Louisiana Voice

Several years back, Fayette Tomkins, a co-worker from my days at the Baton Rouge State-Times newspaper, called me and asked if I’d like to meet him for lunch at the Florida Boulevard Piccadilly.

Sure, I said, and the two of us met that day and renewed a friendship that had lapsed after I left the paper in 1976 to become managing editor of the Daily Leader in my hometown of Ruston.

Thomas Wolfe, it turns out, was right. You can’t go home again. After living in Baton Rouge and working for The State-Times, I was bitten. I missed Baton Rouge, so I moved back to nearby Denham Springs.

That lunch with Fayette proved to be an indication of something more–a semi-regular event. The late Bill Bankston was the first to join us, making it a trio of State-Times alumni and the lunches quickly morphed into a monthly event, though Bankston, unfortunately, passed away soon after.

When I drove Fayette to the hospital for surgery, I was just helping a friend with no expectations of reciprocity. But days after he was back home, I received an Amazon package. I knew I had not ordered anything from Amazon but in that package was a Kindle reader he’d ordered as a gift for me. That was just Fayette being Fayette—generous to the core.

And those lunches soon became a new tradition of former employees of both The State-Times and The Morning Advocate. As more members joined the group, we continued congregating monthly for lunch. Only the location changed. We moved to the Piccadilly on Sherwood Boulevard and word spread as we invited any and every former employee of the two publications.

Now a full-blown tradition, we began calling ourselves (only half-jokingly) The Dinosaurs. Most of us, after all, are either approaching or already past 80 years of age. Our numbers ebb and flow from one month to another but the number consistently hovers around 12 to 15 attendees. Mostly, we just laugh as we reminisce about some of our adventures at the paper—like the one reporter who, fed up with the sticking keys on his typewriter, dumped it into a trash can, poured lighter fluid on it and set it afire. Or about the meeting of an area city council when the mayor, responding to criticism of some official action from a member of the audience, said, “Well, sir, that’s your derogatory.” Or any of a dozen other episodes that made work at the paper enjoyable and memorable, like when Edwin Edwards took a pair of scissors and lopped off about half of Mayor Woody Dumas’s tie. Of course, politics and LSU and Southern University football are also hot topics at the table.

For the most part, the food is just an afterthought; it’s the camaraderie between people who genuinely care for each other, enjoy working together and sincerely enjoy the fellowship that make the gatherings a monthly highlight.

There are no officers in The Dinosaur Club. We’re all equal, no one more equal than anyone else but there was never any question that it was Fayette who came up with the idea of a monthly get-together and he scheduled each month’s meeting faithfully—until he couldn’t.

You see, Fayette was deaf in one ear from birth, which made conversations with him difficult at times. But then his hearing got progressively worse, his eyesight began to fail him and he eventually labored to even walk. Then one of the cruelest maladies of them all—dementia—began to take a toll and though Linda Lightfoot would pick him up and drive him to the lunches, he eventually quit coming altogether. He couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, he explained, and he felt left out of the conversations. It had to be a lonely feeling.

But his condition kept deteriorating and it was discovered he had a brain tumor that was adversely affecting his eyesight and causing severe headaches. It proved to be benign, but that didn’t lessen the pain or the frustration.

Last week, he underwent brain surgery to remove the tumor. They got about 90 percent of it. But then, he suffered a stroke that further sapped his energy and the decision was made to move him to hospice. Last Friday, at approximately 7:40 a.m., Fayette, a native of Homer in Claiborne Parish, passed away. He was 79.

The tradition of The Dinosaur Club lives on and today (Monday, May 11, 2026), Advocate retiree Katheryn Flournoy proposed a toast and 15 Dinosaurs quietly raised a glass in honor of Fayette. It was a fitting tribute and a fitting place and time to give it.