Hometown News For Orange County, Texas
Hometown News For Orange County, Texas
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From Possum Trot, Ga. to the Grand Ole Opry and beyond, Wally Fowler blazed musical trails. I’m proud to record those times in the pages of history. The year was 1948, Dudley J. LeBlanc, the inventor of Hadacol, had come up with a great promotional idea, a Hadacol caravan featuring the biggest entertainment talent in the country. The show traveled the United States and admittance was free. Just one box top from a box of Hadacol is all that was needed to catch the biggest s...
No Record but Good Average If you live an active, busy life, old age will creep up on you. Life is on a fast track. You are always looking back wondering where the last 10 years went. I've been most fortunate with a good support group and a caring family. As a poor kid during the great depression, I started working the cotton fields with my mother. Those old cotton fields back home is a reference point from those days on. Through the ages, I really never had any down time. I...
A personal hero that left his mark on a little boy, that followed him to old age. Back in the 1930’s times were hard around the country but in the Cajun parishes of Louisiana they were really bad. My grandfather died when I was four years old, which left no man around. My uncle Meldon “Tee-Dan” Duplantis was still single but lived away from home. He worked at the Abbeville newspaper and came by to visit grandma Avalia almost every day. He always took a few moments to play...
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...
Monday I got a call from Senator Carl Parker, I always called him ‘Senator.’ He said he was checking on me. I told him outside of nearly daily visits to some doctor, and having to get up too much during the night I was hanging in there. He said join the club about night’s ups and downs, that’s an old man’s curse. He told me he was due to have a heart valve repaired. I didn’t understand why it was put off, something about the doctor not being available. I asked if he had talked...
My grandmother Availia had many children; among them were three sets of twins and a set of triplets. Many of the young died as infants. Only one twin, my uncle Meldan “Tee-Dan” survived. His twin Melda didn’t make it past 3 years old. Grandma had been the carrier of 20 children or more. Few made it to birth, some lived a few months or a few days, and only seven of those children lived a long life. My aunt Eve died in 2008 at age 105. The rest all lived to be 90, with the excep...
With great sadness, we announce the loss of our beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, sister, and family member. In loving memory of Barbara Ann Augustine, we are saddened to announce her passing into her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’s arms on March 12, 2024. Barbara was born on June 12, 1942, to Ora Lee and Fred Alexander in Meridian, Mississippi. A life so beautifully lived, deserves to be beautifully remembered. She was the sweetest soul who loved her sweets a...
Clay Jackson Dunn was the product of a pioneering background. His father, Allen, had come to Texas from Arkansas in a covered wagon with his mother, Sarah Jane, who apparently was a pretty tough cookie for a 26-year-old. She embarked on a 14-month journey in Texas that held many uncertainties and dangers. Her husband, Dr. Stephen James Dunn, had been killed a few months earlier in the Civil War. Sarah Jane sought a new life for her son and younger sister. Abraham Lincoln was...
I started trying to make it through a Down Life's Highway column and have written this copy from the hospital on Christmas day. I came down with COVID and with my COPD and kidney problems I ended up at St. E's very sick. Phyl, being sick herself, drove to an emergency clinic and also tested positive for COVID but without the other issues I have. The medicine the doctor prescribed has done her a lot of good. My daughter Karen, who is seeing that I am being cared for, is also...
Having lived through that dreadful day and the times then, plus the years down life's highway since, this one day has never left my memory. From the time I was a child and throughout this long life, there have been many memorable events, from Pearl Harbor, WWII, the atomic bomb, many storms, all the way to 9-11, and the insurrection of the U.S. Capital on Jan. 6, 2021. However, no tragedy or event has lived with me more than the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,...
A time and place where movers and shakers congregated and 'Spice Girls' waited on them... I came in on the tail end of the heydays of the famous Holland Hotel, where a person could get a bath and a shave for $1. Rooms had no phones, no television, no radio. It was a historic hotel in a small town, featuring a barber shop with eight chairs and two shoeshine stands. The chandeliered dining room had white linen tablecloths. The hotel was located on the exact spot that Orange's...
The knowledge of mankind has fast-forwarded to unbelievable heights in the span of one lifetime as has today’s temperatures reach record heights. When I was a lad in the Cajun country in the late ‘30s and ‘40s, South Louisiana was no paradise. The heat and dust, along with humidity, was almost unbearable. With today’s temperature it would be almost impossible to carry a sack. Dust so heavy it filled your nostrils, your body became covered with the mixture of dust and sweat....
Jeanelle H. Montet, 90, of Bridge City, Texas, passed away on July 6, 2023, at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Beaumont. A Mass of Christian Burial will 2:00 p.m., Tuesday, July 11, 2023, at St. Mary Catholic Church in Orange. Officiating will be Reverend Antony Paulose. Entombment will follow at St. Mary Cemetery in Orange. A Rosary will begin at 11:30 a.m., Tuesday, July 11, 2023, at Claybar Funeral Home in Orange. A visitation will follow from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., at Claybar...
Often I've written about the Cajun side of me, but I seldom have said much about the fighting side of me. That's my Irish side. While a kid in Abbeville, I was a strange youngster, the only person in the little Cajun town with the Irish name of Dunn. The real kick in the behind was that this Irishman couldn't speak a word of English until I was nearly seven. I was poor and endured a lot of abuse because of the way I dressed or didn't. I didn't own any everyday shoes, but I...
How quickly the years have flown by. Come December 31, Phyl and I will mark our 68th wedding anniversary. I knew, my heart knew, and my soul knew, the second I met her that she was the one I wanted to spend my life with. I went home and told my mom that I had met the girl I wanted to be my wife. Phyl never suspected. She was blinded by a smooth talking half-breed Cajun and Irish. I'd been around a lot and mostly on my own since the age of 14. She was a beautiful, olive...
When you're poor, really poor, Christmas can be a very sad time, especially for a youngster. Sometimes the scar is so deep that even a lifetime won't remove it. My childhood Christmas' were spent in extreme poverty. If you ask me about my fondest memories of Christmas, without hesitation I will say it was midnight mass at beautiful old St. Mary Magdalene Catholic Church. The church sits up on a knoll near the bank of the Vermilion River in the Acadian town of Abbeville. With i...
It's come on the 81st anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Prior to the attack, life in the little Cajun community of Abbeville was slower and more country than any Norman Rockwell painting. Our home was a one-room grain storage shed that wasn't wired for anything. Our light came from a coal oil lamp and our heat from a small coal oil stove. Mom had paid $70 for the little shack that was delivered on a mule drawn sled. After the war she sold it for $90. The old hand pump I used as a...
This is for those youngsters who will be graduating this month, 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...
My grandmother Availia had many children; among them were three sets of twins and a set of triplets. Many of the young died as infants. Only one twin, my uncle Meldan “Tee-Dan” survived. His twin Melda didn’t make it past 3 years old. Grandma had been the carrier of 20 children or more. Few made it to birth, some lived a few months or a few days, and only seven of those children lived a long life. My aunt Eve died in 2008 at age 105. The rest all lived to be 90, with the excep...
The Battle of New Orleans I turned down Larry Messier's offer to be his guest at the Ali-Spinks heavyweight fight in Vegas and made my annual trek to Rising Star's Sipe Spring cemetery, that dates back to the Civil War, where my dad Clay, his parents and siblings are buried. Leon Spinks shocked the boxing world and accomplished, against great odds, what he had told me a few days earlier he would do. He defeated world champion Muhammad Ali for the heavy weight crown. Ali was un...
It was a dark day in the U.S.A. on Oct. 24, 1929, the day the Great Depression began. The stock market crashed investors and wealthy people lost everything. Many committed suicide, jumping out of skyscraper buildings. No one was spared. Two of my father's brothers, who owned Dunn Brothers, the country's largest pipeline stringers, lost everything with the exception on one brother who had a banker friend who tipped him off before every bank in the country went into lockdown....
On New Year's Eve, December 31, 2021, Phyl and I will celebrate our 67th wedding anniversary. Over the Thanksgiving Holidays we had all three of our children, five grandchildren and eight of our nine great-grandchildren with us. Our oldest great-grandson Nate, in the Air Force, is stationed in South Dakota. It was such a joy to be around the small ones. There are four of them that are five years old and younger. Each one of them has their own personality. When our...
I don’t have very many good memories of Christmas in my childhood. We were extremely poor, in my very early years, so I don’t recall that I ever received a store-bought gift. Sometimes I got a handmade toy but mostly a useful item like a pair of socks, maybe a new shirt or pair of church pants. Never in my early years did my family have a Christmas tree. When I was about in the eighth grade, the teacher gave me the classroom tree when school let out for the holidays and tha...
For more than a year, President John F. Kennedy had sought the trip to Texas that ended tragically the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963. The national pain and trauma that followed his assassination produced the Kennedy legend. Kennedy had two distinct purposes in mind, and wanted the visit to Texas to achieve them. The first was to raise money. The second was to improve his own political position in a state that promised to be critical in the presidential election of 1964. Nationwid...
Quote from Roy Dunn publisher "The staff of The Record Newspapers is deeply saddened by the tragic death of our popular fishing columnist, longtime fishing guide, Dickie Colburn." On a personal note, "I didn't want to believe the news that Dickie had left us. He's the last person I would have believed would have lost his life due to an accident. As a guide he was always very cautious and alert. I had trouble going to sleep and I woke up with him on my mind. He was easy to...
