Childhood memories will last a lifetime, but, life will never again be the same

This is for those youngsters who will be graduating this month, who will be leaving the protection of home and striking out on their own.

You have absolutely no idea what the future has in store. You will have great things happen, and you will also get a lot of hard bumps. The bumps will seem harder to you than they really are. Your parents, up to now, have been taking many bumps for you, sheltering you against them. Later, you will do the same for your children.

Time will help you become calloused against those hard knocks. So don’t get discouraged. It takes cutting and polishing to reveal a diamond; it also takes some suffering to “bring you out.” Many of life’s worst heartaches come in those early years when we strike out into the world for ourselves. We stub our toes and scrape our shins on mountains made of molehills. Keep the courage; don’t get disheartened.

You will find d...

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Memories of the past are a reflection of the road we’ve traveled and where it brought us

In my mind, from time to time, I go back to times of my youth. Raised on Young Switch Road, named after the railroad switch station, less than 150 yards from Mom and my grain storage shack we called home. It was salvaged from a farm and drug to our spot by a team of mules, pulling our shed on a sled. That little one-room building was our castle. It had room for one bed. I slept on a cornshuck pallet. Two boards nailed side by side was our table. Nail kegs, with feed sack covers, were our chairs. We had no utilities or indoor plumbing. A coal oil lamp and stove gave us light and a way to heat.

Mom was a wash lady who did laundry and ironing for the well to do in town. She washed on a scrub board, with homemade lye soap, mornings and hung the clothes to dry on the line. At night she ironed with a sad-iron way into the late hours. During cotton-picking time, she and I were in the field b...

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Our roots run deep
Shortly after Phyl and I got married, 55 years ago last December; we bought our first home in Bridge City on Shady Drive. My father Clay was partly responsible for us starting out our lives together in Bridge City. He really believed in the area after the Rainbow Bridge was completed in 1937 and the swing bridge linked Texas 87.

He had pioneered the business world here while folks were still commuting to Port Arthur by ferry. On that Ferry Road, now Lake Street, he built the Silver Slipper Supper Club. That was in the mid-1920s when prohibition was in full swing. Ironically, Phyl’s parents were caretakers there in the 1930s. The building stood at the same location and probably was Bridge City’s oldest existing building until hit by the winds of Hurricane Rita and waters of Ike.

In 1946, after the war’s end, dad put in the Midway Motel on the new highway. The name had changed but the motel was in continuous operation through the years and was the town...

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Goodness and mercy followed him all the days of his life

His constant smile and ever-present laugh were his trademarks. In the 50-odd years I had known him, I seldom saw Red Garrett when he wasn’t a true optimist. Mayor Brown Claybar told me recently of a quote Red made many years ago that stuck with him. It went something like this, “The law of averages is that everyone is going to have a bad day, I never have.”

As a young man, Red served many years in the Orange Jaycees and for seven of those years in the early 1960s, Red was chairman of the Jaycee Rodeo. He was responsible for bringing many movie and television stars to our area. Tex Ritter, Clu Gulager, Steve McQueen, Lash LaRue and Lefty Frizzell, who I got to be friends with after a night of partying after the rodeo. 

Edgar Brown Jr. once said at a rodeo performance, “All this county needs is more dedicated people like Red Garrett. Through his years as a Jaycee, Red attained most of the ...

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I’ve been fortunate to have walked this earth with some of God’s great Cajun guys. Men who worked every day to promote their culture, a way of life they loved and felt an urge to preserve.

W.T. “Boss Cajun” Oliver, after returning from the military service, launched the first area Cajun music show on KPNG radio. He was raised in Little Abbeville, on the outskirts of Port Neches. When he left home to join the service at age 17, he spoke barely understandable English. To his dying day, like most of us Cajuns, English gave him trouble with “th.” He never mastered it. His tongue still had the roll of the Cajun accent on many words.

However, he was very proud of his heritage.

When he was elected to the Texas State House in 1960, Waggoner Carr, speaker, often spoke of how W.T. had introduced gumbo and Cajun music to the capital city. With “Boucheries” that he and wife Ann hosted, and in his daily life, he never let anyone forget what Cajuns are made of and that their wa...

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Even before I knew what it meant, I can remember celebrating Mardi Gras. It was a special day for us South Louisiana Cajuns.

Most communities had their own way of celebrate Fat Tuesday, the day before the start of the Lenten season. Large communities like New Orleans and Lafayette held a carnival with hundreds of costumed children, clowns, ballerinas, large parades and lots of fanfare. Few of us rural people ever attended those festivals. For the country folks, the day began in the early morning with masked horseback riders going through the countryside collecting chickens for gumbo to be enjoyed later in the day. At the gathering, the country gentlemen always came with their finest horses and often left with a horse's tail cut off. These same boys were responsible for putting red pepper on the dance floor. Drove all the "partiers" noses crazy. The boys would hide and roll with laughter. As usual, the adults were well juiced in the spirits and having a great time.

I rec...

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Doing it his way made him a legend

It seems ironic that the day after I wrote in this column about Ned Theall’s death I would get a call from Jivin’ Gene informing me Bobby Charles had just died. I had mentioned, in the Theall column, that Bobby was the only one from the original group of talented youngsters that I had grown up with who was still living in Abbeville. In fact, after the World War years things started to change in our Cajun community in many ways. A group of youngsters, boys and girls alike, came along that displayed a lot of talent in many forms, not just musically but in other fields as well.

Many went off, did well and never returned.

There is so much I could write about Bobby Charles that I don’t know where to start, plus the space of a column can’t cover it all.

By going back to the beginning and hitting some high spots along the colorful road in Bobby’s life I might give the reader a glimpse into the talented life ...

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The death of Ned Theall, 72, caught me by surprise. He had lived the nightlife of a musician for years and in time that takes it’s toll. Ned however, never smoked, drank, used drugs or abused food. I have been aware for many years of heart problems in his family history. My half-sisters, first cousins of Ned, fight the same problem that killed their father and Ned’s father – who were brothers, at an early age.

Ned’s brother Skip and I were the same age, Ned three years younger but always just a couple of grades behind us in school. He had a younger brother, Gary who is an attorney in Abbeville and a sister, June. His mother was head of the draft board in Abbeville.

After serving in the Air Force, Ned became a college music professor but his call was always to play and write music. Several years ago, after playing with the Fabulous Boogie Kings since the 1950s, Ned bought and managed the popular group. Over the last few years we had visited about his hanging up his horn, ...

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“It’s really not amazing that we’ve been married 55 years, what’s amazing is how quickly the years have flown by.”

It was Friday, the last day of the year of 1954. The date didn’t hold any particular significants. The year had seen the New York Giants win the World Series over Cleveland in just four games. In fact, that game was the first color television broadcast. “Determine” won the Kentucky Derby. President Dwight David Eisenhower had been elected in 1953. Allen Shivers had succeeded Texas Gov. Beauford Jester, who died in 1949. Shivers, who worked with my father and my mother-in-law in Port Arthur was elected in 1950, ‘52 and ‘54.
A postage stamp cost three-cents, gasoline was 21 cents a gallon, a brand new Ford cost between $1,500 and $2,400. The average yearly income was $3,960 and that was a good job. The most any of my friends were earning was $50 to $60 a week to raise their families on. Unemployment was at 2.9 percent. A new, top-of-the-li...

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From childhood Christmas to present, quite a ride

 The joy of Christmas for me has taken drastic turns as I’ve traveled down this life’s highway. Raised a very poor youngster in south Louisiana, I had very little to look forward to on Christmas morning. We lived in a small, one-room shack, raised by a single mom. A lot of people were poor but real poverty, hanging at our door Christmas morning, brought very little. A fruit, a piece of rock candy or maybe a three-inch piece of a big peppermint stick.

The highlight of my Christmas, which I’ve written about before, was midnight Mass at St. Mary Magdalene Church that sits on a knoll, on the banks of the Vermillion River, in downtown Abbeville. The beautiful mass was said in Latin, the Gospel spoken in both French and English. The large choir sang beautiful hymns. The service was that of the old Catholic faith. My grandmother and I would brave the weather to walk the two miles down the dirt roads to...

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