Downtown Arcadia 1983

 In early 1983 I worked as editor of the Bienville Democrat, a weekly newspaper in Arcadia, LA. That is halfway between Ruston and Shreveport, LA, so it was a long way from Covington, but pretty much the same small town newspaper type goings-on. 

One thing of interest that year was a request of photographs for photographs of the area to put in the Louisiana section of the 1984 Worlds Fair that was to take place in New Orleans. I took over a dozen photographs and submitted them to the Bienville Parish Tourist Commission. I was told they were put on display at the World's Fair, but I had to take their word for it, since I never went to the World's Fair myself.

Here is one of the photographs, this one showing the Arcadia downtown area. Arcadia's main claim to fame was that it was the town where the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde, the bank robbers, were taken after they were shot on the highway going to Gibsland a few miles west. They even made a movie about that recently. 

Arcadia is a great little town and I enjoyed living there, even though one winter it was so cold for so long that all my water pipes froze solid and the entire house had to be re-plumbed. I do remember playing host to some friends of mine from Covington when they came to the area for some deer hunting, and the extreme cold chased them out of their tents in the woods back into civilization. They gave me a call, and I said, come on over, the heaters are on. 

Multiple Listing Service

 Back in the mid-1970's  (or was it the mid-1980's?) a friend of mine in real estate asked me if I would be interested in a one-day a week job of delivering multiple listing service computer print outs to real estate offices across the parish. 

I worked at the St. Tammany Farmer newspaper, and I did have Thursday mornings off (the day after the weekly publication came out), so I looked into it. They would need me to drive to Slidell to the St. Tammany Board of Realtors office on Thursday mornings, pick up a huge stack of computer printouts filled with the weekly update of houses for sale in the parish, and then drive all over St. Tammany Parish dropping off the computer printouts to real estate brokers who were members of the service.

The Multiple Listing Service, known as MLS, was the realtor's first effort at computerizing house listings. Since the internet had not been invented yet, the list of listings had to be printed out on large fanfold computer paper using a dot matrix printer. Anyone who remembers dot matrix printers knows that this process printing out those big binders had to be a labor-intensive and noisy procedure. Considering the computers involved, I'm thinking this was more likely in the mid-1980's.

The result was a continuous printout on fanfold paper that was folded over and over and bound together with a cardboard cover. Each one weighed several pounds. 

Remember pulling off the paper edges where the sprocket holes were?

Since I enjoyed driving around the parish taking photographs of interesting scenes and news events anyway, I decided to go with it. So each Thursday morning found me driving to Slidell, picking up the a few dozen bound computer printouts and heading out. I would stop at real estate offices in Lacombe, Mandeville, Madisonville, Covington and Folsom. Many of those stops were at the homes of individual brokers who wanted them delivered to their homes.

I remember dropping off the printouts at a big home on the Mandeville lakefront, at small offices scattered throughout the big towns, and at the big real estate company offices on North Causeway Approach. There were houses with big dogs barking, so extra caution was called for in some deliveries. Often a real estate agent would see me coming and meet me at the door, eager to get their hands on the latest printout, with which they would then sit down and go through page after page to see what was new for sale that week. 

I delivered those binders for over a year, putting hundreds of miles on my car. 

Eventually, of course, the internet kicked in and outlying real estate offices could just pull up the listings on their new large expensive computers. Today with the world wide web, real estate professionals can have access to almost real time posting of house listings. The world wide web also gives home seekers the excellent access to the MLS, with maps showing listing location, photos of the interior and exterior, and detailed descriptions of the home for sale. Realtor.com and Zillow.com are best known, but there are many more websites available with that information. Some of those websites offer specialized listings for niche real estate markets. 

So the early days of the multiple listing service with its heavy binders of dot matrix printed computer listings has advanced significantly over the past few decades. What hasn't changed is that people are still looking for homes and real estate agents are still trying to make that process as informative as possible.

Christmas Tree Lot Watch

 Back in the early 1980's I was doing volunteer work for the Kids Jamboree television show in Baton Rouge, and one Christmas its founder, Sam DiMaria (known as "Uncle Sam") set up a Christmas tree lot on Florida Blvd. near its intersection with Wooddale Blvd. His office was on Wooddale just a couple of blocks north of Florida, so it was a good location for him and also for people looking to buy a Christmas tree and help support a local children's television show and ministry.

He asked me if I would be the "night watchman" for the Christmas tree lot, and I agreed. That meant spending several nights sleeping in a pick up truck camper parked in the middle of the lot, and that didn't seem too challenging, since it was only a little smaller than the apartment I had in Baton Rouge at the time. 

Besides, who would want to steal a Christmas tree during the middle of the night on the busiest thoroughfare in Baton Rouge? The answer was no one, especially when it would be taking money away from "Uncle Sam" and Kids Jamboree. So, I slept  in the cramped up truck camper overhead bed, had one window cracked open so I could hear anything going on outside. Stealing a Christmas tree would be kind of noisy and would wake me up if it did happen.

But I'm happy to report that it didn't happen, and I spent several restful nights. Each night I would report in as the Christmas tree lot was closing, then I could go to my day job after it opened the following morning. Not very exciting, I know, but it was an interesting week.

DiMaria went on to buy the old YMCA camp in Holden, La.,  with plans to turn it into a Kids Jamboree summer camp for kids. I visited there several times and was planning to live at the camp, even got a personal mail box at the Holden post office. The camp was named Camp Singing Waters, since it was right on the Tickfaw River. However I never did get to live there, having gotten a new job that required that I be somewhere else. 

DiMaria died in 2008, and Camp Singing Waters was purchased by John Schneider (one of the main actors on "The Dukes of Hazzard" television show), and he turned it into a movie studio (John Schneider Studios ) where he produces independent films.

Novel Ideas

  Now that I've written and self-published nine novels, someone asked me which one was my favorite. I guess "The Morning Mist Mystery" is my favorite, primarily because it is fast-paced, about everyday people doing crazy things, and the only murder mystery in the group. 

My second favorite one was "The Wedding Photographer," since I was able to write about topics close to me, namely photography over the years, and the unending challenges met by wedding photographers. It featured a wide cast of characters as diverse as lawyers, farmers and historians, in addition to the aforementioned wedding photographers. 

My third favorite novel has to be "Cajun Gold," a slapstick adventure in southwest Louisiana, with a wacky cast of Cajun characters. Throw in a sledge hammer, welding torch, and offbeat bank robbery, and it's a circus.

My fourth favorite story is "Going Knots," which explores how a love of knots gets a New York stockbroker through his mid-life crisis. It's a little more complicated than that with its crusty Maine marina background, but balances out with an overview of how art galleries sometimes get really desperate. 

My latest novel, "The Imaginary Bookstore," explores imagination, prejudice, and unexpected far-reaching revelations from small town interactions.

The rest of the list involves mainly science fiction stories:

"The Time When" is a novel that proposes that Nikola Tesla had a time machine, and a present-day print shop manager and his grandfather's home health nurse figure out how to use it. Probably the less said about that storyline, the better. 

Another science fiction book is "Mind Pivot." This one is set in a college and involves a student research paper into the "fight or flight" defense mechanism. Let's hope this story never actually becomes reality, because it's both scary and fascinating.

Finley's Flying Car is about an inventor who builds a flying car and decides to drive it across America to the patent office in Washington, D.C. Here is the story of his ups and downs, his near misses and his remarkable ability to be in the right place at just the right time. 

There is also a collection of short stories, poems and essays called "Smatterings." These have been written over the past 50 years. Some are humorous, some are thought-provoking, and some are weird. A blend of science fiction, observations, and goofiness. 

"The Gaffery Perspective" unveils surprising new viewpoints about health and well-being, while its sequel, "The Gaffery Momentum," talks about time manipulation. The two books blend together well, tying up a lot of loose ends, but I'm currently updating them so Perspective is not available at this time. 

Non-fiction

I have also put together a large number of non-fiction books about the people and places in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. For more information about those, CLICK HERE. 

Maps

If you're into maps, you might want to check out my collection of hand-drawn "bird's eye view" maps produced over the past four decades. They are printed in "The Pictorial Maps of Ron Barthet." Included in that collection is a bonus section featuring Posters from Imaginary Festivals and Conventions. 

Submarine Razorback

 I visited the submarine "Razorback" docked on the river in Little Rock, Arkansas, recently. Here are some pictures. Click on the images to make them larger.

Rear deck

Diving planes wheels

Christmas lights board 

Propellers

Torpedo room

The Talladega Speedway

 In the late 1980's I worked as editor of the weekly newspaper in Pell City, Alabama. The mayor of Pell City one day invited me to take a tour of the Talladega Superspeedway, which was about 13 miles from Pell City. He served on the board of the Superspeedway and wanted to show me the race car museum, the speedway itself, and the infield where people would camp during the regularly scheduled races. 

We drove over and were met by the executive director of the operation, and he gave me a guided tour of the museum which detailed the history of the speedway, the races, the car drivers, and the wild goings-on of race day crowds.

We then got into a pace car and did a couple of laps around the speedway itself, sometimes reaching speeds of up to 110 miles per hour. The curves were banked so that helped to keep us on the track. 

I was impressed with the history of the facility, the fanatical loyalty of the thousands upon thousands of race fans over the years, and the professionalism with which the people in charge keep it all going. It takes a lot of expertise to run an operation which involves high speed races and thousands of screaming fans in the stands. I won't go into the infield shenanigans because what happens on the Talladega infield stays in the Talladega infield. 

Links of interest

https://www.talladegasuperspeedway.com/

A map of the superspeedway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4qyLPkQcfQ

When Something's Wrong

Every year over the past 30 something years I've drawn a cartoon map of the Chef Soiree event, not a big deal, just a drawing of a bunch of cartoon people eating  cartoon food listening to good music. It involves three days of intensive drawing, computer graphics and proofreading. But this year I was unable to draw the map, because something stopped me in my tracks. A heart attack.

There's nothing like planning your day out, lining up your drawing sessions, scheduling numerous  trips to get the rough draft scanned and digitized, wrapped up with  hours of detail work on the computer. Then your chest starts hurting and you realize something is wrong. 

At 1:30 p.m. on March 5 I left a meeting at the Youth Service Bureau office (home of the ChefSoiree)  with an armful of sketches, lists, and instructions. By the time I had crossed the street and gotten into my car, I noticed that my chest was sore all the way across. Not hurting, just a growing soreness. 

As I drove home I began to recognize the situation. There wasn't any pain in the left arm, there wasn't any "elephant sittting on my chest." I kept driving. At the red light at Lee Road and Collins, I sat in traffic mulling it over.

The pain wasn't bad, it would probably just  go away after a few minutes. Before I got too far from the hospital however, I thought it would be a good idea to just park for a while and see what the soreness did. I even thought of parking in a nearby church parking lot to wait it out. 

But then I thought, well if it is a heart attack, and I died while sitting in my car in the church parking lot, it would look bad for the church. So I decided to turn around and go park in the hospital parking lot and wait it out. 

I made a quick U turn in the parking lot of a business on Lee Road. At a moderate speed I drove down Columbia to Jeffferson, then on to 21st Avenue, down to Tyler and southward towards the hospital. No "elephant sitting on my chest" pain yet. 

I stopped at a restaurant on Tyler, went inside and splashed some water on my face in the bathroom. I did not look good. Then I got back into my car and drove  to the red light at 11th and Tyler and had to wait for what seemed forever to turn left and head for the emergency room parking lot. Luckily, there was one spot open. I pulled in, turned the car off and was just going to sit there and see what happens. 

A hospital shuttle bus pulled up behind me and stopped. After a few seconds, I realized the driver was waiting for me to exit the car, so instead of sitting in my car to see if the pain got any worse, I got out, climbed aboard the shuttle and headed for the emergency room entrance. I figured I could just sit in the waiting room.

For some reason I went to the desk instead, told them I had chest pains and gave some indentification. By this time I was hunched over and holding my hand against my chest.  They told me to sit down. A few seconds later someone from the back came for me, and I was taken into an initial exam room. Vital signs, an ekg, and quick examination. I was sent back to the waiting room. I started charging my cellphone at one of the charging stations. 

Another person then came to get me. This time I was taken all the way into the emergency room, and within a minute I was being prepared for emergency heart surgery. Just before I was wheeled away down the surgical suite corridor, however, a second EKG came back better than the first, and the brakes were put on the "emergency heart surgery" express train. A third EKG a few minutes later came back slightly better.

So within the next three  days I underwent the usual battery of tests for heart function and blockages. On Friday another round of chest soreness came and the whole scenario was repeated. This prompted a decision to move me from a regular room to an adult critical care room. Three days later I had heart bypass surgery to open up four blocked arteries. 

So the moral of this story is: when it's obvious that something's wrong, don't sit in you car in parking lots to see if it goes away. 

Up In The Air in an Autogyro

Back in the 1960's, my dad and I would drive out Morrison Road in Gentilly east of New Orleans and sometimes we would see several gyrocopters taking off and landing on the old highway that was parallel to the new road. The gyrocopters looked like large tricycles with propellers attached to them in the back and overhead, but when they took off, they gained altitude quickly and headed into the sky. That was more than 50 years ago.

 When the chance came to fly in a new streamlined autogyro, I grabbed my camera and headed for Hammond Airport. Stephen Rastanis has a couple of autogryos based over there at the Autogyro of Louisiana facility, and he teaches folks how to fly them.

 The basics are pretty simple. In a fixed wing aircraft, a propeller pushes the airplane forward and air rushes over the wing and lift is created. In a helicopter, a motor turns the rotors around, and lift is created and the copter can go straight up.

 In an autogyro, however, lift is created by the helicopter-like rotors going around, but the rotors are not powered. Instead, there is a propeller that pushes the aircraft forward and lift is generated by the rotors being pushed forward through the air. There is no power applied to the rotors while the autogyro is in flight.

 This creates remarkably stable air flight. The autogyro cannot stall, and if the engine suddenly quits for some reason, the aircraft starts slowing down, and the rotors gradually lower the craft to the ground. A good autogyro pilot doesn't require much space to land in. Any amount of crosswind actually provides more lift to the rotors, so landing is even gentler. 

We took off on the runway, using less than half of it before being zoomed away far above the treetops. The autogyro, when fully fueled, can run for four hours at speeds up to 100 mph. It is quite maneuverable, capable of sharp turns, steep dives, or, in a good wind, just sitting still in mid-air. 

 While autogyros are very popular in Europe, they haven't caught on bigtime in the States yet, even though they have been featured in James Bond movies and (I am told) the Little Orphan Annie movie. 

 They call them "the motorcycle of the sky" and that descriptive phrase fits well, since it’s an open-air cockpit and one gets to wear a helmet (with headphones and microphone.)

 Once you are strapped into the seat and the engine revs up, it's not scary or breath-taking, just a unique way to get up high enough to see some distance, check out the landscape, rivers, houses, and stores, and fly in a way for which there is no comparison. 

 

Hammond High School from the air

Wal-Mart Distribution Center

Campground on the interstate south of Robert

Hammond Airport

 

 

 

 

Countdown Clock

 Several years ago Hudson's Bargain Center had a countdown clock for sale, a big digital read-out clock that counted down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds. I knew it would come in handy and bought one. I've used it several times for big events and deadlines, and I've loaned it to friends for their big day countdowns: things like retirement, graduation, weddings, etc. 

In between uses I set it for a countdown a few years from now and let it run in my house. It has medium bright red digital numbers so it makes a good night light. Well, that and it makes a good conversation piece. 

"What's that?"

"Oh, that's my countdown clock."

"What's it counting down?"

"Nothing important..."

"But it's got 708 days, 14 hours, 32 minutes and 29 seconds on it..."

"Yes, it does."

"What happens in 708 days and 14 hours?"

"We'll just have to wait and see."

I'm thinking of resetting it for 345 days, 11 hours, 6 minutes and nine seconds. That means the countdown will end sooner. We won't have to wait as long to see what happens.

Happy Father's Day

 There are, within my brain, several memories permanently etched regarding my father and stepfather. This is their day, so I am going to re-visit some of those memories.

There is the memory of the go-kart my father built for me. It was made of two-by-fours, had four wheels, a seat, and a rope tied to the front axle with which to steer it. We would take to it to the Mississippi River levee and ride down the slope of the levee.

He eventually decided it needed a motor, so he mounted a five horsepower motor to the rear deck and installed a V-belt to drive one of the rear wheels. It actually worked, and we spent many a fun hours driving it back and forth, up and down the levee. 

A few years later he bought me a go-kart that was more professionally made (from Sears, I think) with a welded metal tube frame (painted orange) and powered by another five horsepower engine. This one came with real brakes. That was a plus, not that I actually used the brakes that often. 

My dad was a sign painter, so there were always cans of paint around, as well as his collection of paint brushes of every size, and sign boards waiting to be sketched out and lettered. He also worked for a chemical plant as a piping draftsman for a while, in addition to his nighttime and weekend occupation of selling hot tamales. Come to think of it, he was always working, doing something.

Other memories I have with my dad is the Saturdays we would go visit my grandfather. His name was Joe and he lived in the lower ninth ward. His house was flooded during Hurricane Betsy. I don't remember much about my grandfather, other than his wife would always give me a Coke float when I visited.

My stepfather Tex was quite a character. He ran a service station when my mother met him, but he eventually ran a landscape nursery. He loved dogs, got along great with people, and almost ran for the city council of Waveland one time. My mother talked him out of it. I learned a lot from Tex, and I appreciate his efforts to make our lives better.

So to both my fathers, Happy Fathers Day. The world is a better place because of you, and I think I became a better person as well. 

An Array of Abacuses

 My dad collected manually-operated adding machines. His drafting work often called upon him to add up numbers, so he had at hand a hand-cranked adding machine with dozens of buttons, also one of those plastic turn wheel adding machines that you had to use a stylus to turn the wheels, and he also had three (or more)  abacuses (the plural of abacus), those featuring sliding beads that a skilled manipulator could use to add up totals very quickly. 

In fact, that is what my dad used when adding up orders and sales tax for his hot tamale sales business. Here is a picture of three of his abacuses. 

Click on the image to make it larger.

He also had a selection of slide rules of various sizes, even a circular one. Those came in handy for multiplication and other more complex mathematical calculations. His day job was a piping run draftsman for a chemical plant in Ama, La., so he did a lot of measuring and computations comparing plans for piping runs to actual as-built piping runs between processing units in the plant. 

All these were prior to the coming of electronic calculators, both the desk models and handheld kinds. I remember the first handheld calculators, they cost several hundred dollars. The "scientific calculators" cost even more. Now they give them away as souvenirs at trade conventions. 

Slide rules

Cuckoo Clock Conundrum

 In 1971 I acquired a cuckoo clock. It actually worked and kept pretty good time, so I put in on the wall and every hour it would announce the time with a little bird coming out of the swinging door and going cuckoo. 

It was powered by a falling weight on a chain, so every so often you had to run the weight (that looked like a long pine cone) up to the top so gravity could pull it downward again and keep the gears turning.

After a while I just forgot about winding it, but left it on the wall anyway. Here is a picture of it:

The clock and the cuckoo

I didn't realize it at the time, but not winding a cuckoo clock on a continuing basis tends to make it malfunction in unusual ways. 

Not long afterwards, I was listening to a New Orleans radio station, one that used the sound of a cuckoo clock as a sound effect to introduce various segments or to punch up a particular joke being told. The radio station announced that it needed to record a new cuckoo clock sound effect, and it was now taking "auditions" from area cuckoo clock owners. 

I called the station, got on the air, and told them I had a slightly-malfunctioning cuckoo clock I would like to audition. The disc jockey asked me what was wrong with it, and I told him that when it strikes the hour, it doesn't sound the first part of the cuckoo, the "kook," but it did sound the second sound, the "oou." In other words, instead of going "cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo" at the top of the hour, it just went "oou, oou  oou."

The disc jockey declined to make a recording of my clock. He said he thought he knew where the kook was. 

I soon took the clock down off the wall, since it was getting embarrassing to have friends over and all of a sudden the cuckoo clock going "oou, oou, oou."

Pictorial Map Book

 I just beefed up and republished my book of cartoon bird's eye view maps. These are the maps that I have been drawing over the past 40 years, starting in 1983 with downtown Covington. 

I had published a smaller version of the book a few years ago. This one is 8 1/2 by 11 inches, so the maps have been reduced to fit. The original maps were 11 x17" and in many cases two feet by three feet, so the reduced-to-fit versions in the book will not contain the level of detail of the original maps. But the overall map is interesting to look at, and many of those maps have been posted to this website and over at Tammany Family blog at full size so you can zoom in to see the detail. Links to those at the bottom of this post. 

Since the mid-1980's I've been drawing maps in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and even South Carolina. They are fun to look at, and I would think a valuable historical reference. Already I get emails from people saying that they have a copy of one of my maps from 30 years ago, and it helps jog their memories of what was where, especially the businesses that are no longer with us. I made many great friends travelling across the South visiting the cities and towns, and working with the local chambers of commerce and newspapers to use the maps for promotional purposes. 

To order a copy of the book, click on this link.

Links to cartoon maps on the internet:

Folsom Pictorial Maps

Mandeville Business Map 1986

Walking Tour of Covington - 1983

Tammany Trace Map

Cartoon Maps

Pontchartrain Drive - Slidell in 1985

Gause Blvd in 1985 - Map

Covington Maps Side by Side

An Early Tammany Trace Map

Cartoon Shopping Centers

Slidell Chamber Hosts Holiday Party

Destination Downtown 

Madisonville Map 2017  

Pictorial Maps Presented   

Shop Local USA

Cartoon Map Presentation

Smatterings

 Some friends have asked me to put my short stories and poems into a book. Here it is. This collection features a number of my gallery blog articles, selections from my "sixty second science fiction" book, and several humorous off-the-wall stories.

As a bonus I have included the three "Tibert the Cajun" adventures - sort of as a tribute to Justin Wilson. The poems are generally upbeat, except the one about New Year's Eve. So if you like fiction, lines that rhyme, or an offbeat look at time travel fiction, this book has a smattering of each. Now available on Amazon.

Houston Hotel Lobby

 One Christmas vacation I decided to go to Houston for the holidays. After visiting with some relatives, I headed downtown with my camera and just wandered around, taking pictures of the urban landscape, the fountains, the sidewalks surrounded by tall buildings and the underground shopping center. 

The photo below shows the lobby of the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel from one of the interior atrium balconies. The bank of elevators are at the top of the frame. 

This view became important later on because when I wrote my science fiction novel "The Gafferty Perspective" a few years after my visit, the final moments of the novel took place in the atrium lobby of the hotel. 

The last chapter of the novel was revised during a subsequent visit to the Houston area, where I used a typewriter in the offices of the The Woodlands community newspaper to put the finishing touches on it. 

Mount Cheaha

 Every so often I drive to north Alabama to take in the mountain roads and long-range high elevation vistas. While there are a number of good views and curvy roads up around Chattanooga, the best combination of those are found over on Mount Cheaha near Anniston, which features "the highest point in the state."

I find myself going back to Mount Cheaha State Park every few years, just to sit on the overlook balcony and watch the sunset. I lived near there when I was an editor for the newspaper in Pell City, and even then I would drive over to Mount Cheaha every other week to take in the scenery. It helped that the state built a lodge, a picnic grounds, a campground, a motel, and a great little restaurant with a great big window you can look out of while eating. 

Here are some photos:

The roads are steep with a lot of sharp turns, but once you get there it is worth the effort. There is even a four story stone tower at the "highest point" that you can climb up to the very top and be the highest person in the state, out of breath for sure, but still the highest person if you don't count people in aircraft. 

I went there a few weeks ago, and the place was about deserted. There were only about four people staying in the 120 room motel, the restaurant was closed due to a shortage of people to staff it, and the buildings looked a little shabbier than when I last saw them. Perhaps that was due to smaller maintenance budgets, perhaps due to the buildings getting older, or perhaps my memory of them being too forgiving since the last time I saw them. 

CovID 19 threw the state park for a loop, no doubt. Probably  not many people drive their motor homes and travel trailers up the long winding roads any longer.  I hope it will bounce back and revive. Until then, I will hold onto my memory of eating a full Thanksgiving dinner at the mountain top restaurant, looking at the fantastic view of the mountains receding in the distance, but for the same price of a meal at Shoney's down at the interstate exit.

Screaming Yellow Zonkers to The Rescue

 When I went to college I managed to avoid taking speech class until the very last semester. It's not that I don't like speeches, I go to them often and even listen to podcast speeches once in a while. It's just that I don't give speeches. The operative word is "give." It's more like a speech has to be pried out of me.

I have made speeches in the past. People have asked me to speak and once in a million requests I agree to it. It's just not my favorite thing to do. 

Anyway, along came "speech" class and I was required, once a week, to give a speech to my fellow college students. 

My first speech was about the evolutionary miracle that is the human hand. It was mind-numbing.

I remember only one other speech, and that was the time I read the front and back of a box of Screaming Yellow Zonkers. Now SYZ was some kind of popcorn snack that I was fond of at the time, and noticing that I had a speech to make the next day, it would seem appropriate (and extremely entertaining as well as convenient) to just read the quips and jokes found on a box of Screaming Yellow Zonkers. 

The time came, I got up, and after a brief introduction (which was not necessary since everyone was consuming large amounts of Zonkers daily), I launched into a dramatic reading of the front and back of the box, humorous stories, puns, a zany cartoon or two. I think I threw in a side panel for a bonus. (I did not read the ingredients list. That would have been a bummer.)

But the speech was well-received, especially afterwards when I passed the box around for anyone who wanted to sample the product. 

So my suggestion is, if you find yourself pressed for a speech topic, turn to snack food. Always a hit with the crowd, especially if you pass some around at the end. 

 

St. Bernard Parish Bird's Eye View Map

The new pictorial cartoon map of St. Bernard Parish is finished. I was born in Chalmette, so it was kind of a personal project. I learned much about the amazing history of the parish and the dedication and endurance of its residents.

Click on the video link below to see a time-lapse video showing the colorization of the map.

 

Northlake Welcome Center

In a never ending quest to provide people with information about St. Tammany Parish, a few friends and I opened the Northlake Welcome Center on North Causeway Approach in the mid-1980's. It was located in a small tan brick building on the east side of the major roadway, just a few blocks from Lake Pontchartrain.

We filled it with brochure racks offering brochures and business cards of a wide variety of businesses, motels, tourist attractions, real estate agents and other items of interest to people driving off the north end of the Causeway.

The Northlake Welcome Center staff included Karen Hays, myself, and a couple of others, but as time went on, those volunteers had others things to do than wait for people to walk in the door. 

It was successful at the beginning, but as time wore on, it became seasonal and the traffic dwindled. We were asking local community supporters and businesses to advertise on a monthly basis, but it wasn't enough, so we had to close the doors on the operation. 

A few years later the St. Tammany Tourist and Convention Commission opened up a tourist information center over on La. 59 north of Interstate 12, spending a lot of money on a building of considerable architectural presence, basically a backwoods camp style structure on pilings over a swamp near Koop Drive. 

It helps if tourist welcome centers have some sort of government funding in the form of a dedicated tax base, I guess. The Northlake Welcome Center did not have that and although it was fun to do and we met a lot of great people, it was just ahead of its time. 

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

Smatterings: a collection of short stories, poems, and essays. There's a section of science fiction stories, some Cajun humor in the section on Tibert's Swamp Stories, and a variety of off-the-wall observations.

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 Sun: An 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: A Collection of "bird's eye view" cartoon maps, with a special section featuring Posters of Imaginary Festivals and Conventions: Humorous posters advertising non-existent events. 

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 (and probably last ) murder mystery novel

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

Abita Springs: Collection of Articles and Photographs Over the Years

Movie Memories on the Northshore: movie making and theaters of St. Tammany Parish. 

Mind Pivot is the story of a college student researching the reasons why people faint, when he comes across an incredible discovery. 

The Wedding Photographer is a novel that showcases a variety of wedding photographers over the years, some serious, some wacky, and some just amazed at the wedding and reception highjinks where they are asked to take pictures.

The Imaginary Bookstore is the story of a young woman who wants to do her job better, so she turns to her imagination for ideas. There she repeatedly visits an imaginary bookstore and asks a variety of people for advice. Only when real world events convince her to re-assess her life choices does she discover the answer she's been looking for. 

 

 

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 95 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. Bob Sander, a house designer, asked me to help him computerize some of his more popular house plans

A Video of the Lifetime Achievement Recognition

Click on the Play Triangle to view the video.