Henri Clay Bienvenu was born in 1941, but his story really begins over half a century earlier, around 1886, with a 12-year-old kid tacking obituary notices to telegraph poles in St. Martinville, notices that he had printed himself on a small hand press in the offices of a brand-new newspaper called the Weekly Messenger.
The kid was Lazaire E. Bienvenu, Henri’s grandfather. Lazaire’s older bro...