CECIL BLAIR a memory of my daddy.
At his funeral, our pastor at Emmanuel
Baptist Church, Dr. Larry Taylor said that the first time he met Cecil Blair he
thought that he had seen “a figure who had stepped out of the pages of southern
literature. That even someone with a
heart as big as Cecil Blair’s couldn’t keep going forever. He had a big heart that finally gave out.” This was an accurate description of my father.
One could imagine seeing him in a white suit, a huge cigar stuck in his thick
mustached mouth, his southern drawl holding court in the legislative houses of
Louisiana. Instead, he was a down to earth person who felt comfortable next to
poor farmers or governors. He treated everyone the same and seldom forgot a
name.
Most
Sunday mornings you could see him standing in his suit wearing a colorful
necktie featuring a hand-painted horse’s head, cigar, unlit, carefully placed
between his middle and index finger on his left hand, or stuffed in the top,
coat pocket, as he greeted people at the front door of church, telling tales of
events, laughing, and enjoying everyone as he handed them a program. Any time anyone complimented him on his tie
he would say, “You like it? Here, you
can have it. I have plenty.” Then he removed the tie and handed it to the
surprised person. “Now you have to wear
it next Sunday,” he’d chuckle. This man
loved sharing and he didn’t really mind losing the tie because he did have
plenty. Our former minister, Dr. Glenn
Bryant, took up painting after retirement and began painting a horse’s head on
neckties. Since he and daddy were close
friends and traveled to Shetland pony shows together, daddy received a lot of
neckties. These became a regular part of
Cecil Blair’s business wardrobe.
Cecil Blair was a farmer, businessman, state
Senator, and a raconteur. He embodied
the character in a Hemingway novel. This man was always looking for a new
adventure and when conquering it, would quit and move on. Through the years he learned golf, played for years,
and then moved on to a new adventure. He grafted camellias and entered flower
shows, judging on occasion, he grew roses and gave new rosebuds to every
patient in hospitals for several years, he fell in love with Shetland ponies
and raised them to show across the United States winning blue ribbons, he
became the National President of the Shetland pony association, then quit. We had a pony ride for a while before raising
goats -descendants of Carl Sandburg’s floppy eared goats, no less. The list goes on and on.
When
not taking care of business at his pest control, or in Baton Rouge, taking care
of state business, then he was on his farm unwinding. He wore old, faded shirts, sometimes with
tobacco juice stains, old, faded jeans and boots on the farm. There are no words to describe the torn, bedraggled
hat on his head.
Daddy had friends on the state and
national level. To see him in his
element you would never think that he had grown up a sharecropper’s son and was
called “white trash”. He was the third
of eight children, growing up in Sicily Island, a small community in Catahoula
Parish, in northeast Louisiana. His
school principal often talked to my grandfather about why he was keeping daddy
out of school to work crops. “He’s too
smart, Mr. Blair, that boy could go somewhere, be somebody,” he told him.
After graduating from Sicily Island high
school in 1934, Cecil Blair wanted to go to college, be the first in his family
to do so, yet he had no idea how. At
eighteen years old and with virtually no money, he hitchhiked to Ruston,
Louisiana hoping to attend Louisiana Tech University. He knocked on the university president’s door,
tired and hungry. He told the president that he wanted to attend
college but didn’t know what to do. The
president was impressed and found him a job on campus. He moved into the athletic dorm under the
stadium with the football players who were always sending him on errands and
such. He knew little about modern technology. He had never been to a restaurant and wasn’t
sure how to order food. He had never used
a phone before in his life and when asked to do so was dumbfounded how to
operate it. He was thrilled to have an
indoor toilet and a shower.
He
worked his way through college earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology
in 1938. While at Louisiana Tech he met
Virginia Susan Ruth “Susie” George.
After graduation he enrolled in graduate school at Louisiana State
University where he earned a Master of Science degree in entomology. Susie followed him to complete her studies.
When they were getting the marriage
certificate and he was asked her name, he turned to her and said, “What’s your
name?” He had only known her as Susie. They got married in 1939 and went back to
their dorms. They moved to Alexandria in
1940.
In 1944, although he had two small children
(my sister Becky and I), he enlisted in the United States Navy and served in
the Pacific Theater of Operations until the end of World War II using his
entomology degree by spraying mosquitos for malaria in China. He was never on a ship.
In 1952 he became a member of the
Louisiana house of Representatives for Rapides Parish. During this time, he supported farmers in
need of open range lands. He authored a
bill to fence the highways to keep roaming cattle off the roads. He worked to
obtain the relocation to Alexandria of St. Mary’s Training School for the
handicapped. In the Senate (1960-1976)
he pushed for the creation of Buhlow Lake from the unused pasture of the cows
that once supplied milk to Central Louisiana Mental Hospital in Pineville,
Louisiana. Boat races are held there.
He also worked for the establishment of LSU-A, located between
Alexandria and Lecompte, Louisiana.
Years later, the school was given four-year status which came through
just weeks before his death.
My daddy loved life and a good joke. During
his political years, people would come to the farmhouse on highway 71S to see “the
senator”, and mama would say, “Drive down the pasture lane and keep going toward
the back and you’ll find him. Don’t forget to shut gates or the animals will
get out.” They’d drive down the lane
slowly, see a man on a tractor. Stop. Get out and walk toward the man, while waving
their arms above their head as if trying to stop someone in a crowd. When
he stopped and looked at them with his faded tobacco-stained shirt, they’d ask
if he’d seen the senator. Daddy, knowing
they had not recognized him would occasionally say, “Naw, sir, I ain’t seen
him. I just work back here plowing for
him. Ask that woman up in the house by the road where he might be. Don’t forget to shut gates, there’s a lotta
bull back here.”
The person would then quickly walk back to
their car, drive very slowly down the lane, shutting gates carefully keeping an
eye out for some bull, and return to the house.
When mama answered the door, they’d tell her that that man on the
tractor said that he wasn’t back there and to ask her. This usually flustered Ms. Susie but she
would take what information they had while promising to let him know when he
came in. If she were extremely agitated,
she would send them back down the lane with a folded note saying, “Quit giving
these people bull, dammit. I’m busy.”
Daddy raised sweet corn and sold a lot of
it from his vegetable stand by the highway. He held court with anyone that
stopped by. Since we were in the center
of the state, politicians traveling back and forth frequently stopped. Friends or strangers would stop and talk
politics or listen to him tell stories. He lived on the honor system when not sitting
in the shade in his rocking chair under a box fan. There was always a jar to place the money in with
a note next to it, written on cardboard with the prices. The
jar was always full at the end of the day.
When the sweet corn season was over, Cecil
Blair always held a corn boil. Hay bales
would be placed around the vegetable stand by the highway. People would gather, corn would be boiled,
brisket cooked, dishes brought by friends and the party would go for
hours. There would be preachers of all
religions, politicians, friends, and strangers. Cars would line the service
road as far as you could see. Sometimes
the rabbi or the catholic priest would say the blessing, or the Baptist, or
Methodist. Sometimes even the governor
or a politician would be put on the spot. It was always a good time, people sitting on
hay bales, conversation and laughter filling the air, paper plates balanced in
their laps, drinks on the ground with cautions to the many children as to not
spill them accidently. Everyone had all
the corn they could eat, leaving barrels of cobs for the neighbor’s pigs. Occasionally
there’d be contests to see who could eat the most, and most times people would
pile their finished cobs on an unsuspecting preacher’s plate for a photo shoot.
Daddy also held corn boils on the grounds of the state capitol in Baton Rouge, for the governor, the legislators, and the staff that worked there. I can imagine the conversations that went on during those gatherings.
Cecil on the grounds of the governor's mansion.
Cecil Blair was a democrat of the
anti-Long faction, mostly because he loathed corruption and favoritism in
government which sometimes agitated other legislators. When he retired in 1976, after twenty
something years, he was given a washing machine agitator as one of his
departing gifts. Very appropriate.
My daddy loved flowers. Especially camellias and roses. We had over three-hundred camellia bushes and
around three thousand rose bushes around the house. One year, he planted wildflowers on the
highway right of way in front of the farm property, beautiful red clover. When
the highway department came to mow the highway, they mowed the clover down. Daddy fussed. The head of the department said
it was illegal. Cecil
Blair called the governor, explained the situation, and the matter was settled
with an apology. He replanted clover all the way to town after that, even
received a letter from Lady Bird Johnson for his efforts to beautify the
highways. The highway department never
mowed that section again. Today,
wildflowers still grace that part of highway 71 South.
One day he was out weeding the thistles around
the red clover on the highway, and stopped to rest on a culvert, his hoe by his
side. A car drove by, slowed down,
looked at this man with his disheveled gray hair, and overgrown mustache,
fanning himself with a beat-up straw hat, tobacco juice running down his chin, looking
pitiful on the side of the road. They
thought he was homeless and rolled down their window asking if he was okay. He
replied that he was hoeing weeds so the flowers would be pretty. Thinking he had lost some of his marbles, they
asked if they could take him somewhere, for food or water. “Nope,”
he said, my children take care of me.” They
then asked if his children knew where he was.
“Hope not,” he replied, “they’ll find me eventually,” and kept fanning. “Ya’ll
go on now, I’m fine. Trucks right up
there,” he pointed.
This man was a colorful raconteur.
Another time, daddy was working in a
flower bed next to their house in LeCompte, La. and a woman admiring his flower
bed wanted to hire him. He replied, “No,
ma’am. I only work for that woman in
this house because she lets me sleep with her.”
The woman couldn’t leave fast enough.
Cecil Blair died at St. Luke’s Episcopal
Hospital in Houston of heart failure.
While at the hospital we read a quote by Barry Lopez from the book
Crow and Wheel. It was printed at
the top of a newsletter the hospital put in the rooms. It was quite appropriate, and we had it
engraved on the back of his headstone.
“The stories people tell have a way of
taking care of them. If stories come to
you, care for them, and learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more that
food to stay alive. That is why we put
these stories in each other’s memory.
This is how people care for themselves.” Barry Lopez, the Crow and
Wheel.
Daddy spent his life trying to prove he
was somebody other than a “white trash sharecropper’s son”. He once told me that a person was really
somebody if their obituary was on the first page of the newspaper, above the
fold. Well, he was somebody. His death was announced on the first page
above the fold on several newspapers.
There are so many more stories about this
colorful man I called father, but one must stop somewhere.
Cecil Blair was a living sitcom full of
stories. I’m thankful he passed this
gift on to some of his children.
Sine die, Cecil Blair. Your family and friends miss you.
© Nippy Blair 2015.
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