Reunions: 1998 Long Reunion, Winn Parish, LA Submitted by Deanna Simmons Hess, Livingston, TX ********************************************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ********************************************** Source: Houston Chronicle Sunday, Aug. 16, 1998 A reunion of Louisiana's Longs brings loving tales of Huey, Earl By RICK BRAGG New York Times WINNFIELD, La. -- The stories of politics and pig hunts are a little worn from use here in the birthplace of brothers Huey and Earl Long, a bit like the final line of an oft-told fairy tale that a child shouts out even before the reader is finished. No one knows those stories better than family, and as about 50 Long relatives gathered last weekend for an old-fashioned family reunion, the people who hold tiny pieces of that legacy fitted them together to form legend. "Having the name Long was like a magic word," said Floyd H. Long, a distant cousin, born here in 1915. Huey Long, the governor and U.S. senator who was assassinated in the hallway of the state capitol he built, and Earl, who was governor three times and died soon after he was elected to Congress, were imperfect men -- Earl wore a big button that said "I'm Not Crazy," after time in a mental hospital. But here, people with the same name as these two famous and sometimes infamous Louisiana politicians swapped tales tempered by familial love, and stroked their memories like an old dog. "My favorite story is one everyone knows, about how Huey tried to impress the Catholics," said a distant cousin, Huey P.Long, who was born here in 1929. "How on Sundays, he would say he carried his Irish Catholic mother to church in a wagon, then later came back for his father," to take him to services. "Some people didn't believe him, and asked him if it was true. And he said straight-out, `Hell, no, we don't even have a wagon.' " Huey Long, the demagogue who dreamed of being president but endeared himself to generations of Louisianians with a colossal personality, paved roads and free textbooks, died in 1935. Earl Long, a beloved but vexing man who kept company with a stripper, died in 1960. But to say either one is gone would be inaccurate. Here in the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame, where family members gathered and some Long memorabilia was auctioned, figures in the likenesses of Huey and Earl glare down from podiums. Huey, his dark hair parted in the middle like the tenor in a barbershop quartet, is jabbing his finger into the air, like he jabbed it into the faces and probably even the dreams of the rich. Earl is just Earl, kindly looking and only a little wild-eyed, holding a straw hat. That might be fitting. Historians, scholars and relatives agree. People feared Huey, and loved Earl. Jimmy D. Long, who has served his district in central Louisiana for three decades in the Louisiana House of Representatives, tells of the time Earl lost his entire campaign war chest while hunting for wild pig outside Winnfield around 1956. Earl had placed in a folded newspaper an envelope containing $100,000 and put it in his pocket before the hunt, Jimmy Long said. After hunting pigs all day on horseback with several of his cronies, Earl got back to the farm to discover that the money was gone, he said. Earl assumed one of them had stolen it. He called in his friend B.B. (Sixty) Rayburn and told him he was going to line the cronies up and search them, but did not want Sixty -- no one at the reunion was sure how he got that name -- to be offended. "I know you didn't take it," Earl told him. When he did not find the money on his friends, he ordered them all up early the next morning to search. They found it on the ground, still rolled in newspaper. Most of the stories told here this weekend were about Earl, who was elected governor in 1939, 1948 and again in 1958. He outlived Huey by three decades, so naturally memories of him have faded less with time. "He always wanted home-smoked pork," said Vera Long Wells, 82, whose father was a first cousin of Earl and Huey. But it also seems as if the relatives enjoyed talking about him more, because he seemed more a part of Winnfield and less a part of the Baton Rouge political scene. They were protective of his mental health history -- he once was held, in his later years, in a mental institution, but relatives said his erratic behavior might have been caused by several small strokes. Jessie Baxter, who, as former head of the state Department of Hospitals, oversaw the hospital that held Earl, was the guest speaker at the reunion. "I think Earl was the best governor Louisiana ever had," he said. But after being slow to rule that Earl was sane, Baxter was fired by the state's lieutenant governor. When Earl died, "it was the only time I saw my daddy cry," said Carroll Long, a third cousin. He remembers Earl's last political moment in 1960. At 65, thin and ill, he had just been elected to Congress.Carroll Long recalls seeing him stand at the lectern, gripping the microphone stand, to keep from falling. "You could see the light through his arms," where the flesh hung loose on his bones, Carroll Long said. "It was almost like he just refused to die until he won one more race." He died 10 days later. Huey, who was called the Kingfish and who preached a sort of share-the-wealth socialism as he played golf, chased women and sometimes reputedly misplaced state money, was elected governor in 1928, then moved on to the Senate in 1932. At 42, he was poised to challenge Franklin D. Roosevelt for the White House when a Louisiana doctor mortally wounded him in the state capitol in September 1935. Bodyguards shot the assassin, Dr. Carl Weiss, 61 times. His older brother, Julius, once wrote that Huey "had no sense of family." According to one of his biographers, T. Harry Williams, in Huey Long, (Knopf, 1969) Huey once said: "I'd like to get as far away from my damn kinfolks as I could. This state is full of sapsucker, hillbilly and Cajun relatives of mine, and there ain't enough dignity in the bunch to keep a chigger still long enough to brush his hair." Other relatives say Huey loved his family, and liked coming home. He genuinely loved the poor people who put him in office, relatives said. "My mother and father thought everything of Huey in our home," said Floyd Long. He recalls that when Floyd was a member of a 1,200-member cadet corps at Louisiana State University in the early years of the Depression, Huey would often pay hundreds of $10 train fares so poorer cadets could see football games in other parts of the state. "People can debate Huey's motive," said Carroll Long. But the fact is "he was helping people." Earl did the same, he said, and that is why there is such pride in the family name. Many of the surviving members of the extended Long family remain dazzled by a brief encounter with one of the brothers. Kenny Long remembers standing in his grandmother's front yard, awed as Earl arrived in a black stretch limousine and handed out watermelons from the trunk. "It was like meeting the president or something," he said. The relatives have what so many others want, a part of that legacy. In Louisiana, people still talk about the time they met Huey Long, said Huey P. Long, the cousin. "A lot of people say they knew him, but he was dead before most of them were born."