Columns

Are you singing the seasonal allergies blues?

“An allergy season so bad you don’t need allergies to feel miserable,” blared the headline in the Wall Street Journal. My own symptoms are relatively mild, but they do exist. I feel your pain.

Ville Platte vault heist netted $20,000

Police were baffled after someone used a cutting torch to open the vault in a store in the LaHaye building in Ville Platte early in the morning of June 21, 1962. The culprits got away with $20,000 — which may still be the biggest robbery ever in Evangeline Parish.

1953 rains brought more than cats and dogs

There were some pretty good thunderstorms across south Louisiana on April 24, 1953 — the kind we see regularly when fronts slide through the area. Nobody suspected they were the beginning of a series of downpours that eventually sent every stream in south Louisiana way out of its banks.

Do you have a babysitting horror story?

At approximately the time this column is uploaded to the syndicate website, I will be attending the funeral of my Aunt Jean. I’m sure the eulogist will wax eloquent about heaven, but I want to nominate Aunt Jean to the Babysitter Hall of Fame.

Monetary crisis: Is the Fed to blame?

Our political leaders told us that inflation is transitory, the Banking System is fine, and that deficits don’t matter as Modern Monetary Theory allows us to print as much money as we need to fund deficit spending on welfare (for the 51% of voters who do not pay taxes).

Remembering growing up female

I just saw the trailer for a movie that made me actually tear up. The preview of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” propelled me backward in time, over 50 years, to a moment when I was in the sixth grade and sitting in a corner, falling in love with a book of the same title that changed my life.

Richard Ieyoub was a class public official

Former three-term Attorney General Richard Ieyoub passed away last week at the age of 78. He was currently serving as Louisiana’s commissioner of conservation, overseeing the regulation of all oil and gas activities in the state.

What’s taking Biden so long?

Outwardly at least, the Democratic Party’s national leadership has exhibited no sense of urgency over the absence of any definitive announcement of a President Biden re-election campaign.

What else needs a baseball pitch clock?

My brother, the former Babe Ruth Leaguer, remains deeply skeptical of Major League Baseball’s newly instituted pitch clock. He is not alone in regarding the sport’s leisurely pace as an integral part of its charm. But many analysts cheer any attempt to trim the bloated runtime of modern games.

Pie was the best shooter ever

In days long gone by, when people thought we could shoot as many ducks as we could hit, and when they were in big demand at New Orleans restaurants, hundreds of sharpshooting market hunters earned a good living in the south Louisiana marshes. People said Florine “Pie” Champagne was the best of them.