Tuesday, September 7, 2021

The Lifetime Achievement Award

 Well, you know you are getting old when someone gives you a lifetime achievement award. It's actually a little embarrassing. I usually try to stay in the background, behind the camera. 

Most of my life has been about interviewing other people, taking their pictures, showcasing their contributions and accomplishments. So this award is really about them, the people of St. Tammany Parish. 

I was recently recognized by the Cultural Arts Commission of St. Tammany Parish with the President's Lifetime Achievement Award for 2021. I've known Mike Cooper for years, when he was mayor of Covington, and now is Parish President. I knew (and took many photos of) his dad Ernest Cooper back in the 1970's. 

The group asked me to provide some background of my life, and when I started compiling the list of things I have done, it kept getting longer and longer. So I shortened it considerably and here is the press release they sent out about this particular award. Click on the links in boldface for more information:

From the Cultural Arts Commission Facebook page:

"Our final featured recipient before the awards event tomorrow is Ron Barthet, Lifetime Achievement President’s Arts Award.

Ron Lamar Barthet was born in New Orleans, LA, and moved to Covington, LA in 1968. After attending Southeastern Louisiana University, he became editor of the Slidell Sentry News. He was named Associate News Editor at the Covington Daily News in 1972, and the following year Ron was promoted to editor of the Mandeville Banner, the successor to the Mandeville Bantam.

During this time he became active with the newly-organized St. Tammany Historical Society and the St. Tammany Art Association. In mid-1974 Bob Landry left The St. Tammany Farmer, and Ron was called in to work there as editor.

In his spare time, he traveled across the parish, making copies of old faded photographs, in an effort to preserve them. He would present to various civic associations across the parish slide shows featuring hundreds of old pictures, as well as aerial photographs he had taken on several flights over the area.

Ron served as president of the historical society in 1977, and again in the mid-1980's, and then again in 1997. He was elected to the board of directors of the Art Association in 1975, and he was a founding member of the St. Tammany Press Club.

His work history includes magazine articles published in several regional and national magazines, and his photographic work includes wedding and family portraits, pictures for legal cases, and slide shows for tourist promotion programs. For two years in the early 1980's he hosted a daily radio interview show over WARB in Covington.

In 1984, he drew a cartoon pictorial map of downtown Covington to show where various portions of the first "Olde Towne Festival" would be held, and the map was so popular that he has now drawn more than 70 additional "bird's eye view" maps of communities across the South. He has produced maps for the annual ChefSoiree held by the Youth Service Bureau for more than 20 years.

Barthet has written several books, some science fiction, and he dabbles in poetry and songwriting, one song of which was named the “official song of Covington.” His books have spotlighted history, Cajun comedy, and imaginary festivals.

Between 2000 and 2014, he managed the St. Tammany Parish Public St. Tammany Parish Public School System's website. Now retired, he currently takes pictures and writes articles for his "Tammany Family" blog, a daily look at the people, places, history and scenic beauty of St. Tammany Parish."
 
-------------------- End of press release
 
As exhausting as all of that was above, there are a few things that I left out that deserve mentioning.
 
The SLU Radio Program
 
Jim Martel and I started the first radio program for Southeastern Louisiana University, and it was called "Campus Modulation." WTGI Hammond radio station broadcasted it once a week. We played a few songs and mostly read press releases from the college's public information office.  Now the university has its own radio station.
 

Audio Cassette Recordings
 
One of the most demanding and least paid jobs I had was with an audio recording company in Los Angeles. For just over a year in the mid-1980's, I flew around the country tape recording speeches at a variety of conventions, trade shows, professional seminars, etc. Then I would immediately duplicate the speeches on cassette tapes and sell convention attendees copies of the speech, as they were walking out of the door of the meeting. 
 
I went to places like Orlando, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Los Angeles, and Fairhope (AL), staying several days in each location, many times in the fanciest hotel in town where the convention was being held. That job, while enjoyable while I was doing it, required all my time and paid very little money. I worked seven days a week, seldom got home for more than a day, and there was a lot of heavy equipment cases hauling around as well as late night plane flights. I had to give the job up because I was digging myself into a financial hole.  
 
Volunteer Audio Work

As my expertise in audio recording expanded, I began volunteering on the weekends to do audio duplication work for the "Kid's Jamboree" television and radio show in Baton Rouge. They were expanding their ministry into the Caribbean and needed someone to take the audio tracks from prior television shows and convert them to 15 minute radio programs. That was a time consuming process, but an enjoyable one. During this time "Kid's Jamboree" bought the old Singing Waters summer camp out in Holden, La., for its own summer kids program, and for a while I was planning to move to Holden and live at the camp. That didn't happen, but now the property is owned by John Schneider of the "Dukes of Hazard" fame, who has turned it into an independent film studio.  

I also did volunteer audio work for Bethesda Cassette Library in Covington, an operation run by Bill and Marie Knight who were distributing cassette tapes of various religious teachings to their library members around the world. I helped them print up their catalog, wrote an article about them, and did some narrating on the tapes. One of the bigger projects was tape-recording an audio version of the newly-published New American Standard Bible (just the New Testament). Pronouncing some of those Biblical names was a challenge. 

For two years I did a taped interview show for WARB radio station in Covington. Each interview was about 30 minutes long, and the radio station played five minutes of it every day. Back then five minutes was a long time to listen to anything on the radio, so it worked out well. I interviewed a wide variety of people across the community, public officials, the postmaster, artists, business people, etc. 

The Video Production

In 1996 I produced a two-hour documentary on the use of pesticides in the public school system. Many people were interviewed, including several state level experts, and the legislative effort to better protect children from pesticide use was explained. Randy Perkins helped me with the video editing for this massive project, and Ellen Winchell helped provide names of individuals and organizations that would assist the effort.
 
In 1997, I managed the Star Theater for several months, showing movies and eating leftover popcorn. That job ended when the tornado came through downtown Covington. At the same time, I had a little sideline business, putting together websites for local businesses who wanted to have some kind of presence on the new world wide web. That business was called Net Flyer, and basically I just converted their business pamphlet / flyer into a webpage, registering a domain name for them and the like. 

For some reason, I was still interviewing people with my own video camera, even though I didn't have an outlet for the finished product. I interviewed Warren Salles of the Star Theater and Nancy Bowen-Ellzey of Bowen and Associates who talked about her firm's study of downtown Covington's business potential. Many of the things she predicted in 1997 have come to pass. I'm glad I did those interviews because now I have posted them to my St. Tammany blog.
 
I worked at Lakeside Camera in Mandeville during December Christmas season that year, and while that was interesting, it was a little confusing with digital cameras coming into focus and 35mm cameras fading into the background.
 
One of the fun things I did that year was take a bunch of pictures of the St. Patrick's Day parade through downtown Covington.  

That was also around the time I served on a committee to come up with a name for what we now call the Three Rivers Art Festival. A lot of possibilities were tossed around, but we came up with Three Rivers Art Fest and that seemed to stick. Twenty five years later, the annual event seems to have created quite a following, both in artist participants and festival goers.
 
I then worked at Poole Lumber Company for two years, digitizing house plans into AutoCAD files and helping them use a new software program to size engineered wood beams. When that software came into general use with homebuilders and architects, my position was phased out, and I went to work as Linda Roan's assistant at the school board office. 

Eventually I became content manager for the School System's website. One of the first things I did there was put together a webpage featuring a "photo archives" of old school and classroom photographs taken over the years.  The new position also gave me the chance to go out to the schools on a regular basis and take hundreds of pictures of events going on across the parish. I did that for 14 years.
 
The Blog

Now I provide content for the TammanyFamily.com blog, pulling old photographs and negatives from my personal files, and taking new pictures of current events. Since Hurricane Katrina destroyed almost 3,000 of my printed photographs, this is not as easy as it used to be. Fortunately, I had 14,000 negatives and slides to go through, scan, and try to remember what they were showing.

 I thought it would be useful to compile a list of books I have written. Some of them are available in printed versions. Those are linked to the book ordering page. 

Here they are:

Reveling: science fiction about the investigation into alternate realities

Cajun Gold: comedy about a Cajun who finds 200 lbs. of gold in the woods

Tibert's Swamp Stories: comedy about Tibert the Cajun and his misadventures

The Bridges of St. Tammany: information about the history of bridges in St. Tammany Parish.

The Southern Hotel: A Covington Legacy - History of the Southern Hotel

The History of SunAn account of the history of the Village of Sun

Artists, Writers and Other Talented People of the Tammany Family

The Pictorial Maps of Ron Barthet: Collection of cartoon maps

Posters of Imaginary Festivals and ConventionsHumorous posters advertising non-existent events. Now included in the book of pictorial cartoon maps.

Sharing Family Memories: A Guide To Interviewing and Recording

The Time When: A time travel novel about second chances

Going Knots: A coming-of-age story, 23 years after the fact. 

The Morning Mist Mystery: my first serious murder myster novel

Folsom: Yesterday & Today A scrapbook history of Folsom with maps and photographs

Abita Springs: Collection of Articles and Photographs Over the Years

Madisonville's Vantage Point Upon History: the location of the Maritime Museum

 
One of my limited edition books, just for family members, was a compilation of all the pictures in the family scrapbook, scanned and placed in a book format, sent to the printer and several copies made. That way everyone in the family can look at old family pictures at their convenience.

A friend from the early days of the St. Tammany Historical Society, Don Sharp, asked for my help several years ago to get his area research out into the world. He had published a large book on the history of Mandeville, but he had a tremendous about of information on Madisonville, The Amite River and Gulf Coast lighthouses. So I put together a blog for him Sharp History, and we have continued meeting on a regular basis, now doing video interviews since he is 94 years old. 

I've also helped Don Sharp publish a couple of books, one on the History of Lacombe and the other the History of the Amite River.


A newsletter from the Louisiana Society, American Institute of Building Design, April, 2001