Ernie Alexander – Speech & Social Studies Education, 1964

Ernie Alexander

1964 Speech and Social Studies Education

Dear Ed:

There are no memories to compare to those of our college years.  The transition from adolescence to adulthood is indelibly inscribed in all of us.  Charting the course of our future, making lifelong friends, encountering new ideas and philosophies and molding ourselves into the person we want to be all fall into the “never-to-be-forgotten” category.

The choice of which college or university to attend was a simple one for most of the class of 1951 at Port Allen High.  Many of us, as Boy Scouts, had walked to the landing, taken the ferry across the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge, and walked to Tiger Stadium where we ushered fans to their seats.

Two of us believed immediate independence was more important than convenience of location and opted for Lafayette and Southwestern.  Four years of work as a soda jerk at the Port Allen Drug Store, where half the pay was stashed away for college, ensured the summer and fall semesters would be financed. 

Newton Plaisance (who became a career Air Force officer) and I roomed in Dormitory “A”.  I became an altar boy at Our Lady of Wisdom Chapel and was involved in Newman Club activities.  George Bradley ( later Doctor George Bradley, a professor at S.L.I./U.S.L.), who broadcast the Mass on Sundays over L, was in his last semester.  George asked me to take over the broadcasts, which were done in a hushed “golf broadcast” voice, and Father Sigur prodded me to accept.  George assisted me on two broadcasts to ensure that I had the “hang of it” and then he left.  He recommended, prior to his departure, enrollment in the S.L.I. Radio Workshop for more familiarity with broadcast equipment and procedures.

It was fun, it was creative and it was exciting.  The S.L.I. Radio Workshop broadcast over L was for one-half hour on a Monday through Friday basis in the early afternoon.  Mister “C” (Mister Albert Capuder who ran the Radio Department at S.L.I.) called me into his office one afternoon with a most important message.  L had lost an announcer and the Station Manager, Evan Hughes, had called to say, “Send that kid Alexander around for an interview; I like the way he sounds on the air.”  That’s how the skinny eighteen year old from West Baton Rouge got into the broadcast business.  Serendipity had struck again!  It was December 1951 and the savings were just about to run out.

The night shift ended any thoughts of romance on campus.  Because of R.O.T.C. drill, which extended into work time at the radio station, Monday became my day off.  My character and announcing skills were developed under the tutelage of Evan Hughes, Tom Pears, Al Terry and Buddy Hebert.

Charles “Buddy” Hebert and I shared the night shift and soon became roommates.  Buddy was one of the greatest characters of all time.  He was animated and charismatic.  He was a year or two older and had a year or so of radio experience under his belt, which he was willing to share with a beginner if the beginner was willing to do more than his share of the work.  He even talked the tyro into helping him ad lib a fifteen minute radio drama from blank sheets of paper for an important grade.  It was a sweaty situation but we pulled it off and Buddy got an “A” for the project.  He was a big spender and more often than not spent his week’s paycheck treating others to food and drink and then imposing on his roommate for financial help.  We once went two days with no food except a box of popcorn which was popped in Vaseline Hair Tonic.  Always short, Buddy decided we needed to sell my tenor sax.  He took it to New Orleans, sold it and on his return he said, “Here’s your half,” as he handed me fifty dollars.  Buddy went on to open his own advertising agency in Baton Rouge and was Governor Edwin Edwards’ first press secretary.  Tragically, he died in a fire at his home in Baton Rouge in the seventies.

Some of us change colleges and/or majors.  Liberal Arts required a foreign language.  The skinny freshman elected French.  It doesn’t seem possible that the top conjugator in the class would be at the bottom in vocabulary but it happened.  Most of the class already spoke Cajun French and it was apparent that the kid from West Baton Rouge was headed for his first “F”.  The College of Education did not require a foreign language and it found itself with an additional student.

One of the top English teachers on campus awarded a second “F” after a third un-excused absence.  It was really tough making those eight o’clock classes when we didn’t get home until almost one in the morning after leaving the night shift.  A third “F” came when an immature youngster got up in the middle of a course in education and walked out of the room thinking, “This guy is supposed to be showing us how to inspire students instead of boring us to death.”  Ah, principles, they will be the death of us some day.  Always above a 2.0 but never a 2.5, there were many of us who stayed in college by a shoestring while having the time of our lives.

There were teachers who spring to mind like Dr. Claycomb in Biology.  If your last name started with “A” and you were sent to the first seat on row one to be “under the gun” for whatever new assignment or question he had in mind, you would understand why some of us longed for a last name like Zystosky.  Doctors Hemleben and De La Rue in History were outstanding.  Doctor Seale allowed me to sleep through two different English classes with a “C”.  Luckily, he had based grades on ability to write.  His enthusiasm and the sheer physical energy he put into instructing the class compelled you to learn.  Doctor Flowers became the first (copy) continuity writer at Y Television in 1955.

The boy’s gym housed many ceremonies, lectures and dances.  I missed most of them because of the night-shift work at L.  An important dance in the spring of 1952 was Theta Xi’s 6294 party.  Arranging for a replacement and transportation, I asked a very attractive upperclassman for a date.  Thinking a ride in a 1930-something Ford convertible, loaned to me by Pat Kinney, would cast me in a good light, I was flabbergasted when my dream date told me how upset she was that the wind had blown her new hairdo awry.  She allowed me two dances, still upset with me.  That would be my only date as a freshman or sophomore.

Anyone who has attended Southwestern has certainly been to one or more of the many festivals in the area.  In 1952 M in New Iberia borrowed me from L to broadcast portions of the Sugar Cane Festival.  It was there that I met the girl who would later become my wife.  She was the Terrebonne Parish Queen, a pretty brunette from Houma named Shirley Champagne.  We spoke often on campus after that but never dated because of my rotten work schedule.

During the spring semester of 1952 I was elected to the Student Council as a representative from the College of Education.  Fortunately, the Student Council met on Monday night, my night off from KVOL.

Most students’ sophomore year is exciting.  No longer were we immature freshmen but we were far from being bored with college life.  Student Council, R.O.T.C., staff cartoon work for the Vermilion, and Speech Department activities such as broadcasting, debate, drama, public speaking and speech correction kept the adrenaline flowing.  1952-53 flew by.

1953-54 was an important year.  L had given me a more reasonable schedule, my roommates in Declouet Hall (Billy Butler, Hank Steckler and Ronnie Schultz) and I moved into the Theta Xi house at the corner of Cherry and Brashear (which we purposely pronounced “brassiere”).  There were lots of activities, grades were good enough and, most importantly, I could now date.  You probably will not be surprised when you find out the first girl (and only girl) I dated that year was Shirley Champagne.  It did not take long for us to fall in love and during the Christmas holidays I asked her father if I could marry her.  She graduated a few weeks later and we kept up our long-distance romance while she taught school in Montegut (outside Houma).

That spring, the nomination to become Student Body President came from the Pelican Party.  It is with deep regret that you must learn that there was little effort to attain this position.  Friends said, “Your opponent, Albert Ortego, is going around shaking hands, visiting dormitories and asking people to vote for him.”  Twenty year olds who have the world by the tail don’t have to do this.   Albert won the election by eighteen votes.  It is ironic to note that all four of the top officers came from the College of Agriculture.  Pelican Party candidates Karlan Greene (Vice President), Donna Hamic (Secretary) and George Piontek (Treasurer) were elected with the Independent Party’s Albert Ortego.  The most embarrassing day of my life was the day after the election when I had to face my friends in the student union (now the Campus Police Building).  The embarrassing part was not in having failed, it was in not having tried very hard.

R.O.T.C. cadets were sent to an Air Force base between their junior and senior years for a month of training.  The summer of 1954 saw several S.L.I. cadets end up at Harlingen Air Force Base near Brownsville, Texas.  After undergoing physical and mental tests, the students were assigned to be heavy aircraft pilots, fighter pilots, or navigators.  I was assigned to the first group.  The Air Force had given us five physical examinations by that time, all of them with us in shoes and socks and nothing else.  Near the end of camp, a sergeant spotted operation scars on my feet as I walked through a pool of disinfectant water.  He shipped me to X-rays and then to the commanding officer who first congratulated me on wanting to serve my country and then told me that my designation was now 4-F and that the Air Force no longer could use me.  Back home, the three seniors who were deciding who would be the cadet commander of the corps had selected another cadet over me by a 2-1 vote.

Shirley and I were married in August of 1954 and moved into a “dollhouse” (20′ x 14′) on Roosevelt Street.  When the fall semester rolled around integration came to Southwestern.  There were not a lot of Black students on campus.  There was only one in any of the classes I attended.  He was polite, very quiet and spoke only when spoken to.  It seemed that half the class tried very hard to make him feel welcome while the other half appeared to pretend that he wasn’t really there at all.  I wouldn’t see the end of that semester.  When the realization comes to you that you are making more money working your way through school in radio than you are going to make when you graduate and become a teacher, it has an amazing impact.  Less than a month into that semester, I quit Southwestern.

KLFY Radio called with a job offer.  The next summer, KLFY Television went on the air and the radio announcers became television announcers.  Raises in pay came along with promotions.  At age twenty-one I was Program Director of KLFY Radio and Television.  WIBR in Baton Rouge called to offer more money and we lived in the capitol city for two years.  Homesick, we came back to the town we had grown to love and to KVOL.  Offers continued to come from across the country but Shirley didn’t want to leave Lafayette.  “You can go if you want to but I’m staying here.”  It was hard to turn some of them down.  It was difficult to say, “No,” to WDSU in New Orleans and downright heart-breaking to have to refuse Gordon McLendon when he offered to make me one of the original staffers at KILT in Houston.  We stayed in Lafayette but our marriage was becoming strained.

Shirley recognized this and came up with a plan.  “If you go back to Southwestern, get your degree and teach for one year, I’ll go wherever you want to go.”  Agreed!

From the fall of 1954 to fall of 1962 Southwestern had undergone tremendous change.  No longer was it the small campus of two or three thousand students, it was now a university with several times the amount of students.  Not only had the school changed physically, it had also changed philosophically, teachers taught better and more, classes were challenging and there was no way a person could avoid learning.  U.S.L. had really changed or I had matured.

There was an additional year added to complete the degree (B.A.) because of additional requirements during the years which had passed.  No matter, let’s get on with the show.  During the spring I was asked by Johnny Melton (later President of Revlon) to run for the office of Student Body Vice-President.  Having learned a bitter lesson years before, you can imagine that a huge amount of effort was given to the campaign.  The T.I.C. Party took the two top spots and the Independent Party the next two.  Eddie Provost won as President and I squeaked to a narrow twenty-two vote upset win over a popular candidate.  Sally Evans (later to become Mrs. Dean Church) was elected Secretary and Malcolm Robinson (a track star) was elected Treasurer.  The campus had never seen such a big election and probably will never again since administration rules downsized campaigns.

1963-64 was a big year, the year of graduation.  Our Lieutenant-Governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, was a classmate as was United States Senator John Breaux.  Kathleen had been active in student government but John had been content to be a member of U.S.L.’s tennis team.  My early mornings were spent as Program Director and disc-jockey for W and my evenings were spent as C Television’s Sports Director.  Classes and student-teaching were sandwiched in between.  Miss Dorothy Blakely was my supervising teacher at Lafayette High.  She was outstanding.  Because she demanded that the student teachers under her supervision write down ever question they would ask and every response they expected, my sleep time was cut to three and one-half hours per night.  I completed the year and was pleasantly surprised to find I had been named the Outstanding Male Student Teacher at the university.

As per our agreement, I taught at Lafayette High the following year and continued to teach for eighteen years.  There was a new love in my life, there was nothing like the joy of teaching.  Thanks to the preparation U.S.L. had given me and the guidance of Miss Blakely offered, honors began to come.  Outstanding Teacher in Lafayette Parish, Outstanding Speech and Debate Coach in Louisiana, the L.A.E. Public Relations Award for positive publicity for education and the Amway Award for the outstanding Free Enterprise teaching project in the nation.  You certainly must agree that there is no finer teacher training program in the United States than the one we have right here at Southwestern.

U.S.L. deserves many thanks from so many of us.  There is one area, however, which stands above all others when it comes to saying, “Thanks.”  “Thanks, Southwestern a million times over for all the tremendous things you have done for your graduates…and thanks especially for all the wonderful memories.”

Sincerely,

Ernie Alexander