Lunchtime at Bossier Elementary c. 1930

 In 2023 Bossier Elementary School will be celebrating the 100th year of its original brick school building. It was the first brick (not wood) school building in Bossier City, built on ten lots on Traffic Street. It served as both high school and elementary school. In 1927 the student population was growing and a second two- story brick building was built on the campus for the elementary students. High school students stayed in the old building until 1941 when the Bossier High School building on Bearkat Drive near Fort Smith Park and Coleman Street opened. However, there was another outbuilding associated with the school that is largely forgotten but served an important purpose. A tiny building in the school’s neighborhood served as the school cafeteria, and it was nothing like the institution of a school cafeteria as we know of today. The school cafeteria was a “business” that was run first by one widowed mother, Mrs. Baby Yarborough, and then another, widowed mother, Mrs. Cora Daigle. This work even launched Mrs. Yarborough into a teaching career.

According to an oral history interview with Mrs. Yarborough’s son, Col. Neill Yarborough, Baby Yarborough ran the cafeteria for the whole four years he was in high school, and a couple of years before that. According to Col. Yarborough, the school board furnished the building, on Traffic Street according to Mr. Yarborough, and that was all. Mrs. Yarborough paid all the utilities, bought the food and sold it, and hired the school kids to help her work. When he was in school, every day at recess and lunchtime he went to the cafeteria building and helped her. After Neill and his sister and youngest brother got out of school, she’d hire other kids and had an adult helper, too.

Neill recalled that the kids would be roughhousing in the cafeteria, just one big room including the kitchen, and she could just glance at them and with a couple of words, quiet them down. The other teachers would say, “I wish I could do that. I wish I had that knack“ and told Mrs. Yarborough she should be a teacher. Mrs. Yarborough took their advice. She became a teacher after going to school in the summertime, taking some classes at Centenary College in Shreveport and ultimately attending East Texas Baptist University.

Mrs. Gloria Daigle Roberts’ mother Mrs. Cora Daigle, ran a cafeteria after Mrs. Yarborough. Mrs. Daigle was a widowed mother living in her parents’ home at 500 Wyche Avenue in Bossier City who needed a job. In interviews, Mrs. Roberts recalled the day that Mr. Kerr, the Superintendent of Schools, came to tell her mother that she had gotten the job as a school cafeteria "lady." “She jumped up and down…She was crying. We were all so excited because Mother got the job as cafeteria ‘lady.’" “Mr. Kerr gave her a start in the business. Back then women didn't have their own business and this was considered her own.” She ran the cafeteria from a tiny shotgun house on Peach Street, and first week's profit was $19.00.

Gloria Daigle Roberts worked for her mother from the time she was in the first grade by helping her serve lunch to the teachers. She remembered, “it was wholesome, homestyle food that Mother cooked and served that to the teachers on a lawn table with the table cloth… and flowers on it and silverware…. And I was excused ... from class so that I could take the menus around for the all the teachers to decide what they wanted to eat. And so … their plate would be ready.” According to Mrs. Roberts, that service was no longer offered once her mother left the cafeteria. Students still were served hamburgers, and “chipped barbecue beef, [which] was hamburger meat with barbecue sauce in it on a bun, and it was 5 or 10 cents for each one of those. “

Mrs. Roberts’ other memories included, “Kids didn’t go through orderly… There were hands through the air and they wanted to give me their dime and they were getting their change and this, that and the other. And wanting that, ‘Give me a hamburger, give me a hamburger!’ It was so chaotic in this little house.” (The students ate inside too, at long tables.) She also remembers freezing her arms when helping her mother serve multiple cokes from the icebox, where you “put the cokes in and you chip up the ice and put it on there and you put your hand down in that cold water.” But, Mrs. Roberts recalled, “those were wonderful, wonderful days.”

The Bossier Parish Libraries History Center can provide an abundance of interesting facts and photographs about Bossier Parish schools. (We don’t seem to have any photos of these special cafeterias, however.) We would also love to hear your school stories and see your photos. With your permission we could scan them to add to our collection. Visit us soon at 2206 Beckett Street, Bossier City. For our regular hours, we are now open: M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. However, for this holiday week, we will be closed on Thanksgiving Day plus Friday and Saturday.

For more information, and for other intriguing facts, photos, and videos of Bossier Parish history, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok

Images: 

1.) Bossier High School faculty, 1937. Many of these teachers likely enjoyed Mrs. Cora Daigle’s home-cooked meals during their lunch break, served on table cloths with silverware and fresh flowers with help from Mrs. Daigle’s daughter, Gloria.  

2.) Gloria Daigle Roberts (right) with Pam Glorioso at the Bossier High Reunion for classes of 1940-1944 that was held in 1999.

Article by: Pam Carlisle 

Remembering the Louisiana Maneuvers

Louisiana Maneuvers The Louisiana Maneuvers were large-scale military training exercises beginning in 1939. The maneuvers included a mock ’war’ to prepare the United States’ young and inexperienced military force for possible U.S. entrance into the Second World War. The idea was for troops (and equipment, including newly designed tanks and aircraft) to be tested in actual primitive battle conditions. As General George Patton himself said, "If you could take these tanks through Louisiana, you could take them through hell." Some of the men, who came from around the country, concurred with Patton’s view of Louisiana’s wilds: “I had spent some of the worst days and nights of my existence chasing all around the boondocks of that state,” wrote Bob Bearden, a paratrooper from Dallas who participated in three Louisiana Maneuvers.

The 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers were the largest training exercises ever held in U.S. Army history. They were held with half a million men in a 30,000 square mile area in northwest and central Louisiana. “The Second Army,” commanded by General Ben Lear, was pitted against the “Third Army,” commanded by Lieut. General Walter Krueger. The troops tested new types of equipment, strategies, supply systems and the use of massive divisions and corps instead of customarily small units. The maneuvers also brought public attention and money to this area of Louisiana and resulted in the establishment of new training camps like Fort Polk and Camps Claiborne and Beauregard. The 1941 maneuvers ended with the “Battle of Shreveport” in September, 1941 then moved to the Carolinas, wrapping up only 9 days before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941. The United States entered the war the following day.

As critical as the Louisiana Maneuvers were, and despite the fact that some of their key participants went on to become household names, like General George S. Patton, General (later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower, and General George C. Marshall, they are not widely-known. However, there are still some Louisianans who were children at the time, or who heard stories from their parents, who keep alive memories of when, almost literally in their front or back yards, young men from across the United States were preparing to fight across the globe.

That is, in fact, exactly how I first learned of the Louisiana Maneuvers, through a personal story from my mother-in-law, Mary Young Carlisle, who grew up in tiny Avinger in Northeast Texas and lived almost all of her adult life in Coushatta, Louisiana. Even though the Louisiana Maneuvers were supposed to stay in Louisiana, Major General Patton, commanding the Blue Army’s 2nd Armored Division, decided to capture Shreveport using the element of surprise. Instead of coming from the south where they were stationed in central Louisiana, they’d approach Shreveport coming from the north, by going well up into northeast Texas, then coming south. This maneuver took them right past Mary’s house, where the teenager stood at the end of her driveway smiling and waving as the young men rolled past. The soldiers wrote down their contact info, crumpled the paper into a ball, and threw the papers to her. Mary struck up correspondence with these young men, sending morale-boosting letters when the men were stationed overseas. Return letters to Mary often included WWII insignia patches as souvenirs, a collection she cherished all her life.

History Center patron William David Caldwell, who grew up in Bienville Parish, cherishes a letter his father, Chapman Caldwell, received from William M. Kerr of Buncome, Illinois who had been sent to the woods of northwest Louisiana during the Maneuvers. William Kerr wrote on November 11, 1941, after he’d been stationed to Camp Forrest Tennessee, “Dear Mr. Caldwell. I often think of you and others who were so nice to us during Maneuvers. I appreciated every kind word. “

Another patron, W. E. Heins, wrote in an email, “I remember the Louisiana Maneuvers. The soldiers camped out on the old football field at what is now Bossier Elementary School. Our home was on Colquitt Street across the street from the school. My friends and I visited with the soldiers and were fascinated by the rifles and other military equipment. They used blank rifle ammunition. They even gave us some of their K-Rations. One day my grandmother invited two of the solders to have lunch with us. We enjoyed talking to them and hearing their stories about military life.”

These could have been some of the same soldiers that turned up at the nearby Bossier City branch of the Bossier Parish Library that shared space in the courtroom of the old City Hall of Bossier City on Barksdale Blvd. A photo in our collection depicts uniformed soldiers packing the small space, seated or standing among the handful of research tables. A newspaper clipping with the photograph is titled, “Soldiers Enjoy Use of Library:”

Remembering the Louisiana Maneuvers

“That soldiers on maneuver, lonely and far from home, find libraries a godsend is testified by the above photograph of soldiers making themselves at home in the Bossier City branch library. The library makes a standing offer of stationery and writing materials for any solder desiring to use them…Night after night soldiers appeared to seat themselves at the reading tables and write home. Others enjoyed the newspapers, current magazines and books provided by the library. All were pleased with the friendly hospitality shown them…[and] the library was pleased to be of service.”

Of course, we are still pleased to be of service. If WWII’s one of your pursuits, come join us at the History Center for World War (II) Tuesdays on the second Tuesday of each month at 10:30 AM for coffee and informal discussion. Participants can share stories like some of the ones above, which brings the war experience “home” in a way that you won’t find in any history text book. We’d love to hear your family’s stories or see your photos or clippings about the Louisiana Maneuvers, whether you attend the program, just drop by or give us a phone call or an email. The History Center is located at 2206 Beckett St, Bossier City, LA. We are open M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org

For other fun facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok, and check out our blog http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/. 

Article by: Pam Carlisle