Paul Kieu
Jim Bradshaw, longtime columnist of "C'est Vrai" and author of "Cajuns and Other Characters."
Predawn hours, 1966. Amid the ghosts of yesterday’s cigarette smoke in the newsroom at the Lafayette Daily Advertiser sat a lone reporter, Jim Bradshaw. Surrounded by clunky war surplus metal desks and armed with a manual Olivetti typewriter, he engaged in a style of “reporting” that would eventually establish him as one of the greats.
Bradshaw’s first daily column, a co-authored “Barbs and Gems” with Barbara Borenkamp, met with quick success when it started in 1971. Almost immediately, he assumed sole authorship and developed a modified column (dropping the “Barbs” and keeping his “Gems”) that examined historical tidings with wit and tenacity, a hybrid of “news story” and “storytelling.”
Oh, Evangeline
Surely, you’ve heard of Longfellow’s dear Evangeline, torn from her lover Gabriel during the great explusion? Their tragic romance has historically spurred much of the attention and speculation in Acadian folklore. But that was before. Now, there are Bradshaw’s George and Helen, husband and wife, running a business together in their small town. They also have a story to tell about South Louisiana.
George and Helen own a hardware store. A simple premise, yet this couple served to act as gatekeepers for what stories got told, and how, in the emerging journalist Jim Bradshaw’s early career. “I tried to tell the story of whatever I was writing as if I was discussing it across their breakfast table,” said Bradshaw. “A substantial part of my growth has come in a fuller understanding of just who George and Helen are and how varied are their interests. They have become far different people as I’ve traveled to practically every community in south Louisiana and talked to their real-life counterparts. Everyday people are uncommonly smart.”
"They have become far different people as I’ve traveled to practically every community in south Louisiana and talked to their real-life counterparts. Everyday people are uncommonly smart.”
When everything Cajun became cool
In the South Louisiana of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the rush to capitalize on the Cajun brand of gold resulted in a splattering of inaccuracy, ranging from half-truths to full-on fallacy.
“Does it have hot sauce? Call it Cajun!” – Author Unknown.
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A reliable narrator gifts a story, and its reader, close proximity to truths.
Readers of his longest-running column, “C’est Vrai” [It’s True], were treated to Bradshaw’s remarkable storytelling ability as he untangled the webbing of oral history that colors what many call “Cajun” during his time at the Advertiser and elsewhere.
“The French culture of South Louisiana is far from exclusively Cajun, and it is the mélange of many cultures that makes its past unique and culture still vibrant.” “C’est Vrai” was the answer to this. “‘C’est Vrai’ isn’t a was, it’s an is,” said Bradshaw. He still puts out one column per week through Louisiana State Newspapers.
Save Ray!
“One of my finest memories working as features editor at the Advertiser years ago was listening to then columnist Jim Bradshaw explain how to pronounce his column, ‘C’est Vrai,’ to our executive editor from Indiana,” recalled Louisiana writer (and frequent Country Roads contributor) Cheré Coen in her column Louisiana Book News.
“Ray is drowning,” Bradshaw told her. “Save Ray!”
As new management cycled in every year or so, Jim seamlessly guided each through the Cajun expressions, explained what a roux was and why we parade and chase chickens at Mardi Gras, said Coen in a recent interview.
Later, Bradshaw would write the introduction for her book, Cooking in Cajun Country.
Truth be told
Before the Advertiser digitized in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, adding a significant amount of history to the landfill, there was the “morgue.”
Recordkeeping in the morgue employed a librarian who seemed to take job security into her own hands by “using some devious scheme that only she understood” as Bradshaw put it. “I cannot for the life of me remember her last name, but her first name was Gladys and she was invaluable,” he says. “She knew more local history than any historian and most of the time didn’t even have to go into the files. When you needed to know something in a hurry the first thing to do was ask Gladys.”
Later, Bradshaw personally claimed the files of old columns and news stories. In 2016, the highly regarded “C’est Vrai” was curated into a book, Cajuns and Other Characters: True Stories from South Louisiana, by Pelican Publishing.
“My family tree is full of Cajuns; Allains and Landrys and Babins on my mother’s side,” he said. “Vincents and Broussards, and Benoits on my dad’s.” Thematically, the book aims to shed light on old Cajun tales and introduce some new truths, said Bradshaw.
[You might also like: A Cajun and a Scholar]
“The greatest difficulty was in finding an arrangement so that the book was not just a hodge-podge of unrelated essays,” he said, while also thanking his talented writer/editor wife, Rose Marie Boudreaux, for her efforts toward the project.
Paul Kieu
Jim Bradshaw’s “Cajuns and Other Characters” (2016), a curated collection of his popular column “C’est Vrai,” can be found at pelicanpub.com.
Journalism 101
Bradshaw´s column “Barbs & Gems” won the first Hal Boyle Award, created to applaud creative writing by columnists and named after the prolific Associated Press columnist and WWII correspondent.
“As an editor, one of the first things I tried to impress, with varying success, on young reporters was drilled into me by Alton Broussard, my Journalism 101 teacher, said Bradshaw. “He’d say, ‘When in doubt, leave it out.’”
In the world of print journalism, there are a few legends. There are also the infamous, known for their gross negligence or failures. In between the two, there exists a stalwart breed of writer who today’s branded media and instant-news tends to glaze over.
“Newspapers and journalism are the first drafts of history,” said Mark Mathes, editor of Cajuns and Other Characters. (Mathes’ father initiated the Hal Boyle Award in Hammond.) “Preserving those stories and photographs in archives helps writers and historians share lost eras with new generations of readers in our digital age.”
Thanks, Jim.
This article originally appeared in our April 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.
