from her mother. It had belonged to her maternal grandfather, Charles Paddock Jr., Master Sergeant Charles E. Paddock was stationed in Italy during World War II. A musician by trade, he was in the special service section of the USO when he met his future wife, Adele Vincenza Paoli, herself an accomplished violinist and artist. They married in Italy 79 years ago almost today the day (October 14th, 1946). Paddock took his bride back to the United States and they lived in New Orleans where Charles taught voice in the music department at Loyola University, and worked with local artists, including legendary entertainer Chris Owens, known as the Queen of the Latin Quarter.
The tablet was one curio among several in the Paddock’s display case at their home in the Gentilly neighborhood. He died in 1986, and neither O’Brien nor any of her older relatives knew anything about the grave marker. They didn’t know it was a grave marker, for that matter. They just thought it was a piece of art.
When O’Brien bought the shotgun house in 2003, her mother gave her the inscribed stone she had inherited from her father. O’Brien and her husband planted a tree in the backyard and placed the slab there as marker to solemnize the start of the new chapter in their lives.
No one in her family had any idea of its history. By the time she sold the house in 2018, she forgot she’d put it there.
“I just thought it was a piece of art,” she said, recalling that the object she and other relatives inherited from her grandparents didn’t seem unusual. “I had no idea it was a 2,000-year-old relic.”
As for how Master Sergeant Charles E. Paddock acquired the artifact, that remains unknown. It seems likely that he (or his wife) bought it in Italy during or right after the war as a souvenir, but they never spoke of it that anybody recalls, so the full saga will probably never be told.
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