Author: Caroline Malouse

Carville

In 1968, when Jose Ramirez Jr. was 20, life in Laredo, Texas, looked promising. He had just been awarded money to attend an area junior college, so now he had a chance to launch a career, but then he got…

The Biggest Win

A photograph in the Shreveport Times showed a group of people rummaging through T-shirts and caps at a sporting goods store. The picture was dated Jan. 25, 2010, the day after the Saints defeated the Minnesota Vikings and received a…

Potomac Revelry

Louisiana can rightfully claim to be the capital of Carnival in North America, but in the eastern province of Carnival’s empire stands another palace, known to the peasantry merely as the Washington Hilton Hotel. Below the hotel’s lobby exists a…

Arnaudville: Going acoustic at Tom’s

Bayou Fuselier meets Bayou Teche at Arnaudville. It has done so at that location for centuries.That’s not all the meeting that goes on in the town, which is split between St. Landry and St. Martin parishes. There is a burgeoning…

La Ville Du Pont des Breaux

I once thought I was going to be a fatality while I was in Breaux Bridge. There were neither maladies nor criminal intents involved; it was just that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The place…

A Really Big Omelette

Here’s a tip: The next time a general comes riding through your town with an army marching behind him, do not fix him an omelette. That, according to legend, is what the people of Bessières, France, learned when Napoleon Bonaparte…

Gustav

Katrina will forever be linked to New Orleans. Rita walloped the state’s west-central side. But Gustav was a Louisiana event. If ever a state could claim a hurricane, Gustav was it. Totally spoiling a Labor Day weekend, the storm forced…

Introducing – Something New

You are holding a first: Louisiana Life’s premiere travel issue, a special edition dedicated entirely to traveling throughout the state. At a time when “staycation” has become a new buzzword that suggests the merits of staying close to home in…

From the Editor

Sometimes green isn’t so good. Take Bayou Des Glaises, for example. The waterway, which meanders from its head near Simmesport down through Avoyelles Parish, is often colored algae-green, especially around Moureuville where the water moves slowly. Not far upstream is…

The Man at 5-1-1

As this is written, State Highway 820 near Ruston is closed temporarily because of construction. I know that because the man at 5-1-1 told me so.I first discovered 5-1-1 totally by accident. Driving along the somewhat-monotonous stretch of Interstate 10…

Women and Rings

What surprises me is that I actually have two stories on the subject of women fighting each other in Avoyelles Parish. The first is from my youth when, so the family story goes, an uncle who was a justice of…

From the Editor

In this election year, listening to the words of the candidates has influenced me to change my life. I want to be a “Good Ole Boy.”By the ways that some candidates decry the Good Ole Boys I can only assume…

In the land of the cochon de lait

A sign on the edge of the fairgrounds announces that Mansura is La Capitale de Cochon de Lait. That claim has remained unchallenged by other capitals including London, Moscow, Rome or Paris. Nor is it questioned by El Mansura, Egypt…

How crawfish got famous

After the waters began to recede from the great flood of 1927, some refugees who had spent time at a Red Cross camp began to return to their homes in rural central Louisiana. What they saw was bleak. Water lines…

Jimmy C. Newman

Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry: Jimmy C. Newman, a veteran of the Opry, waits in his dressing room for the music to begin. Band members are seated on a sofa, miscellaneous opry-ites step in to greet Newman. The performer…

Louisiana’s Lost Season

Football in Louisiana was just not the same in 2005. Games were played, bands performed, cheerleaders did their acrobatics and occasionally the crowd would roar. Nevertheless, the season must have been what it was like when boys tried to play…

“This, too”

Finally, the future. For too many Louisianians, over too many days, the future stalled. Too many hours, filled with too much uncertainty, was too much to take. “This, too, shall pass.” Who first said that? Was it Jesus? Buddha? Moses?…

Louisiana: A united state — A Commentary

Remember always the week that began on Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005, for on that date, as southeast Louisiana emptied to the threat of a tempest in the gulf, Louisiana began to change, becoming poorer and sadder, yet showing its worth…

False River masquerade

Ask a New Orleanian what the oldest existing Carnival parades are and he might say, if he knows his stuff, Rex, Proteus and Zulu (Comus and Momus, which would otherwise have been first and third, stopped parading in 1992). Now…

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