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LEROY - Three baseball players from North Vermilion have officially signed letters of intent to continue their careers at the junior college level.
The signings include:
• Kevin Marix, who will be playing at Nunez Community College in Chalmette, Louisiana. They compete against teams like LSU-E, Delgado, and Baton Rouge Community College. Marix is an infielder and a right-handed pitcher for the Patriots.
• Blaze Duhon has signed with South Arkansas, based in El Dorado, Arkansas. Duhon plays first base and is a left-handed pitcher for NVHS.
• Alex Landry has committed to Gulf Coast State Community College in Panama City, Florida. Landry plays center field and is also a left-handed pitcher.

These three Patriots are set to uphold the legacy of North Vermilion baseball. As of 2026, there are six former Patriots playing college baseball and one in the Minor Leagues, although at the Class 3A level.

April 17, 1937 ~ January 12, 2026

Funeral services officiated by Deacon William Vincent will be held at 11:30 a.m. Friday, January 16, 2026, at Vincent Funeral Home of Abbeville, honoring the life of Delmer Lee Jordan, 88, who passed away on January 12, 2026, at Our Lady of Lourdes Regional Medical Center. He will be laid to rest at St. Mary Magdalen Cemetery. Serving as pallbearers will be Seth Robinson, Colby LeBlanc, Garrett LeBlanc, Cade LeBlanc, Brock Jordan, and Cainnon Meche.
Delmer lived a life dedicated to service, as a dump truck driver and as a respected bus driver for the Vermilion Parish School Board, where he was known for his kindness and dedication. To this day, students who rode his bus loved to talk to Mr. Delmer when they saw him. He never met a stranger. His easy smile and kind heart allowed him to strike up a conversation with anyone, leaving each person he met feeling valued and at ease.
A visitation will take place at Vincent Funeral Home of Abbeville, 209 S. Saint Charles St., Abbeville, on Thursday, January 15, 2026, from 3:30 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. The visitation will continue on Friday, January 16, 2026, from 9:00 AM until the time of services.
He is survived by his devoted wife of 65 years, Rosa Nel B. Jordan; son, Ernie P. Jordan; two daughters, Janeen J. Trivanovich and her husband, David and Francine J. Veazey and her husband, Chad; grandchildren, Colby LeBlanc and his wife, Stacy, Cade LeBlanc, Brock Jordan, and Seth Robinson; great grandchildren, Kallie LeBlanc, Garrett LeBlanc, Cole LeBlanc, and Dani LeBlanc; one great-great grandchild, Railynn Meche; and sister, Lois J. Johnson
He was preceded in death by his parents, John Jordan and the former Odelia Young; daughter, Vanessa LeBlanc; in-laws Ernest and Una Broussard; and several siblings.
The family would like to extend a special thanks to Our Lady of Lourdes JD Moncus Cancer Center nurses and doctors.
All funeral arrangements are being conducted by Vincent Funeral Home - Abbeville (337) 893-4661.

Since the beginning of his second term, President Donald Trump has made tremendous progress in halting the flow of illegal drugs into our country. On the first day of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order that allowed criminal organizations and drug cartels, such as the Venezuelan gang “Tren de Aragua,” to be labeled as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Also, as he started his second term, the President made it a priority to secure the southern border, which has saved countless American lives.
Under President Joe Biden, the open border led to illegal drugs flooding our nation. The results were horrific as the annual number of Americans killed by illegal drugs skyrocketed. It reached a peak of 114,000 drug overdose deaths in the 12-month period ending in September 2023.
Along with securing the border, President Trump authorized 35 military strikes against narco-terrorist boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Since early September, these strikes have killed at least 115 drug cartel criminals. According to President Trump, for every narco-terrorist vessel destroyed, 25,000 American lives were saved.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration began building up military forces in the region. While F-35 fighter jets were deployed to Puerto Rico, “three guided-missile destroyers,” were sent to the waters off the Venezuelan coast.
Eventually, the naval force assembled in the Caribbean Sea would include “nearly a dozen Navy ships” and 12,000 troops, as well as the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, “the U.S. military’s most advanced aircraft carrier.”
On December 10, an oil tanker was seized off the coast of Venezuela that was carrying “2 million barrels of heavy crude” oil. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the tanker was part of “an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations.”
In the weeks that followed, another tanker was seized, a blockade was instituted and a docking facility used for illegal drugs was destroyed. Discussions were also held with Venezuelan dictator Nicolos Maduro, encouraging him to leave office.
After giving Maduro numerous chances to resign peacefully, the President authorized a lightning military strike that was flawlessly executed. Early Saturday morning, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were extracted in an operation led by “Delta Force, the U.S. Army’s most elite counterterrorism and direct-action unit.”
Venezuela was a major supplier of cocaine into the United States; however, 70% of U.S. drug overdose deaths are due to fentanyl. These drugs are shipped across our southern border after being produced by Mexican drug cartels using chemicals supplied by China.
Sadly, these vicious drug cartels are extremely powerful and totally control Mexico. As President Trump noted in a Fox News interview, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is “not running Mexico. The cartels are running Mexico.” The President said that Sheinbaum is “very frightened” of the cartels and has rebuffed his offer to destroy them.
Trump claimed that “Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico.” The President is correct; the Mexican drug cartels are a direct threat to the United States.
Instead of being grateful that Maduro, a dangerous narco-terrorist leader, was apprehended and will face justice, the Mexican government denounced the U.S. military operation in Venezuela.
In their statement, the Mexican government “strongly” condemned the “military actions carried out unilaterally in recent hours by armed forces of the United States of America.”
With the opposition of the Mexican government and Sheinbaum’s refusal to combat the drug cartels, once again, President Trump will be faced with a major decision. While the Mexican President is afraid of the drug cartels, President Trump and our military are not fearful.
Trump realizes that Mexico treats the United States horribly, allowing drugs and illegal immigrants to flood into our nation. If the President decides to act, the United States military has the capability to destroy every Mexican drug cartel. Successfully defeating these deadly cartels would be the biggest step forward in the history of our “war on drugs.”
Trump has been the first United States president to launch a serious “war on drugs” by directly engaging the suppliers with military force and removing a narco-terrorist at the forefront of the illicit shipments into our country. The results have been outstanding, but victory cannot be achieved until the Mexican drug cartels are eradicated.
Striking the Mexican drug cartels can be the latest move of the Trump administration to bring order to the Western Hemisphere. President Trump is updating the Monroe Doctrine for the current era. He said, “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot.”
Under President Trump’s doctrine, the goal is to prevent “hostile actors, foreign-backed criminal networks, and destabilizing regimes from gaining footholds in the hemisphere.” Narco-terrorist organizations in our “neighborhood” should no longer feel comfortable trying to destabilize and destroy the United States. Henceforth, they must face consequences.
President Trump has already placed the outlaw regime of Columbia on notice. He has called the communist dictatorship of Cuba “a failing nation;” however, dealing with Mexico should be next on his agenda.

Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian and is a political columnist, the author of America’s Last Chance, and provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and at Crouere.net. For more information, email him at jcrouere@gmail.com

I was looking for something else when I came across a listing of every post office in the United States at the beginning of 1851. It points up the fact that most of south Louisiana was still sparsely settled just fifteen years before the Civil War, and that it was no easy task for mail or people to get across swamps, marshes, and prairies in those days.
There were fewer than twenty post offices listed in south Louisiana west of the Atchafalaya River, and only two of those, Lake Charles and Ballew’s Ferry (near Vinton on the Sabine River), were west of the Mermentau. It would be thirty years before a railroad spanned the prairies and began to fill with towns that needed post offices.
The places listed in the “Table of Post Offices in the United States on the First Day of January 1851” (W. & J.C. Greer Printers, Washington, D.C.), almost all sprang up on waterways of one size or another. In addition to Lake Charles and Ballew’s Ferry, they include Abbeville, Alligator (St. Mary Parish), Bayou Chicot, Bayou Ramos (St. Mary). Breaux’s Bridge, Fausse Pointe (probably Loreauville today), Franklin, New Iberia, Opelousas, Pattersonville (now Patterson), Perry’s Bridge (now Perry), Plaquemine Brulee, St. Martinsville [sic], Vermilionville (now Lafayette), Ville Platte, and Washington.
Mail from the outside world usually traveled first to New Orleans and from there was sent by various means into the interior. Newspaper publisher Daniel Dennett, who was also postmaster in Franklin, described a typical journey in 1876 in his book “Louisiana As It Is” (Eureka Press, New Orleans). The trip then was probably not much different than it would have been when the 1851 list was compiled.
The Morgan Louisiana and Texas Railroad had been operating from Algiers (across the Mississippi from New Orleans) to Brashear City (Morgan City today) since 1857, but travelers and mail bags still had to find other means of transportation from there.
According to Dennett, “The steamers of the Attakapas Mail Transportation Company leave Brashear City daily, for New Iberia, a distance of 72 miles, halting at Pattersonville, Centreville, Franklin, Charenton, and Jeanerette, and at intermediate landings. They usually extend their trips to St. Martinsville three times a week, 102 miles from Brashear.”
The mail might also be sent into the interior aboard “half a dozen or more small jobbing boats” that travelled to “Vermilion River, Grand Cote, Cote Blanche, Belle Isle, and the mouth of Bayou Sale.” These smaller boats carried the mail only when it was convenient’ They were mostly involved with “a large business towing rafts of cypress logs for the saw mills … and in bringing pieux [split cypress timbers] and other split lumber … to the planters on the Teche.”
Going north, mail coaches left New Iberia three times a week for Vermilionville, Grand Coteau, Opelousas, and Washington.
Another mail coach ran “regularly” between New Iberia and Abbeville, and “a horseback mail” went to “all the postoffices [sic] off the main traveled routes.”
“Regularly” might not have been as regular as one might expect. Newspapers throughout south Louisiana often railed about long intervals when no mail arrived from New Orleans. It could sometimes be weeks between deliveries.
Part of the problem was that there wasn’t a whole lot of profit in carrying the mail. Typically, a letter could be sent from anywhere in the United States to a settlement out on the prairie for a penny or less — and that penny had to be split between the railroad operator, the steamboat captain, and the guy riding horseback “off the main travelled routes.”
Of course, that was when a penny was still worth more than the metal it was made from, but not that much more.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.