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August 28, 1939 ~ November 8, 2022

ABBEVILLE — A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 10:00 AM on Friday, November 11, 2022 at St. Theresa of the Child Jesus Catholic Church honoring the life of James Ralph Landry, 83, who died Tuesday, November 8, 2022 at his residence. He will be laid to rest at St. Paul Cemetery with Fr. François Sainte-Marie officiating the services.
Ralph was a graduate of Abbeville High School. After high school he enlisted in the United States Air Force where he served his country proudly. He was employed as a salesman working in men’s clothing. In his free time, he relished reading books on history, mowing his lawn, and spending time with his sons. He was a gun enthusiast who appreciated spending time with his friends frequently visiting the gun shop.
He is survived by his wife of 62 years, Nara Mayard Landry; sons, Shane Landry (Kim), and Jason Landry; grandchildren, Danielle Chisler (Jay), Laurent Tinnin, Megan Burtner (Taylor), Wesley Landry, André Landry, and James Michael Landry; great-grandchildren, Emma Chisler, Ben Chisler, Nora Tinnin, Amelia Burtner, Raelynn Burtner, Henry Burtner, Ahni Landry and Emery Rae Landry; brothers-in-law, Larris Denais and Roy Guillory (Marie); and several nieces and nephews.
He was preceded in death by his parents, Loreal Landry and the former Cecile Comeaux; son, Michael James Landry; sisters, Beatrice Miller, Thelma Landry and Gladys Denais; brother, Led Landry; and parents-in-law, Minos and Alice Mayard.
The family requests that visiting hours be observed at Vincent Funeral Home - Abbeville, 209 S. St. Charles St., on Thursday, November 10, 2022 from 4:00 PM until 9:00 PM with a rosary being prayed at 6:30 AM; Friday, November 11, 2022 from 8:00 AM until 9:45 AM when the procession will depart for the church.
Condolences may be sent to the family at www.vincentfuneralhome.net.
All funeral arrangements are being conducted by Vincent Funeral Home of Abbeville, (337) 893-4661.

There is an obvious reason that President Donald Trump plays the Sam and Dave classic “Hold On, I’m Comin’” at the end of his campaign rallies. He wants to give the American people hope that our collective nightmare will eventually end.
Since President Donald Trump left the White House in January of 2021, it has been unmitigated hell for the American people. With the Democrats in control of the White House and Congress, the nation has sunk into economic despair.
After almost two years of the Biden administration, the nation is reeling from high inflation, skyrocketing interest rates and negative economic growth in the first two quarters of 2022, which used to identify a recession, prior to the new definitions created by the Biden administration.
The dual threat of soaring inflation and high interest rates are causing Americans to worry about paying their bills and surviving financially. According to recent surveys of Americans, an astounding 63% are living paycheck to paycheck and 66% are worse off financially than one year ago.
With difficult economic times, Americans are dipping into their investment accounts, so 72% have less reserve funds than last year and, sadly, 29% have absolutely nothing left in their savings.
It is inadequate to call this situation a crisis, in fact, it is an economic emergency. However, President Joe Biden, as tone deaf as any politician in American history, claims our economy is “strong as hell.”
Biden is the anti-King Midas, as everything he touches turns to ruin. Along with Democratic Party politicians in control of Congress and our major urban areas, Biden has created devastation throughout our country.
Americans face economic misery, newly created energy dependence on foreign nations, increasing rates of violent crime, an illegal drug epidemic, dangerous content being taught to our children in schools and a wide-open southern border.
This administration inherited a secure border, but quickly ended construction of the wall and reversed successful policies. The result is that an incredible surge of approximately 5 million illegal aliens from more than 150 nations have entered the country since the start of the Biden presidency. This figure exceeds the population of 25 states and 100 countries around the world.
While border patrol agents are overwhelmed, the Biden administration has maintained the fiction that everything is secure. The inept and dangerous Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has often repeated the lie that the “border is closed.”
This indifference, negligence and arrogance should lead to the impeachment of Biden, Mayorkas and other cabinet officials when the Republicans take back control of Congress in January.
The person most responsible for this GOP “wave” is President Donald Trump. From the day he descended the escalator in Trump Tower and announced his presidential campaign, he showed the Republican Party how to fight back against the Deep State, the media, and the Democrats.
The 2022 GOP “wave” will result in many strongly pro-Trump candidates getting elected. These candidates will work non-stop to halt the dangerous Biden agenda, but it will only prevent more harm from being done to the country. Unfortunately, the first two years of the Biden presidency have been unbelievably damaging.
The only way for our country to return to sanity, prosperity, and security is for the right President to be elected in 2024. Of course, the winner of that election should be the most deserving and capable candidate, President Donald Trump.
President Trump deserves a chance to finish the job that he started so magnificently in his first term. During his first four years, he accomplished a tremendous amount for the American people, despite the obstacles created by his political enemies, as well as many establishment Republicans in his own administration.
If he is elected for another term, President Trump will be even more effective for the American people. In his first term, too many of his cabinet members and other key appointees worked to undercut his agenda, subvert his goals, and betray him to his political enemies.
Despite ongoing harassment from the Biden Justice Department and the New York Attorney General, the stage is set for President Trump to announce his next campaign on November 14.
He is telegraphing to the American people that he will run for President again. In the final five days before the midterm election, President Trump scheduled four rallies, a last-minute push to help MAGA candidates win.
At last Thursday’s rally in Sioux City, Iowa, President Trump said, “In order to make our country successful and safe and glorious, I will very, very, very probably do it again...get ready.”
In other words, to the millions of Americans who are suffering, “Hold On,” President Trump is coming back, relief is on the way. This is nothing but music to the ears of all who love our great country.

Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian and is a political columnist, the author of America’s Last Chance and provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and on Crouere.net. For more information, email him at jcrouere@gmail.com

On Monday, Nov 7, at 11:47 p.m., the Abbeville Police Department received a report of a shooting in the area of 300 block of Leblanc Street.
Abbeville Police Officers responded and located a person, who had been shot numerous times, lying in a driveway on the 1700 block of Frank’s Alley.
Gunshot victim was transported to a nearby hospital by Acadian Ambulance Service. Officers taped off crime scene along Frank’s Alley and located assorted spent casings and other related evidence. A car and a truck were hit by stray bullets, A house and a mobile home approximately 300 feet away from the victim were also shot.
The victim remains in the hospital and will undergo multiple surgeries in the next few days, according to Abbeville Chief of Police Mike Hardy.
This case is still under investigation and Chief Hardy urges the public to provide any further information regarding this crime or any other crime by calling the Abbeville Police Department at (337) 893-2511. You may also contact our “Tips” line at (337) 892-6777. All callers may remain anonymous. Citizens may also send anonymous tips through Crime Stoppers of Vermilion by calling (337) 740-TIPS or the P3 app, which can be downloaded through the Apple App Store or at Google Play Store.

In the late 1800s, before narrow-gauge railroads crisscrossed the piney woods of southwest Louisiana, loggers prayed just as fervently as farmers for just the right amount of rain. It wasn’t because they wanted the trees to grow. It was so that they could get their logs to the sawmills.
In those days, logs were floated down the Calcasieu River to the dozen mills that ringed Lake Charles, and the river itself usually wasn’t much of a problem. But the loggers used dozens of little streams to get their timber from deep in the woods to the river. They’d put a big chain across the mouth of a little stream to corral the logs until they had enough to bind into a raft and haul to market.
But those little streams dried up if there wasn’t enough rain. If there was too much, the streams ran amok and the corralled logs were likely to stampede down the river on their own.
Either too little or too much presented a problem that reached beyond the men who cut the logs. Without logs to cut, the mills sat silent. When the mills sat silent, all of southwest Louisiana felt an economic pinch.
That’s why there was widespread interest in weather reports that showed up regularly in the newspapers of the day.
For example, the Lake Charles Commercial noted in January 1882, that “continuous rains” for two weeks had turned streets to mud, but they “caused a good rise in the River and … all the available logs are now afloat and our mill and lumber men may expect a full supply for the next ninety days at least.”
In another item a decade later, in the spring of 1893, the paper said “mill men are … jubilant” after “the hardest rain that has fallen in months.” They didn’t mind the damaging hail that came with the rain. They and the newspaper’s editors were “satisfied that it was sufficient to swell the creeks and river, so as to enable the log men to run logs to market, for some of our mills have already run short of saw-timber.”
The story was different in early 1884, when heavy rains “raised the creeks and brought out a great many logs, which jammed against the chain booms on the Hickory Branch and West Fork, letting logs into the main river,” apparently for the second time in two years.
“The Steam Tug Alert was put to work stretching booms at West Lake Charles [as Westlake was called then], where the jam of two years ago was stopped, but the current aided by the heavy north wind … broke the booms and the logs were adrift again.”
The Alert stretched another chain boom about a mile downstream, but it also broke after holding the logs for about a day.
“It is estimated that between 10,000 and 12,000 logs have gone down the river, and will be a total loss,” the Commercial said. “The actual loss in timber will hardly fall short of $18,000 to $20,000.”
That’s about a half-million dollars in today’s money, and the loss added impetus to long discussed plans to build little railroads to haul logs out of the woods.
The idea had been kicking around since right after the real railroad crossed south Louisiana in 1880, The Commercial reported as early as the summer of 1881 that “the mill owners and lumbermen of Calcasieu have at last realized the fact that they can no longer absolutely depend upon the uncertain rises of the river for their supply of logs.”
The demand for lumber, the newspaper said, “has been constantly increasing since the day that the first saw-mill was erected in Lake Charles, and this demand has … reached such proportions that our twelve sawmills are strained to their utmost capacity to fill one-half of the orders sent to them. Any interruption in the supply of logs is, therefore, a serious loss to them, and we are glad to see that serious steps are being taken by some of our citizens to prevent any such contingency in the future.”
At first, those little railways just carried lumber to the river; it was still floated downstream to the mills. But now the logs went directly to the river, and did not depend on the rise and fall of little streams or the weakest links of chains stretched across them.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.