Columns

There has been an admirable effort in recent years to clean up Bayou Teche and other south Louisiana waterways and to protect the oaks that are such a magnificent part of our scenery. We generally attribute it to a new awareness of our environment and of its fragility.

“The bravest man that ever lived.” That’s how Gen. Richard Taylor described Confederate gunboat captain Emelius Woods Fuller, who fought in south Louisiana.

If you haven’t had your flu shot yet, get one. It can save you a lot of misery and maybe even save your life. Thanks to new vaccines, we’re not likely to have an epidemic like the one that swept across the world in 1918, but a lot of people do still get sick each year.

It was front-page news all across the area in late October 1902 when Southern Pacific announced a new schedule that offered two trains a day running across south Louisiana to connect New Orleans with San Francisco.

I think I’ve confessed before that I love to read advertisements in old newspapers, perhaps more than most of the stories they contain.

An explosion in an oil stove got the blame for the fire that destroyed G. J. Deville’s dance hall and killed 28 people in Ville Platte in the early evening of Saturday, Nov. 22, 1919, but some people said simple panic had a lot to do with the deaths also.

When the railroad crossed the south Louisiana prairies in 1880, land that was once thought of only as grazing land for wild cattle became accessible to farmers from the Midwest who saw in our benign climate and fertile soil a land of milk and honey.

They say that a true Cajun can look at a field of growing rice and tell exactly how much gravy it will require after harvest.

Some St. Martin Parish plantation owners were trying to drill a well to irrigate their rice crop in 1902 and got really upset when the doggoned well kept producing oil and gas. They drew a crowd after tossing a match into the gas, but still couldn’t draw water for their rice.

Weather forecasters are saying that the strongest El Niño in 50 years could bring a white Christmas to places that typically do not see snow in December, but the odds are still loaded against Santa needing snow shoes in south Louisiana.