Journey to Anthropology: An Oral History of Miles Richardson

January 20th, 2012 by jabrah1

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Journey to Anthropology: The Oral History of Miles Richardson

EPISODE 13 (39:44)

Dr. Miles Richardson, ca. 1987, photo by Jim Zietz, LSU University Relations

This episode is a tribute to Dr. Miles Richardson (b. 1932), who recently passed away on November 14th, 2011.  He was interviewed in four sessions (2000-2006),  and in this episode, we would would like to share with you some excerpts from those oral histories, which are available in full at LSU Libraries Special Collections and will be online in the Center’s collection on LOUISiana Digital Library in the upcoming semester.

Dr. Richardson touched so many lives, both professionally and personally, that it would be impossible to sum up his life achievements in this short program.   In today’s episode, we’ll hear about what motivated Miles Richardson to become an anthropologist, what the study of mankind meant to him, and how he achieved this lifelong ambition.  We’ll also hear about the teachers who influenced him, life as a grad student in the 60s, his first research trip to Colombia, and how LSU has changed since he was a student here in the 1950s and 60s.

AUDIO EXCERPT TRANSCRIPTIONS AND CITATIONS

Miles Richardson talking about the lack of divine intervention that led to one of his biggest life decisions is the key excerpt. *For full transcription, see below.

Jennifer Abraham: What was the landscape like around Palestine?

Miles Richardson: Well it’s a piney woods area, its rolling hills with lots of pine.  In fact, if you go just a little bit west of Palestine it begins to get into that more scrub oak prairie area that characterizes a lot of Texas, a little bit west of Palestine. And when I was a kid people still raised cotton there.  It was a cash crop and people always tried to have at least an acre or so.  These are people who lived off the land.  Like I said, we really lived off my father’s income. We had chickens and these chickens would . . . That was one thing, we did sell the eggs to a grocery store down in Palestine  . . . up in Palestine.  And my mother got the egg money.  That was her income as it were.

Abraham: Whose job was it to gather eggs?

Richardson: Well, I did that when I was a little kid. The job that I had that I hated most of all was milking.  For reasons I don’t really understand, we kept the cow in a stall at night. I guess because it would be easier enough to . . . wouldn’t have to run her down the next day.  So when she laid down, she usually laid down where she pooed and she’d get all the manure on her and get it on the side and inevitably get along the side where you had to milk and so you had to smell shit and milk at the same time.  And how pure that milk was, I don’t know.  We didn’t die from it, so I guess it was okay.

But we plowed with the . . . The horse that we had that we bought when I was I guess about . . . I must have been maybe around ten or so when they bought this horse.  It was called Dolly.  She was a riding horse and a plowing horse so she was as dual-purpose horse. We’d plow with that horse and I learned how to plow earlier on.  And plowing was great.  I liked plowing a lot because, you know, really the business about smelling the freshly turned earth is very true, it smells wonderful.  And if I can get it out, I might tell you a story about the pigpen.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2000, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

*Richardson: When my sister and I came home on the bus there were a lot of people out there waiting for us and told us.  My world fell apart right . . . If not then, then it soon did.  And one thing that happened when my world fell apart is I became convinced that I wasn’t saved.  When she died, the thought came to me that I don’t believe in God.  It was just overwhelming me.  How could I think such a horrible thought as that?

And that leads me to the pig story.  The preacher talked about, you know, about confession, making the personal confession to our Lord, Jesus.  What you had to do, you know, you just have to say, “Well, I’m sorry God I’ve sinned, I’ve sinned, I’ve sinned.”  So I tried that and I tried that and it wouldn’t work.  So one evening I went out the pigpen and I knelt down in the pigpen.  The pigs had gone then, it was just the pen itself, and stretched out my arms and said, “God, forgive me.”  And it doesn’t work.  It didn’t happen, you know?  So eventually, you know, I actually did walk the aisle and I actually was baptized but it didn’t work.  It didn’t work, it didn’t . . . you know I couldn’t . . .  So that’s all tied in with me becoming an anthropologist.

When I was in the service, I started reading various things in the library, in the base library. One of the things that I just happened to stumble across was Thomas Paine’s . . . one of his books.  I forget now the title of it, but it’s about his attack on established religion.  When I read that I just thought, my God how can a man say something like that!  But then I thought about it more and more and more and it suddenly dawned on me, well, that’s why I can’t believe in God because I hate his guts.

During my four years in service . . . I joined the service to get out of high school.  I never did finish high school.  But in my four years I . . . you know, after all this reading, it dawned on me, well, you know, with the Korean [GI] Bill maybe I can go to college.  But then one day I was laying . . . in my bed in the barracks in Keesler Air Force Base, just laying there.  And the thought came to me, well why not become an anthropologist?  And it was such an outrageous idea, such a . . . I could barely spell the word but it’s all tied up with the fact that . . . with the pigpen.  You know, if peace had come to me with all understanding, if God himself had appeared and said, “Yes Miles.  I love you” and took me up to his bosom, I wouldn’t become an anthropologist.  But because he didn’t, that’s why I became an anthropologist.  And I became an anthropologist in part to find out about religion.  And I’m still trying to do that!

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2000, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Richardson: Stephen F. Austin didn’t have anthropology so I started to try the best thing that I could, was biology and history.  I loved biology and I loved history so it was . . . it worked out well.  That other course I took in Texas was an anthropology course, Introduction to Anthropology.  I just loved it.  I just lived it and breathed it.

Abraham: Was your impression when you walked away from there, oh I want to continue this?

Richardson: Oh man, oh yeah.  Well, see I couldn’t tell people I wanted to become an anthropologist because I didn’t . . . I don’t know I just . . . I don’t know why, I just felt like I couldn’t tell it because it was something too close to me, too precious to me.  If I said it, it would go away. You ever have that feeling, if you think about something and you tell somebody you won’t do what you said you would do?

Abraham: Yeah. So it was precious to you?

Richardson: Yeah.  Yeah, so . . . That course though really reinforced my notion of what I wanted to do.  When I went back at Stephen F. Austin, I said, “I’m still going to do anthropology.  Somehow or another I’m going to go to graduate school and become an anthropologist.”

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2000, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Richardson: I have to tell you [laughs] about my experience coming over here. I was still in Palestine at the time . . . either Palestine or Nacogdoches I forget, actually, now. But I had a Nash Rambler back when those were still being made. It was a small, mini station wagon.  It’s about the size of this table, not much bigger than that.  So coming over to Louisiana and over in the western part of the state, I was . . . It was in the evening, it wasn’t . . . you know, about like eight or nine o’clock and I was near Kinder, Louisiana.  I topped a hill and before my lights could show down at the bottom of the hill, I ran into a cow. Fortunately, I had seen the cow, you know, enough to slam on the brakes, but even so, it banged up my car pretty badly.  I knocked the cow down but she got up and walked on off.  Shortly after that, a couple of policemen came by, highway patrolmen, and they wanted to give me assistance.  They asked me what happened and I explained to them what had happened and they said “Well, it’s lucky you didn’t kill the cow because then you’d have to pay for it.”

Abraham: Oh no!

Richardson: Also, then right at that  . . . It was lovebug season, which they’re notorious in Louisiana, but . . . They were really thick then, really thick, really . . . making love all over the place. And with that dent in my radiator and with the lovebugs, my car was constantly overheating.  So it took me forever to get here because I had to stop and add water to it and so forth.  So that’s my trip to Louisiana.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2003, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Abraham: You know, one of the questions that just pops into my head is, how in the world did you live off of a hundred dollars a month?

Richardson: [laughs] I starved!  Well, the Union hadn’t been built yet and . . . but I forget now where we ate. I just eventually became a vegetarian because vegetables were so much cheaper than meat. I’d been a meat-eater all my life, being from Texas I guess. I just, you know, cut down on everything I could possibly cut down on.  But I was . . . because I had this office over in the temporary building, I really felt caught up in anthropology and in my studies and in cultural geography. And I spent the whole day and much of the night over there. That was wonderful.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2003, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Richardson: And we got along well, too.  Doctor Kniffen . . . We hit it off so well.  He was . . . That’s one reason why I was able to come back here, you know, because I had such a good relationship with him and with Doctor Haag and the other geographers.  I was determined to become an anthropologist.  I got fascinated with cultural geography but . . . and I just enjoyed the geography courses that I had here. Doctor Haag was the only anthropologist so I took a lot of courses from him.  And he was just . . . he was wonderful, he was good, he was . . . such a broadly-trained person and he knew so much about everything.  I was really impressed with his . . . the breadth of his knowledge, at the same time carrying this enormous teaching load.

Abraham: What influence did their ways of teaching and doing research and that sort of thing . . . What kind of influence did that have on you?

Richardson: In cultural geography, the introduction to me of the cultural landscape is still with me. I think about it a little bit differently now but . . .

Like I say, it just opened my eyes to a . . . to that idea.  And that view of human . . . of the human landscape, again, it has a kind of natural history slant to it.  That is, it looks at humans operating on nature so it pulls you away from trying to get inside human motivations and look at what they do and what the record of human . . . of the human imprint on the landscape.  Of course, it ties in with archaeology very closely and it also develops into a wonderful story of us and the planet Earth, which I’m trying to work on now.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2003, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Abraham: Now, in our previous interview . . .

Richardson: Yes.

Abraham: . . . you spoke about how one of the things that led . . . that interested you about anthropology was the examination of various religious  . . .

Richardson: Yes.

Abraham: . . . beliefs and religious systems.  Did you get to explore any of that while you were here?

Richardson: I did on my . . . more or less on my own.  It wasn’t one of the specialties of anybody here.  Haag and [Leslie] White were materialists, which I am too, in the sense that, whatever answers we can offer about humans, they’re found here on this planet and not in heaven.  Not to say that heaven is not important, but it’s not a cause in some fundamental sense.  That helped me develop my notion about religion.  But it wasn’t until I went to Tulane that I really . . . my eyes were opened about the anthropology of religion and what it had to say about it.

Doctor Edmonson, Munro Edmonson was there and he was a . . . really a brilliant person.  And also he was so well-read on the anthropology of religion as it was then approached that . . .  I remember in one of my classes, it was a religion class that, actually, he taught.  I’d go in the class and . . . had to listen to him just . . . impeccable prose flowing out of him and the profound nature of his thinking about it and all the things that I read, you know, I could see what they meant now.  They were just the bits and pieces that I had and they began to come together. And I was just spellbound in his class.  Sometimes in class I’d get so exhausted hearing him and being so excited about what he said, I’d just have to shut down and wait ‘til the class ended.  It was really a wonderful experience, just amazing.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2003, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Richardson: Exciting time to be at Tulane, to be . . . because it was just opening up its PhD program.  Everybody was really enthusiastic and the graduate students . . . So, it was just wonderful . . . wonderful time.  My best friends at the time in graduate school were sociologists.  [?] graduate students were sociologists.  On guy particularly, Bill Harrell, he and I . . . he was from Texas and I was from Texas so maybe that was some commonality we had or . . . and we were both late bloomers so that was another thing. But I learned a lot of sociology from him. And my wife was also in sociology.  That’s where I met my wife, at Tulane.

Abraham: What’s her name?

Richardson: Valerie. She was . . . She’s from England and she came to Tulane about like I did.  That is, Tulane gave her a nice offer.  She wound up at Tulane and then we were . . . we got married, I think, the following year.  We met in a class . . . a seminar on human nature that was an anthropology sociology combination.  So we started going out and one thing led to another.  [laughs] And we’re still married.

Abraham: Well congratulations.


Richardson: I think that’s one reason why we were attracted to one another; we were so different from each other.  You know, I was just so different from any boy she had met and she was different from any girl I had met so maybe that’s the reason.  But she was in sociology so because of that and her friends and . . . Folk music was just beginning underway so we’d gather together at Bill’s house and listen to Joan Baez, who was just beginning at the time, just getting popular.  And Bill was very much into it so he kind of led the way.  And, you know, we’d talk sociology and listen to folk music.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2003, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Richardson: Valerie and I lived in a half of a house that I rented before we got married.  I paid fifty dollars a month for it and it was about what you’d expect for fifty dollars a month, too.  It’s full of cockroaches and it was just an awful place.  But, you know, we stayed there.

Abraham: Was it close to Tulane?


Richardson: Yeah, it was on Danneel Street.  We had to take the bus to get there but it was . . . Later on when my assistantship got a little bit better and then Valerie started working full time at another place. We got enough money together so we moved out of that place and into a shotgun, half of a shotgun near Tulane. And that was really nice, we enjoyed that. We lived next door to a cemetery.  By then we had got a cat called Rosie. Rosie used to go over to the cemetery and pounce on the . . . jump from tomb to tomb.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2003, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Richardson: Then, after I finished that . . . Well, then they said, “Well, you can do whatever you want to do for your dissertation.” You know, it was kind of wide open, it was just amazing.  And so I decided on a community north of Cali, a place called San Pedro which is where I lived and did my dissertation fieldwork. I never did get a real grip on doing fieldwork in Colombia, you know, I stuck it out.  It was kind of nitty-gritty.    I was teaching myself as I went along because Tulane, at the time, did not have any methods course. And . . . Intentionally, in part, because to learn how to do anthropology, you just got to do it, you know.  I used my background in doing the religion and politics in New Orleans, I drew on that.    I had a guy who worked with me who was kind of an assistant you’d call more than anything else.  A young guy whose name was Seneca[?]. And he and I would go out and visit various people and interview them.  So we’d go from one small farmer . . . peasant farmer to another.  You know, I’d have something that I wanted to ask. Seneca didn’t speak any English and my Spanish was improving.  But we soon hit upon this way of communicating which we had our own special Spanish between the two of us.  If there’s something I didn’t understand one of the farmers saying, well, Seneca would translate it for me; translate it from that Spanish into our Spanish [laughs] so . . . And just living in the community . . . Of course, I went to church all the time and I tried to participate in any kind of festivals or any activities they had.  So a lot of my material came from just being there in the community and observing and watching and keeping track on things. Eventually, I came up with a community study in which I looked at all the various aspects from the economic to the religious parts in the community. I could have stayed there longer.  We were there a year and a half and with Doctor LaViolette’s support I could have just stayed there longer.  But by . . . After a year and a half, Valerie and I were really ready to come home.  So we were so delighted when our plane landed in New Orleans.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2003, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Richardson: Well, one of the things that amazes me today is to think about LSU as it was then.  There’s two aspects of it that just sound so bizarre today.  One aspect was that it was still . . . ROTC was still mandatory so all incoming freshmen had their hair peeled off ‘til they were bald and had to wear these beanies, or freshman caps.  And so you’d see a lot of young guys with their heads completely peeled, wearing this little silly beanie, and how that differs now.   And then the other thing about it was that LSU was still . . . was very much segregated. There had been a few graduate students admitted into graduate schools in other places in the South.  But if I remember rightly, there had not yet been one black student admitted into LSU at the graduate or undergraduate level. So it was segregated.  It was segregated to the extent that it . . . that life was segregated everywhere. The Boy Scouts were segregated.  I remember looking out my window, over down there in the middle of the hallway, and seeing, you know, here’s this African American Boy Scout troop.  And I was just, you know, astonished that the racial barriers were so present then.  And looking back on it now it just seems like a . . . How could we ever have lived like that?  You know, with blacks with one set of fountains and whites with another. How could that have been possible, such brutalizing treatment?

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2003 and 2006, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Miles Richardson on his tricycle, courtesy of Elizabeth Crocker.

Richardson: But I . . . That’s just the feeling that I have about it – the excitement about looking at different life forms and seeing the commonality of them.  I think that’s just great.  That’s what appeals to me so much about evolution is that you see these recurrent themes again and again popping up in the fossil record. But I know something like adaptive radiation where there’s a basic mammalian form that radiates out and occupies different environmental niches from whales to primates.  I think there’s something really intriguing about that.  I don’t think there’s any divine purpose in it but I think there’s . . . that the combination of constraint and variation, or freedom and constraint, is just marvelous.

So my project at the moment is to do an essay or an article on anthropocentrism.  In that notion of anthropocentrism, I want to try to approach it from our question of, “What is our place in nature?” I want to try to put that in the context of evolution in the sense that we’re one of these adaptive branches that radiated out from a basic mammalian pattern which makes us distinctive, but doesn’t make us any more distinctive in some sense of the word than any other . . . than bats, or any other kind of specialized mammalian form.  Although I want to have my cake and eat it; I want to say that it makes us . . . doesn’t make any difference from bats, but look what we’ve done!  We’ve gone to the moon, the bats are still here.  So, I want to try to argue the case for enlightened anthropocentrism.  That’s what you can call it.  And I’d just love to figure out how to talk about that.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2000, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Richardson: But let me say how grateful I am that you are interviewing me and I think . . . I’m really honored that you’re doing it because I can’t help but think about, you know, the people who were here like Doctor [William] Haag and Doctor [Fred] Kniffen.  And those are the people I had always associated with this kind of an activity.  So to have myself in that kind of role is really a great honor.  I appreciate it.

Richardson, Miles Edward, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2000, 4700.1503. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Memorial Oak for Miles Richardson on LSU Campus

MUSIC

King, Freddie, interview by Tatiana Clay and Eric Julien, audio recording, 2008, 4700.1921.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Jennifer Abraham Cramer is the executive producer and audio engineer for “What Endures.”  This episode was co-written and co- produced by Jennifer Abraham Cramer and Erin Hess.   Special thanks to Germain Bienvenu.

This podcast is copyrighted by LSU Libraries Special Collections.

For a full transcript of the podcast, please contact Jennifer Abraham Cramer at jabrah1@lsu.edu.

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South Louisiana Sampler, Part 2

August 22nd, 2011 by jabrah1

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EPISODE 12    (20:31)

Today’s episode is Part 2 of the South Louisiana Sampler.  In Part 1, we heard clips from our Houma Indians and Sue Hebert Series.  In this episode, we delve into our West Feliciana Parish African American Heritage Series.  Like the interviews we’ve featured in the last three podcasts, the material we’re using in this episode was made possible because of our partnerships with various community and scholarly collaborations.  The clips that you’ll hear today came from interviews housed at the Center, resulting from our partnership with the West Feliciana Parish Community Foundation and the Davis Family Foundation.  In particular, helpful individuals were Rolanda Johnson of the former, Susan Davis of the latter, Maida Owens of with the Louisiana Folklife Program, and the folklorist who conducted the interviews, Teresa Parker Ferris. And of course, we owe a debt of gratitude to the people who allowed themselves to be interviewed for the project.

The parish of West Feliciana includes the towns of St. Francisville, Bayou Sara, Elm Park, Laurel Hill, Tunica, and the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

Historically, West Feliciana Parish was fertile plantation land. Crops grown in the parish included cotton, corn, and sweet potatoes. Several antebellum plantations in the parish remain open today, functioning as popular tourist attractions. These include the supposedly haunted Myrtles Plantation, as well as Greenwood and Rosedown plantations, to name a few.

The population in West Feliciana Parish was and still is largely African American, and is tied to the historic number of slaves connected to the many plantations in the area. After emancipation, many African Americans stayed in the parish, continuing to live and work the fertile land as share croppers and tenant farmers. Some of the interviewees from our West Feliciana Parish African American Heritage Series share stories about tenant farming in West Feliciana as late as the 1950s and 60s.

In 2002 the Center partnered with the West Feliciana Parish African American Heritage Task Force and the Davis Family Foundation to build an oral history collection.  The project included many of the community’s oldest and most knowledgeable residents.  The stories focused on aspects of African-American culture including foodways, wedding and funeral traditions, home remedies, music, farming and gardening, sewing, canning, fishing and hunting, and political history.  At the end of the project in 2004, all of the partners held a ceremony at Grace Episcopal Church honoring the interviewees.  For the ceremony, the Center produced a 30 minute audio documentary based on these interviews called “’I Been Here a Long Time:’ Oral Histories of West Feliciana’s African-American Community.” For more about the project, please visit http://wfpsb.org/Documents/Oral%20History%20Project/homepage.html.

In today’s show, Geraldine London will talk about the hard work she did at an early age, Louise Williams will recall her first trip into St. Francisville and describe the first car and first airplane she ever saw, Sallie Smith will remember dancing in the moonlight and the home grown remedies her grandmother prepared, Travis Carter will discuss the difficulties of sharecropping and recall the foods his family ate, finally Alice Johnson will tell us about her surprise wedding and will sing us one of her favorite gospel songs.

Also, please keep in mind that a large part of the Center’s mission is public outreach, so if you have a project like this in mind and you would like to partner with the Center, please get in touch with me at jabrah1@lsu.edu.  Also, if you’d like to make a donation to help us with our mission, please contact me or visit our website at http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/williams/donorsupport.pdf.

AUDIO EXCERPT TRANSCRIPTIONS AND CITATIONS

ALICE JOHNSON is the key excerpt. She sings “Rough Side of the Mountain”   *For full transcription, see below.

Geraldine London, 2004

TERESA PARKER: And so you said you were working outside in the fields at age . . . you said five? Or nine?

GERALDINE LONDON: Yeah, five and six. Between five and six, yeah, I was out there, too.

PARKER: And what kind of things were you doing?

LONDON: Helping to pick cotton and corn and pick up potatoes and pick pepper and all kind of stuff.

PARKER: Was there one thing that you did more of than another?

LONDON: Well, I picked up more potatoes than I did more anything.

PARKER: Alright, sweet potatoes?

LONDON: Sweet potatoes, yeah.

PARKER: Okay.

LONDON: And then we had a garden, so we had to go in the garden and help gather the vegetables.  We did that.  We had okra, tomatoes, butter beans and peas, corn.

PARKER: You’re making me hungry.

LONDON: Oh, it was good. I liked that, too. [both laugh] We also had cows. We had cows and chickens.

PARKER: Yeah?

LONDON: And stuff like that, yeah.  We had to get the cows in, separate the calves and the cows. And we had to get wood. We had a wood fireplace and a wood stove.  And we had to go get water from the bayou, the spring water from the bayou to, like, to take a bath, and wash dishes and stuff. We went to the spring to get water to drink. They had an ice truck that would come by.  We would get ice and, like, dig a hole and put sawdust in the hole and cover the ice up with newspaper and stuff like that and grain sacks to keep it for a few days.  So when we got ready for some cool water, we’d go to the spring and get the water and then we’d chip a piece of ice off and put in it so it would be . . . it would be good.

PARKER: And how far away was the spring?

LONDON: I guess it was about a mile and a half.

PARKER: Wow!

LONDON: We had to walk to get it.

PARKER: Water is not light.

LONDON: No, [laughs] it was heavy. But we did it. Sure did.

London, Geraldine, interview by Teresa Parker, audio recording, 2004, 4700.1698. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Louise Williams, 2004

TERESA PARKER: Was it hard to get into St. Francisville? Living out here, could you get into St. Francisville? Could you go to town when you were young?

LOUISE WILLIAMS: The first time I went to town I went in a wagon. There was no way to go! The first time I went to St. Francisville I went in a wagon. There wasn’t no highway. Nothing but a dusty road. Just [?] little hard dusty road. That’s all it was. Wasn’t no highway nowhere around from here. No highway, nothing but a dusty road.

PARKER: So how did you get across the creek?

WILLIAMS: Go on through. Just keep going! The water wasn’t too deep for them horses and the wagon to cross the creeks, just keep going.  People didn’t have no other way to go. Cross the creeks, they wade the creek or put poles across the creek [?] cross the creek walk over the poles across the creek.

……

PARKER: The first time you saw a car, do you remember when that was? Where were you?

WILLIAMS: We at home, but we was close enough to see it coming up the road….  Looked to me something like a buggy, wasn’t made like the cars made now.

PARKER: In what way?

WILLIAMS: Made something like a buggy. The cars wasn’t made like they making . . . like they is now. They made something like a buggy. Then the . . .on where you started the car be on the front of the car.  Turn the wheel or whatever it was.  Spin it to start it up, start the car up.

PARKER: So you saw it coming up the road? You said you saw the car . . . ?

WILLIAMS: When we see it coming up the road we ain’t know what it was. That’s what Daddy said, it was a car. That car one of the first cars we’d seen . . . he’d ever seen.

PARKER: What about the first time you saw an airplane?

WILLIAMS: We ain’t know what it was. We just all went out to look to see what was going on. We heard the roaring and there was something in the air, but we didn’t know what it was. After that we heard people say was an airplane. We didn’t know what it was. We just went out to see, but they be some people run and hid.  But we always wanted to see what was going on. Went out there and looked till it got out of sight. Said it was an airplane.

Williams, Louise, interview by Teresa Parker, audio recording, 2004, 4700.1702. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Sallie Smith, 2004

TERESA PARKER: We were talking earlier about when you learned to dance, or when you danced. Tell me what . . . What would you do?

SALLIE SMITH: I said when I learned how to dance we call ourselves two-stepping.  I don’t know what . . . you don’t know what that is, huh?

PARKER: I’ve heard of it.

SMITH: Well, call yourselves two-stepping, that’s all it . . . That’s the kind of dance we called what we was doing, out in the yard.  Just going all around, two people together. Call yourself two-stepping. That’s what they called it.

PARKER: And when would you do it? When would you do it? At night did you . . .?

SMITH: Well yeah, you know, first night they would come around just neighbors, right, neighborhood.  They just come to our house and we would get out there in the yard.  Then he’d play the music. We’d all be out there, called ourselves hopping around. That’s all we’d be doing. Wasn’t nobody doing no dancing.

PARKER: And what kind of music would they . . . what instruments would they . . .?

SMITH: They have a guitar. Playing guitar, that’s all.

PARKER: And you’d do it in the moonlight?

SMITH: Yeah. Yard is all nice and clean, we’d get out there. The moon would be shining, we’d be out there hopping around, that’s all we’d be doing.

……

PARKER: When you were growing up, do you . . . When you got sick, do you remember what your grandmother did? Because a lot of the people I’ve spoken with, their parents or their grandparents used different plants for . . .

SMITH: Yeah that’s all she . . . My grandmother, when we got sick, she ain’t never take us to no doctor. She always doctor us herself. Some kind of weeds or something like that she get and make tea out of and this that and the other. Like people get by one [?] but she didn’t ever do that. Some kind of old stinky . . . stinky weed she’d make that stuff out of. It’d get the worms out of you though.

Smith, Sallie interview by Teresa Parker, audio recording, 2004, 4700.1700. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Travis Carter, 2004

PARKER: So you would either sell the bale and get the money and then give them the money? Or they would just take some of the cotton?

CARTER: Well, no we always baled it . . . bale the cotton up and take to that gin. Bale it up did get so much out of the bale. Pay them whatever the rent was. We pay them so much out of a bale.

PARKER: Would you pay each month or at the end of the year? When did you pay? Once a year?

CARTER: Once a year.

PARKER: Not every month? No?

CARTER: Just once a year. When you get your crop, pay them off.   Started getting on in October and when they get everything gathered up and you pay your rent then there . . . sometimes wouldn’t have nothing left for your pay or for you. When you get through paying your rent sometimes you done make pretty good, you didn’t have nothing left for yourself.

PARKER: So what would you do?

CARTER: Had to go into another year, that’s all. When you paid out, sometimes didn’t make enough to pay your rent out of it. Back then . . . farming was bad back then in those days. Rent wasn’t so high but you just couldn’t make it.

………

CARTER: Yeah. We raised a lot of stuff we eat, you see.  We raised a garden and everything. We could get by pretty good because we raised the most food we eat. We raised chicken, hogs, raised a garden. That’s the most things we lived on then. I used to cure my own hogs, kill a calf once in a while. I actually have a barrel . . . I used to have a barrel of meat.

TERESA PARKER: A barrel?

CARTER: Barrel. One of these big old wooden barrels. Used to fill one of them up with meat.

PARKER: What kind of meat?

CARTER: Hog meat.  Killed one or two hogs. They be big hogs. Put it up and fill that barrel up with meat.

PARKER: Would you have to salt the meat? Would you have to salt it? Salt?

CARTER: Yeah. Put salt on it, cure it.

PARKER: How long would it keep?

CARTER: It would keep a year or more, a lot. Keep a year or more. Sometimes you could make up some salt and water to put on it and pour it in there.  It would keep fresh all the year.

PARKER: Tasted good?

CARTER: [Laughs]  Yeah, that was good eating, there. Sure was. People don’t do that now.

Carter, Travis, interview by Teresa Parker, audio recording, 2004, 4700.1697. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Alice Johnson, 2004

*TERESA PARKER: So tell me again . . . So you came home and who said what?

ALICE JOHNSON: No, I say I had been working and when I came home . . . He was off from work,   and he said, “Go take a bath, put on some clothes, preacher be here . . . ”  I say, “What preacher come in here for?” “He gonna marry us off.” I say “I know he’s joking!”  He said “No I ain’t.” I say “Well you didn’t ask me!” He called my momma “Ma.” “Well I did. I asked Ma”

PARKER: Oh my gosh! That’s too funny. That’s great. Do you remember what you wore?

JOHNSON: No, I think I put on some blue jeans! I know I didn’t dress up! Yeah, I did put on jeans. I put on jeans, I sure did.

PARKER: So you were sixteen?

JOHNSON: Yes.

………

JOHNSON: We . . . when I come up, I’m saying I come up [?]. It’s on this record I play all the time, come up the rough side of the mountain. That mean I come up through hell.

PARKER: Do you know how it . . . Can you sing a little bar for me?

JOHNSON: Oh yeah! Coming up on the rough side [singing] I’m coming up on the rough side of the mountain. I’m doing my best to make it in . . . [laughing]

PARKER: Any more? I was enjoying it!

JOHNSON: [singing] This old race will soon be over. I’m going and Jesus [?]. I’m coming up on the rough side of the mountain. I’m doing my best to make it in. [laughs]

PARKER: That was great. Thank you. [both laugh]

Johnson, Alice, interview by Teresa Parker, audio recording, 2004, 4700.1699. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

MUSIC

King, Freddie, interview by Tatiana Clay and Eric Julien, audio recording, 2008, 4700.1921.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

PHOTOGRAPHS

All photographs were taken by Teresa Parker Ferris.

Jennifer Abraham Cramer is the executive producer of “What Endures.”  This episode was written and produced by Erin Hess.  The audio engineer was Rob Fleming.  Special thanks to Germain Bienvenu.

This podcast is copyrighted by LSU Libraries Special Collections.

For a full transcript of the podcast, please contact Jennifer Abraham Cramer at jabrah1@lsu.edu.

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What Makes a Good Interviewer?

March 25th, 2011 by jabrah1

A colleague and I were recently sharing stories about “when interviewers attack” and he told a particular story, to which I could relate, about being interviewed by a reporter for a local paper.  The interview lasted five hours.  The reporter didn’t record the interview; she took very few notes;  she showed up an hour late for the interview; she called my colleague while he was on a scheduled family vacation only hours before the publishing deadline requesting help with content and organization of the interview;  and when he asked her if he could read the article before publication, the reporter declined.  When the article came out, she included the little to none of the interview, which was of course, her journalistic choice.  Ironically, in the course of the interview, the journalist, perched on her elbow, asked my colleague: “What makes a good interviewer?”  He rattled off the standard musts, hoping she would perhaps at some point look him in the eye and listen to him, and maybe even take a note or two.  However, the journalist gave him a glazed over look, interrupted him, and launched into a pontification of her own about what makes a good interviewer.  Apparently, she did that a lot–asked a question, then answered it herself, with a story about, of course, herself.

As an oral historian, it’s a great learning experience to be on the other side of an interview.  Especially a really long one with an unexpected outcome.  Having been interviewed myself a few times, I, too know how it feels.  There are obvious differences between journalism and oral history, which we don’t need to get into right now–it’s the similarities that have my attention today. The biggest one being the vulnerability of the interviewee:  Talking to a stranger for hours creates this quickly forged intimacy.   And the interviewer, at that point, is doing all of the opening up.  It’s a process that takes a lot out of the person being interviewed, as well as the person doing the interview.  Both the interviewer and the narrator are working together to create a product–whether it’s a newspaper article or an archived interview.

One of the things we pride ourselves on here at the Center, and in the field of oral history, is the ethical partnership between oral historian and the narrator.  So now I’m curious –has anyone been interviewed for an oral history project ever felt drained, disrespected, disappointed, and unheard?

I would venture to say that the methodology and process involved in the creation of an oral history prevents that outcome (see http://www.oralhistory.org/wiki/index.php/Evaluation_Guide).  However, my colleague’s experience and my own similar experiences have made me accutely aware of the reason that best practices are in place for our interviewers.

So in anwer to the reporter’s question, posed to my colleague,  I’d like to weigh in.  A good interviewer needs to be at least five things:

1) Familiar with modern recording devices; or an excellent note-taker, if a device is neither available,  nor appropriate

2) A good researcher (know what you want to ask before you get there)

3) A good listener who asks follow-up questions, when appropriate

4) Someone who asks open-ended questions

5) Devoted to the follow-through of the end-product

So for now, I’d like to leave you with the same question.

Please, I want to hear from you. If you’ve conducted oral histories or interviews or have been interviewed, please share your experiences!

What skill set do you think people need to conduct an interview that will stand the test of time?

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“Go Home… and Listen Again:” A Religious Studies Oral History Project Offers Insights into Life along Bayou Lafourche

February 22nd, 2011 by jabrah1

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EPISODE 11     (33:13)

Students visit Bayou Lafourche resident to collect oral history

Today’s show is an interview with one of the Center’s partners, Dr. Mike Pasquier, a professor here at LSU in the Religious Studies Department.  Dr. Pasquier is working with the Center to establish the Bayou Lafourche Oral History Project.  He and his students collected oral histories to gain a better understanding of the role of religion in everyday life among Bayou Lafourche residents.  He’s also partnering with the Coastal Sustainability Studio here at LSU, and is using this material to garner a better understanding of how south Louisiana culture is being affected by wetland loss.  He teaches courses in U.S. religious history, Christianity, and world religions and his research focuses on the history of Roman Catholicism in the American South, Catholic devotional culture, and religion in colonial Louisiana.

In this episode, the director will speak with him about his ongoing project in Bayou Lafourche, how he uses oral history in the college classroom, and how this research will be useful to a larger, interdisciplinary study assessing the impact of land loss on residents of the area.  We’ll get to hear some clips from interviews recorded by some of his students with Bayou Lafourche residents.  So join us today as we hear about men murmuring the rosary during Hurricane Betsy, about school children being punished for speaking French on state property, and about how the land and waters where people fish, work, and live is disappearing before our eyes.

Also, please keep in mind that a large part of the Center’s mission is public outreach, and if you have a project like this in mind and you would like to partner with the Center, please get in touch with me at jabrah1@lsu.edu.  Also, if you’d like to make a donation to help us with our mission, please contact me or visit our website at http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/williams/donorsupport.pdf.

AUDIO EXCERPT TRANSCRIPTIONS AND CITATIONS

INTERVIEWER: What type of neighborhood did you live in and, you know, where did you play at and, you know, go hang out with your friends at?

ROBICHEAUX: So, my name is Brenda Dardar Robicheaux. I grew up in a community called Golden Meadow, but I actually grew up below the corporation limits of Golden Meadow because Indian people did not live in the corporation limits in Golden Meadow, we lived below the corporation limits of Golden Meadow, that’s where the Indian community was. And so, in the community, there was a church and there was an old Indian settlement school. The old Indian settlement school housed from kindergarten through seventh grade and that was it, there were no high schools or anything that you could further your education, so the generation of my father has been a seventh grade education and that’s because that was all that was available. Our people, the Sabines. So, if you were brave enough to go teach the Sabines down the bayou, you would have a job. And so I did not attend the school there. It closed with the civil rights movement.

INTERVIEWER:     Oh, you mentioned the bayou. Did y’all utilize the bayou for transportation or did y’all use, you know, usual means: cars and trucks?

ROBICHEAUX: At the beginning, it was for transportation. There was actually a school boat that would go and pick up children across the bayou. There were no highways there. And so this boat would go across the bayou and pick up the children and bring them to the settlement school.

INTERVIEWER:     Oh wow, that’s cool.

ROBICHEAUX: And then even after that in later years, there were still people who lived there and there was a smaller boat that would go to this one particular house and pick up children and bring them to school.

INTERVIEWER:     Darn. Gathering places in your community, is there any that you were fond of that you could recall?

ROBICHEAUX: Driving in the car down the bayou to Leeville, which is the town right after Golden Meadow, and there were thistles that would grow “chadrons” in French. And so it’s this tall thing with pickers that grow out and so we’d go with vinegar, salt, and a cane knife and that’s how you spend your afternoon just driving down and you’d see one, “Oh that one’s too tall,” you know, “That one’s gonna be too hard.” It’s kind of like a celery. And so you would just stop the car “Oh, there’s one!” So you’d stop the car, you’d cut it, you know, get in the car, slice it up, put salt, eat it and just keep traveling down. So it was a very simple life but it was fun. That’s what we did.

Robicheaux, Brenda, interview by anonymous, audio recording, 2010, unprocessed. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

RYAN BRANTON:        So you say family was the center?

JOHN DOUCET: Yeah, definitely, it wasn’t the community that was the center necessarily because we were stretched out for miles. Or maybe we just didn’t get along, I don’t know [laughs], I think it’s a geographical thing. I think this whole parish is in the same situation because we all developed along the linear bayou and now we have cars and transportation and email. We don’t even have to get out of our houses. But I think things were different. I think you established those sub-communities within your families and, if you’re fortunate, your neighborhood.  But as far as big community gathering, it was only church, or it was only a high school graduation, as far as I know, or things like that.

My mom used to tell me stories of how she was punished in high school for speaking French when it was her native language.

BRANTON:       Really?

DOUCET: Oh yeah. There was a law in nineteen fifteen that made speaking French forbidden on state property, including public schools, and this was okay for some place in Natchitoches or in Baton Rouge, perhaps, but in a place like Golden Meadow, it was horrible because the first language of the students is French, and you’re making us speak something else. So if you spoke French to a teacher, weather you’re doing it sarcastically, or if you could not formulate the sentence, you were punished and it was corporal punishment and even cruel punishment. My mom used to have to kneel in the corner in a little pad of corn kernels. That was her punishment. She never ate corn the rest of her life.

Doucet, John, interview by Ryan Branton, audio recording, 2010, unprocessed. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

KAYLA DUPLECHAIN:            Would you say life was in, like growing up here was different than other places?

LARRY WILLIAMS:    Oh, definitely, yes.

DUPLECHAIN: How so?

WILLIAMS:     Well, for one thing, when I went to school, my parents all spoke French and while we were in school, teachers didn’t want us to speak French. I learned French with my grandmother. She taught me French and there was more or less, old timers were like that. And most of the families, that’s how they are, learned French from their grandmothers cause they knew nothing but French.

DUPLECHAIN: What is it mean to you to live along bayou Lafourche?

WILLIAMS:     As far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Because of the close-knit families. It was all about the family back when I was growing up. Families would get together at night and cook and you know, feed everybody.

Williams, Larry, interview by Kayla Duplechain, audio recording, 2010, unprocessed. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Ophelia Lefort shows students her paintings of Bayou Lafourche

OPHELIA LEFORT:

Most people that lived along the bayou lived, they worked in . . . later on, in the oil field but before that, it was trappers. We trapped furs like muskrats, minks, otters. Every year, we’d go to a camp in the marsh. I used to be the skinner of my daddy’s muskrats, I used to skin pelts.

BLAKE CWIEKA: Wow.

LEFORT: Yes. And I was just fourteen, fifteen years old so everybody would . . . but the bayou was it. That was “Main Street”. And on both sides, people lived and I remember as a child we had a grocery store across the bayou. We had to ride a flat boat to go buy groceries. Painting . . . if people would realize just what painting is . . . that you can lose yourself. It’s so rewarding. You can meditate, you can . . .  you know. It’s really wonderful. I had to do a rendering of this boat to show my children how it was when I was a young kid growing up we’d stand on the bayou and they would pass, they’d go from New Orleans from Grand Isle. Grand Isle raised watermelons and, I didn’t know that at that time, but I found out later that they did the cucumbers and they’d go to the French market in New Orleans with that. So I did a rendering of that boat, as I’m standing on the shore. They would throw us bananas and apples and stuff like that so I did that and I’ll show it to you if you want.

Lefort, Ophelia. Interview by Blake Cwieka, audio recording, 2010, unprocessed. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

KAYLA DUPLECHAIN:            What are some of the differences between living in golden meadow with the lock systems and below golden meadow without them?

LARRY WILLIAMS:    Well, the flooding. I don’t remember any hurricanes I went through. There was always the threat of flooding. Now that we have this levee system, more or less, we still can flood, but we’re protected because of the levee system.

DUPLECHAIN:              What kind of jobs have you held throughout your life?

WILLIAMS:     I used to work, well, on Sundays when we’d go to church, on the way back. They used to have . . . it was a trolling for shrimp community. And when there was a lot of boats would come in with a lot of shrimp, they would sound the siren and all the people in the community wanted to go to the shrimp shed, they’d break heads and they had a bucket about a gallon . . . about three gallon bucket and when you put all the heads in there, and you’d turn in your bucket, you’d get ten cents a bucket [laughs] and on the way back from church sometimes, we’d stop at the shrimp shed and break heads just for ten cents to buy us a candy or something.

DUPLECHAIN:              The major industries in the area are the oil industry . . .

WILLIAMS:     The oil and the fishing industry. That’s what a lot of people don’t understand; It goes hand in hand, you see, the fishing industry, when the season is finished, a lot of the fishermen would go and get jobs in the oil field. They’d work in the oil field because there was always contractors, you know, that would hire them. And then when the season was open again, they’d all quit the oil field and go back to fishing. I guess everybody supported each other like that, the whole community.

Williams, Larry, interview by Kayla Duplechain, audio recording, 2010, unprocessed. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

JB Barnes is interviewed by MC Tannehill and

J.B. BARNES:

But during that time, it was . . .  everything was real good. A pair of shoes, you had to have a stamp to buy shoes.

M.C. TANNEHILL: Really?

BARNES: Okay, you gets a stamp every six months for a pair of work shoes. You gets a stamp for dress shoes once a year, so we had to walk to school eight miles to school in the church so we would carry our shoes, put them on our shoulder, we had a wet rag, a towel as you called it. One wet, one dry. We sat down, we wiped our feet. We put our one pair of socks, our shoes on. We’d go to church, and we’d enjoy church, Sunday school. We had to go to church, we had to go to Sunday school every Sunday; we had to go to that. But during that time, it was . . . We didn’t know any better. It was good. Oh, it was really a good time, we . . . Now, Sunday, we couldn’t play on a Sunday. We had to do all our work Saturday. Sunday, that’s the Lord’s day. We had to go to church, Sunday school, and all that. We had to sit around in the yard. We couldn’t do no sport like ball games and shooting marbles and all that. We couldn’t do that on a Sunday.

BARNES: I had to hire, and I was the one who had to fire.  They couldn’t.  I didn’t care what trouble that they would give. They had to come to me to do it. Well, I run in to quite some problems with that because . . .  it was mostly with the white bosses.  The idea of me being a black man over them. They didn’t like that so well. But like I told the owner of that factory, I was gonna run it or either I was gonna quit it. Only one color that I go by, one color. That’s the color…. I don’t have no pick in colors. I said, we working a man , you know, we don’t work boys. I didn’t allow them to call a man a boy. I put their initial on their hat, their names, so the foremans could call them by their names. “I say, boy!” you know… they used to have that thing of calling mens boys. That don’t go  no more, you know, call them boys. So I enjoyed doing that. I did it until the factory closed in 1979.

Barnes, JB, interview by MC Tannehill, audio recording, 2010, unprocessed. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

JOHN DOUCET:           Anyway, by the time we got there, things were really bad. We got out, we went in the house and it was late. It was almost time to go to bed but as a kid, I was petrified. I was a nervous wreck. I couldn’t possibly go to bed. Alright? So mom was nervous, everybody was nervous. They wanted the kids in bed and away, so. I was nervous. I threw up in bed. I remember that the boards that my aunt had put against her window were pounding and one of the windows crashed on top of me so there was no way I was getting back in bed so I was a wreck all night but the most harrowing thing was when the man got together to murmur the Rosary. When women pray, it’s alright. When men pray, you know something’s wrong. And that was probably . . . it wasn’t’ the nervousness, it wasn’t ’cause my dad wasn’t there although those were tremendously big emotional things. It wasn’t the glass falling on me. When my grandpa and the other men started praying, that was scary.

Doucet, John, interview by Ryan Branton, audio recording, 2010, unprocessed. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

PHOTOGRAPHS

All photographs courtesy of Dr. Michael Pasquier

This podcast was written and produced by Jennifer Abraham Cramer.  The audio engineer was Rob Fleming.  Special thanks to Germain Bienvenu, Erin Hess, and Tim Schiro.

This podcast is copyrighted by LSU Libraries Special Collections.

For a full transcript of the podcast, please contact Jennifer Abraham Cramer at jabrah1@lsu.edu.

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South Louisiana Sampler, Part 1

November 30th, 2010 by rfleming

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Episode 10   (26:47)

Louisiana is known as a melting pot of cultures and ethnic groups, so for oral historians, it’s a great place to get a variety of stories from people with widely differing life experiences.  From Creole to Cajun, French to Spanish, African American to Native American, Louisiana just about has it all.  In this episode, we’ll focus on people who were raised in, or spent most of their lives in the Atchafalaya Basin area of South Louisiana.

The men and women  we’ll hear from today trace their heritage to Native American, French, or Cajun roots,  or a mixture of these.  But regardless of how these people identify themselves and their culture today, many of  their ancestors shared a common thread of living on what nature provided.  In the Atchafalaya Basin, people’s lives were tied to the places they lived – the plants they used for food and medicine; the animals they hunted, ate, and whose byproducts they relied on; and the streams, bayous and rivers that surrounded them.  Each of these groups of people had their own traditions, customs, and knowledge passed down from generation to generation, surviving through centuries.  Many of these traditions faded over time for various reasons, and many aspects of people’s lives and physical surroundings changed dramatically within their lifetimes.

Today’s episode will give us a peek at life throughout the last century in the Atchafalaya Basin area. From the Houma Indians Series: Roch Naquin will tell us about his heritage, his French speaking  mother, and the loss of the French language among his peers;  Kirby Verret will discuss the symbolism of crawfish to the Houma tribe, and will talk about his family’s method for hunting geese; Rita and Howard Dion will make your mouth water with a description of the foods they ate as children, and Howard will tell us about the Houma’s struggle for recognition in the state of Louisiana.  From the Sue Hebert Series: Samuel McQuiston will tell us about the place he was born, the changes he’s seen during his lifetime of fishing, and about the upkeep of fishing nets; Edward Coussou will explain how he picked and prepared moss for sale, and how moss has gradually become less abundant in the swamp;  finally, Nelson McQuiston will explain the process of making a dugout canoe, or pirogue.

AUDIO EXCERPT TRANSCRIPTIONS AND CITATIONS

NELSON MCQUISTON is the key excerpt. He reminisces about the prices of fishing nets.  *For full transcription, see below.

Houma Indians Series

“Mixed Houma Indians, Bayou LaFourche, La.” 1907

DANIEL D’ONEY: Okay, but you consider yourself to be full blood?

ROCH NAQUIN: Not really, though. French and Indian.  I always …  people say, “Who are you?”  I say, “I’m French and Indian.”

D’ONEY: So your mom’s side of the family was full blood then?

NAQUIN: Not really, it’s a mixture from both sides.

D’ONEY: Alright, so your family’s a mixture. How much would you say you are Houma and how much would you say are … I guess you wouldn’t consider yourself to be Cajun French would you?

NAQUIN: We did not really receive Cajun French, even though we’ll have people call us that and we take it because they kind of look at the whole locality as such.  Cajun is mostly a people who came from Acadia [in modern-day Canada], and Nova Scotia [Canada] and that area and came down into Louisiana whereas ours … the Naquins came from France. Supposedly, they were in Canada and when the shipping of people took place, some came into Louisiana and some they shipped back to France.

D’ONEY: You’re talking about the Cajuns?

NAQUIN: Yeah, and so supposedly the Naquins were shipped back to France and then from France they came to United States.

D’ONEY: They came back?

NAQUIN: Yes.

D’ONEY: So I guess you could consider them to be Cajun in a roundabout way.

NAQUIN: In a sense, yes.

D’ONEY: That’s pretty interesting.

NAQUIN: They called me that, they called me Indian. They have another name they used to call the Indian people, sabine. Used to be very offensive name at one time but … because it was kind of a put down name.

D’ONEY: Does anybody know where that term comes from?

NAQUIN: I’m not sure, but I think it was used to kind of indicate the uncivilized and all … and there’s like, you know, “You’re not as much as we are.” But I don’t have the full history on that.

D’ONEY: Because there’s a Sabine River but I don’t think I have …

NAQUIN: Yeah, Sabine River out west over there that divides Louisiana and Texas. I was interested you know, on that too … because of the fact supposedly the Houma came over that general area. But, I really don’t know just where they got that name, but it was common.

________________________________________________________

DANIEL D’ONEY: What about your mother? Did she speak or write English?

ROCH NAQUIN: My mother spoke only French. She never learned any English. We tried to teach her but she always said, “No, I think I’m too old now.” At a point she finally got too old to learn and then at that time she started saying, “Well, maybe I should have tried to learn English.” She didn’t get to go to school, so she didn’t know how to read or write.  She could count and everything. Learned, you know, a few things, basic things like that, but she had never gone to school. I used to . . . I tell people there was only four words that she knew … four or five words: good morning, goodnight, goodbye, shut up.

D’ONEY: [Laughing]  Okay, did she get a chance to use those very often with her kids?

NAQUIN: Yes.  [laughs]

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Students on Isle de Jean Charles, c. 1938

Students on Isle de Jean Charles, c. 1938

ROCH NAQUIN:They would tell us we were not to speak French in school. If they would catch us speaking French, they would make us write five hundred times, “I must not speak French in school.”  Because the hope for us was to try to get us to learn in English. But that had a bad effect, because first of all, it began to leave an impression which is something would be wrong with the language every time I used it, I would get punished.  But also parents were interested in having their children learn French, I mean English, and so they would not stress French. And what happened was we have several generations who lost the ability to speak French.

Naquin, Roch, interview by Daniel d’Oney, audio recording, 1996, 4700.0841. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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KIRBY VERRET: And one of the signs of poverty in her era was to eat crawfish. If you were so downtrodden that you couldn’t find any food, you could take one of these tubs, a kind of a wash tub, and you could put it where they let the rice fields drain out. You could put a tub full sunk down by the drainage. Some of the crawfish would wash out of the rice field, and as they’d hit that tub they just settle to the bottom, and if you let it sit there it would just eventually fill up with crawfish and all you do is get the water out of it and you have a tub full of crawfish. But that was at one time a symbol of poverty, when you ate crawfish. I found that unique, knowing that there was such a … somewhat of a dishonor to eat crawfish. Of course, later on as I grew up to find out that the crawfish was a … very much a tribal symbol, you know, that was our symbol. But to eat it just for the sake of survival, that was … There was more to it than I understood.

DANIEL D’ONEY: Yeah.

VERRET: Clearly there was sacredness about the crawfish, but also it represented poverty.  So there were two worlds there of …

D’ONEY: [?]

VERRET: Yeah, you see how the crawfish who was a creature never to back off, who would stand up to anybody, and hold his ground, even if it meant death. So that crawfish was one symbol.  Then of course, the crawfish that came out of the earth was sacred in a way, but also was the ultimate sign of poverty if you ate it.

The Houma's war emblem, the crawfish

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KIRBY VERRET: My mother would go in the back of the camp in the trapping field and she’d turn loose a few loose sheets of newspaper. And the geese would be flying over, they see that … those papers that would look like geese moving on the ground, and they’d drop down and my father would shoot a couple of them, we had supper. I mean they’d fall for that, you just take a newspaper sheet and you’d drop it on the … Let the wind blow, it would roll on the ground, and they’d actually think it was geese. So they’d circle down and see what it was, and … There was always a way to get food.

Verret, Kirby, interview by Daniel d’Oney, audio recording, 1997, 4700.0842. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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DANIEL D’ONEY: What did you all eat growing up?

HOWARD DION: Fish, crabs, shrimp.

RITA DION: I ate a lot of seafood.

H. DION: Wild game, duck, deer.

R. DION: Yeah, my mom cooked duck and deer, rabbits and stuff that I don’t …

H. DION: Rabbit.  We lived off the land.  I mean, we strictly … all our food was …

R. DION: And then to go with that …

H. DION: … seasonal.

R. DION: … we had white beans or mustard greens.

H. DION: Got to have white beans and rice with everything.

R: DION: White beans and rice, or … And then my dad had a garden, so he grew vegetables.  So we had green beans and mustard greens, and things like that.

H. DION: But we ate everything.

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HOWARD DION: Well, people were scared all over. They thought that the Houmas was going to reclaim them the whole parish. And our legislature made sure that there wasn’t any political help coming to us. We got a letter from … that was intercepted from our attorney general Gus[?], and wrote our legislature to be sure that the Houmas … “Whatever you did,” you know, “don’t recognize it, because the state will be in jeopardy.” That’s his own words. I don’t have … The only documented help that we have from the Houma Alliance and our state recognition was from Governor Edwin Edwards. He recognized our cause and he thought that we had a good legitimate reason to do what we were doing. He supported us, and [Governor]Dave Treen supported us also. But as far as our senators and representatives and all those guys, you don’t hear from at all. Nothing was ever documented that I received from them.

Dion, Howard and Rita, interview by Daniel d’Oney, audio recording, 2003, 4700.1574. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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Sue Hebert Series

SAMUEL MCQUISTON: Where I was born, they had plenty of water. But that dump in the [Atchafalaya] Spillway now and that’s filled up with sand [ ... ?] near high enough to cultivate. They do have cattle over there on them places where … right where I was born seventy-nine years ago on the eleventh of October, 1899. They got cattle there where they had water at that time. And I’m not ashamed of it, I was born on a camp crib. I don’t know if you know what a camp crib is, but it’s a bunch of logs nailed together and [throw it?] over and a tent put on top of it. That’s the way … That’s the place I was born.

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SAMUEL MCQUISTON: We’d get anywhere from three to eight cents for catfish and from about one and a half to three cents for buffalo [fish] and goo [gaspergou, a drum fish]. But today, they all up in the … catfish is about forty-five cents and the buffalo and goo is about twenty cents.  Lot of difference in the price, but it’s due to the scarcity of fish. We don’t have the fish we used to have. I used to catch fish by the thousands of pounds and today I catch about a hundred pounds. So there’s just a lot of difference between fishing then and fishing now. We have a truck come now to the river, to the edge of the river where people comes in with the fish and buy them and some of them take the fish to places like [?]. But we don’t have no more boats running through the community like they used to be.

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* SAMUEL MCQUISTON: Now, about the operations of a net fisherman … in tarring his nets and taking care of them, there’s cotton twine … Used to have to take nets up very often. Maybe in the summertime when the water’s hot, take them up every two weeks and tar them.  And we’d have maybe a hundred to tar at one time and there’d be maybe two or three of us together in the family that would tar.  We never would have anybody else to come and tar with us. Other than maybe a friend tar one or two nets for … get him a mess of fish to eat. But we didn’t have a whole lot of people coming and tarring with us.

SUE HEBERT: Who knitted these nets?

MCQUISTON: Well, most of the nets that was knit was by lady folks around here that knitted nets.  I know my sister and a lot of other people. Your momma used to knit.  There’s still ladies that knit nets.  Used to knit a net for a dollar and a half, and now they want fifteen dollars to knit it. Things is went up so high you can’t get something done for nothing anymore like you used to be. I like the used to be, not the times of now.

McQuiston, Samuel, interview by Sue Hebert, audio recording, 1979, 4700.0045.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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Spanish moss growing in the Atchafalaya Basin

SUE HEBERT: How about picking moss? What kind of tools you use for that?

EDWARD COUSSOU: Well, I used a barge about eighteen feet long, six feet wide, and a twelve foot derrick on there, and a twelve foot pole and I’m five feet nine. So I was [?] up in there.

HEBERT: Yeah, you right.  And you got to get the moss out of the trees way at the top.

COUSSOU: Oh yeah, get the moss out of the trees. Why … the reason that I [?] a little moss was on account of these snakes get on them limbs and you get bit.

HEBERT: Oh really?

COUSSOU: Oh yeah. You’ll get bit. I’ll tell you this: Atchafalaya Basin is plum full of these little cottonmouths!

HEBERT: Well, after you picked the moss, what did you do with it then?

COUSSOU: Well, I come in with that moss and I throw it overboard and let it soak.

HEBERT: It wouldn’t float away?

COUSSOU: No, no.  I [?] slope, whatever it is, go down before you get to the spillway out there. Let it stay in there today … I put it in there today, next day I come and I take it out and I put another load in the same place.  If you don’t do that … Now you just pile that moss on that bank, and wait for the rain to wet it, you going to lose that moss because it’s going to burn up.  It’ll just get so hot, you can’t hold your hands in there, and it won’t get either color. Once it get a dingy looking color, it won’t come out.

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EDWARD COUSSOU: Today, I don’t know what happened, moss is dying in the woods. You didn’t have no more moss.  Used to hang from way up in the tree to way down.

SUE HEBERT: You don’t think people picked too much of it? That wouldn’t have been it?

COUSSOU: No, no, no. That’s not [?] that’s [?] You had moss you couldn’t catch in them big trees, well, maybe sixty feet high. But, I don’t know what killed it out, but it’s dead.  And now they ain’t got no moss, they paying twenty cents a pound for it.  And when I was picking, much as I ever got was six cents a pound.

HEBERT: How much could you make a day picking moss?

COUSSOU: Well, I never did figure that out. I made a living and raised six kids. I could tell you that much about it.

Coussou, Edward, interview by Sue Hebert, audio recording, 1979, 4700.0454. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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SUE HEBERT: … made the pirogues, you made dugouts.  Some people did.

NELSON MCQUISTON: Well, there was about three men back there years ago made dugouts.

HEBERT: They did them all of the time?

MCQUISTON: Out of a solid … a solid cypress tree. A half of a tree. Take a pretty good size cypress tree and bust it in half. They’d hew it out and make what they call a dugout. You know how they had to do that?

HEBERT: How?

MCQUISTON: They had what they call a hand auger. They’d bore holes … bore holes, and they’d bore a hole in that log … If it’s sixteen foot long, they’d bore holes with that auger, excuse me, about every six inches apart all the way through that log. Then they’d take wedges [?] and bust it open, half of it. Then they’d dig out some of the inside of it … dig out some of the inside of it where they could turn it over. Then they would make the outside just like the shape they wanted it. And all just like they wanted. Then they’d bring the inside out there to about maybe a inch and a quarter thick all the way around and that’s what they call a dugout.

McQuiston, Nelson and Lottie, interview by Sue Hebert, audio recording, 1979, 4700.0044.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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MUSIC

King, Freddie, interview by Tatiana Clay and Eric Julien, audio recording, 2008, 4700.1921.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

PHOTOGRAPHS

“Mixed Houma Indians, Bayou LaFourche, La.”  from The Houma People of Louisiana: a story of Indian survival by Greg Bowman, [1982?], photo by John Swanton, used in Bowman courtesy of the Smithsonian’s Swanton collection.

Group of boys, detail from photo in The Houma People of Louisiana: a story of Indian survival by Greg Bowman, [1982?].

Two girls, detail from photo in The Houma People of Louisiana: a story of Indian survival by Greg Bowman, [1982?].

Jim Courteaux with crawfish banner, from Land of the Houmas by Sherwin Guidry [1981?]

Spanish moss, from Land of the Houmas by Sherwin Guidry [1981?]


This podcast is copyrighted by LSU Libraries Special Collections.

For a full transcript of the podcast, please contact Jennifer Abraham at jabrah1@lsu.edu.

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“We Watched Everything Wash Away:” Storm Stories Part 2, Hurricane Katrina

August 27th, 2010 by jabrah1

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

EPISODE 9     (27:49)

The Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, August 31, 2005

Almost everyone in Louisiana has a story to tell about a hurricane.  Be it Audrey or Betsy, Andrew or Katrina, Rita or Gustav.  In the podcast we did last year to celebrate the end of hurricane season, Storm Stories, Part 1, we focused on some of Louisiana’s historic storms and floods.  We played excerpts from individuals who survived the 1927 Flood, Hurricane Audrey, and Hurricane Betsy. 

And today, to mark the five year anniversary of Katrina, we’ll continue where Part 1 left off.  We’ll hear from Gwen Ridgley and George Miller, whose actions in Katrina  were influenced by stories and experiences from Hurricane Betsy.  Dr. Frank Minyard, coroner in New Orleans at the time of the hurricane, explains how he walked, waded and swam through flood waters to get back into the city and then five days later evacuated to Saint Gabriel to perform autopsies on each dead body from the storm.  Angel Aucoin, a flight nurse at Memorial Medical Center, details her harrowing journey to evacuate patients to safety from the hospital to the Convention Center to West Jefferson.  Cathy Chauvin tells us about the evacuation of River Bend Nursing Home to Kentwood, Louisiana, and how, when none of the contracted suppliers could get through, three trucks of civilians from “some northern state” made it there with essential supplies.  Vicky Webb “got light as a feather” when she and her dog, Max, were rescued from flood waters by boat, and when strangers offered to drive her to New Roads when she had no other transportation. Barbara Terance explains why she didn’t leave New Orleans for the hurricane, and how after being rescued by boat and later evacuated by bus out of the city, she and her mother got off the bus at a  gas station in Port Allen and got the last room at the Days Inn. Sharon Normand tells how she and her husband returned to the city one week later and slept on hospital gurneys, and how community members bonded in City Hall. 

These interviews are the result of partnerships between the Center and a New Orleans-based project and a New Roads, Louisiana based project.  To learn more about these projects, please visit the following websites: 

“Voices in the Storm”  Julien Poydras Museum Arts Council in Pointe Coupee Parish 

http://www.lsu.edu/highlights/2007/06/katrina.html

“Floodwall: A Tribute to New Orleans in the Aftermath of Katrina” headed by Jana Napoli 

http://www.floodwall.org/index.php

AUDIO EXCERPT TRANSCRIPTIONS AND CITATIONS 

CATHY CHAUVIN is the key excerpt.  She recalls the Hurricane Katrina evacuation of nursing home residents to Kentwood, Louisiana.     *For full transcription, see below. 

Gwen Ridgley

GWEN RIDGLEY: And at that point, I could hear Galaxy lapping water. The storm Betsy that passed in, was it 1965 or 1966—quite a few people died in that storm, because they went to the attic and they didn’t have the proper tools to get out through the roof. We just used to talk about that all the time. But now we’re confronted with this storm. So we did pull down the stairs to the attic. And I told Pat, I said, “I’m not going in the attic.” And we just laughed. And just at that point, the water hit the front door.  And her air handler is in the hallway, right there as you’re going up. And in there is where she kept her little miscellaneous tools. Her saw, the hammer that we needed. And we got those things, and up in the attic we went! 

Ridgley, Gwendolyn, interview by Myrna Matherne, audio recording, 2007, 4700.1955. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

George Miller

GEORGE MILLER: And both my wife and I, we experienced Betsy in 1965. I was nineteen. In fact, I was staying at my grandmother’s house. And that’s when the Corps of Engineers actually did blow up the levee for Betsy. And it flooded the Lower Ninth Ward. They didn’t really, like I said, I guess, blow it up. They actually thought they could blow the levee and control the water with a barge. The barge went through the levee. And I walked in water up to my chest and promised that if I ever had the opportunity to get out of there alive, I would never, ever get caught in a storm. And my wife and I were talking the other day. And I guess in my forty-something years of working, we figured that we evacuated something like thirty-five times. Sometimes you might evacuate two or three times a season. So when you say thirty-five times, it sounds like a lot. But if you do it every three or four times a year. And the reason why, because both of us got caught in Betsy. So we knew exactly what we were up against.

Miller, George, interview by Blanche Jewell, audio recording, 2007, 4700.1954. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Dr. Frank Minyard

FRANK MINYARD:  When the hurricane hit, I was at my farm in Folsom.  So I came in here Tuesday. I didn’t know about the flood. We had no communication. So I drove in, I tried to go down Tulane Avenue in the flood. I tried to go down Canal Street, and it was all flooded. I had to get out of the car and wade and walk and swim and everything. But it just dawned on me then that this was a disaster beyond my ability to do anything. 

So we had about ten people in the office. Little did I know we would be trapped there for five days. But, so, as far as preparation, I had preparations in my own mind, but nothing of the magnitude of what happened. So I knew we couldn’t help. We were held up. We couldn’t get out of the office. Once I got there in a boat, I couldn’t get out until Friday. 

A thousand of these people are my people, from New Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, and I am treating them the same way I treat them when I am in my office.  We find out exactly what caused them to die.  And as long as people died at the hands of the good Lord then I am happy. But if they died at someone else’s hands then we are not happy. We are not just going to scuff them off because we don’t like the living conditions or we don’t like the working conditions, for sure, but we are going to treat them like they are my people, my friends. 

Minyard, Frank, interview by Angie Juban, audio recording, 2007, 4700.1956. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Angel Aucoin

ANGEL AUCOIN: And the emergency room was crazily busy [prior to the storm]. People were just dropping people off. No names, no ID. Just little old people were just getting dropped off on the ER ramps.  It was just, you couldn’t keep up with them. And we were literally full to capacity. The waiting room, standing room only.  We’re going to get these people out of here. So we’re going to take the sickest first. So that was our ICU patients, moms and babies.  And [after the storm] we just started flying people out. I mean, just five at a time, six at a time. We would just load people into these helicopters.  

So we go up to this vehicle.  And I say, “I have a thousand dollars, and I’m going to give it all to you if you get me out of here.” And he said, “No,” he said, “I’m working on a job.” I said, “I bet you a thousand bucks is more than you’re going to make tonight.” And I pulled it out of my backpack.  

There was nobody on the highway. See, I didn’t know that everybody was shut off from coming in at this time, still. So we finally get to West Jeff , and I mean, we jump out of that truck, people are jumping out of that truck, seventeen of us. And they draw their guns on us. And they’re like, “Get back in the truck!” And I’m like, “No! We’re here. I work here.” I’m saying, “I work here,” meaning “I worked here.”  I didn’t recognize any of the little people that were outside in the military. I said, “Where’s Connie? Is Connie here? Is Connie here?” And before I could finish what I’m trying to explain who I was, here comes this paramedic. Good looking guy, bald head. And it was Abe. I’m like, “Abe!” You know, because you knew the paramedics when you did this for so many years. And he’s like, “Angel?” And I’m like, “It’s me! Help us! Help us!” And I’m like, “Don’t kick us out.” I said, “Just give me this piece of grass and a phone, and I’ll be out of your way.”

Aucoin, Angel, interview by Mary Price, audio recording, 2007, 4700.1949. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Cathy and Daryl Chauvin

*CATHY CHAUVIN:   I was working at Riverbend Nursing and Rehab Center. I actually evacuated with my nursing home. So we took eighty-five geriatrics to Kentwood and housed them in a gymnasium. 

We had evacuated before, so it wasn’t new to us. We took all of our residents’ mattresses with us. And we took enough clothing for three days for each resident. And of course we took just huge quantities of things like diapers and medical supplies. We took all of our medicine carts and just put them in the back of the vehicles. And then we loaded three buses of our residents. And that was tough, because most of them couldn’t get on the bus.  

And the employees didn’t really stay in the gymnasium. Some of our CNAs stayed in an upstairs area with their children. But it was very tight quarters up there, and we didn’t want to impede on the residents, because they didn’t have a whole lot of space. So most of us slept in our automobiles at night, and then we’d get up.  But we were very fortunate. We had a couple of guys who evacuated with us. The maintenance man, his brother. And they managed to make a makeshift shower, so we were able to keep the residents clean. We really met all of their needs. And laughed, some crew from Red Cross came though, and they, I guess, panicked, seeing that we had all these elderly. And the first thing they said was that they would be more than happy to bring us food. Well, we were providing not only three meals a day, but three hot meals a day. They were getting balanced meals that were hot. So we just kind of got a kick out of that, because we were managing. 

We kind of started to panic. I’m trying to think, it must have been like Thursday of the first week. We had all these contracts with people, but nobody could get through.  And I’ll never forget, out of nowhere, these three trucks showed up. It was people from some northern state, I don’t even know where they were from, who just decided to get on the road. And they packaged ice, and just all the basics that they really needed. Ice. I never though ice would be such a thrill. But we were so happy to get ice. And they had propane, because we needed propane to run the things for the kitchen, you know. And they showed up with all of that.  Don’t ever think that one person can’t make a difference in this world. 

Chauvin, Daryl and Cathy, interview by Blanche Jewell, audio recording, 2007, 4700.1950. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Vicky Webb

VICKY WEBB: So he showed us where to go to get in the boat. So I asked, I asked him what I had to do with my dog. He said, “Don’t worry about it,” he said, “You’re going to be able to take your dog.” Oh my God, I got as light as a feather, you know. Then the next thing, “How Max going to put up? How he’s going to react?” But Max love the water, so I think that’s one thing that helped, you see? So I said, “Where Max going to be?” He put me seated. He said, “You sit right here,” he said, “and Max going to sit right there, right next to your feet.” I said, “Well God, God, please help me, please help me,” that he wouldn’t start pulling and barking and all of that. I got seated, Max came in like a human being. He sit by my feet. He didn’t try to bark. He didn’t try to move. And that’s when we went to Tulane. 

And after we knew that the buses couldn’t take us to New Roads, just out of the blue sky the guardian angel, the lady called me by name and she said, “Vicky, come over.”  And when I went there she said, “I overheard that no bus would be going to New Roads.” So she said, “My mother said that she would take you and your sister to New Roads.”  Oh my God.  I got as light-I was already light-I got lighter than a feather, you know.  I was so happy.  I didn’t believe it was real.  I just couldn’t believe it was real.  Just out of the deep blue.  They didn’t know us, you know.  And I said, “Oh yes!” I said how much we would love that and appreciate it.  

Webb, Victoria Davis, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2007, 4700.1957. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

BARBARA TERANCE: My mother never did leave during a hurricane. We’d figure we going to ride it out and my sister was going to go stay with Button in Gentilly  because we have a duplex in Gentilly and we thought we were safe that morning and my mother and I were eating breakfast and all of a sudden we heard like this rushing sound. We were like “What in the world is this?” When we looked down the water was bubbling up through the floor. When we ran to the door, it was a river. So I called 911 and they told us to try to get on the roof. And I called my sister, and all she could say was that the water had had risen real high over there and the phone went dead and that was it. And that was the only communication we had.  

That was Monday morning. And we didn’t get out until that Wednesday morning. I think either that Wednesday or Thursday morning because I would come sit out on the porch and we thought we were the only ones in the neighborhood. And that duplex over there, there were people that we saw. And we were hollering to them across the way and they told us to come over but neither one of us could swim and we didn’t have a boat. And so we were set outside and we were putting my mom in the wheel chair and sitting on the porch, and a boat stopped by, the National Guard, and they picked us up and they brought us right down to the bridge off of Gentilly Blvd and dropped us on the bridge on the Interstate and we had to wait there for a bus, a school bus.  

But they didn’t tell you where you were going. They put you on a bus but, they don’t tell you they are bringing you to a staging area. And somebody comes and whispers to the bus driver in his ear and he takes off and when he’s way out there I ask him, “where are we going?” And he says “I can tell you right now I’m bringing y’all to the Cajundome in Lafayette, but y’all don’t want to go there. So I asked him if we could make a pit stop. Well, people didn’t want to stop and I said “Well we need to make a stop”. We had crossed the bridge over to Port Allen. Well, Baton Rouge is right across. So when I knew we had crossed over from Baton Rouge to Port Allen, he stopped at this gas station, and I dragged my mother off the bus with her walker because we couldn’t bring her wheel chair. And we got to walk to Days Inn and she said she could make it. We sat in the lobby and gave us coffee because she didn’t have any rooms. And then hours later she came and said that they had a room. We were like, “Thank you Jesus!”  

Terance, Barbara, interview by Tatiana Clay, audio recording, 2007, 4700.1962. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

SHARON NORMAND: I came back the Monday after the storm. One week after the storm I came back, which is very early by most people’s return date. My husband is, you know, a physician at EJ [East Jefferson General Hospital], so he had to come back because the people that were there had been there for a whole week under horrible conditions and had you know other things that they had to do. So we came back and stayed at EJ for a few days on the gurney [laughs]. That was our bed. We shared a gurney.  

There were no elderly or children in the city when we came back. It was very strange.  Every time I go to City Hall, the staff there is reduced to like a minimum when they need it more than ever. They’re working like with a skeleton crew with like this primitive system of musical chairs you know. If one person goes in, everybody stands up and moves one chair over.  I’m not expecting any high tech system but it’s like super primitive. But every time we go, I take my mom, we actually always have a good time because we’re with like forty, you know, people in the same boat and people have their pictures with them because it’s required for almost everything. And everyone is showing each other their pictures of how nice, you know, or they’re showing the ugly pictures and telling each other how nice their house used to be. It’s very therapeutic and it’s very interesting because you are having to move chairs and it’s like you get a new mix of people every twenty minutes. It’s been hilarious, you know, and by the time you leave, you are going to wish people well and it’s been kind of fun–not the bureaucracy itself, but the people going through it too. It’s been very bonding. It’s hard to explain. To see my mom talking, with the people like that, it’s just precious. She’s encouraging them. It’s you know, just very cute.  

Normand, Sharon, interview by Tatiana Clay, audio recording, 2006, 4700.1964. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

MUSIC 

King, Freddie, interview by Tatiana Clay and Eric Julien, audio recording, 2008, 4700.1921.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

PHOTOGRAPHS 

The Louisiana Superdome, courtesy of  NOAA

All portraits courtesy of David Breidenbach   

 

This podcast is copyrighted by LSU Libraries Special Collections. 

For a full transcript of the podcast, please contact Jennifer Abraham at jabrah1@lsu.edu. 

<!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–> <!–[endif]–>The Julien Poydras Museum Arts Council in Pointe Coupee Parish

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Campus Buildings

April 22nd, 2010 by jabrah1

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EPISODE 8   (36:26)

Huey P. Long Fieldhouse, entrance

Huey P. Long Fieldhouse, entrance

In celebration of LSU Day and to continue with the Center’s series of podcasts dedicated to the LSU Sesquicentennial, this episode centers on LSU Buildings – the stories, personalities and histories behind the names.

We’ll hear from Cecil Taylor about President James Monroe Smith for whom Smith Hall was named and later un-named;  Lloyd Love will tell us about how he attended LSU with Alex Box, for whom the baseball stadium was named; Charles Barney talks about playing football for Coach Bernie Moore, for whom the track stadium is named;  Steele Burden will give us his opinion of Middleton Library; Quinn Coco talks about Hill Memorial Library when it was the main library;  Paul Young recalls a certain absent minded professor;  and former students, Abe Mickal, Wilbur Joffrion, and Albert Clary share stories about the once-upon-a-time center of campus activities, the Huey P. Long Fieldhouse.

AUDIO EXCERPT TRANSCRIPTIONS AND CITATIONS

ABE MICKAL is the key excerpt.  He recalls the layout of the Huey P. Long Fieldhouse from his days as a student at LSU in the late 1930s.    *For full transcription, see below.

Smith Hall, renamed to Pleasant Hall

Smith Hall, renamed to Pleasant Hall

CECIL TAYLOR:   In terms of the actual explosion, it was in the . . . in June of ’39, I guess.  Well, I was teaching in summer school and went to my early class.  I usually had a class at 7:30, I like to start early.  The students said, “Don’t we get a holiday?” [laughs]  ”Don’t we get a holiday?”  I said, “Why?”  I didn’t know anything about it.  They knew it, they had heard it on the radio, but I hadn’t listened to the radio.  What had happened is President Smith had skipped town. 

But the thing broke in June, and I don’t believe anything else in state government . . . I think this was the opening gun.  That when Dr. Smith ran away, then the rest of the thing began to unravel, the whole debacle of the post-Huey Long era, there.  It was tenuous.

Well, he was Secretary to the Board of Supervisors, and he was playing the futures market.  He ran short.  So he wrote up a set of minutes authorizing him to borrow in the name of the university.  He borrowed a half-million dollars to keep his enterprise afloat down there in New Orleans.

When we saw him walking around the campus, “we,” I guess being just I, had a little sense of pity for him.  He looked like a man heavily burdened . . . weight of things upon him.  But he got caught up in . . . He got caught in a thing.  Part of it was attributed to his wife.  She was definitely a social climber.  The Smith’s daughter, Margery, when she was coming of age, we’ll say, they offered her a debut.  They rented a floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans.  Imagine trying to sort of invade that society.

Taylor, Cecil,  interview by Pamela Dean, audio recording, 1992, 4700.0071. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

LLOYD LOVE:  Right now you hear the phrase “Box”  Alex Box Stadium, Alex Box Field.  That was just a cow pasture when I was there.  Then one day this baseball player said to me, “They’re going to pick a freshman manager for the baseball team and if you go over and make the application you might can get the job.”  I already had the job, so all they had to so was let me transfer over there.  I ran all the way over to the stadium where the coaches’ offices were at that time, and I got the job.  And then I had the time of my life. 

I grew up reading about the New York Giants and Mel Ott from New Orleans, who was a home run hitter.  Carl Hubbell, who was a left-handed pitcher and used to win twenty games a year and people like that.  They trained on the LSU campus in 1940.  I could go down and climb on the dugout and listen to them and watch them because of my job as student manager.

The New York Giants spent a lot of money on the field, but it never really got to be what is there now until Skip Bertman came and started that program.  But I think without doubt it’s the best baseball program in the nation . . . and that field . . . and they have that song about the Box. Alex Box was in my class at LSU and he was a football player actually. Wasn’t really that much of a baseball player.

But he was the first LSU student to be killed in World War II and that’s why they named it for . . . Named the baseball field Alex Box Stadium for him. 

Love, Lloyd, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 1999, 4700.1208, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Bernie Moore (L) and Charles Coates (R)

Bernie Moore (L) and Charles Coates (R)

CHARLES BARNEY:  Bernie Moore. Yes, okay. Bernie Moore. Yes, sure. And he was such a great example for all of us. He was a wonderful person. And didn’t put up with any horsing around or anything like that. He was very strict. But he was an excellent coach. Very good. Had won a lot of games. Was very prominent.

FRANCES BARNEY:  He and his wife would have the players and their, sometimes girlfriends and wives over to the house. And they would have big dinners. And they were so nice to us. They were just wonderful, homey, down to earth family. And they really cared about the players. Really treated them like family. Great guy.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM: What are some things that you learned from him as a coach? What are some of the things he’d say?

C. BARNEY: Well the first thing I learned is I wanted to be a coach the rest of my life. [laughs] Because I was so enamored with what I was doing, and so excited about it that, and he was such an outstanding person himself, that I thought that would be a great career. And I told my wife many times that’s what I was going to be. But it turned out that I found another interest. So I didn’t turn out to be a coach. And I still to this day kind of wish I had have been a coach.

C. BARNEY:  Now some of this, you may not want to even put in there. But I mean, you can do what you want to with it. But Bernie Moore, I found out, after I’d been there for about three or four months, if you go see Bernie, he could give you some cash. Well, we were always broke. There was no, we got a scholarship, we got food, we got a little bit of pay. But if you wanted more money, you went to see Bernie. You went in his office. He’d reach in a drawer and he’d pull out and he’d hand you cash. Quite a bit of cash. [laughs] That was it.

ABRAHAM:  Did you have to tell him what you were going to use it for or anything?

C. BARNEY:  No.

ABRAHAM:   Just say, “I need some.”

C. BARNEY:  Say, “I’m out of cash. I’m broke. I’ve got things that I got to do.”  That was really all it took. And it depended on how good he thought you were. [laughs]

ABRAHAM:  Third string, on the bench, not worth so much, right?

C. BARNEY:  No. No.

Barney, Charles interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2007, 4700.0944.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

hill_entrance

Hill Memorial Library

EVERETT BESCH:  We were going to start to talk about the Hill Memorial Library and you’ve mentioned I think to me that the Hill Memorial Library, the name of the library was retained from the old campus.

QUINN COCO:  Yes.

BESCH:  That’s the old campus, that’s where the old capital is now.

COCO:  Yes. The downtown area where the capital is now and state library and all of those . . .

BESCH:  Now up there at the old library, at the old campus . . .

COCO:  Mr. Hill, yes, Mr. Hill memorialized his son with, if I’m not mistaken, a ten thousand dollar gift to the university and the library named for his son.  The name was transferred to the new campus and given to the first library building on the new campus, Hill Memorial Library.

BESCH:  Now the library at the old campus was just a block building, a square block building several floors high, sat on the road that now passes to the west of the campus, west of the capital.

COCO:  Capital, right.

BESCH:  I recall looking at the pictures and that was called Hill Memorial Library, too.

COCO:  It was Hill Memorial Library on the old campus, yes.

BESCH:  And then prior to the Middleton Library, which we might say, the Middleton Library was only named Middleton after Middleton died, prior to that it was called the University Library.

COCO:  Yes, LSU Library.

BESCH:  And at that time the Hill Memorial Library, prior to that time, or prior to the construction of the Middleton Library the Hill Memorial Library was the university library.

COCO:  Yes, it’s a beautiful building too.

BESCH:  Yes, still is.

COCO:  Its ceilings must be sixteen feet tall.

BESCH:  Oh yes, more than that.

COCO:  I used to go and study, as a student I used to go study in the library.  It was fine built.

BESCH:  You got both the south and north reading rooms which were very . . . I bet those are a good twenty feet tall and then when the renovated it, you know the paneling in there is complete, there is no break in the paneling, so they used complete paneling.

COCO:  Beautiful paneling, beautiful wood paneling.

Coco, Quinn, interview by Everett Besch, audio recording, 1990, 4700.0179.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

STEELE BURDEN:  Of course that’s one of the most tragic things ever happened on the campus, putting the Middleton Library where it is today, because when the university was originally planned, the Quadrangle with all the same architecture, I’ve got a booklet here in which they said at the time that was done it was the most beautiful piece of architecture done in the United States at that time.  And of course the Middleton Library was put in the middle of it and broke up this . . .

KATHY GRIGSBY:  Quadrangle.

BURDEN:  Quadrangle.  After they put the library there, I spent the rest of my time trying to hide it.  I planted a forest in front of it.  I guess it’s all cut down now.

Burden, Steele, interview by Kathy Grigsby, audio recording, 1994, 4700.0452. Louisiana  and  Lower Mississippi  Valley  Collections,  LSU  Libraries,  Baton  Rouge,  Louisiana.

Coates Hall

Coates Hall

PAUL YOUNG:  One was Coates, C. E. Coates, Dr. C. E. Coates, Dean Coates, beautiful person.  All of the absent-minded professor jokes, they put off on Dean Coates.  I could tell you one or two.  I think maybe I will.  It is said, this was rumor of course, just as all mine, I’ll tell you about mine later.  They said one time that he took his wife, who was a lovely person, down to New Orleans to shop.  In those days, if you wanted to go to Maison Blanche, you went to New Orleans.  If you wanted to go the fancy store now, you just shop here in Baton Rouge, better of course.  But anyway, they said that he took her down there to shop one day, in a car of course, by that time automobiles had come in.  He took down there to shop.  And he went around some of his business, and then just came home by himself!  And when he got home, one of the boys said, “Where is mother?”  And he said, “Mother?  She is in New Orleans.”  So he went back and picked her up from the curb, out in front of Maison Blanche, or Godchaux’s, or somewhere.

Young, Paul, interview by Jack Fiser, audio recording, 1980, 4700.0066. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

A.P. TUREAUD, JR.:  When I got to the room they had assigned me to, which was the top floor of the stadium, which was the third or fourth floor up, there must have been fifty students standing, waiting outside of my door with scissors to clip your hair.  Because it, you know, the freshmen things, they cut all your hair off, and they were joking and laughing and carrying . . .  and having a good time.  I felt, “Oh, this is great.  This is just what I wanted.”  You know, I thought, “They’re going to be my friends.”

They came in, and my father was very excited.  He thought this, we all thought this was a welcome party.  They came in a talked and cut my hair and talked, joked to each other and so forth.  After I thought about it, I realized they were not talking to me, they were talking about me.  It was like I was an inanimate object [Tureaud laughs] that they were performing this ritual on.  I was trying to say,  “Well, what’s your name, and where do you eat?”  And I, well, they just ignored that.  They were just engaging with each other.  I didn’t realize it until after.

Of course, I looked like Ichabod Crane or some waif by the time they finished chopping all my hair off.  I had to go to a barber shop to have it evened out, and my parents took me.   We found a barber shop nearby, and of course, we realized they were white barber shops.  So, we had to find a black barber shop in town.  So, we went to a black barber shop, the guy buzzed my head through.

Then, I went back, I was anxious to get back to the campus and find all of these guys who had been cutting my hair and start making some friends.  They were gone.  They were gone.  The idea was we did what we had to do, and we’re out of here.   None of them, of course, spoke to me, and none of them acknowledged that they were there.  I shooed my parents away.  “Oh go, go home quick!  I got to get back, and all those guys are there, and I’m going to start making friends.”

When I got back to the room and when my parents dropped me off, I was absolutely alone.  That dormitory, the section I was in was totally deserted, and I sat there like in a funk about well where did everybody go?  I thought well they probably had something to do, I must have missed some event or something and maybe . . .  Well no, I, that was a, that was a severe blow.  Then as I thought about it, they really didn’t engage in any activity with me.  So, that was, that was hard.

TUREAUD:  My most touching moment. I don’t know if I can say this because it chokes me up, but my most touching moment at LSU, and I’ll never forget it was . . . This, I told you , I mentioned this to you once before.  One morning, I came out, I couldn’t sleep, and I came out just to be outside and to get away from that crazy dormitory with all the noise and stuff.  It was like six o’clock in the morning, and I was coming out of the dorm. I don’t know where I was going, but there was this black man out there sitting in a truck.  He had on bib overalls, and he had a little boy with him.  As I came out the entrance, he walked over to me and, big smile on his face, and he said, he asked me if I was A. P. Tureaud.  I said, “Yes.”   He said, “I thought you were.”  He said that he had been to the campus a few times, but he hadn’t seen me.  He lived somewhere in the Baton Rouge area, and he had brought his son who was six or seven years old to meet me because he wanted his kid to remember that this was possible.  That also made me realize that I had a responsibility to help other people realize that what I was doing was possible for everyone.  Because I didn’t go into this thing with a mission, and I wasn’t there to be a pioneer.  I just wanted to go to school.  But I realized . . . And I knew that would happen, that it would take on a different meaning for black people because people had come up to me . . . And at home, people would say, “We’re very proud of you,” and things like that, but this, this was a . . . This man and this little boy, you know, that just meant so much to me.

Tureaud, A.P., Jr. interview by Rachel Emanuel-Wallace, audio recording, 1993, 4700.0245.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Huey P. Long Fieldhouse, entrance

Huey P. Long Fieldhouse, entrance

MARY HEBERT:  Was the Fieldhouse one of the main hangouts on campus?

WILBUR JOFFRION:  Fieldhouse was like the [Student] Union is now, Fieldhouse was where you went to get you mail, where you went through it to check things out and maybe the barber shop was there where you met people, and I think they must have had a soda fountain there. Must have had a snack bar. It was kind of a hangout place.

HEBERT:  I’ve heard people describe smooch hollow, do you remember that area of campus?

JOFFRION:  I remember that, but I don’t remember going down there because I wasn’t smooching in those days. But I think that was where we went to have our initiation into this honorary math fraternity. It was just a nice little place where there were a lot of oak trees and halfway between where the men lived and where the women lived, a convenient stop off point.

Joffrion, Wilbur, interview by Mary Hebert, audio recording, 1999, 4700.0639. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Folder 1 - Abe Mickal copy

Abe Mickal, LSU Football Player, 1938

* ABE MICKAL:  Oh, yeah.  Well, we had fraternity dances.  We had fraternity and sorority dances.   Then, too there, I can remember we put on two or three big dances to make money for the council.  We had Jimmy Lunsford come down.  We tried to get, I think, Cab Calloway.  In those days, you would have to.  We would have a dance in the Fieldhouse, on the first floor of the Fieldhouse.  Remember, the Fieldhouse had that,  “L” shape.  I have not been there in a long time.  “L” shaped and you walked out and you looked down on the swimming pool.

JENNIFER ABRAHAM:  There is a picture of it in here.  There are a bunch of illustrations in this.

MICKAL:   Let’s see.  I remember the Fieldhouse. I don’t think it’s in here.  Well, you walk into the Fieldhouse.  You walk in the front door . . . it had the bookstore.  You have this hole.  Then, you walked out on this veranda, it had a swimming pool here.  It had the hand ball courts were on the side.  You ever walked out on the Fieldhouse?  Do that.

ABRAHAM:  I need to do that.

MICKAL:  It is the veranda that walked all around.  Now, there is a Bernie Moore Field now. Before that, it was just open air.  Open area, but we used to put the orchestra right here and everybody would dance.  It’s quite a size of a place, clear out all of that stuff; the sorority dances.  Of course, we also had the old gym.  By the time you took in the sorority and the fraternity, of course, you would get invited to several of those.  It was enough activity.  Okay.

Mickal, Abe, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 1998, 4700.1051. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

ALBERT CLARY:  It was the Huey Long Fieldhouse.  Was a, had a little snack bar and sort of almost a restaurant.  And you, and you, there were juke boxes in there and you could play music and it was a hangout for the students.  Also the Huey P. Long Fieldhouse was used for dances, tea dances, usually in the afternoons, they’d have tea dances, sororities would usually have them.  And so the Huey P. Long Fieldhouse was the center of activity on the campus at that time.

EVERETT BESCH:  But the . . . Was the Fieldhouse more of a student union?

CLARY:  It was the equivalent of a student union, yes.  Very small scale.

Clary, Albert, interview by Everett Besch, audio recording, 1993, 4700.0398. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

MUSIC

King, Freddie, interview by Tatiana Clay and Eric Julien, audio recording, 2008, 4700.1921.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Huey P. Long Fieldhouse, Under Stately Oaks, p. 79.

Smith Hall, LSU Gumbo, 1943.

Bernie Moore and Charles Coates, Office of Public Relations Photographs, RG #A5000.0020

Hill Memorial Library

Coates Hall, A Pictorial Record of the First Hundred Years.

Abe Mickal, LSU Photograph Collection, A Golden Century Exhibit Photographs, RG #A5000.

 

This podcast is copyrighted by LSU Libraries Special Collections.

For a full transcript of the podcast, please contact Jennifer Abraham at jabrah1@lsu.edu.

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“All of a Sudden All These Dames Show Up:” Women’s History at LSU

March 29th, 2010 by jabrah1

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EPISODE 7   (30:12)

To recognize the history of women at LSU and the LSU Sesquicentennial, this podcast episode centers on the role that women played in the changing demographics of attendance at LSU.  In 1929, women began living on the new campus and thirty-something years later, African-American men and women began living on campus.  

                         campus gowns cropped                                  AKA, LSU Gumbo 1973                                            

We’ll hear from some of the first women to live in Smith Hall on the new campus in the 1930s. Sharing their stories are a home economics major, a law student, a Metropolitan Opera star, and a mural artist. Then we’ll jump ahead to the 1960s and listen to stories from the first African-American woman to live on campus, one of the students who integrated the undergraduate program, and two women who were charter members of Alpha Kappa Alpha at LSU.

We hope that you enjoy today’s episode, which is being presented as a video podcast. If you are viewing this on a Mac, please use Firefox browser.

AUDIO EXCERPT CITATIONS

Glassell, Alfred C., interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2006, 4700.1747. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Berkett, Marian Meyer, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2004, 4700.1933. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Howell, Dorothy Colvin, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2002, 4700.1418. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Brown-Dietrich, Sue, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2001, 4700.1507. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Greer, Frances, interview by Ronald and J. Ross, audio recording, 1997, 4700.0902.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Rivers, Freya Anderson, interview by Maxine Crump, audio recording, 1993, 4700.0335. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Crump, Maxine, interview by Pamela Dean, audio recording, 1992, 4700.0117. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Lamotte, Joanne, interview by Mary Hebert, audio recording, 1994, 4700.0400. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Howard, Dee, interview by Mary Hebert, audio recording, 1993, 4700.0323. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

MUSIC

King, Freddie, interview by Tatiana Clay and Eric Julien, audio recording, 2008, 4700.1921.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Still photos from LSU Libraries Special Collections

Still photos courtesy of Freya Rivers and the LSU Department of Human Ecology

 

This podcast is copyrighted by LSU Libraries Special Collections.

For a full transcript of the podcast, please contact Jennifer Abraham at jabrah1@lsu.edu.

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Campus Stories

February 23rd, 2010 by jabrah1

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EPISODE 6   (18:56)      

Lora Hinton playing for the LSU Tigers

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the founding of LSU and there are celebrations commemorating this event all throughout the year. The Center is also marking its 18th year on campus!  The Center’s original initiative was to document the history of LSU.  Today we have over 500 interviews with faculty, staff, and alumni.  Topics include: Distinguished Faculty and Administrators; Distinguished Alumni; Athletics; Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine; Ole War Skule and the Military Tradition at LSU; Integration and the African American Experience at LSU; Women at LSU, and the history of Student Government Association Presidents.   

University History is where the Center started and that topic has led us through many wonderful stories both in and out of LSU. Because we tend to conduct life-narratives with those we interview, additional topics organically grew out of the LSU History project. An interview with someone who went to LSU in the 30s inevitably leads to a story about Huey Long. An interview with a 1942 alum always involves a war story, and an interview with someone who attended LSU in the 50s, 60s or 70s often leads to a story about integration, women’s lib, civil rights, and/or  the Vietnam War.     

In this episode, we’ll get a snapshot of life on campus from the early 1900s through the 1960s. We’ll hear about the Ole War Skule from a former cadet; we’ll hear about fashions of the 20s from one of the few women who attended LSU at the time; a former yearbook editor defends her use of a controversial symbol in the 1933 LSU Gumbo; and we’ll hear stories about integrating the LSU undergraduate school and the football team.     

Enjoy!     

AUDIO EXCERPT TRANSCRIPTIONS AND CITATIONS     

LEONA SPAHT HUFF is the key excerpt. She discusses the unspoken dress code of university students at the time. *For full transcription, see below.     

Andrew Babin belonged to E Company in the "Ole War Skule"

ANDREW BABIN:  And the average student knew everybody at the university.  You know you would see them walking by on Sunday evening in the parade in front of the old barracks.  That was a popular place.  But then when the automobile came, they would drive fast through the university so that the president put some hills, you know.  And they had a guard in the [Louise] Garig building, and he was paid a salary to report all of those who speeded across.  Now that Mary Bird who founded that hospital, she ran through the boys going to dinner; they almost put her in jail. 

PAMELA DEAN:  She just drove right through.    

BABIN:  She had a big car, and she went fast.  Yes, sir.   
DEAN:  What would an average meal be?
BABIN:  Well, on Sunday we always had ham, on Sunday.  And . . . I’ll tell you a joke.  They had beans for dinner.  One fellow hollered that they had a rat in the beans.  They cooked the rat with it.  [laughs]   
DEAN:  So on Sundays you had ham.  And what did you have for just a regular meal during the week? 
BABIN:  Vegetables and sausage and spaghetti.  We had biscuits all the time, and syrup; they had that on the table.  But they had a place where the officers ate. 
DEAN:  I see. 
BABIN:  But that was special. 
DEAN:  So you had an officers table? 
BABIN:  They didn’t eat where we ate. 
DEAN:  Oh, they had a whole different table. 
BABIN:  Oh, yes! 
DEAN:  Now, this was not the cadet officers.  Was this the cadet officers? 
BABIN:  Yes.  The cadet officers, they ate with us, and they had a special table, a special meal everyday, but we didn’t mind it.  
Babin, Andrew, interview by Pamela Dean, audio recording, 1992, 4700.0099. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.   

Leona Spaht

* LEONA SPAHT HUFF:  Well, all the girls we knew wouldn’t even think of wearing pants to school or shorts or anything like that.  The boys wore shirts and long pants.  I don’t think anybody tried to wear anything else.  I mean just take for granted, that’s what you’d wear.   

If you live in town, you could catch a ride.  It was very popular then.  They didn’t have buses.  The students would just go out and catch a ride.  You know, that’s what the boys would do if they knew a girl who lived in town and want to have a date.  But there were no apartments.  And the girls who lived in the dorm, I don’t know about the men’s dorm, but they had to check in and out.  They had very strict rules about what time they had to be in, and I think, ten o’clock on the weekdays.  Which was a good idea, now that I see what goes on.     

Huff, Leona Spaht, interview  by Katherine Huff O’Neil, audio recording, 1995, 4700.0508. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.   

Marian Meyer, LSU Gumbo Editor

MARIAN MEYER BERKETT:  Well, I was of course informed that I would be the editor of The Gumbo, and that is the annual at LSU. And in preparation for it, I wanted to make a theme to run through.  And on the campus we have an Indian mound, so I adopted a theme of the mound builders throughout – not just LSU, but throughout the region. So the artwork [in the Gumbo] is attuned to that, and one of these symbols that these Indian tribes used besides other symbols that were there was in inverted what we now call the swastika.  It is a symbol that has been used world-wide by different tribes and different ethnic groups.  And while Hitler came to power in March of ’33, I really had started all my plans on the Gumbo before.  And somehow it . . . because it wasn’t really the same symbol, I persisted even after he came to power because it was part of the artwork of what I was trying to represent.  And nevertheless, when the book finally came out it caused a lot of criticism, about why I was using the swastika, which I was not, and particularly why I, a Jewish girl, would be using it in the annual.  And that’s the explanation. So be it.    

Berkett, Marian Meyer, interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2004, 4700.1933.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana  

A.P. TUREAUD, JR.:   We packed the car from New Orleans and you know the typical excitement.  The other thing, too, is that I didn’t have the opportunity, as you said, to go, to be oriented, to be recruited, and to be courted by the university or encouraged to come.  It was, “No, don’t come.  You’re not welcome, go somewhere else.”  So that and all of the other social amenities and support systems that other students had I didn’t have.  The only support system I had were my parents, and they were right there.  We loaded up the car with all the typical things including a typewriter and a pillow and all that stuff, got to LSU, and then were refused.  I was refused admittance…. We went back the next day, and I was admitted.  I did live in the dormitory.  And, the students did queue up outside of my room.  I had been escorted from the president’s office to the stadium where I lived.    

Tureaud, A.P. Jr., interview by Rachel Emanuel-Wallace, audio recording, 1993, 4700.0245.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.     

Lora Hinton

MARY HEBERT:  You were the first black football player to be given a scholarship to LSU.  Were you aware of that when that scholarship was offered to you?    

LORA HINTON:  Yes, I was.     

HEBERT:  How did you feel about that?    

HINTON:  It was a challenge I was ready for.  I think, at that time, they were interested in recruiting black athletes. And, I was just ready to come on in and show that we not only had the ability to play, but we also had the ability to do the class work and so forth. Every day all you guys are paying the same price, and you’ve got something in mind that you want to get done.  When you see the other guy paying the same price you’re paying, then you’re just naturally going to respect that guy.  That’s probably why athletics is good for this country.      

HEBERT:  Were there places around campus like bars or restaurants that did not freely welcome black students?    

HINTON:  Yes, there were some.     

HEBERT:  Did you avoid those places?    

HINTON:  Of course.  But, that wasn’t a big issue with me because some of those places, when the team went there, they made sure that I was there, and if anybody had any problem with that, they had to deal with those guys.  That’s just the way it was.    

HEBERT:  Still being a part of the team.    

HINTON:  Yes.  They made sure that if it was a team function, “You be there.  I’m going to be there with you.”  That was nice.  These are Southern boys telling me that.   They’re from right here.  “This is my teammate.  This is my friend.  This is his name.”  And you know, “Okay, come on in.”  It made a difference.     

Hinton, Lora, interview by Mary Hebert (Price), audio recording, 1993, 4700.0327.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.       

MUSIC       

King, Freddie, interview by Tatiana Clay and Eric Julien, audio recording, 2008, 4700.1921.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.       

PHOTOGRAPHS      

Lora Hinton playing football for the LSU Tigers, LSU Gumbo, 1973 

Andrew Babin and E Company, LSU Gumbo, 1917

Leona Spaht, LSU Gumbo, 1933

Marian Meyer, LSU Gumbo Editor 1933

Lora Hinton, LSU Gumbo, 1973

        

This podcast is copyrighted by LSU Libraries Special Collections.       

For a full transcript of the podcast, please contact Jennifer Abraham at jabrah1@lsu.edu.      

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“People Rode Free by Day and Paid for it at Night:” How the Baton Rouge Community Influenced Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 15th, 2010 by jabrah1

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EPISODE 5   (26:45) 

Free Ride System, Baton Rouge, 1953

Free Ride System, Baton Rouge, 1953

 

On January 18 we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. In observance of this holiday, the Center would like to honor his memory as well as explore the role that Baton Rouge citizen activism played in King’s political successes. 

MLK had a tie to Baton Rouge through his religious and political affiliations. For example, early in his adult life, Dr. King visited Southern University for Sunday Vespers. But what a lot of people don’t know is that Baton Rouge had a direct effect on Dr. King, and thus on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. In early 1956, Dr. King paid a visit to Baton Rouge that would irrevocably change the course of 20th century history.  He came here to study the blueprint of the 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott, a non-violent protest where the city’s African American residents boycotted the public transportation system, organized an alternative car-pooling system, and in eight days collapsed the city’s bus system. Ultimately, the boycott did not end segregation in Louisiana, but it inspired the leaders for the next battle in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Federal courts.  After meeting with the organizers of the boycott, Dr. King returned to Alabama and applied the lessons learned in Louisiana.  With a call for unity, he and fellow activists like Rosa Parks carried out the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

In today’s podcast we’ll hear from those who were inspired by Dr. King in their humanitarian efforts here in Baton Rouge, and we’ll hear from those who were involved in the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott that inspired Dr. King and his fellow citizens to take action that led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared state and city laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional. 

AUDIO EXCERPT TRANSCRIPTIONS AND CITATIONS 

DUPUY ANDERSON is the key excerpt.  He discusses the lessons Dr. King learned from the Baton Rouge compromise, ending the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott.  *For full transcription, see below. 

HUEL PERKINS:  Martin Luther King, before he was famous, used to come to Southern. We had what was called a vespers series, and it was a lecture series. And he would come and he’d talk to us. We had no idea that he was going to become as famous as he would become. But we got a chance to meet him. And I remember at Northwestern he came up, and I was invited to the luncheon they gave him. So I got a chance to meet him at various points in his career. These sorts of things changed America. You can say what you want. Voting Rights Act of 1964, Lyndon Johnson. All these things had everything to do with the changing of America, and the South. And let me be specific. When all the places, the eating places, were opened up in Baton Rouge, I had a friend, Rogers Newman. I said, he was studying out in California. He was doing some research out there. I said, “Come back to Baton Rouge. Blacks are eating everywhere.” [laughs] And they were. Look, they could go to Sears and Roebucks, they could go to Walgreen’s, they could go to Stroube’s, all these places that were not open before. 

Perkins, Huel, interview by Petra Hendry and Dorian McCoy, audio recording, 2006, 4700.1792.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  

PAUL Y. BURNS: Well in 1968 we had another project. Ralph Dreger and I went down to the Highways Department, Louisiana Department of Highways, down by the governor’s mansion, and we were investigating racial discrimination in their signs and we found four kinds of restrooms. [laughs] They had white ladies and black women and white gentlemen and black men. I think, something like that so. It was ridiculous. Well actually in a sense it was even more ridiculous because the Louisiana legislature back, the time that building was built, it was built the same time the LSU library was built, about 1958, the new Middleton Library. They had a law that you had to have separate drinking fountains and separate restrooms I think. In the case of Middleton Library you’ll find on each floor two . . .drinking fountains.  And the reason is one originally was for blacks and the other was for whites. One of the LSU students, some LSU student over there wrote under “white” he put “trash.” [laughs] Sense of humor you know. So it wasn’t long before they tore those signs down. That’s the reason you go to Middleton Library you got these two drinking fountains, identical, side to side, separate but equal you know. Well the same deal I guess was going on down at the highway deal, and we thought that was ridiculous so we wrote to the head, the highway department head and didn’t get a response so we wrote to the governor and we got a response and those signs were changed. 

ABRAHAM:  Who was the Governor at the time? 

BURNS:  McKeithen, I think, was Governor. 

ABRAHAM: And so the signs were changed at once? 

BURNS:  Yes. Yes. 

ABRAHAM:  So you would think . . . Would you say that letter writing is a good strategy? 

BURNS:  It was in a case where you have…it’s kind of like Martin Luther King Junior and his nonviolent protest where you have a good cause and you know you’re right.  And you also know that the people that you’re protesting about know in their hearts it’s wrong what they’re doing. 

ABRAHAM:  So you’re appealing to them on a human to human level? 

BURNS:  Yes. Do the right thing because it’s the right thing.  We also appealed to them, do the right thing because it’s the law, sometimes that.  Or do the right thing because you’re going to make more money if you do the right thing than if you continue to do the wrong thing. 

Burns, Paul Y., interview by Jennifer Abraham, audio recording, 2001, 4700.1336. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

Dupuy Anderson

 

* MAXINE CRUMP:  I want to go back up to the bus boycott for a couple more questions.  One of things that happened as a result of the bus boycott was that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. came down to meet with the designers of the bus boycott here in this area, in order to carry out the Montgomery bus boycott.  Were you involved in that meeting? 

DUPUY ANDERSON:  I was there with Johnnie Jones, Raymond Scott, Reverend Jemison a few others.
CRUMP:  Okay.  What sort of things did he want to know?
ANDERSON:  One of the things, and most important things, he wanted to know how we did the community to rally behind us, and to get the business people, the filling stations and the like.
CRUMP:  The black businesses?
ANDERSON:  The black businesses, to gain their support.  They had planned to go through.  I think Martin Luther’s plan was regardless we are going to boycott.  But he knew they needed complete support of the black community in order to carry out a bus boycott.
Anderson, Dupuy, interview by Maxine Crump, audio recording, 1994, 4700.0418. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.Free Ride System, 1953
The following excerpts were taken from “‘Old Ways No More:’ Oral Histories of the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott”, copyrighted by the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, LSU Libraries Special Collections, 2003.   For the full presentation, please visit our site on the LOUISiana Digital Libraries.  All excerpts in the presentation are from LSU Libraries Special Collections housed at the Williams Center.

DUPUY ANDERSON:  Coming up in segregated community, we had no judges. We had no architects. We had no engineers. And going to a segregated school and living in a segregated community at the time, my experience was very limited; my thinking was very limited to other careers. . . . We didn’t even think of a black policeman or a black judge. 

REGINALD BROWN:  My mother, she was a veteran of World War II, and so was her brother, my uncle. When they came back to Baton Rouge from the war, it was very, very much a crude awakening for her. She thought things would be a lot different. 

WILLIS REED:  I would deliver [groceries] to LSU, but I couldn’t go up to the front. I couldn’t carry the bill up there to get anybody to sign it, because I was black. When I carried the eggs or chickens or what it is, I just had to stand around and wait until somebody came up to the front, or else somebody in the front would come back there to take my bill up there.   

Olivia Huey

Olivia Huey

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

OLIVIA HUEY:  In some ways, now that I look back on it, it was humiliating for the blacks. Because you get on the bus, and you paid what everybody else paid, but you couldn’t sit where everybody else would sit. There was a divided section. You would go to that section and sit on the bus. If you sat anywhere else, you were asked to go to the back of the bus. And it was known at that time that the blacks did not sit in the front of the bus. 

REVEREND T.J. JEMISON:  The blacks going down into South Baton Rouge were forced to stand up over empty seats. They could put their bags, their bundles, in the seats, but they couldn’t put their bodies. Of course, I thought that was ridiculous. I was much younger then, and I was more daring, and I thought we would have to do something about that. And of course, we did. 

JEMISON:  The City Council heard our plea. They passed an ordinance; the ordinance was Ordinance 222. That said that black people could sit from the back to the front and whites could sit from the front to the back. There would be no reserved seats, and that first come, first served. 

REED:  The next morning, a lady got on the bus. And when she got on the bus, the bus driver comes up, took the lady off and tried to arrest her. When the police got there, he arrested the lady. But then somebody came from police headquarters and said ‘You ain’t got no business arresting this lady.’ And he told the policeman, ‘You go back to headquarters. I’ll handle this.’ So the bus company, they got mad and went on a strike. 

ANDERSON:  recalls a stirring moment that night on June 18:  “The night before the boycott, one little woman asked to speak. She got up and gave a very stirring speech — that she had an old raggedy car, and she would run it until you couldn’t run it any more. That morning at five o’clock we were all in place with our automobiles ready to accept the challenge. 

ALMENIA FREEMAN:  When the bus boycott come along in 1953, I was happy to help with that. We met with Mr. [Fred] Matthews and Reverend Jemison and others. We had meetings, and I was available to get out and drive up and down the road, take people wherever they had to go. It was like a daily job. It was a pleasure, you know? 

BROWN: Mass meetings basically took place at churches. When they put on this big mass meeting at Memorial Stadium, that was an effort to show unity, strength and bring about the raising of funds to finance this massive bus boycott.  

Rev. T. J. Jemison

Rev. T. J. Jemison

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

JEMISON:  Well at night, when we had our mass meetings, we would take up money that would pay for the gas and the tires and whatever else happened to the cars during the time they were driving them. The people rode free in the day and paid for it at night. 

WILLIE SPOONER, JR.:  And during the bus boycott it was a tremendous sacrifice for me because I was married; I was working on Terrace and Highland Road, so bus transportation was the only transportation that I had at that time. But we gave it up, my wife and I. We gave it up to try to make the bus boycott work. 

JOHNNIE JONES:  [Reverend Jemison] went down and entered into a compromise with the mayor and the city council that they wouldn’t desegregate the bus. Jemison thought that was right as long as it was ‘separate but equal,’ because that was the law. There wasn’t any animosity between us. It was just that I didn’t agree; because to me, ‘separate but equal’ was wrong. 

SPOONER:  Everybody was glad. We had a chance to go back and ride the bus, and you could sit where you wanted to sit. The person who rode the bus was really happy that it was over. . . .We weren’t going to ride the bus unless some demands were met; and those demands were met.  

ANDERSON:  Baton Rouge is known for appeasement. Give me a little taste of the pie, and they quiet us down. Those of us that wanted the whole pie, or half of the pie, was rabble-rousers.   

Free Ride system in action, 1953

Free Ride system in action, 1953

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

CRUMP:  Did he respond to the compromise? 

ANDERSON:  Who? 

CRUMP:  Dr. King.  Did he comment on the compromise that took place with the Baton? 

ANDERSON:  No, I don’ t think he did.  But, he went through with his boycott.  And it was my feeling, this is the reason why he was successful. 

CRUMP:  Because he had learned from the compromise? 

ANDERSON:  He learned from it.  He learned from it.  We could have done the same thing in this community.  You know we started off a lot of things right here in Baton Rouge, but we did not carry it to the complete finish 

Anderson, Dupuy, interview by Maxine Crump, audio recording, 1994, 4700.0418. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

Johnnie Jones

Johnnie Jones

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

JONES:  When we prepared the petition for the federal court, Reverend Jemison did not want that.  

BETH SMITH:  Why? 

JONES:  He said he wanted the power structure of this city and of this parish to know that we, the black people, still had faith in them and trust them to do right.  He was a Christian.  That’s religious talk.  That was alright in the church house, but that doesn’t mean a thing in the court house.  You see.  It’s hard to get… Martin Luther King, one of the few preachers, and another guy Stalworth I think his name was, out in Alabama, they were one of the few people that saw that different.  That was, the church house was one thing.  The court house was another one. 

SMITH:  Do you think the bus boycott might have been just too soon for Baton Rouge to handle? 

JONES:  The time had not quite come for Reverend Jemison to do what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did, but he did a yeoman’s job, a very good job.  He started the ball a-rolling.  He got things started.  He opened their eyes.  Martin Luther King sought out Jemison to get information on how to proceed with a boycott.  He was a forerunner.  His philosophy was filled with good intentions.  “Let them see that we still believe that they will do right.  We trust them.”  He was hoping.  He was hoping that they would go ahead on and desegregate the buses in a different manner. 

Jones, Johnnie, interview by Beth Smith, audio recording, 2002, 4700.1589. Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

MUSIC 

King, Freddie, interview by Tatiana Clay and Eric Julien, audio recording, 2008, 4700.1921.  Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

PHOTOGRAPHS 

Free Ride System, Baton Rouge, 1953.  Courtesy Ernest Ritchie. Rembrandt Studio 

Dupuy Anderson 

Free Ride System, Baton Rouge, 1953.  Courtesy Ernest Ritchie. Rembrandt Studio 

Olivia Huey 

Reverend T.J. Jemison, photo rights reserved 

Free Ride System, Baton Rouge, 1953.  Courtesy Ernest Ritchie. Rembrandt Studio 

Johnnie Jones 

  

This podcast is copyrighted by LSU Libraries Special Collections. 

For a full transcript of the podcast, please contact Jennifer Abraham at jabrah1@lsu.edu. 

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