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The full story of Alexandria’s emergence as a “baseball town,” its entry into the scrappy but electrifying Evangeline League,1 and its decades-long dance with minor league baseball2 hasn’t been forgotten so much as it has been misremembered. The local media has, for example, long repeated the claim that its historic ballpark, Bringhurst Field, was built in 1933. It was actually constructed in only three weeks, one year later, in 1934,3 right in time for the home opener of the Evangeline League’s inaugural season.4567

That may seem like a trivial inaccuracy, but it points to a larger, more significant problem: a form of civic amnesia that occurs when a community loses the institutions that once preserved and corrected its own memory. The facts were not hidden. For more than 100 years, Alexandria’s local newspaper, The Town Talk, extensively chronicled the rises, falls, and rebirths of the city’s professional baseball teams, and its 1.4 million-page digital archive is available online.

Retelling this story requires reconstructing a complicated past, and it forces an uncomfortable but unavoidable confrontation with the present. The Alexandria of 1934 was vastly different from the city of today, even though they are both unmistakably the same place.

Among the Evangeline League’s charter cities, Alexandria would become both the outlier and the anchor. It was there from the beginning, and it remained when every other original city disappeared, returned, reorganized, or gave way to some later version of the circuit.8 Eventually, the Alexandria franchise would become the only one to play every regular season of the Evangeline League, maintaining the same civic baseball identity while other cities changed names, affiliations, arrangements, and operators.

Location mattered. New Orleans had the port and the romance; Baton Rouge had the Capitol and the Tigers; Shreveport had oil money and swagger; Lafayette had the prairie Cajun pulse that would later define Acadiana. Alexandria had something quieter but no less consequential: the crossroads. Situated at the hinge of north Louisiana, Acadiana, the piney woods, and the old river parishes, Alexandria was not a single culture so much as a meeting place: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Black, white, rural, commercial, legal, medical, military, and mercantile. Central Louisiana in the fullest sense.

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By 1934, Alexandria’s confidence had been built over nearly half a century of progress.910 Between 1890 and 1910, the city grew from a small riverside town of 2,861 people into a bona fide American city of 11,213,11 asserting itself as the commercial capital of central Louisiana. “Alexandria has more paved streets and sidewalks than any city of its size in the Union,” The Alexandria Weekly Town Talk boasted in 1907. “It was one of the first cities of the South to own its waterworks and electric light systems. It has a larger and better sewer system than any city of 12,000 inhabitants in the Union.”12

But despite its advantages and its appetite for baseball, Alexandria had reason to be cautious. All six of the Evangeline League’s charter cities had seen professional baseball before, and all six still dreamt of the magic that the game unlocked. Only Alexandria, however, had recently experienced the heartache and humiliation of losing its hometown team, and in 1934, that loss still stung.

Alexandria’s first major purpose-built public ballpark, Sportsman’s Park, opened in 1907.13 It was located at the end of the city’s electric streetcar line, adjacent to the existing Electric Park skating rink and near the present-day intersection of Jackson Street and Texas Avenue. That same year, the White Sox of the Gulf Coast League became the city’s first professional baseball team. The league’s directors, The Town Talk reported, “were all pleased with Sportsman’s Park, and the verdict of all was that Alexandria would have one of the finest parks in the League.”14

Alexandria already knew what professional baseball could promise, and what it could cost. The city’s minor-league record was long enough to inspire nostalgia but uneven enough to justify caution: the Alexandria White Sox of the Gulf Coast League in 1907 and 1908;15 the Alexandria Hoo Hoos16 of the Arkansas State League in 1909;17 the Alexandria Tigers of the Louisiana State League in 1920;18 and, most recently and most memorably, the Alexandria Reds of the Cotton States League, who played from 1925 until their bitter collapse, mid-season, in 1930.19

But this list, useful as it may be, needs one more sentence of correction: it is the lineage of Alexandria’s white professional clubs.

Black Alexandria had built a baseball world of its own long before the Evangeline League arrived. Michael D. Wynne, a local historian and writer, recently unearthed evidence of at least one documented Black club, the West Alexandria Lightfoots,20 that played competitively—and for cash—in June of 1906,21 one year before the White Sox entered the Gulf Coast League. To be sure, the Lightfoots did not belong to a professional league, and there are earlier reports of competitive club and amateur baseball teams, both Black and white, dating back to at least 1901. Regardless, given the structural and institutional barriers that existed for Black Alexandrians during the Jim Crow Era, the fact that a Black team was both recognized and named—an earlier Black team was simply referred to as “Alexandria’s Colored Club”—by the white establishment newspaper is significant. Alexandria’s story as a “baseball town” does not begin with the White Sox, the Hoo Hoos, the Tigers, or the Reds. It begins, at least in part, with the Black teams—the Lightfoots, the All-Stars,2223 the Pioneers, and the Lincoln Giants—whose games were segregated or simply erased from the official civic narrative.

The same is true of Alexandria’s baseball geography. While the city’s first organized white team, the White Sox, played at Sportsman’s Park, organized Black baseball first played at Alexandria’s “Negro Base Ball Grounds,” located on Casson Street and better known as Lincoln Park. The site and much of the surrounding neighborhood were later demolished and are now part of Interstate 49 and the Pineville Expressway Overpass.

On July 1, 1932, The Town Talk announced the opening of a newly constructed “Negro baseball field” at Lee and Harris streets and, confusingly, also named Lincoln Park. The formal opening was scheduled for July 3 and 4, with the Alexandria Pioneers playing a strong semi-pro club from Lake Charles. The park had been built for approximately $900, with a 150-foot grandstand and seating for about 700 spectators. Special reservations were made for white spectators, because “scores” of white people had already been attending games there that season.24 Even in segregation, the Black game was not invisible. It was visible enough that white spectators came to watch, and visible enough that the white newspaper had to acknowledge the crowd.

The new Lincoln Park was a purpose-built ballpark, constructed on land owned by local attorney Ralph Thornton25 two years before Bringhurst Field, with officers, a grandstand, scheduled holiday openings, visiting opponents, and a team. The Pioneers’ opening series against Lake Charles placed Alexandria’s Black baseball scene inside the broader semi-pro network of Louisiana. The language was booster language. The pride was institutional. Black Alexandria was building more than a team. It was creating a baseball public.

Within a month, the Alexandria Pioneers had been replaced by a larger and more ambitious arrangement when the owners of the Shreveport Giants struck a deal to relocate to Alexandria. On August 29, 1932, as the newly renamed Alexandria Lincoln Giants prepared to host two games against the Natchitoches Reds, The Town Talk not only promoted the games but also gave special attention to one of the hometown team’s pitchers: Tom “Big Train” Parker, described as a star Alexandria hurler who had already turned back three teams that season with only one hit each.26

He more than deserved the special attention. Parker was an Alexandria native. After spending the previous season with the Indianapolis ABCs of the first National Negro League, he went on to build a long and notable career as a member of numerous Negro League clubs across the country, culminating in 1948, his final season, with a World Series championship as a starting pitcher for the Homestead (Pittsburgh) Grays. 1948, it turned out, would be the last-ever Negro League World Series. Although he was known primarily as a pitcher, Parker actually played more seasons as an outfielder.

The Town Talk’s reporting on Parker’s two seasons with the Alexandria Lincoln Giants appears to clarify a gap in Parker’s documented career.27 Tom Parker seemed to disappear after leaving Indianapolis in 1931, only to emerge in 1934 as a member of the New Orleans Crescent Stars. He wasn’t, as baseball historian James Riley claimed without any corroborating evidence, with the Monroe Monarchs.28 Parker, still a teenager at the end of his season in Indianapolis, decided to return home, and, fortuitously for him, he did so at the same time Black baseball had truly arrived.

Both Parker and the team were a sensation. On August 29, 1932, The Town Talk acknowledged something special was happening at Lincoln Park:29

In 1933, the Lincoln Giants of Alexandria were admitted into the (Black) Dixie League, a Black baseball circuit composed of teams from New Orleans, Shreveport, Little Rock, Memphis, Monroe, Jackson, and Algiers (New Orleans). R. D. Marcus and Glen Bradford were placed in charge of the local club. Lincoln Park was to be repaired, the grandstand covered, players signed, and exhibition games opened in March.30

The connection between the Alexandria Lincoln Giants and the broader Negro League-era baseball world places Central Louisiana inside the same segregated baseball ecosystem that, for generations, baseball writers treated as peripheral. But it was not peripheral. It was parallel.

None of that means every game at Lincoln Park belonged to the same category as formal Negro League competition. Local histories like Alexandria’s often blur formal league games, exhibitions, and semi-pro contests in the same ballparks and newspaper columns. But it does mean Alexandria’s Black baseball history belongs in the same paragraph as its white professional history, not in a footnote. The city had two baseball inheritances moving side by side: one better funded, more loudly promoted, and more easily remembered; the other segregated, under-documented, but just as rooted as white baseball and substantial enough to build its own field before Bringhurst existed.

That organization also complicates the birth story of Alexandria’s Evangeline League franchise. In June 1933, with Alexandria still without a white professional club, Lincoln Park became part of the conversation about bringing league baseball back to the city. When Baton Rouge and Jackson, two (white) Dixie League teams, arranged an exhibition at Lincoln Park, Josh Billings of Baton Rouge used the occasion to urge Alexandria fans to improve their ballpark.31 According to The Town Talk, Billings called Lincoln Park “a good beginning in the right direction,” suggesting that if the infield were skinned back, box seats and dugouts built, and the outfield fences extended and improved, the field “would do.”32

It is a striking moment: a Black ballpark, built by and for segregated Black baseball, was suddenly being evaluated as the possible foundation for Alexandria’s return to professional league baseball.

That was Jim Crow’s double logic at work. Segregation forced Black Alexandrians to build their own institutions, but once those institutions proved useful, white baseball men could imagine converting them into civic assets for the city at large—or, more precisely, for the white city that claimed the authority to speak for the whole. Lincoln Park was good enough to draw crowds, host traveling clubs, attract white spectators, and be discussed as a possible professional venue. Yet in the traditional story, it nearly disappears, replaced by Bringhurst Field as if Alexandria’s baseball geography began only when white professional baseball returned.

The Lincoln Park thread continued into 1934. As Alexandria maneuvered toward a place in what would become the Evangeline League, The Town Talk described prospective players, groundkeepers, umpires, ticket-sellers, rookies, and veterans swarming around Lincoln Park, as well as local men trying to bring baseball back.33 Before Alexandria’s new professional franchise had fully taken shape, Lincoln Park was one of the places where the city’s baseball future was being imagined.34 The park built for Black baseball stood, for a brief and revealing moment, at the edge of the white professional game’s return.

That history changes the frame. The Evangeline League arrived in a city that carried two baseball histories at once: one segregated, under-documented, and older than the civic story usually admits; the other better publicized, more commercially organized, and still raw from recent disappointment.

Among Alexandria’s four white professional predecessors, the Reds remained the most vivid cautionary tale. The wound had not scarred over. Former fans, merchants, boosters, and civic leaders still remembered the embarrassment of having rallied around a team that disappeared almost overnight. What made the loss sting even more was that the Reds had not been a failed experiment in any simple sense.

The Reds played at City Park Diamond, Alexandria’s public ballpark behind Bolton High School on Country Club Road, near what is now Masonic Drive and Lee Street. They had begun auspiciously enough. More than 4,000 fans crowded into the park on Sunday, April 19, 1925, to watch the club’s home debut against the Monroe Drillers, a 14-3 Alexandria victory that gave the Reds their third consecutive win.35

Attendance mattered in the Cotton States League almost as much as the standings, because gate receipts were the oxygen of Class D baseball. “If Alexandria doesn’t capture the attendance cup with yesterday’s crowd,” The Town Talk surmised the next day, “this city should at least feel proud of its showing as it has not had professional baseball in some time.” The paper could not resist the comparison: Alexandria’s crowd was nearly half as large as the one at New Orleans’ opener. “It proved beyond a doubt,” the paper declared, “that Alexandria is ready for baseball.”36

But even in that moment of triumph, the ceiling was already visible. Alexandria did not capture the 1925 attendance cup. The Reds would draw the league’s largest opening-day crowd the following year—an official attendance of 3,741—but the more than 4,000 who saw the 1925 home debut remained the club’s local high-water mark, later surpassed elsewhere by a crowd of more than 4,500 at Jackson, Mississippi.

After that, the promise began to fray. By July 1926, barely fifteen months after the Reds’ triumphant debut, the club was already asking Alexandria to save its professional baseball club from financial ruin. Reds boosters urged 2,000 fans to attend a benefit game and help wipe out a $1,888 deficit. The appeal was not subtle: if the deficit could be retired, Alexandria would remain in the league in 1927; if not, its future was uncertain. The numbers told the story. Weekday attendance, once estimated at around 610, had fallen to roughly 200. Sunday crowds, once near 900, had slipped closer to 600.37

By 1928, the question was being asked in print with almost accusatory bluntness: Did Alexandria even want baseball?38

The Town Talk reported that attendance that season had fallen so low that some recent gates barely covered the visiting club’s guarantee, leaving ordinary expenses unpaid. Crowds that had once numbered 500 or 600 had dwindled to 150 or 200. Players complained that City Park had become too quiet, that the home crowd waited for mistakes instead of lifting the team, and that the Reds needed not merely spectators but believers.

This was when the argument turned. The Reds were no longer simply a team trying to win games. They had become a referendum on Alexandria’s civic seriousness, a test of whether the city could sustain what it had once so loudly celebrated.

And then, the very next year, the Reds treated fans to a season more riveting and rewarding than they could have imagined.

The unlikely star of the 1929 club was a young right-handed pitcher named Lon Warneke. A gangly Arkansas farm boy known as “Dixie Dude” by his Alexandria teammates, Warneke had talked his way onto the team at the tail end of the 1928 season after being cut from the Cotton States club in Laurel, Mississippi.39 He had been a clumsy first baseman with little apparent hope of making it in the big leagues. But in Alexandria, he reinvented himself.

“I refused to quit just because they had let me go,” Warneke recalled later. In Alexandria, Warneke completed his reinvention as a pitcher.40 As part of the Reds’ starting rotation, he honed his craft and added a devastating curveball to his repertoire. He finished the year as the team’s co-MVP, with a 16-10 record and a $7,500 contract with the Chicago Cubs. Lon Warneke would become one of the National League’s best pitchers of the 1930s, an ace on two pennant-winning Cubs clubs, a five-time All-Star, and a 192-game major-league winner whose career totals were likely shortened by wartime service.

Today, Lon Warneke may be one of baseball’s most accomplished forgotten figures, but for much of the twentieth century, he remained cherished in Alexandria, appreciated not simply for anything he accomplished in a Reds uniform but as an emblem of the “future great” that Alexandria had helped cultivate.

In addition to Warneke, the 1929 squad also featured Odell Hale, a preternaturally gifted rookie infielder and a deceptively powerful slugger who would spend the bulk of his major-league career shuffling between second and third base with the Cleveland Indians. During his season with the Reds, Hale’s sensational clutch hitting, offensive productivity, league-leading 116 runs scored, and towering home runs made him an immediate fan favorite in Alexandria and earned him one of baseball’s most spectacular nicknames. In central Louisiana, Arvel Odell Hale was simply known as “Bad News.”41

In 1929, the Reds finished first in the Cotton States League and helped nurture the careers of at least seven future major leaguers, including “Dixie Dude” Warneke and “Bad News” Hale. They proved that minor-league baseball could generate civic pride in abundance and that Alexandria could matter to the larger baseball world. But they also proved that pride, talent, and even a first-place finish were not enough when crowds thinned, deficits mounted, and outside baseball interests decided a town was no longer worth the trouble.

The team’s successes only sharpened the bitterness of what followed.

The final break came in 1930, after Ollie Lee Biedenharn of the Shreveport Baseball Association had taken control of the franchise. Alexandria’s leaders later argued that supporters had raised about $5,000 before the season after Biedenharn allegedly told them the club would remain for the full schedule if local investors produced that amount.

Instead, after five-and-a-half seasons in the Class D Cotton States League, “saddened fans attended the funeral of the Alexandria Reds,” their final game as a professional baseball team, The Town Talk reported. At one hour and twenty minutes, it was said to have been “the fastest nine-inning game in the city’s professional baseball history.” Ultimately, the Reds fell to the Pine Bluff Judges, 8-7.42

The Alexandria Reds, however, would not go gently.

The local complaint wasn’t that the Reds had failed at the gate. It was that Alexandria had been used: its fans had bought in, its merchants had contributed, its players had been developed and sold, and then the city had been dropped when the arrangement no longer suited outside interests. Alexandria asked Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, commissioner of Major League Baseball, and Mike Sexton, president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, to intervene and force the Cotton States League to readmit the Reds in 1931, but the appeal went nowhere.43 Biedenharn, for his part, categorically denied Alexandria’s version of the story.

In 1931, the Cotton States League continued without Alexandria, narrowing to six clubs in Jackson, Vicksburg, Pine Bluff, Baton Rouge, Monroe, and El Dorado. By 1932, even that reduced circuit could not hold. Franchises lurched from Port Arthur to DeQuincy to Opelousas, from Vicksburg to Jackson, and then the league itself folded on July 13. By 1933, the old Class D Cotton States League had effectively been supplanted by a broader Class C Dixie League, a more expensive and less hospitable arrangement that included Baton Rouge and Shreveport but still left Alexandria outside the map.

The city wanted professional baseball, but the league it hoped to rejoin was no longer there in any meaningful sense.

What survived in Alexandria from 1931 through 1933 was not a franchise in any formal sense. The professional Reds were gone, and with them the payrolls, league obligations, and fragile illusion that civic pride alone could keep a Class D club solvent.

But Paul A. Gilham, Sr., understood that the habit of baseball had not disappeared with the franchise. He was not just another fan with a scorecard. Gilham, an Atlanta native who built a prosperous career as the head of Alexandria Coca-Cola, was a respected businessman and a politically ambitious civic leader. In 1929, he had challenged Mayor Victor V. Lamkin,44 a local bank executive whom Huey Long had appointed following the death of Mayor John F. Foisy. Gilham lost despite the local paper’s endorsement, finishing fourth in the Democratic primary,45 but the campaign marked him as one of those familiar Alexandria figures who believed public life belonged not only to officeholders but also to merchants, boosters, clubmen, and organizers.

Baseball gave Gilham a different arena for that same instinct. The town still had players, fans, a ballpark, newspaper space, merchants willing to talk, and the stubborn conviction that Alexandria was too much of a baseball town to sit out the summer in silence.

So in 1931, Gilham helped reconstitute the Reds in humbler form. They were no longer Alexandria’s emissaries to organized baseball, no longer a professional club chasing standings in the Cotton States League. They became instead a local amateur and semi-professional team, part of a scrappy Central Louisiana Baseball League built from courthouse towns, lumber settlements, hospital clubs, and mill communities—places like Colfax, Urania, Rochelle, Glenmora, Hodge, and Winnfield.46

This was baseball stripped of its more expensive pretensions but not of its importance. It had schedules, officers, rules, standings, opening ceremonies, disputes over eligibility, arguments about former professionals, and enough seriousness to make the sports page treat it as more than a pastime.

Gilham’s achievement was more than administrative. He kept the Reds’ name in circulation when it might easily have become a synonym for embarrassment. Under his hand, the name became something more forgiving and more durable: not the broken promise of the old professional club, but the sign of a community unwilling to give up the game.47

The amateur Reds represented a kind of civic salvage operation. They allowed Alexandria to continue imagining itself through baseball without asking the city to finance another dream it could not yet afford. They also gave local players a stage, local fans a team, and local boosters a reason to keep talking in the language of innings, schedules, rivalries, and summer crowds.

That mattered because Alexandria’s baseball problem was never only athletic. It was civic and economic. The old professional Reds had exposed the danger of confusing enthusiasm with solvency. Gilham’s Central Louisiana League offered a smaller, safer bargain: keep the name, keep the games, keep the summer ritual, but lower the stakes.

In that sense, the amateur Reds were both a consolation and a rehearsal. They preserved the appetite for professional baseball while teaching the town to be more careful about the terms on which it would return.

There was also a lesson embedded in that revival. The Central Louisiana League proved that baseball could still organize Alexandria’s civic imagination, but it also revealed the limits of nostalgia. The amateur Reds could preserve the habit, but they could not restore the status. They could keep the game alive, but they could not make Alexandria whole again as a professional baseball city.

By 1933, Alexandria had not stopped being a baseball town. It had become a more complicated one. Black Alexandrians had built their own baseball institutions under segregation, including a purpose-built ballpark before Bringhurst existed. White Alexandrians had watched a professional club make them proud, develop future major leaguers, finish first, and then vanish under the control of outside baseball interests. Paul Gilham had kept the old Reds name alive, but only in a smaller, safer form.

The city did not need to be taught to love baseball. It needed to be convinced that professional baseball could return without betraying it again.

That was the Alexandria J. Walter Morris would soon try to recruit. Not an empty market. Not a naïve town. Not a place waiting for baseball to arrive for the first time.

A baseball town on the brink.

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Preface | Abrahamic Flaws

In Mangham, a small village in northeast Louisiana where Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham, Jr. built his career,1 everyone has a story to tell about their most notable and celebrated native son. For years, Abraham served as one of Richland Parish’s only physicians, operating his medical practice out of a small brick building near the intersection of US Highway 425 and Louisiana Highway 132.

In America’s patriarchal popular imagination, the “country doctor” is almost always an honorable, humble, and deeply respected man. He may not have attended the fanciest medical school or felt comfortable in a big city, but somehow, he was a specialist in everything and a friend to everyone.

Before he became known as “Doc,” Ralph Abraham was a farmer. Like nearly everyone in Richland Parish, Abraham grew up on the family farm. After high school, he…

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In early July 2023, nearly two years after his death, the FBI quietly released a declassified but heavily redacted 328-page volume about four-term Louisiana Gov. Edwin Washington Edwards through its online “vault.” Edwards, a charismatic and enduringly popular Democrat and the only person in Louisiana history to serve in all three branches and all three levels of government, was hounded by allegations of corruption throughout his career.

In May 2000, five years after his final term as governor and following a controversial trial overseen by an erratic and hostile judge, Frank Polozola, Edwards was convicted on 17 charges related to a purported shakedown scheme involving the issuance of casino licenses. Judge Polozola, whose imperial self-regard and dictatorial courtroom management style earned him the nickname “Ayatollah Polozola,” handed Edwards a ten-year sentence, a punishment many believed was equivalent to the death penalty considering Edwards’s age.

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My mission on Imagine Louisiana is simple and stubborn: correct the record, widen the context, and tell this state’s story with rigor and heart. To that end, I want to highlight a set of reports from the Bayou Brief archives that continue to do work in the world.

Why this list of twenty? Because each one changed a conversation, sharpened public understanding, or restored history that had been buried under myth. Together, they map the throughline of my journalism: documents over spin, memory over myth, people over power.

To receive new posts, support my work, and collect your gift basket, become a paid subscriber for just $50 a year.

What to Expect

• History that isn’t homework. The three-part Carlos Marcello series reads like narrative nonfiction while sticking to the paper trail.

• A truthful reckoning with the Kingfish. These Huey Long pieces resist both hagiography and hit job, focusing on evidence.

• Pow…

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Nearly seven months ago, on Friday, April 4, 2025, I cranked up the engine of my Substack account and quietly published a piece celebrating the 64th anniversary of Carlos Marcello’s wild ride from New Orleans to Guatemala. Even though my Substack account had been essentially dormant since its inception in late December 2021, I somehow managed to collect nearly 50 free subscribers, and I wasn’t in any particular hurry to expand.

This would be a slow launch, I decided, a way of reestablishing my digital presence as an investigative writer. I named the site “CenLamar 2.0” both because “cenlamar” was the name I’d registered under at Substack (and therefore, already in the site’s address, cenlamar.substack.com) and because I thought the call-back to my first website, CenLamar, was appropriate.

Two months later, having tripled the number of subscribers (184!), I rebranded and relaunched the site, upcycling an old name: Imagine Louisiana.

There was one other major change on the reimagined Imagine Louisiana platform: It would operate largely behind a paywall—an imminently affordable paywall!—and actively encourage readers to become paid subscribers. I’d already switched on the “paid subscriber” feature, though the status didn’t confer any real benefits. On the relaunched site, the vast majority of new content would be free to read in full for a week. After a week, it would hop over the paywall and remain eternally in the archives, accessible only to paid subscribers.

As of yesterday, 47 of the site’s 305 total subscribers are paid subscribers. Not bad.

It’d be nice to finish the year strong. During the next few weeks, I will be expanding the paid archives with exclusive content.

To that end, as a way of thanking our —yes, I know the site is just me—paid annual subscribers and welcoming new paid annual subscribers, here’s a little gift:

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Audio

Recorded phone call between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Attorney General Ramsey Clark, 02/22/1967. Clark provides Johnson with a full briefing1 on the death and the life of David Ferrie, who died early that morning.

Recording starts after the conversation has begun.

Photographs

Documents

DWF: FBI File Part 1 of 2

52MB ∙ PDF file

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Part Two of a two-part series. Read Part One here.

I.

“People today are too concerned with trivial matters, things that could be dismissed if viewed in the light of the bearing on the eternal,” Dave Ferrie, a pilot with Eastern Airlines and self-described psychologist, told an audience of 75 Alabama businesswomen at Birmingham’s Episcopal Church of the Advent on December 1, 1954.1 “What has worry over everyday things have to do with eternity?”

The Birmingham News published a brief item about Ferrie’s lecture at the historic downtown church the following day. “Capt. Ferrie reported a tremendous increase in mental illness cases in the United States,” the paper noted. “He attributed the increase to two things: ‘The lack of parental and teacher discipline, and underdeveloped willpower.’ He said most mental illnesses can be cured through the patient’s will to be cured.”

David William Ferrie’s life serves as a vivid reflection of how mid-century America dealt with those who deviated from the n…

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On Friday, August 26, 2005, the front page of the Times-Picayune carried huuuge news for New Orleans: The day before, from the cheaply-gilded offices atop his epoynmous tower in Midtown Manhattan, Donald Trump, star of NBC’s newest hit reality television show, “The Apprentice,” announced he was stamping his name on a massive new skyscraper in the heart of the city’s Central Business District, located on the site of a parking lot at 501 Poydras Street.

“It’s a sexy, great city in so many different ways, and our customers have requested New Orleans as a location they’d like to buy in,” Trump claimed. “We’ve got buyers who follow us wherever we go.” According to the Times-Picayune, Trump’s plan was “expected to bring glitz” (whatever that meant) to a city already internationally known for its spectacular architecture. “[Trump Tower New Orleans] is going to be absolutely the most incredible building New Orleans has ever seen,” he boasted. “It will be the best building in New Orleans. Noth…

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In this audio recording, Ferrie reads from a portion of a lengthy, single-spaced, 10-page document he typed in late 1961. The document is an emotionally fraught and occasionally vindictive personal narrative in which Ferrie details his multiple arrests for indecency with underage teen boys and accuses a litany of individuals involved in his legal case, including two of his lawyers, of criminality.

Ferrie presumably elected not to send the document. It was discovered among his possessions after his death and taken into evidence by Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison.

The recording first surfaced in Baton Rouge in March 1967. On March 17, 1967, the Baton Rouge State Times reported that East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Sargent Pitcher personally delivered the tape to Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison.

In the late evening of November 22, 1963, as Captain David W. Ferrie’s brand-new light blue 1961 Comet streaked westward through the blinding rain, escaping the vortex of New Orleans and into “the whirlpool of despair,”12 a massive flotilla of federal agents dropped anchor in the Crescent City, the first invasion of investigators dispatched to Louisiana in order to gather information about Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old ex-Marine and New Orleans native suspected of assassinating President John F. Kennedy earlier that day in Dallas. Dave Ferrie couldn’t have picked a worse possible time to skip town.

“All I wanted to do was relax,” Ferrie explained to 31-year-old Andrew “Moo Moo” Sciambra, a baby lawyer working for Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison. “As it turned out, it w…

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A note: As a way of kicking off the launch of a reborn ImagineLouisiana.com, paid subscribers will be able to access my entire database of Huey P. Long research right here (just scroll all the way down). Make sure to check this space, because I will continue to organize and add material over time.

He was outrageous and disruptive, impatient and immature, charismatic and magnetic. Sui generis. In seven short years, he skyrocketed out of the piney wilderness and onto the world stage, entertainining and inspiring millions of working class Americans to believe in a future of shared prosperity and equal opportunities, alchemizing outrage against the privileged and the powerful. He was ruthless and capricious in his pursuit, uncompromising to a fault and blind to his own hypocricies. An iconoclast and autocrat. A principled populist and an imperial tyrant.

On Capitol Hill, he was full of sound and fury that signified nothing, but back home in Louisiana, he bulldozed anything in the way of his ambitions.

Huey Pierce Long, Jr. met life in a hury, taking every shortcut he encountered, clutching every unattended microphone for as long as he could, inserting himself into every important story and in front of every news camera. His unrestrained attacks against his opponents and critics earned him an audience, often attracting more enemies than allies.

Huey knew that he would never be admitted by the gatekeepers of high society. He would have to blaze his own trail. After installing a subservient Oscar K. Allen as his successor and stand-in and satisfied that he had control of nearly every aspect of state government in Louisiana, Long relinquished only the title of governor so that he could belatedly take his seat in the U.S. Senate. He immediately made his presence known, but while he relished in the performance of political theater, he struggled to find support for his proposals. To most of his colleagues, Long was too reactionary, and his ideas were too radical. For a moment, particularly after he drunkenly stumbled out of the men’s room of an exclusive Long Island country club with embarrasssing black eye and an incoherent story about gangsters, it looked as if his political career was doomed to stall out.

But, surprisingly, after a little introspection, Huey Long decided to make some changes. He retreated from the press, sobered up, and started quietly professionalizing his political operation. He also hit the road, traveling across the country to campaign for like-minded Democrats, and nearly everywhere he went, he was met with a crowd of enthusiastic supporters. Once he reemereged in the press, it was clear that if he decided to run as a third-party candidate the following year, he would seriously jeopardize Franklin D. Roosevelt’s chances of winning a second term.

But just as his message began to resonate and his movement began to mobilize, Huey P. Long was gone in a flash. In Louisiana, he left behind a state entirely transformed by his service, a place that jolted into the 20th century, 35 tumultous years late, because of his tenacity. For the rest of the nation, he became a cautionary tale about unbridled ambition, a story of unrealized dreams and open questions: What would have happened if he had lived beyond the age of 42?

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Taken on June 27, 1930, after reporting to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, Carlos Marcello, 20, faced a sentence of 9 to 14 years of hard labor for a crime he indisputably did not commit. After two younger teens robbed a local grocery store at gunpoint and fled in a stolen car, they were quickly apprehended, failing to account for the fact that the store’s owner easily recognized the boys and knew their families. To avoid prosecution, the boys alleged that Marcello, who was nowhere near the scene, had “masterminded” the botched heist, testifying against him at trial and courting the support of the local press, who presented the boys as victims of a manipulative, sophisticated, and brutal Sicilian criminal. Marcello knew the two teens, but there was no evidence corroborating the story they told authorities. Had Marcello, who was convicted of armed robbery and assault hired better legal counsel, he likely would have prevailed, a lesson he had to learn again, ne…

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In the upcoming weeks, CenLamar (2.0) will be featuring a selection of excerpts from The Original Gangster: The American Saga of Carlos Marcello, the working title of a book I have been researching and writing for the past five years.

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