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. Posts and pictures on this blog cannot be copied, downloaded, printed, or used without the permission of the blog owner, Nippy Blair.