Reflections On River City

"The past is never dead.  It isn't even past."-- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

My young days were fortunate...

I lived in a magical place of beautiful old homes and friendly people... 

Third Street-- former commercial heart of Alexandria

There were other places in Louisiana besides Alexandria, of course.  New Orleans, La Ville transported to America, was a little more than three hours southeastward.  U S Highway 71 took you there and passed through Baton Rouge which took its name from a reddish cypress pole marking the boundary which separated the hunting grounds of the Houma from those of the Bayou Goula.  The road wound past oil refineries, ships along the wide Mississippi, cotton fields, and sugar plantations, to another magical city of voodoo, red beans and rice, and the Sunday Times-Picayune...

Postcard featuring the Old City Hall and Hotel Bentley

Alexandria then sat and yet sits between two worlds, Protestant North Louisiana and the Catholic South.  Appropriate enough for a city that can be located by looking at a map of Louisiana and confidently placing a finger in the center...

The Providence Academy, Elliot Street

This regional cultural division is not quite as pronounced today.  Local folk shift around in search of work.  Boys from the north head south to take jobs on oil rigs.  Girls with soft French accents find themselves in the bustle of Shreveport offices, a town more Texas than Louisiana.  Out-of-state technicians and managers arrive sporadically to operate manufacturing facilities.  They bring a nomadic sameness of values, begging false culinary gods to deliver them from gumbo and guide them safely to Golden Arches.  But in my youngest days, a politician asked crowds to vote for Michael Ryan in Shreveport and Michel Ree'an in Lafayette...

Guaranty Bank and Trust Building

Different paths to the same salvation may symbolize the distinction between the two Louisianas but they merely point to other, perhaps older, cultural clashes.  Men born in the British Isles did not forget wars with continental France and Spain merely because they crossed an ocean.  A person listening to the radio in Winnfield knows whereof Roy Acuff speaks when he sings of lonely mounds of clay and wrecks on the highway where none prayed and the only sounds heard were the groans of those dying in twisted metal frames.  He may speak with grudging admiration of the Marksville resident who seems continuously happy and apparently has naught to worry over save wine, dancing, and chasing pretty girls.  Maybe ancient Roman ghosts still battle ancient Celtic ghosts in the souls of those born long after they drifted off to Hades.  Even the land itself makes for differences among men and things they must value.  Casting nets on Gulf waters brings different concerns than plowing hardscrabble red clay...

Settlement around my hometown dates to the late 1700s when merchants and farmers clustered around a Spanish post that guarded a section of rough water in the Red River.  By the time the river reaches the Mississippi, it becomes a wide and powerful stream.  Its birthplace is a trickle of liquid in the dry desolation of the Texas Panhandle.  The rapids by the military outpost gave their name to Rapides Parish, alternately French and Spanish territory, ultimately part of the United States.  The gathering of store owners served as a stop on the way to Natchitoches, oldest permanent town in an 828,000 square mile wilderness and northern terminus of El Camino Real, a seemingly endless highway that ran all the way to Mexico City...

Federal Courthouse and Post Office, on Murray Street, built
by the Works Project Administration during Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's presidency

Before France got Louisiana back in time to sell it to Tom Jefferson, the King of Spain granted land to one Alexander Fulton, a Pennsylvanian.  In 1805, Fulton and a business partner laid out the town of Alexandria.  The official story goes it was named for Fulton's daughter.  But, at 31° 17' North Latitude, its location seems suspiciously close to the 31° 12' North Latitude of an Egyptian metropolis of the same name raised to classical glory by Alexander the Great...

Murray Street Bridge, circa 1911

The river separating Anglo Louisiana from Franco Louisiana rolls through a relatively flat plain upon which Alexandria sits 75' above sea level.  Pine forests, with some hardwood stands, are found to the north and south and east and west.  Bayous meander through the city limits.  One flows a couple blocks from the house where I grew up.  Summer day strolls to trace its lazy route meant sweat, chirping crickets, battle with mosquitoes, and the wistful sad scent of magnolias and honeysuckle.  A humid subtropical climate with average rains of 60" dispersed in relatively equal measures throughout the year encouraged the citizenry to garden and plant flowers even where there are no bayous...

Downtown Alexandria seen from the Red River

Rich land and a perfect location on a major tributary of the Mississippi made Rapides Parish one of the richest county units in the entire nation as the United States moved toward fracturing itself into a Union and a Confederacy.  Unfortunately, this wealth was not measured solely by land and crops but also by the value attached to those enslaved to work the soil and the crops growing on it.  Alexandria would be occupied fairly early during the Civil War and consumed by flames of still disputed origin as Union forces left.  Legacies of slavery and racial division remain, I suspect.  Rebel flags on porches and pickups dot pockets of Alexandria and Rapides Parish...

Union forces marching through Alexandria, an early target of
northern forces, due to its role as a key port of the Red River

In the tradition of man, destruction is followed by rebuilding.  Alexandria and Rapides Parish followed custom and re-emerged as prosperous if not relatively isolated parts of the American South... 

One of Alexandria's loveliest houses of worship, this Reform
movement synagogue was lost to fire in 1952

The Steamer, Red River, circa 1900

Its history became one of colorful characters and events as befits a city only slightly known outside its own part of the state. The most significant of those events, at least from a national perspective, might include the Louisiana Maneuvers conducted in the late summer of 1941 as the United States Army prepared itself to join Europe's war against Hitler.  Approximately 500,000 troops assigned to 19 divisions simulated a war on another continent on a simulated battlefield of 3400 square miles.  Participants included some prominent future Allied commanders-- Dwight D Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George S Patton.  Another officer, an obscure second lieutenant named Henry Kissinger, would in his later days be counted among the diplomatic giants of the 20th Century...

Lobby of the Hotel Bentley, now facing an uncertain future,
one of the grandest of the Grand Hotels of the American South

A true Alexandrian knows the city would have been only an ordinary small town without a colorful and often eccentric citizenry.  One of these was Joseph A Bentley, lumber magnate and banker.  Local folklore has it the former Pennsylvanian built the stately hotel bearing his name when another lodging house refused to allow him to bring his dog into its restaurant.  Should the enumeration include a local lawyer who owned a radio station and read flying saucer stories culled from pages of the National Enquirer during the noon lunch hour?  Perhaps, a mayor who waged bitter war against the "Shadow Government" of Alexandria and Rapides Parish?  My own father was named a member of this band of nefarious malefactors which included a newspaper publisher who set the mayor upon a lifelong path of righteous vengeance when he borrowed a pencil in the second grade and failed to return it...

Hotel Bentley

Maybe the magic of my hometown, in the end, becomes things more personal and important than historical events or prominent citizens, whether sane or not quite right.  True magic lies inside miracles hidden in ordinary moments of life such as the smell of ozone dancing in the air as the sky darkens and lightning flashes and the first drops of summer rain fall.  No wizard has power to create memories of a nurturing and loving family, grandparents with tales of the sin and hope of a Reconstructed South and Jewish life in turn-of-the-century New York, the tantalizing smell of peanuts roasting at the Kress dime store candy counter, heading downtown to the Modern Record Shop, burgers and malts at Hopper's Drive-In, chilly nights at the parish fair and in the stands of the high school football stadium, the smile of a cheerleader...  

Commerce during the World War I years

Note: all images located through Google Images with no owner or author information provided except as noted in captions or on the image itself.