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Lawndale Tribune
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Hawthorne Press Tribune
Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 3, No. 48 - December 2, 2021
Inside
This Issue
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................8
Classifieds............................2
Entertainment......................2
Hawthorne............................3
Lawndale..............................4
Inglewood.............................5
Legals..........................2,4,6-7
Finance..................................2
Pets........................................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Mostly
Sunny
60˚/52˚
Saturday
Mostly
Sunny
63˚/50˚
Sunday
Sunny
79˚/56˚
A Beautiful Holiday Tree Lighting
Ceremony in the South Bay
South Bay residents, families and friends joined Inglewood’s Mayor and Council Members for the City’s Annual Holiday Tree Lighting Ceremony. The event took place on Monday, November 29, 2021 on the
grounds of The Forum and included live entertainment, refreshments for all and a special holiday visit by Santa. It felt amazing to be back on the grounds of The Forum this year. Photo courtesy City of Inglewood.
Down on the Bayou—
Five Days Lost in Louisiana
Article and photos
by Ben & Glinda Shipley
If you’re looking for the muddy crossroads
between fact and fiction, between history and
legend, between this world and some other,
murkier plane, then Louisiana is just the place.
And you don’t need Hank Williams twanging
“Jambalaya” or Creedence Clearwater Revival
thumping “Down on the Bayou” to get you in
the mood. In a world of bland uniformity and
mass-produced entertainment, there are still
eccentric eddies in the stream where cultures
have veered off on their own and left the
rest of us behind. And, in America, no place
remains more individual than the Cajun and
Bayou country of South-Central Louisiana.
The language fills a melodious, rhythmic
space between antique French and modern
English. The food is legendary—as Hank
puts it, “Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé
gumbo, for tonight I’m a gonna see my ma cher
ami-o.” The religion, an obscure, if graceful
concoction of Roman Catholicism, Southern
Baptism, and Haitian Voodoo, still carries the
heavy loads. And the music—from traditional
Cajun to Swamp Blues to Zydeco—reverberates
with a raucous energy at the crawfish feasts
along the fringes of the swamp.
But first…
Première— D’Houston à Beaumont à
Port Arthur:
We didn’t even make it out of East Texas the
first day, because of another travel obsession,
with the thousands of hidden places in the
world where human “things”—things we so
easily take for granted—first got started. And
one could argue that modern America (and
certainly modern Texas) got started on January
10, 1901, when the Lucas Gusher spewed
a filthy, black geyser of oil 150 feet into the
air above an earthen dome called Spindletop.
Down the road in Port Arthur, the first modern
American oil refinery still chugs along, minting
pennies with its tangle of rusting pipes and
sclerotic cracking columns. It isn’t pretty, and
it’s certainly not romantic, but remove these
two antiques from history, and 120 years on,
we Americans are not who we are.
Deuxième— De Beaumont à Cameron
Parish:
As we crossed the bridge over the Sabine
River from Port Arthur, sickly-sweet brown
clouds arose to the north from the cane being
burned off in the legendary Louisiana sugar
fields. Just inside Cameron Parish, a pair of
good ol’ jerky salesmen operating out of their
pickup turned us onto dried elk (hmmm…) and
offered sound touring advice—”Keep goin’, cos
there ain’t nothin’ left ahead a y’all.”
And they had a point. This was two years
after the four Category 5 monsters of the worst
hurricane season in history had laid waste to
the states and countries around the Gulf. Emily,
Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, along with their
24 lesser siblings, had killed 3,912 people and
wreaked havoc to the tune of $172 billion.
In Cameron itself, entire blocks of houses
had been swept away by a 17-foot storm surge
that left behind a wasteland of weeds and grass.
Massive chunks of concrete seawall lay shattered
and strewn about. But if the population had
shrunk, the remaining survivors were already
well along in the rebuild—the same rebuild
they’d unfortunately have to repeat after four
more catastrophic storms in the decade ahead.
Troisième— De Cameron à Avery Island:
Heading East, the devastation eventually
gave way to the forests, swamps, creeks, and
roads-to-nowhere of our imaginings. Abandoned
volunteer corn and cane in a tangle of willows
and wildflowers—all the classic flotsam of
rural decay and regeneration. So picture our
surprise, when we came to an intersection
deep in the labyrinth and found a sparkling
metal sign pointing off to the McIlhenny Co.
Tabasco Sauce is one of those very rare
brands that has spread all over the planet without
diluting its superb quality or offending anyone
by morphing into a symbol of commercial
colonialism. And the peppery brew originates
entirely—secret ingredients and all—from the
massive, forested salt dome here called Avery
Island. The family and its pristine factory (and
park) embody an affable throwback to the best
of 19th century American capitalism.
Quatrième— D’Avery Island à New Iberia
à Houma:
Eventually, you realize that you’re never going
to truly experience the Bayou by exploring on
land. Everywhere you look, lazy fingers of water
wander off into the mysterious shadows of the
mangrove. So in Houma, we asked around for
someone to ferry us about. There were a few
commercial tours (today, there are a gazillion),
but all were closed for the winter. Until we
wandered into the Bayou Delight Café, where
the owner gave us Jimmy’s number.
Jimmy’s mom, Alligator Annie Miller,
invented commercial swamp touring as an
elderly woman in the 1970s. Jimmy himself
was a big-city attorney, but was born on the
Bayou and knew every inch of it. Finally,
he agreed that he had nothing better to do
after church on a warm Sunday. So we spent
the day puttering around the deepest reaches
of the swamp, getting a quick education in
Louisiana marine life, and meeting Jimmy’s
favorite alligators.
shacks, rusting tractors and combines, See Travel, page 8