Looking at the influence of a childhood poem For some 10 years, I lived in a primitive old farmhouse on the plains of eastern Kansas, working with somewhat mixed results to complete the maturation process from a boy to a man. It wasn't e...
Duson bad guy was well armed It was big news in Duson when fast living and local police caught up with Robert Benton Mathus on the morning of March 19, 1953.
He was one of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Men when Lafayet...
Christmas and Mardi Gras have something in common Possibly you remember an unusual toy collection called Transformers. They were made a little like a Rubric Cube so that, with a few twists and turns, a human figure would turn into a truck.The attr...
Bunk Johnson had proper nickname Everyone’s heard of Louis Armstrong, the most famous New Orleans jazz trumpeter of all, but the man who created Armstrong’s music and who the New York Times said taught Armstrong to play that m...
Could Kansas be a tourist attraction like Louisiana? Over six years have passed since we moved here. This is our home now. We are no longer strangers, passing through. Neither are we tourists; we merely live where many tourists come. We are now on th...
What happened when we only wanted to start a little fire This sounds like an excuse and it probably is. But this was back in the 80s. There were no household computers, no internet, no Web, no Google. The nearest good library was thirty miles away. ...
Politics and old feud turned deadly Practically everyone’s heard of the long running feud between the Hatfields and McCoys in the Appalachian back country, but we’ve had a few bloody family encounters in Acadiana too.
One of them cam...
For better or worse, we remember those things that are incomplete Let me take you back to a turbulent time in my life. I'm sure everyone can remember such times, when everything seems to happen at once. In the midst of all this, certain events protrude that ...
Forty acres yielded riches When I was a small child I thought all pickup trucks were painted gray and carried on the door a yellow decal with a red devil in the center. I also thought these trucks carried potted meat. As ...
You can learn to program your own hands, if you want to Today I write about three kinds of keys, piano keys, keys that open locks, and ideas that are keys to unlock the mind.
I am also writing about three men whose writing passed a baton of a...
Nothing like Louisiana politics
The old story goes that in the early 1970s Louisiana sold some used voting machines to Matamoras, Mexico. They were used for the first time in a local election in Mexico several months later, and...
Remembering a tough time when 'Gray' rhymed with 'cry' How far can a man go in pursuit of a dream? How far should he go, when the whole world seems precariously balanced, so that any little thing could tip? Either way, so a carefully tended future...
![Your hands can "handle" whatever is in your pocket.](http://matchbin-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/public/sites/1076/assets/AXUC_Boutwell1_16150X150.jpg "Your hands can "handle" whatever is in your pocket.")
