Columns

Big Joe was a mean pig and a natural troublemaker who regularly got out of his pen in Eunice to throw his weight around. Sam McManus thought of himself as a gallant knight like the ones who slew dragons and saved towns in ancient times.
The headline in the Ville Platte Gazette on Feb. 12, 1938, tells what happened when they met: “Man and Pig Battle Said Real Classic.” The gallant knight won the “tusk-to-club battle,” but not without “both combatants getting seriously injured.”

Alice, a high school guidance counselor, was conducting a job and career seminar for seniors. During their four years in high school, she overheard students worrying about their hair, their clothes, who was dating who, what cars people were driving, along with all the other typical teenage angst.

A heroic daughter and a bale of cotton saved her father’s life when the steamboat Lessie Taylor sank just after leaving the busy St. Landry port at Washington on Feb. 3, 1878.
The boat had been running regularly to New Orleans for nearly a decade by then and was regarded as one of the better steamers operating on Bayou Courtableau before it ran into a streak of bad luck. The late David Jasper McNicoll recalled in a memoir about Washington in the 1800s that the sinking was such a big deal that “folks used to mark time by that event.”