Louisiana Voice

DISCLAIMER: As the father of a former beauty queen and homecoming queen and as the grandfather of an aspiring beauty pageant contestant, I feel I have certain poetic license here. So before any beauty queen, mother or father of a beauty queen or any sponsor of a beauty pageant decides to take me to task for this post, please know it is written with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

—Editor

One July many years ago, I was in the little town of Farmerville, near the Arkansas line in Union Parish. While there, I attended a beauty pageant called Miss Louisiana Watermelon. No joke. There was actually a beauty pageant named for a watermelon. It is held as part of the Louisiana Watermelon Festival and the queen would go on to compete in the Miss Louisiana Pageant later in the year—as Miss Louisiana Watermelon.

Intrigued at the prospect of any girl aspiring to the dubious title of Miss Watermelon, I decided to conduct some quick research into beauty pageants.

I already knew about the Queen Dixie Gem Pageant held each year in conjunction with the Louisiana Peach Festival in my hometown of Ruston. I covered several of them in my early years as a journalist. Not content with a big girl peach queen, festival leaders decades ago also came up with something called the Princess Peach Pageant for the benefit of the little girls. Two pageants in one. Bless their hearts.

One Queen Dixie Gem Pageant that I had the pleasure of covering sometime back in the early 1970s languished for a shade under five hours as the bevy of beauties paraded across the stage four separate times—for their initial introductions in street dress, then in evening dress, a return in tasteful one-piece swimsuits, and finally to display their talents by performing interpretive baton twirling to the overture to Phantom of the Opera. It was the beauty pageant from hell.

That’s because the emcee, quite a dashing spokesman for a Shreveport charm school in his own right, rather than choosing snippets of each contestant’s complete bio card on each trip to center stage, insisted on reading the complete biography of each contestant on all four of the trips. And each bio, without a single exception, included some variation of the clincher: “She enjoys the game of love…tennis,” or “She enjoys tennis, the game of love.” That tactic, employed on each of the 37 contestants, did little to shorten the pageant’s duration or to improve the disposition of the weary audience, growing more irritable by the minute.

The real highlight, however, came in the wee hours, somewhere around 1:30 a.m. when, as the judges were tabulating their scores, said emcee whipped out a three-foot-long scroll of paper from his pocket and proceeded with a rhythmic recitation of his list of things to do on a rainy day (In the interest of brevity, I’ve shortened the list by about 80-90 percent of its length.): “cook a meal, vacuum the apartment, water the plants, read a book, write a novel, call a friend, redecorate, play the piano,…sprinkle perfume in your drawers.”

Honest. He said that. I can only hope that last suggestion was meant for his bureau or dresser. At least it momentarily lightened the mood of the crowd that had by then become quite surly.

I also found a Miss Louisiana Swine Festival Pageant in Basile, a town that straddles the parishes of Acadia and Evangeline. It, too, has pageants for the younger girls: Baby Miss, Toddler Miss, Tiny Miss, Petite Miss and Little Miss Piggies but I did not have the courage or inclination to confront a Queen Swine or the princess piglets. I still don’t.

Yet, it’s interesting to contemplate this: The Miss Louisiana Swine winner advances to the Miss Louisiana pageant and that winner goes on to the Miss America pageant. So what if Miss Swine should win Miss Louisiana and Miss America and some enterprising reporter were to trace her lineage back to Miss Louisiana Swine?

I ache for the opportunity to be that reporter.

My less than extensive research soon brought me back to Farmerville and the Watermelon Festival. The burning question that kept haunting me was: Why? Why a watermelon queen when the economy of Union Parish is driven by broiler houses?

Broiler houses are facilities in which baby chicks are taken from the hatcheries and nurtured for their date thirteen weeks hence with Col. Sanders or Popeye’s. It’s big business. So big, that Gov. Bobby Jindal invested $50 million in state money to keep the chicken plucking plant operative there a few years back.

The answer is, there is a Louisiana Chicken Festival, but it’s not in Farmerville. It’s in Dubach in Lincoln Parish, just a short 12-mile jaunt up U.S. 167 from Ruston, home of the Peach Festival. Well, they have broiler houses all over Lincoln Parish, too, so while it’s not in Farmerville, it’s close enough—only about 15 miles away. So why not hold a pageant to honor that pillar of the economic structure?

Think about it. The Louisiana Chicken Festival with the lovely Queen Pullet and Princess Little Chick. Can’t you just see Queen Pullet walking along the runway in her evening gown of beautiful white….chicken feathers, her tiara a beautiful red comb and an ominous ax (to dispatch the chicken’s head, of course) for a scepter?

Of course, if you have a Queen Pullet and Princess Little Chick, you may as well go from the sublime to the ridiculous and have a Miss Louisiana Egg beauty pageant at the same time.

Miss Louisiana Egg? There’s a yolk there somewhere that should crack you up, but we’ll let it lie. Or would that be lay, the past tense of which would be laid?

Read Full Post »

BATON ROUGE—He would have made 91 on November 27 had he lived until then. He didn’t.

Still, he worked right up to the end. A blood clot in his leg hospitalized him and when he was released his doctor said he could not return to work. His last day on the job was September 20. He died exactly a month later, on October 20.

James Jene (Gene) Ruffin was a retired bricklayer who couldn’t stay retired. He went back to work as a security guard, first for a Baton Rouge hospital and then for a company under contract to the State of Louisiana in the Claiborne Building, which houses the Division of Administration, the Office of Risk Management, the State Land Office, the Department of Education, the Department of Civil Service, and various other state agencies.

Because of bid laws, the contract for security shifted from firm to firm on an annual basis but whichever firm would win the contract would simply take on the employees from the previous firm. The contractor might change, but the personnel rarely did. Even when one of those firms defaulted on the guards’ paychecks and lost the contract, Mr. Ruffin stayed on. He never did get paid for those two weeks.

He was a short man who moved with all the agility and speed one might expect of a 90-year-old. That is to say he never hurried. He also was a quiet man but one who always spoke.

He and fellow guard Robert Goree became fast friends. Mr. Goree, himself in his eighties, is a native of Grambling and a graduate of Grambling State University. He is a retired teacher and often gave Mr. Ruffin a ride to work, letting him out of his car by the loading dock where one of the guard stations was located.

“I can still see him shuffling up that long ramp going into the building, taking those little steps of his,” said Mr. Goree, who was one of three people to offer a tribute to Mr. Ruffin at the funeral. The other two were grandsons.

Several employees of the Office of Risk Management were members of a coffee club with each member charged only with bringing an occasional fresh bag of Community medium roast coffee to replenish supplies. There were no monetary dues to belong to the club. Both Mr. Ruffin and Mr. Goree were honorary members, welcome to partake of coffee in the community kitchen of the Claiborne Building’s basement.

Mr. Goree always got a fresh cup in the morning. One cup, that’s all. Mr. Ruffin, who didn’t come on shift until 2 p.m. would usually come into the kitchen during the 2:30 break and pour himself a cup of what by that time of day was a syrupy sludge, more akin to number two west Texas crude than real coffee. But he drank it, nevertheless.

Those of us in the break room at 2:30 grew accustomed to checking his belt each day. There was this one belt loop that he always seemed to miss and it became something of a running joke with all of us.

But the joke may ultimately be on us. How many of us will be working at 90? Most of us, provided we make it that far, will more likely be sitting in a sun room in some rest home with a lap blanket and shoulder shawl nodding off in front of some nameless soap opera on television. But Mr. Ruffin was working.

One of fondest memories of Mr. Ruffin will be the ongoing trash talking with Mr. Goree over the Grambling-Southern rivalry. Mr. Goree loves Grambling but Mr. Ruffin lived for Southern. He never missed a game. One of his sons usually drove him to out-of-town games but for one recent game, that son was unavailable to drive him so he and another son hopped a Greyhound and rode for hours on end to an out-of-state game. That’s devotion.

He and Mr. Goree never passed up the opportunity to trade friendly insults. It was not only fun to watch, it was heartwarming. It’s a certainty that Mr. Goree is going to miss their good-natured banter and the affable rivalry in the weeks and days leading up to the annual Bayou Classic game between the two schools.

And we will both miss Mr. Ruffin.

Read Full Post »

Editor’s note: Occasionally in our outrage over the apparent double standard practiced by this administration, we will write a scathing article intended to point the spotlight on something we feel is wrong and in the process, cast undue attention on other participants. Mrs. Thompson’s own comments may be read in the comments section of last week’s post.

And on occasion, we regrettably get a few facts mixed up. We are human, after all. But when we do that, we try to rectify matters as best we can. With that in mind, we will attempt to clarify a couple of points in our last post about the state practice of retire/rehire.

We waited to post this on Sunday night because readership is much reduced during the weekend and we wanted to expose our clarification to as many of our readers as possible.

While it is true that Alexis Thompson was rehired after retiring from her position at the State Bond Commission, the date of her retirement was incorrect. We said she retired on March 21 of this year and was rehired the following day when in fact her retirement date was July 31, 2010. She remained retired nearly eight months before returning to work for work for the State Treasury Department charged with the duty of effecting an evaluation of job levels at the State Bond Commission in an effort to reduce the number of positions.

Moreover, after our story was posted, we were informed by LASERS that Mrs. Thompson’s retirement income (as well as the retirement income of any other retire/rehire) would be reduced if the rehire earned more than 50 percent of his/her previous full-time salary. Inasmuch as her annualized salary was 80 percent of her full-time salary, it should be assumed that her retirement income during the period of her re-employment would be reduced accordingly.

We are not suggesting that LASERS was remiss in not informing us up front because when we made the public records request for Mrs. Thompson’s retirement income (which is public record), the folks at LASERS had no way of knowing that we were inquiring into the retirement income of a rehire. They simply gave us the information requested by us—the figure at which she retired.

All this contrition on our part in no way diminishes the problems we have with retire/rehire practices. The quality of work performed by rehires is immaterial to us. People are out of work and state employees are among those likely to be laid off. They are not alone; people in all walks of life are losing their jobs, their insurance, their homes and their dignity.

A state employee who has retired should not be eligible for rehire. If the employee intends to continue working, postpone retirement. To do otherwise is a drain on the state budget and on the administration’s credibility.

Mrs. Thompson said her expertise was necessary to complete the job efficiently and effectively. No agency should be so compartmentalized as to impede the uninterrupted flow of work upon the loss of one person. What if Mrs. Thompson had become physically incapacitated or was otherwise unavailable for the chore during those eight months of her retirement? Surely Treasury had some form of backup plan in place.

We can’t help but believe if an agency like John Kennedy’s Treasury Department is doing its job properly, there should be an alternative to having to bring back no fewer than three of its former employees.

That’s right. At least three rehires in Treasury. Our first story only mentioned Mrs. Thompson because hers was the only name we had at the time. Subsequent to that story’s posting, we received information on two more retire/rehires in Treasury. That story will be posted on Monday evening. We will write about others as we find them.

As a final note, it should be clear that the real target of our indignation in the original post was John Kennedy and the Treasury Department. That’s because Mr. Kennedy has made so much of his plan to reduce state employment by 15,000 by simply not replacing those 5,000 or so who retire or quit state government each year.

Such a plan is disingenuous at best. Consider this: The highest turnovers in state government, in order, are in the Department of Corrections, state hospitals, and the Department of Transportation and Development.

Under Mr. Kennedy’s plan, we would have fewer people guarding dangerous prisoners, fewer people tending to the health needs of the sick and dying, and fewer people trying to keep up with the deteriorating condition of our state highways.

And even as he travels the state speaking to civic clubs about the need to reduce state employment, Mr. Kennedy quietly brings retired workers back into the fold of his agency. This is duplicity, pure and simple.

If this is indicative of the brand of candor we can expect of our public officials—and we fear it is—then this state is in more trouble than we are willing to admit.

Read Full Post »

As political gaffes go, it has to be one of the worst in the storied history of American presidential campaigns, one from which it is almost certain to be difficult, if not impossible, to recover.

Michele Bachmann, whose tour bus is equipped with external speakers, pulled up to a campaign stop in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on Tuesday, August 16 the same way she does at every campaign stop: to the pounding beat of Elvis Presley’s version of Promised Land.

But the Newsweek cover girl from Minnesota wasn’t content with just entertaining the crowd with the Elvis version of the Chuck Berry hit. She decided to give a shout out to Elvis. And what a shout it was:

“Before we get started, let’s all say, ‘Happy Birthday’ to Elvis Presley today!” she exhorted the crowd of 16 onlookers who promptly broke out in stony, perplexed silence.

Elvis was born on Jan. 8, 1935. He died on Aug. 16, 1977. Bachmann was wishing the man happy birthday on the 34th anniversary of his death.

We can’t wait to see what she does on Nov. 22. (Cue the Marilyn Monroe tape.)

Bachmann won the Iowa caucus but she still has a long, uphill fight against a bevy of Republican presidential wannabes. She cannot afford to offend those 73,482 Elvis impersonators and she’s going to need every one of the votes of those 286 Elvis fans out there in America’s heartland.

The Elvis shtick does seem to work for her, however, but it’s really nothing new. Remember John McCain’s Take a Chance on Me (Abba) and Johnny Be Goode (Chuck Berry)? Or Hillary Clinton’s Blue Sky (Big Head Todd and the Monsters)?

And what K Street lobbyist worth his salt doesn’t know the words to Signed, Sealed, Delivered (Stevie Wonder)?

So with that in mind, we’ve come up with some suggestions for theme songs for the other candidates clamoring for voters’ attention, votes, and most of all, campaign contributions. For some candidates, it was impossible to choose just one song, so we offer a choice:

• Michele Bachmann: Yakety Yak (The Coasters), Think (Aretha Franklin);

• Tim Pawlenty: Gone (Ferlin Husky), I’m Movin’ On (Hank Snow);

• Newt Gingrich: Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen), Do Wacka Do (Roger Miller);

• Ron Paul: The Impossible Dream (Pick an artist);

• Rick Perry: Bad to the Bone (George Thorogood), I Won’t Back Down (Tom Petty);

• Mitt Romney: It’s Over (Roy Orbison), Against the Wind (Bob Seger);

• Sarah Palin: North to Alaska (Johnny Horton), You Talk Too Much (Joe Jones);

• Rudy Giuliani: New York, New York (Frank Sinatra);

• Paul Ryan: Crazy (Patsy Cline), Witchcraft (Frank Sinatra);

• Barack Obama, 2008: A Change Gonna Come (Sam Cooke);

• Barack Obama, 2012: Won’t Get Fooled Again (The Who);

• Buddy Roemer: I’m A Nut (Roger Miller), Theme from Rocky (Bill Conti)

• Bobby Jindal: Who Are You? (The Who);

• The American People: This Land Is Your Land (Woody Guthrie)

Read Full Post »