The Holiday Lounge

The iconic haze of blinking lights—red, green, blue, yellow—burnt deeply into the memory in ethereal, symbolic contrast to the quiet, flat calm of the Cajun prairie at night. A neon lady, lounging in a martini glass, her heel kicking up and down, up and down, bubbles pop, pop, popping all around her. A spooky spot of bright effervescence in the middle of Evangeline Parish stillness. It’s wrong in all the right ways, the Holiday.

Speaking about the Cajun band Charivari’s song “Le Holiday,” fiddler Mitch Reed described glimpsing the nightclub out the back window while driving on Highway 13. “It looked like a mothership had landed in the rice field, or a traveling carnival had settled there for the weekend. I remember really thinking it was a carnival and getting all excited, and asking my mom and dad, you know, if tomorrow we could go there and ride the Ferris wheel.” 

Roughly translated from French into English, Charivari’s song—the nominal track of their 2005 album “A Trip to the Holiday Lounge”—invites the masses to Mamou’s outskirts with the high-pitched seduction of the Cajun fiddle:

“Come and meet me, we’ll go to a place called the Holiday.

The boss T-Ed is as mean as a mad dog.

The place looks like a circus with all the neon lights.

It’s only ten miles from Carriere’s Bar.

You can drink a beer or have a whiskey.

Or you can go in the back and see the pretty girls.

It’s not a place to go if you are married.

The place that we call the Holiday.” 

A sort of landmark to the mythos of rural Acadiana nightlife, the Holiday Lounge has held its corner of the prairie for over sixty years now. Once open twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, a bright blot of Las Vegas in Mamou; the Lounge now only lights up for special occasions, once every few months. Hurricane Rita stole the martini lady, and after the iconic neon “Holiday” banner atop the roof got blown into the cow fields more than a few times, it found a new permanent (and more Instagrammable) home inside the bar. And then, the Edwin Edwards sign out front? “Bienvenue a Grand Mamou Governeur Edwards.” Well, it eventually started to make the roof leak, and had to come down too.

And still, faded out and stripped down as it is, you can’t the miss the Holiday. Incongruous as ever, the mint-green club sits with its hand-painted seascape mural, sand and palm trees emblazoned on cinderblocks, drawing eyes and curiosity from every traveler coming down LA 13. 

It's Still Here

“It’s still here,” the stranger whispered, shaking his head, staring at the green-bikinied pinup girl on the wall. His eyes lowered to the pockmarked dance floor, then came back up across the yellowing green and foil wallpaper, all the way up to the ceiling where black-lighted stars approximated a much closer heaven. When his head tilted level again, he was staring right at the jukebox, which had to be almost half a century old. “I can’t believe it’s still here.” 

From the bar, the owner Eugene Manuel asked him, “Can I help you sir?” The man looked up, “I can’t believe this place still exists.” Laughing, Manuel said, “Oh so, you been to the Holiday before? Well, how long’s it been?”  

“Ohhh man, probably about forty years,” the stranger said. “We were stationed at Fort Polk and used to come here all the time, stay up late late. I love this place. I met my wife here.” 

“Well, where you comin’ from now?” 

“Dwight, Kansas. My daughter’s getting married in Mississippi. But I just had to make the detour.” 

“Well, how on Earth you remembered the way here from Dwight, Kansas?”  

The stranger laughed. “Well, the old owner of this place, Mr. T-Ed—good, good man, he’d always make us eat something after we drank too much and remind us we had training in the morning. He gave me this matchbook all these years ago, and it had the address on it. I held onto that thing. Thought for sure this place would be a pile of rubble by now. You knew T-Ed?” 

“Oh yeah I knew him pretty good,” said Manuel, smiling. “That’s my daddy.” 

T-Ed Manuel's Holiday Lounge

Spend enough time in Mamou—especially on the lively, if tired, little strip of nightlife called 6th Street—and you’ll hear the name T-Ed (pronounced “Tee-Ed”) Manuel (1924-1992) thrown around a bit. In a town of farmers and oil field workers, T-Ed stood out partly because he wouldn’t be caught dead without a suit and tie on. “Looked like he came straight outta Las Vegas,” said Daniel Baham, who, decades ago, worked as a technician at the Holiday. “I remember T-Ed used to walk with two pockets. He had his big bills on one side, little bills on the other. Little bills were twenties, tens, fives, and ones. Big bills were fifties and hundreds. He would walk, and this was the eighties. He’d have ten thousand dollars in his pockets. He could buy a car right then and there.” 

After serving in the merchant marines during World War II, T-Ed entered Evangeline Parish’s thriving nightlife industry with his brothers Austin and Ulyses, opening Manuel’s Bar on 6th in 1946. With Fort Polk just down the road in Vernon Parish, the “wet” towns of Mamou and Ville Platte were popular haunts for soldiers stationed in Louisiana throughout the mid-twentieth century. Manuel’s was especially popular for its private poker room and live entertainment, and became immortalized in Milton Molitor and Austin Pitre’s rendition of the “Manuel Bar Waltz,” (1957) the first ever 78 produced by Cajun music recording engineer Floyd Soileau (who recorded the likes of the Balfa Brothers, Nathan Abshire, Warren Storm, Rockin’ Sidney, Keith Frank, and more) for his debut label “Big Mamou.” 

“In a way, my dad was ahead of his time,” explained T-Ed’s son Eugene, who currently owns both Manuel’s and the Holiday Lounge. “He would listen and he’d learn and he’d watch. He realized the young people weren’t into the French music stuff. It was 1957, rock and roll was takin’ off.” T-Ed got his hands into the newfangled jukebox business and was managing boxes in most of the area’s nightclubs, amassing a small fortune in coins. “With that, he invested in this place,” said Eugene of the Holiday. “My grandfather thought he was crazy. He said, ‘T-Ed, what’s wrong whichtu? You gonna go broke out there in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a field. You think people’s gonna leave allll dat stuff goin’ on in town to come out ova here?’ But my daddy knew, he said ‘You give them something they want, they gonna come.’ And every night, from ten in the mornin’ till five the next mornin’, full.” 

A Portal to Partying Past

Growing up just eight or so miles from the town of Mamou, I knew what the Holiday was way before I knew what it was. It held a firm spot in my internal geography alongside the rice dryer, the used car lot, the crawfish field—places I could picture perfectly but had never stepped inside. That is, until this past Lundi Gras, when I saw the Holiday—for the very first time—with all its lights aglow, reflecting on the flat surface of the crawfish fields surrounding it. Inside was a wonderland of mirrors, Christmas lights, disco balls, and jukeboxes. The Daiquiri Queens sang in French in the corner atop the glowing multi-colored stage floor, and we joined couples young and old spinning around, and around, and around. At some point, not recognizing any of them as Evangeline Parish natives, I asked my dad, “Where did all of these people come from?” 

“People who wanted to be somebody else at the Holiday. People who had everything, and you’d never know it. People that didn’t have nothin’, but had one good suit. They’d come in here and act like they had everything.” —Eugene Manuel 

Visiting recently, on the Monday after Hurricane Laura hit, the first thing I notice are cots on the dance floor, which Eugene quickly explained: he, his mother, and his girlfriend had weathered the storm here. “I had to protect my place,” he said. “And it’s much sturdier than a lot of other buildings around here.” 

In the daylight, the Holiday reveals its age. Half of the floor is pockmarked cement—“That’s from a lot of dancin’, yeah”—the other half badly scratched and stained black and white tile. The wallpaper, an elegant design of gold foil and green mosaic, is wrinkled in some places, stained in others. Some of the mirrors lining the walls are cracked, and part of the bar is wrapped up in duct tape. 

This is the price, though, for preserving portals to the past, and then letting people inside to romp. “These are the original tables, here,” Eugene told me, made by an artisan in Mamou. The other tables, he pointed out, were purchased by T-Ed from the Orleans Hotel’s closing auction. “That was in 1957, and they were twenty years old then.” 

[Read this: Doug Kershaw's much-anticipated memoir and a long-lost collection of photos documenting life inside the dance halls of Acadiana in the seventies.]

“See this bar? They don’t build these anymore,” he said. It’s movable: “I could pick this bar up and go put it outside.” And the formica countertop, of course, is original—“My daddy liked pink.” 

Behind the 1981 wallpaper lives brick walls painted in black light paint, with hand painted palm trees, fellows playing bongos. At another point, Eugene told me, the walls were draped in satin and featured a massive canvas painting depicting an Asian woman with a dragon. The “girls,” as Eugene calls the fifties-style pinup cutouts on the wall, were made by a man in Alexandria by the name of Bill Mirashe, who airbrushed them when airbrush art was just becoming popular. In between the girls are cutouts of pineapples—a nod to T-Ed’s fondness for the tropical culture of Hawaii, where pineapples are a symbol of hospitality. 

Eugene pointed to bricks used on a section of the building’s exterior, and told me that they were once part of Mamou High School before it burnt down. T-Ed bought them from the rubble as a favor. The 1940s curved green leather booths lining the wall came from the old Archway Lounge in Opelousas, and the still fully functional electric disco dancefloor—installed by Baham—came from the Golden Spur. “Man, they love to play music on that,” said Eugene. The “LADIES” neon sign above the bathroom came from the Joy Theatre in Mamou, and the murals inside of it—mountainous Eden-like wilderness painted in airy brushstrokes of red, blue, and green upon yellow walls—were offered as a drink tab payment by a broke old Michigan man named Pops. “My daddy always had a soft heart when it came to old men who were divorced or widowed, lost their place to live. Guys who had a drinking problem.” 

[Read this: John Sharp documents the dancehalls of South Louisiana.]

Pieces of Acadiana, all of it, but arranged in such a way—inspired by the trends of nightclubs in Vegas and on Bourbon Street—that they transport one far, far away from here. The lights, the flair, the evocations of the tropical, the rock and roll music pouring from the jukebox (which, yes, is still there)—it was all about escape, said Eugene. “Daddy wanted you to feel like you were somewhere else. Like you were out of town, away from 6^th Street and Mamou and all that. Over here, you came and it was another world.” 

Growing up in the Holiday as he did—diapers changed on the bar, falling asleep on the pool table, talking French with the regulars—Eugene said he always paid most attention to the pretenders. “The people who wanted to be somebody else at the Holiday. People who had everything, and you’d never know it. People that didn’t have nothin’, but had one good suit. They’d come in here and act like they had everything.” 

Some patrons, of course, did have everything—at least for a little while. One of the most famous pieces of Holiday Lounge décor was positioned on the roof right over the front door, in between the neon “Holiday” sign and one depicting a stripper named Terry Belinda: the eight-foot tall poster of T-Ed’s good friend, Governor Edwin Edwards. 

Vote for the Crook

“I guess it was around three o’ clock in the afternoon,” as Baham tells the story. “Flop-flop-flop-flop-flop. The back of T-Ed’s house. He had a little fence. He had a little barn. He had some donkeys and some geese and some chickens, some guineas, and some goats. Here comes the copter, a 412, the big bird they use to transport when coming off the oil platforms. A big bird. It comes sittin’ down, and the barnyard wakes up. First one, the donkey’s over the fence. Then the geese went over. Then the goats. Then the guineas and the chickens. Everything that was in the chicken yard is now in the front yard. Then, boom, it lands.

“Now, T-Ed’s put the word out. The whole town’s there. Every dignitary you can think of, every poor coonass and drunk you can think of, was there. They put the thing down, and the entourage starts coming out. Some young men, body guards, come first. Then his pretty girls, his secretaries, coming out with their stiletto heels and tight skirts and all that. And everybody’s got a job to do. And then there’s Governor Edwards, wearing a cowboy shirt, a bolo tie, blue jeans, pointed boots, and a rodeo buckle this big.” 

It wasn’t the only time Edwards visited Mamou, but it is the best remembered—an extravagant example of the “Cajun” governor’s cozy relationship with Mamou’s honky-tonk royalty. The two had met when Edwards was a councilman in Crowley, where T-Ed owned some jukeboxes. “There were some parties,” said Eugene. “They had mutual friends. Edwards was moving up, and he was popular. My dad was like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ and Edwards would look at my dad like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ He’d see my daddy with all these good lookin’ women all dressed up. They wanted to meet each other, and they hit it off right away because they both spoke French.” 

In his first run for governor, T-Ed had been more than happy to show his buddy some support, putting up signs at the lounge and spreading the word. The poster came about the second round, though. “We ended up putting some lights all around it, just like the rest of the lounge,” said Baham. “By the time it was over he had a big halo goin’ around him, neon on the inside. Edwards, he looked like a little angel up there on the roof.” For each of his remaining three terms, Edwards—in all his glory—was the esteemed welcoming committee of the Holiday. And on some occasions, he was inside too, shootin’ the shit with the Mamou crowd. And in all likelihood, playing the slots. 

An Underworld on the Acadian Prairie

"He used to come to our house, Carlos,” said Eugene of the infamous New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. “One time my little brother made him a cup of coffee, and he gave him a twenty. My daddy said, ‘Nooononono. You give that back. You can’t do that; you don’t owe them people.’” 

To this day, people around Evangeline Parish refer to T-Ed in whispers as the “Cajun Godfather.” Everyone knew that in the 1940s through the ‘70s, anyone involved in anything coin-operated in Louisiana had to go through the mob. “You couldn’t buy jukeboxes in those days unless you were connected,” said Baham. “The whole business was controlled by the mafia. All they were gonna sell to was the people they were connected to. You had to have enough machines to make an operation.” 

 According to Baham, at the height of it, T-Ed had jukeboxes set up in bars across Bunkie, Opelousas, Lawtell, Ville Platte, Oakdale, Oberlin, Kinder, Elton, Basile, and beyond. And while jukeboxes were his specialty, he also had some pinball and cigarette machines. My dad, who was a teenager in Mamou in the seventies, told me that he always pictured the Holiday as the kind of place Carlos Marcello’s men would visit, then load down their cars with coins. 

“I remember T-Ed used to walk with two pockets. He had his big bills on one side, little bills on the other. Little bills were twenties, tens, fives, and ones. Big bills were fifties and hundreds. He would walk, and this was the eighties. He’d have ten thousand dollars in his pockets. He could buy a car right then and there.”  —Daniel Baham

Marcello is best remembered in Louisiana for two things. The first is his distributing the New York mobster Frank Costello’s illegal coin-operated gambling machines across Louisiana (with, as the story goes, the help and support of Governor Huey P. Long). 

In the Holiday, one of the first things Eugene pointed out to me is the way the interior corners of the room were made with large indented sections, about the size of a refrigerator, pushed back from the rest of the wall. “One time, I asked my daddy why he did that. He told me, ‘Six hundred dollars more a month.’ The slot machines were right there, and with that indention, you could add one more on each end.” 

Marcello’s second great legacy comes in the form of widely-spread conspiracy theories dubbing him the mastermind of the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Though the allegations were never proven, countless articles and books and investigations tie Marcello to the crime, including a tiny tome called A Rose by Many Other Names (2013), written by investigative journalist from the Eunice News Todd Elliott. 

The focus of Elliott’s book is Rose Cherami, a prostitute and drug runner with ties to both Marcello and Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin Jack Ruby, who was found on the side of Highway 190 in Eunice on November 20, 1963. That night, at the Moosa Hospital, Cherami—bloodied and drug-addled—told anyone who would listen that the President of the United States was in grave, grave danger. 

[Read this: On the way to Camelot, JFK stopped in Crowley.]

In a 2017 interview with the Ville Platte Gazette, Elliott said, “The Holiday in Mamou was the first place that I stopped when I was doing my research.” After interviewing Eugene, his mother, and other recognizable characters of Mamou’s nightlife like Dr. Frank Savoy, Jr. and T’aunte Sue (whose son Jimmy married Marcello’s daughter), Elliott felt confident in the probabilities of mob presence in Mamou and in locations all the way down the “Acadiana Trail” of Highway 190, which ran from New Orleans to Eunice before turning into Louisiana State Highway 13 leading to Mamou, passing right in front of the Holiday. 

The theories connecting Cherami to Marcello and Marcello to Kennedy and all of this to a larger, more complicated conspiracy run wild and worrisome. Most of it remains speculation, but intriguing and often founded enough to suggest a definite element of the underworld on the mid-to-late-twentieth century Cajun Prairie. And the Holiday—this brightly-lit haven of sin and rock ‘n roll in the middle of nowhere—well, it offers the perfect milieu for long-held secrets. 

The Party Lives On

“We’re gonna party at the Holiday

all night long. 

We’re gonna party at the Holiday, get down to the bone. 

T-Ed is my best friend. 

We’re gonna party at the Holiday all night long. 

We’re gonna party at the Holiday, get down to the bone. 

Crank that jukebox, make it scream. 

We’re gonna party at the Holiday, blow some steam.” 

—From Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys' Party at the Holiday, All Night Long album, written by Stephen C. Lafleur

In the twenty-first century, the Holiday Lounge remains as a living, breathing relic of good times gone by. Under Eugene’s preservationist wing, it lives on as a memory—more novelty than naughty—shared by a community of storytellers captivated by its strange spell. The old regulars are still around—the drunks and the gamblers and the lady-swindlers, the veterans and the farmers and the offshore workers, the jokesters and fighters and French-speaking old men and all the pretty ladies—and their memories have contributed to the living lore of a place existing outside of time, outside of convention. And this mythology, even today, continues to inspire the artists most tied to this peculiar Acadiana region. Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys featured Stephen C. Lafleur's “Party at the Holiday, All Night Long” as the title track for their 2016 Christmas album. Charivari’s 2005 “A Trip to the Holiday Lounge,” including the song “Le Holiday,” featured album artwork of the band photographed at the lounge’s iconic neon entryway. Even up-and-coming Louisiana musician Renée Reed, twenty one, felt inspired enough by the Holiday’s haunting retro Cajun aura to stage the artwork for her upcoming debut album on its dancefloor, in the Archway booths, against the bathroom mural.  And just before I visited Eugene there, on the Friday after Hurricane Laura hit, Cajun musician and producer Joel Savoy staged a Facebook Live fiddle performance with Cameron Fontenot on the unmistakable disco dance floor. 

“Joel kind of saved my place, in a way,” said Eugene. In the early 2000s, with a trickle of the business it once had, the Holiday had become little more than a dusty home for, as Eugene put it, the “sad local drunks.” “Joel said, ‘I love this bar man, let’s do something else with it.’” 

The Holiday—this brightly-lit haven of sin and rock ‘n roll in the middle of nowhere—well, it offers the perfect milieu for long-held secrets. 

Using his connections in the Louisiana music scene, Savoy invited bands from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, and beyond. And with the bands—Kyle Huval and the Dixie Club Ramblers, The Lost Bayou Ramblers, Feufollet, and others—came their crowds. “I didn’t know most of the people in here,” said Eugene. 

Growing up a Eunice boy who spent a lot of time in Mamou, Savoy said that the Holiday always lived on in his mind as an example of “how wacky and funky everything else in Mamou was.” 

“I wanted to share this gem in the middle of rice fields on the edge of a teeny little Cajun town with my friends,” he said. And I get it. As a creative person also captivated by the dynamic culture of this prairie, I knew as soon as I walked through the door that Lundi Gras that I had to know more about this place, had to do more with it—this world within a world, this time outside of time, hiding so indiscreetly on the far side of Mamou.