Married To A Celebrity

Photo by (Abby Tabor/Staff)

Ha! I'll bet that you didn't know that I was a celebrity wife, or, you could say a trophy wife. Well, maybe I'm too old for the trophy wife, but a celebrity wife, anyway. The picture above is splashed all over the front page of the local newspaper, and is, indeed, my man, Grandpère.

From the Daily Comet:

By John DeSantis, Senior Staff Writer

LOCKPORT - Hidden behind the brick walls of a pre-World War I commercial building on this central Lafourche town’s main street, wooden treasures lie at rest from their many years of labor.

Boats once used for crabbing and fishing, as well as for put-putting around south Louisiana’s bayous and canals, await the loving hands of woodworkers who will sand, plane, paint and touch up, just enough to return the vessels to their former glory.

Back in 1979, Grandpère and a history professor from Nicholls State University started a small boat museum at the university, which they named the Center for Traditional Louisiana Boatbuilding. They accumulated donations of old wooden boats and placed them at the university here, there, and anywhere the powers would allow, always dreaming that one day they would have a museum to house the boats, but never knowing where the money would come from.

They located older boatbuilders, who built wooden boats in in the old ways, with no plans, out of their heads, and had them teach classes in an attempt to preserve the craft of wooden boatbuilding. Eventually, the history professor dropped out of the project, and Grandpère was left to pursue the goal, along with other interested persons in the community who worked with him.

A few years ago, the city of Lockport, La., a town down Bayou Lafourche from Thibodaux, took a step in faith and purchased in an old Ford dealership. It's a nice old building, built in 1917, with huge doors, sized for putting new car models on the floor, but also perfect for moving large boats in and out of the building. And it's right on the water. The building has good bones, but it needs work, extensive work, before it will be useful to house the boats, the tools, the art work, and all that has been collected over 28 years.

The Center has had grants over the years to build boats in the old way, but nothing in the way of real money to move forward the goal of having its own museum building to gather all the materials together in one place. Now they have a $100,000 allocation from the state and a set of plans to begin the real work of renovating the building. That amount will not be enough to complete the project, but there is hope for another $100,000 from the state.

Here's a link to the Center's website. You can view some of the boats in the collection here.

The picture below shows the largest boat in the collection, a New Orleans oyster lugger, a boat which is now extinct. This one was constructed in 1997, and is the only one of its kind.