NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre of the Green Bay Packers once made a sarcastic remark about Alexandria when Craig Nall told him that was his hometown.
“Joking with me, he said, ‘Ah, Alexandria, the armpit of Louisiana,’” said Nall, who was Favre’s backup quarterback with the Packers for several years.
That’s OK, we can laugh at being roasted. We can dish it out, too. Favre’s Mississippi hometown of Kiln is a place where the most popular sightseeing is at Dollar General.
Seriously, this is a column about taking pride in our city, and our sister city, Pineville, which recently received recognition in the Rapides Parish Journal for being named by the Louisiana Garden Club Federation as the state’s cleanest city in mid-size category G. It competed with Broussard, Crowley and Reserve for the state title.
Well, the La. Garden Club also has named Alexandria as the state’s cleanest city for category H, the second largest division, beating Monroe for the title. Yvette Hebert, who keeps records for the Alexandria Garden Club, said the club started the statewide competition in 1958.
Sid McDaniel, the club’s chairperson for the cleanest city competition, accompanied the judges as they rode through Alexandria for about an hour on a trolley a few weeks ago. The judges look at various things such as approaches to the city, hospitals, municipal buildings like city hall, parks and recreation areas, business establishments, streets and sidewalks.
The judges like to see evidence of city involvement, too, and they were impressed when they approached the city complex, and “many city workers came out, jumping up and down and cheering with a lot of enthusiasm.”
Long story short, the judges were impressed with the so-called “armpit of Louisiana,” and it goes back to people caring about the community and doing their part to make a difference. I was inspired to do so by taking part in the “Team Up to Clean Up” project a few weeks ago put on for the 16th straight year by the South Alexandria Revitalization Organization, founded by Roosevelt Johnson.
We met early on a Saturday morning at Antioch Baptist Church, about 100 of us -– a notable increase from the nine people who participated in the first year. We dispersed as small groups with gloves and garbage bags and trash grabbers to various streets in the area to clean up. That was after Roosevelt and several other citizens and sponsors revved up the crowd with pep talks and reminders how important it is to have a clean city to attract industries and businesses and improve morale and the general quality of life.
The day’s mantra was “Love the Boot” and it became Johnson’s organized group cheer, in keeping with the Keep Louisiana Beautiful slogan, “love the boot, don’t pollute.” And what should our work crew find along the route but a single black rubber boot, sitting by a stone step-up to nowhere. Call it our “morale” compass.
Some of us followed that duty by going to another volunteer work project at the Huie Dellmon Home, a 127-year-old Colonial Revival house on St. James Street in downtown Alexandria. The original owner was Henarie Huie, who co-founded the Town Talk newspaper with Edgar McCormick on March 17, 1883. It was donated in 1993 to the Rapides Parish Library, which has administrative offices and a meeting room for the public and the library board.
Unfortunately, vines and plants were vastly overgrown in the yard and climbing the fence, and, with help from a $2,400 “Keep Louisiana Beautiful” grant, volunteers from the Alexandria Garden Club and Blue Cross helped restore the grounds at the site that seven years ago was added to the National Historic Register.
A day or two later, inspired by all this, I bought my own trash grabber and took it with me as I walked around the neighborhood with a plastic grocery bag. Thankfully, that one bag was all I needed, but I needed all of that bag.
If we’re going to profess to love the boot, we all need to team up to clean up, and not just on one day of the year.