By Kimberly Hopson
L’Observateur

RESERVE – Eighty-two-year-old Gloria Mabile Triche is enthusiastic about the 100th anniversary of L’Observateur because the paper has been in her family for generations.
“My great-grandfather was editor of Le Meschacebe, but he sold it to somebody else because he thought my grandfather wasn’t going to make a go of it,” she said. “But boy, a hundred years huh? Wouldn’t I love to tell him that today! You didn’t think he was going make it and here he is…well, not him but, L’Observateur’s hundred years.”
La Meschacebe was a mostly French language paper published by Charles Lasseigne, Triche’s great-grandfather, in St. John the Baptist Parish. The paper was sold to a Eugene Dumez in 1909. Triche’s grandfather, Wallace Lasseigne, began the L’Observateur paper in January 1913. The exact date of the first publication is up for debate, but Triche insists that it is Jan. 18.
Triche has many fond memories of her grandfather and L’Observateur. Though she never worked for the paper herself, she was constantly in and around the shop as a little girl because her mother worked the linotype there. She said that the very first picture snapped at L’Observateur was of her, taken by a reporter from the Times-Picayune for a Sunday column.
“Can you imagine that I still have this copy? I’m about 7 years old — you see my teeth coming out?,” she said, pointing at a grainy, black and white copy of a news clipping. “I’m in the front yard, and this guy came in from the Times-Picayune to talk to my grandfather. So they’re talking shop and he saw me in the yard. I was playing ball, and he says, ‘Little girl, come see.’ I said OK. He says ‘I want you to sit in the front of your grandfather’s desk, I want his spectacles on your nose, and I want you with paper and pencil as though you’re writing an article for L’Observateur.”
Triche said that the history of L’Observateur is made of blood, sweat and tears. The blood comes from when her grandfather set the linotype by hand in the winter and would have to rub Vaseline onto his bleeding fingers. She recalls that the shop was always terribly hot, so that makes the sweat. The tears come from the tragic death of her young uncle, Sgt. Larry Lasseigne, during WWII. Larry Lasseigne was going to become the sports editor at L’Observateur before his untimely death.
Following his death, the paper eventually switched ownership, coming under the direction of the Lucia family.
Look for more memories of L’Observateur’s first century of existence in Wednesday’s “Down Through the Years” special section. If you have any memories of the newspaper you would like to share, stop by or mail them to the office at 116 Newspaper Drive in LaPlace just behind Destiny Christian Center on Main Street or share them on L’Observateur’s Facebook page. They can also be emailed to lobnews@ bellsouth.net.