Cajun-born daredevil Berchman Richard of Alexandria has an action-packed résumé over his lifetime of 88 years, but one of his achievements comes to mind as Alexandria prepares to celebrate River Fête next month.
Richard (pronounced REE-shard) was working at KRRV-AM radio in 1994 when he suggested to Judy Karst, then the station’s owner and operator, that KRRV stage and help sponsor a patriotic July 4th celebration by the Red River. Karst agreed, and Richard was named the event coordinator. He and the late KRRV disc jockey Hollywood Harrison found some other co-sponsors and put together the inaugural “Uncle Sam Jam.”
“We made arrangements to get a barge at the river, and we shot fireworks from the barge,” Richard recalled last Thursday, sitting at a windswept table outside Tamp and Grind. The one-day event, which featured activities and displays on both the Alexandria and Pineville sides of the river, attracted more than 10,000, and it was so popular it was expanded to a four-day event the following year.
The only “Uncle Sam Jam” scheduled this summer in the state, according to Explore Louisiana.com, is in Metairie, but our River Féte, based on its 12-year history, should be a great event on the first weekend of May.
Berchman, who can regale you with stories of flying airplanes, helicopters, race cars, motorcycles and ocean-racing sailboats, knew a thing or two about putting on a “show.” With the help of his friend Pete Ferrington, in 2004 he conceived and produced a reality TV show called “Hog Heaven” that chronicled Harley Davidson bikers’ journeys on the open road. He had experience in television as a former general manager at Fox WNTZ in Alexandria.
“I wore a metal TV camera on top of my helmet and just turned it on and rode around, and everything was live,” he said. “We traveled from Key West, Florida, to Santa Fe, New Mexico.” One of the subplots was to show that many of the bikers were “responsible, hard-working people” and not hard-edged rebels as many often perceived them to be.
It was popular enough, Richard said, to run for 53 episodes.
Afflicted with polio as a youth, “Berch,” as he was nicknamed, had a short-lived experience in high school football as a freshman offensive lineman, but he graduated from LaGrange High School in Lake Charles in 1955, and after graduating from McNeese State, where he participated in the Army ROTC, he entered the Army as a second lieutenant.
“All I wanted was to become a pilot,” he said. He went to flight school and graduated in 1960 and joined the 101st Airborne in Ft. Campbell, Ky. As a DMZ check pilot, he was involved in an incident that nearly got him court-martialed. In 1963 he was authorized to “fly the tape” (surveying the area where there was a yellow tape spread out over the countryside to mark the boundary between North and South Korea) in a single-engine, short takeoff and landing aircraft. He’d sometimes take a visiting dignitary to see a close-up look at the border.
Once, he was with a colonel, and they were hunting for the landing spot for the colonel’s meeting with some officers of the South Korean army. The colonel told Berch to land immediately. “I told him that I could not since that would put us across the border into North Korea. He informed me I didn’t know what I was talking about, and to land there immediately.”
The colonel eventually tried to pull rank on him, telling him he was giving him a direct order to land.
“Colonel,” Berch said, “as long as this aircraft is in the air, I am the aircraft commander and the ranking officer.” And he eventually landed on the correct side of the tape. The colonel, before leaving him, threatened to have him court-martialed, but he later returned with an apology. The South Korean officers he met with told him if they had landed where he wanted, they would both be prisoners in North Korea.
This story and others are in Richard’s book “Adrenaline Junkie – The Adventures of a Cajun Test Pilot.” As someone who rightfully boasts of once shaking hands with World War II Army Air Corps hero Jimmy Doolittle, Richard has also written a tale of historical fiction called “Death on the Atchafalaya.”
Another gem in the “Adrenaline Junkie” book is the background on getting his name from a Belgian Jesuit priest who became a saint in the Catholic Church. Richard’s father, a descendent of ancestors who were passengers on the first boat of Acadians to arrive in Louisiana in 1785, was named John Berchman Richard after a miracle at Grand Coteau.
Berchman’s full name is John Berchman Richard Jr., and his namesake father was known mostly as “JB,” and Berchman was known as “Berch.” He said he knew nothing about the origin of his name until after his parents died. Neither he nor his parents ever brought it up, he said.
His sister called him while he was living in California and told him she had read a story in Louisiana Life about the miracle in 1866 in Grand Coteau involving the priest, John Berchmans. He is credited with healing a Canadian woman who was so sick she was given the last rites.
Richard traveled from California to Grand Coteau on a Sunday and found the infirmary where the miracle took place, which is now a shrine to St. John Berchmans. What’s more, he found a large book in the entryway, hand-written, that told the story of the miracle by the man whose name he bears.
This Cajun test pilot who flirted more than a few times with death said he read the entire account of the miracle.
“It sent shivers up and down my spine,” he said.