Louisiana

Growing up in rural Louisiana was hard for many. Nolan Fontenot shares his story

Published

2 years ago

May 21, 2024

Growing up in rural Louisiana was hard for many. Nolan Fontenot shares his story

Editor’s Note: On writer Melinda Rawls Howell’s trips to the East Feliciana Council on Aging she’s spoken with many who have shared stories of growing up in and around the Felicianas. While not a Feliciana native, Nolan Fontenot’s stories of his early childhood growing up in another parish are similar to those told by many who grew up in the Felicianas. Here is the first of a two-part series on Fontenot’s life.

Nolan Fontenot’s stories are full of readily recalled dates and memories of family, places, other people and events. They are also glimpses of local, Louisiana, American history and of personal challenges that many families may have experienced.

When listening to Fontenot tell who and where he came from, why he settled in Jackson and went to work at institutions in East and West Feliciana parishes, his reminiscing is tinged with humor and compassion — reflecting his personality and character.

He recalls days of struggle and hardships, kindness and opportunities, growth and change, finding God and ministering to others. He still speaks with a lingering Cajun French accent and sprinkles French expressions/words in his conversation with a slight smile.

A large family in rural America

Fontenot, 86, is one of 16 children born to Feranand Joseph Fontenot and Threase Charles Fontenot. He was born April 26, 1938, during the Great Depression, into a French-speaking, Catholic family on a cotton farm in Tate Cove off Wabash Road north of Ville Platte, in Evangeline Parish.

There were three sets of twins in his family, of which Fontenot is one, and his parents “lost one child at 8 months,” he adds. The first child, Abel, was born in 1918 followed by Lee in 1919, Melton in 1921, Clamie in 1923, by Ethel who was the infant who died, then Eula in 1926, twins Harris and John in 1928, Rosella in 1931, Aline and Louise in 1932, Eva in 1943, Irene in 1936, twins Enola and Nolan in 1938 followed by the last child, Edison, born in 1939.

Growing mostly cotton, the hardship payment and more

The farm was owned by Dr. Arthur Vidine, who Fontenot describes as “very good doctor.” As a sharecropper, his father had “to give one-third of his profits from his cotton and sweet potato crops to the landowner,” he explains. In addition to those crops, he says, they raised some corn, soybeans and rice.

“We were very poor … Evangeline Parish was a poor parish“ and “then came the Depression,” he says.

Except for farming, the only other regular source of income for the family was an $8-a-month “hardship” payment. This was because they lived near “the Cabot carbon-black plant” which “had no filters” and dropped airborne pollution onto everything, he says.

“The closer your farm was to the plant the more money you were paid” and “the carbon affected the color and price we got for the cotton,” he adds.

His father plowed the cotton fields behind one of two horses they owned — Honey or Bella. As a child, Fontenot says he “couldn’t wait until he was big enough” to help plow.

He says father “walked his life away.” His father, Fontenot says, “never owned an automobile … he had a wagon and a buggy.”

For meat they had some chickens and ate “coon” sometimes, he says. They ate crawfish but his mother “did not like to cook them,” he adds.

The cattle on the farm belonged to the landowner but the family could milk the cows in exchange for taking care of them, he adds. There were two barns on the site — one could hold “1,600 bales of hay for the cows in winter, “ he says. The other one was the stables and housed the buggy and wagon.

In the town of Ville Platte, they got store-bought necessities on credit at the store of Henri Vidrine, the brother of Dr. Vidrine. He remembers his sisters’ dresses were made from the cloth from flour sacks.

The mud house, chores, siblings, school

Fontenot’s family first lived in a one-bedroom house but they eventually moved into a three-bedroom house nearby on the same farm. He calls it the “mud house.” The wood-frame structure “had walls made of mud, twigs and Spanish moss that were whitewashed inside and covered with shiplap outside,” he says.

The house had a two-sided fireplace, he adds.

Drinking water came from a cistern and a small amount of “coal oil was added” to discourage mosquitoes. The water was also “strained through cloth to remove mosquito larvae.” There was “an outhouse for the girls to use and the barn for the boys,” he says.

Like most children growing up on a farm he helped with chores. After moving to town as a youth, he briefly worked at a creamery and was hired out to dig sweet potatoes and pick cotton. As for picking cotton he “wasn’t very good at it,” he says, shrugging and tilting his head slightly and that he was “slow” and, of course, “didn’t like the heat.”

As children they “went barefoot unless it was extremely cold,” he says. One of his older sisters, Irene, who he remembers as having a ready laugh, was the one who would defend them, when needed, on the school bus. Another sister, Rosella, was in charge of washing the kids in the evening but conditions were very basic — a shared bowl of water and cloth.

He remembers one of his older brothers, Melton, married at 16 and moved away to farm a place south of Ville Platte. Another older brother, Lee, was in the United States Army for eight years serving in the military police during World War II from 1941-1945.

Lunch during the school year was often “milk pudding sandwiches made on homemade bread” and “it was good,” he says.

He remembers that his only younger brother, Edison, did not want to go to school when it was his time. He says his little brother cried and cried and, arriving at school with several big pecans in his pocket, tried to give them to the teacher so she would let him stay with his big brother. “She probably didn’t even understand him” and that his prized pecans were an attempted bribe, he says.

The radio and electricity

The family had a box-shaped radio, which was powered by a large free-standing battery and connected to a tall antenna. They listened sparingly and mostly to the French programs and music, he says.

His parents did eventually get electricity on the farm in the 1950s.

It wasn’t too long afterward that they all moved into town, he says. Fontenot’s father died at 70 in 1969 and his mother lived to be 76 and passed away in 1977.

Source link

Louisiana

Commentary: Trump can be hard to take. But his tariffs keep this fisherman afloat

Published

3 hours ago

January 11, 2026

Press Room

Commentary: Trump can be hard to take. But his tariffs keep this fisherman afloat

HOUMA, La. — For nearly 50 years, James Blanchard has made his living in the Gulf of Mexico, pulling shrimp from the sea.

It’s all he ever wanted to do, since he was around 12 years old and accompanied his father, a mailman and part-time shrimper, as he spent weekends trawling the marshy waters off Louisiana. Blanchard loved the adventure and splendid isolation.

He made a good living, even as the industry collapsed around him. He and his wife, Cheri, bought a comfortable home in a tidy subdivision here in the heart of Bayou Country. They helped put three kids through college.

But eventually Blanchard began to contemplate his forced retirement, selling his 63-foot boat and hanging up his wall of big green fishing nets once he turns 65 in February.

“The amount of shrimp was not a problem,” said Blanchard, a fourth-generation shrimper who routinely hauls in north of 30,000 flash-frozen pounds on a two-week trip. “It’s making a profit, because the prices were so low.”

Then came President Trump, his tariffs and famously itchy trigger finger.

Blanchard is a lifelong Republican, but wasn’t initially a big Trump fan.

In April, Trump slapped a 10% fee on shrimp imports, which grew to 50% for India, America’s largest overseas source of shrimp. Further levies were imposed on Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia, which are other major U.S. suppliers.

Views of the 47th president, from the ground up

Tariffs may slow economic growth, discombobulate markets and boost inflation. Trump’s single-handed approach to tax-and-trade policy has landed him before the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule by summer on a major test case of presidential power.

But for Blanchard, those tariffs have been a lifeline. He’s seen a significant uptick in prices, from as low as 87 cents a pound for wild-caught shrimp to $1.50 or more. That’s nowhere near the $4.50 a pound, adjusted for inflation, that U.S shrimpers earned back in the roaring 1980s, when shrimp was less common in home kitchens and something of a luxury item.

It’s enough, however, for Blanchard to shelve his retirement plans and for that — and Trump — he’s appreciative.

“Writing all the bills in the world is great,” he said of efforts by congressional lawmakers to prop up the country’s dwindling shrimp fishermen. “But it don’t get nothing done.”

Trump, Blanchard said, has delivered.

Shrimp is America’s most popular seafood, but that hasn’t buoyed the U.S. shrimp industry.

Wild-caught domestic shrimp make up less than 10% of the market. It’s not a matter of quality, or overfishing. A flood of imports — farmed on a mass scale, lightly regulated by developing countries and thus cheaper to produce — has decimated the market for American shrimpers.

In the Gulf and South Atlantic, warm water shrimp landings — the term the industry uses — had an average annual value of more than $460 million between 1975 and 2022, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a trade group. (Those numbers are not adjusted for inflation.)

Over the last two years, the value of the commercial shrimp fishery has fallen to $269 million in 2023 and $256 million in 2024.

As the country’s leading shrimp producer, Louisiana has been particularly hard hit. “It’s getting to the point that we are on our knees,” Acy Cooper, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Assn., recently told New Orleans television station WVUE.

In the 1980s, there were more than 6,000 licensed shrimpers working in Louisiana. Today, there are fewer than 1,500.

Blanchard can see the ripple effects in Houma — in the shuttered businesses, the depleted job market and the high incidence of drug overdoses.

Latrevien Moultrie, 14, fishes in Houma, La.

“It’s affected everybody,” he said. “It’s not only the boats, the infrastructure, the packing plants. It’s the hardware stores. The fuel docks. The grocery stores.”

Two of the Blanchardses’ three children have moved away, seeking opportunity elsewhere. One daughter is a university law professor. Their son works in logistics for a trucking company in Georgia. Their other daughter, who lives near the couple, applies her advanced degree in school psychology as a stay-at-home mother of five.

(Cheri Blanchard, 64 and retired from the state labor department, keeps the books for her husband.)

It turns out the federal government is at least partly responsible for the shrinking of the domestic shrimp industry. In recent years, U.S. taxpayers have subsidized overseas shrimp farming to the tune of at least $195 million in development aid.

Seated at their dining room table, near a Christmas tree and other remnants of the holidays, Blanchard read from a set of scribbled notes — a Bible close at hand — as he and his wife decried the lax safety standards, labor abuses and environmental degradation associated with overseas shrimp farming.

James Blanchard and his wife, Cheri, like Trump's policies. His personality is another thing.

The fact their taxes help support those practices is particularly galling.

“A slap in the face,” Blanchard called it.

Donald Trump grew slowly on the Blanchards.

The two are lifelong Republicans, but they voted for Trump in 2016 only because they considered him less bad than Hillary Clinton.

Once he took office, they were pleasantly surprised.

They had more money in their pockets. Inflation wasn’t an issue. Washington seemed less heavy-handed and intrusive. By the time Trump ran for reelection, the couple were fully on board and they happily voted for him again in 2024.

Republican National Committee reading material sits on the counter of James Blanchard's kitchen.

Still, there are things that irk Blanchard. He doesn’t much care for Trump’s brash persona and can’t stand all the childish name-calling. For a long time, he couldn’t bear listening to Trump’s speeches.

“You didn’t ever really listen to many of Obama’s speeches,” Cheri interjected, and James allowed as how that was true.

“I liked his personality,” Blanchard said of the former Democratic president. “I liked his character. But I didn’t like his policies.”

It’s the opposite with Trump.

Unlike most politicians, Blanchard said, when Trump says he’ll do something he generally follows through.

Such as tightening border security.

“I have no issue at all with immigrants,” he said, as his wife nodded alongside. “I have an issue with illegal immigrants.” (She echoed Trump in blaming Renee Good for her death last week at the hands of an ICE agent.)

“I have sympathy for them as families,” Blanchard went on, but crossing the border doesn’t make someone a U.S. citizen. “If I go down the highway 70 miles an hour in that 30-mile-an-hour zone, guess what? I’m getting a ticket. … Or if I get in that car and I’m drinking, guess what? They’re bringing me to jail. So what’s the difference?”

Between the two there isn’t much — apart from Trump’s “trolling,” as Cheri called it — they find fault with.

Blanchard hailed the lightning-strike capture and arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as another example of Trump doing and meaning exactly what he says.

“When Biden was in office, they had a $25-million bounty on [Maduro’s] head,” Blanchard said. “But apparently it was done knowing that it was never going to be enforced.”

More empty talk, he suggested.

Just like all those years of unfulfilled promises from politicians vowing to rein in foreign competition and revive America’s suffering shrimping industry.

James Blanchard aboard his boat, which he docks in Bayou Little Caillou.

Trump and his tariffs have given Blanchard back his livelihood and for that alone he’s grateful.

There’s maintenance and repair work to be done on his boat — named Waymaker, to honor the Lord — before Blanchard musters his two-man crew and sets out from Bayou Little Caillou.

He can hardly wait.

Source link

Louisiana

Troy basketball rolls past Louisiana behind barrage of 3s, 90-70

Published

15 hours ago

January 10, 2026

Press Room

Troy basketball rolls past Louisiana behind barrage of 3s, 90-70

Troy scorched the net for a season-best 17 3-pointers in a 90-70 victory over Louisiana at the Cajundome in Lafayette, La., on Saturday.

Brothers Cobi and Cooper Campbell hit four 3-pointers and scored 12 points each for the Trojans, who improve to 11-6 overall and 4-1 in Sun Belt Conference play. After Georgia Southern lost at South Alabama on Saturday, Troy is now tied for first place in the league standings.

Troy scored the first nine points of the game, and led by double-digits from the 12-minute mark of the first half. The Trojans were up 53-35 at halftime and by no less than 10 the rest of the way.

Thomas Dowd was Troy’s leading scorer (15 points, including three 3-pointers) and rebounder (8) while also dishing out five assists. Victor Valdes added 12 points, five rebounds and seven assists, while Jerrel Bellany contributed 11 points, Kerrington Kiel 11 and Theo Seng nine.

Dorian Finister scored a game-high 25 points for Louisiana, which falls to 4-14 overall, 2-4 in the Sun Belt. Dariyus Woodson was the only other Ragin’ Cajuns player in double-figures scoring with 13 points.

Troy is back home Wednesday, hosting Southern Miss at 6 p.m. at Trojan Arena. That game will stream live via ESPN+.

Source link

Louisiana

McGlinchey Stafford vote to shut down reshuffles Louisiana legal landscape

Published

1 day ago

January 10, 2026

Press Room

McGlinchey Stafford vote to shut down reshuffles Louisiana legal landscape

The decision by McGlinchey Stafford PLLC leaders this week to shutter their powerhouse law firm after more than 50 years sent shock waves across south Louisiana’s legal community, and even took some of the firm’s attorneys by surprise.

It also began reshaping the local legal landscape. In the days since the announcement, at least two firms have announced that McGlinchey attorneys will be joining them, bringing lucrative practices and longtime clients along.

New Orleans-based Adams and Reese said Thursday it is hiring nearly a third of McGlinchey’s Baton Rouge office — 11 attorneys and two paralegals — from the real estate and corporate transactions group. More announcements are expected to follow, as firms try to snag top McGlinchey talent before the competition does.

Amid the reshuffling, the full picture of what caused McGlinchey’s partners who own the firm, known as equity members, to vote to dissolve is starting to emerge. According to attorneys familiar with the situation and a statement from the firm’s managing partner, Michael Ferachi, McGlinchey had been struggling for a while. It had lost several highly skilled attorneys that had lucrative client lists, announcements from rival firms show, and departures had accelerated in recent months.

Now, dozens of secretaries and back-office staff are scrambling for positions, according to social media posts. Some younger attorneys or attorneys without large books of business are also looking for work.

Loyola University law professor Dane Ciolino said they’ll be doing so in a Louisiana legal market that’s more competitive and less lucrative than it used to be.

“Big cases with high billable hours are fewer and father between than 30 or 40 years ago because we don’t have the big companies that generated that kind of work,” said Ciolino. “As the business community goes, so goes the legal community.”

Big dreams

It’s not unusual for mid-sized law firms like McGlinchey to experience ups and down, lose groups of attorneys and merge or sell to other firms. But according to 10 other attorneys in New Orleans and Baton Rouge who agreed to be interviewed for this is story but declined to give their names, it was surprising that McGlinchey’s owners voted to dissolve.

The New Orleans-based firm was among the most aspirational and aggressive in the city when it was founded in 1974. Back then, the city’s legal community was dominated by a handful of old-line firms populated by socially prominent attorneys.

McGlinchey sought to be different.

Founding partners Graham Stafford and Dermott McGlinchey were young, ambitious and smart, those who knew them remember. They wanted their firm to be taken seriously, setting up offices in One Shell Square, now the Hancock Whitney Center, then the city’s newest and tallest skyscraper.

The firm started out doing mostly insurance defense, which bills at a lower hourly rate and isn’t as prestigious as corporate transactions. But it quickly expanded as attorneys logged long hours and pursued out-of-state clients, which was less common then than today. They also sought to recruit the best and brightest young talent coming out of law school.

By the late 1980s, the firm had bought its own office building on Magazine Street in the newly trendy Warehouse District. In a nod to the New York-style firms it sought to emulate, McGlinchey had its own cafeteria, gym and showers, signaling that its attorneys were expected to live at the office.

Both founding partners died young. Stafford in 1987; McGlinchey, at age 60, in 1993. The firm continued to grow in their absence, but some longtime competitors said it didn’t hum with the same intensity.

String of departures

In a statement released Tuesday, Ferachi, a Baton Rouge-based commercial litigation specialist who became the firm’s managing member in 2021, said that no single factor had led to the vote to dissolve. Rather, troubles had been building.

“This is not because of any specific attorney’s departure, or any individual financial decision or leadership action that led us to this point,” he said. “This is the result of a combination of market factors, such as lagging collections, compounded with various internal factors over several years.”

The statement also said the firm’s leaders made the decision after “assessing several strategic alternatives.”

Ferachi declined to make additional comment or respond to additional questions. His predecessor, Rudy Aguilar, also a Baton Rouge attorney who is leading the group going to Adams and Reese, also did not respond to requests seeking comment.

Prominent departures have been ongoing for at least a decade and began building in recent months.

In 2015, two prominent attorneys in the real estate and commercial transactions division took their practice to Kean Miller, according to an announcement from Kean Miller at the time. In 2020, five partners from McGlinchey’s consumer finance litigation practice went to Hinshaw, a national firm based in Chicago with more than 500 attorneys across the country, a release from Hinshaw shows.

Around the same time, the firm downsized its footprint in the Pan American Life Center in New Orleans, where it had moved in 2008 after vacating the Magazine Street building, according to real estate sources familiar with the move.

According to Law.com, an online trade publication for the legal industry, the firm’s head count declined from 199 in 2016 to 37 in 2021, though it was back up to between 150-160 attorneys the time of the announcement.

In 2024, defense attorney Ally Byrd left McGlinchey for Jones Walker. More recently, in late November 2025, Deirdre McGlinchey, daughter of the late founding partner, moved her successful corporate litigation practice, which represented national clients and included three attorneys, to Jones Walker.

By then, the Baton Rouge McGlinchey office was already in serious talks with Adams and Reese, according to a statement from Adams and Reese.

On Jan. 2, three days before the McGlinchey vote, Hinshaw announced it had hired four attorneys from McGlinchey’s Washington D.C, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida offices, the firm announced. All specialize in defending consumer financial services companies in high stakes lawsuits.

At the same time it was losing some of its top rainmakers, the firm was continuing to sign new leases for offices. In 2023, it moved its Boston office into One Beacon Street, among the city’s most prestigious office towers, with estimated rents of near $50 per square foot.

In May, it moved its Baton Rouge offices from their longtime headquarters in One American Place to the newly renovated II Rivermark Centre down the street.

Late last year, the firm announced it had created four new administrative positions, hiring from within. The move, the firm said at the time, was designed to strengthen and improve back-office functions.

The firm had also “reconfigured its governance structure and compensation system,” Ferachi said in his statement.

‘Dignity and grace’

The effect of McGlinchey’s closure is already reverberating across the markets where it operated.

Adams and Reese Managing Partner Gyf Thornton said bringing on McGlinchey’s real estate practice in Baton Rouge will not only benefit the individual attorneys from both firms but create new opportunities.

“With these kinds of combinations, we have found that we typically get a one plus one equals three,” he said. “We start with their current book of business and together we grow to something bigger than the sum of the two parts.”

Partners may bring their associates and paralegals with them when they move, though they don’t typically bring back-office staff.

In a LinkedIn post, McGlinchey’s Chief Business Development Officer Heather Morse posted on behalf of her colleagues, saying “There are people, the #McGlinchey Family, who need to find their next beginning. Many of us are blessed with wide networks, but others are not.”

She tagged 20 colleagues from the firm’s administrative staff, noting she also was “open to new opportunities.”

There’s no word on how long the wind down will take, but Ferachi said the firm “was committed to comporting ourselves with dignity and grace during this process.”

Ciolino said it’s hard to say what exactly the departure of McGlinchey will mean for the market, noting it “does seem odd the way it all went down.”

Source link