Louis Kendall Broussard Sr. is the author of Thoughtful Places, a collection of poetry, reflections, and photographs. His childhood memories remain with him like one who travels, takes a suitcase, and frequently opens it to expose golden memories of life’s experiences in those thoughtful places.
Broussard is a 1964 graduate of Northwestern State College in Natchitoches, Louisiana. In college he drove a 1957 Studebaker Hawk. He majored in upper elementary education and taught school for seven years before changing careers. He became a salesman and later in 1981 a business owner until selling the business in 2012 and retiring. In 2022, he published Thoughtful Places with Palmetto Publishing.
Broussard was born in Abbeville, Louisiana, in the heart of Acadiana, in 1942. He has one sister, Edith Russo, of their parents Dudley L. Broussard and Lillian Pinell Broussard. They were dedicated Catholics and Sunday mass was seldom missed. Young Louis was an adventuresome barefoot boy, shirtless, and tanned from the summer sun of South Louisiana. He quickly graduated from a 24-inch two-wheel bike to a Sears, J. C. Higgins 26-inch beauty. He also was given a Daisy cock BB gun and two years later a Daisy pump. Romps through the woods and fields were frequent, alone or with his neighborhood friends.
His father was a tugboat captain who worked three weeks on the tug and came home for a week. When his father came home there were projects and honey-do lists for him to accomplish. Louis was mentored by his father in woodworking and mechanics on those days off from the tug. He frequently visited his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Elize Broussard, who were French speaking Acadians. They were able to teach him their French language. It was there that he experienced farm life such as milking the cow, feeding chickens and gathering their eggs.
His father had five siblings, and their nineteen children frequented the old homestead on weekends. The homestead was in the woods on the banks of the Vermillion Bayou south of Milton, Louisiana. Joined with his cousins and friends, his romps through the woods were always an adventure. The holidays brought a family gathering to the big dinner table with Grandpa at the end with extra elbow room as he was a large man. French was mainly spoken by everyone and the atmosphere was filled with the fragrance of home cooked foods.
Grandpa Elize had been a shrimper, an oyster fisherman, a trapper of furs in the winter months, and a wood chopper supplying wood for the wood fired syrup mills and cotton gin steam engines. In the summer grandpa took vacationers down the bayou to a resort called Cheniere au Tigre. The resort had cottages and a large hotel run by the Sagrera family.
Soon after Louis received his driver’s license, his father bought a 1950 Plymouth station wagon for him and his sister Edith. He put spinner hub caps on it and cruised the main drag with his raised shirt collar and duck-tail hairstyle. Teen dances and dance halls offered recreation different from hunting and adventures with water skiing, baseball or swimming in the rice canals. Girls! His heart turned to putty as girls in their can-can skirts sashayed before his eyes.
After graduating high school, a new world unfolded before him. He met and married the love of his life, Julia Katherine King, while attending college. She was from Shreveport and a graduate of C. E. Byrd High. The couple married on December 7, 1962. Julia is also a 1964 graduate of Northwestern State College.
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