Editor’s Note: The following is a remembrance of Reserve – the way it used to be -in the middle of the last century. A blending of memories, it has no chronology of time, day or season.

Part 3 of 4

Cattle grazing on the Mississippi River levee often wander across the road onto private property. Reserve Community Club’s defense is an arched turnstile gate on the sidewalk and a cattle-guard (a depression with steel rate about five inches apart) in the roadway. A quick swing through the gate and I check out the baseball field on my left. The covered grandstand is empty today. Home field for Reserve’s semi-pro team and Leon Godchaux High’s team, local teenage boys also use it for pick-up games.

Between the ball field and the Clubhouse, gardeners are busy trimming shrubs and weeding rose beds along paths leading to the grandstand. The men are refinery employees, so it’s not surprising that some beds are freshly mulched with bagasse.

Getting closer to the swimming pool, I remember it’s Monday when the pool is closed for cleaning, so I meander on over to the Clubhouse. The Club is pretty quiet today, too. The upstairs Movie Theater only operates Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Without folks milling about, buying frozen Milky Way bars, ice cream and snacks from the concession area. Club Manager Percy Kelter seems rather bored. Sitting behind the counter on a high stool where he can keep his eye on everything, he’s intimidating to me, a non-member, so I retreat to the north side of the Clubhouse, to the white wooden building everyone calls “The Pavillion.”

The muiti-windowed hall is pretty much a community center: dances, beauty contests, elections are held here. Now smiling families are leaving; boys are towing red wagons and girls are hugging baby dolls. Inside, children are walking around the floor in a large circle. As a child reaches the bandstand, an adult drops an apple in the brown paper bag the child is carrying. Another adult drops an orange, and yet another puts a red net Santa Claus stocking filled with assorted candies in the child’s bag. Finally, each boy is handed a Lone Ranger cap pistol set, and each girl is given a nurse’s kit. Only a few children in the circle remain, awaiting their turn — so it appears Godchaux Sugars’ annual Christmas party for employees’ children is coming to an end.

As I leave the Pavillion a tantalizing aroma of frying hamburgers and sounds of a festive crowd are coming from the adjacent fairgrounds. The Fourth of July Fair, one of two fairs held annually (the other being Labor Day), has begun. In one of the concession Mr. Rose is frying hamburger patties. He is a jovial and good-natured man.

No doubt his jokes and laughter with workers and fair-goers help

sell hamburgers. Each night though, when the stand closes, Mr. Rose

quietly vanishes from the fairgrounds.

Nearby, prominently glistening on a low wooden platform, is a brand-new black 1945 Chevrolet sedan, the fair’s big raffle item this year. As I walk around to get a look at it from every angle, I hear random snippets of conversation.

“I wonder what it cost?”

“I heard $948,” someone answered.

“How could they get it, with the war and all?”

“I heard they ordered it a year ago.”

“Man, I’d like to win it,” said another.

“You can’t even drive!”

“I’ll learn in a hurry if I win!”

Reluctantly, I turn from the object of my fascination. Fair-goers, some boisteriously, are playing challenging games at wooden booths that line north and west sides of the fairgrounds. From the Pavillton I hear music and a female voice singing “Til the End of Time”— so I scoot over and peek in. Its Iris Boudreaux, elegant in a black strapless gown, at the microphone and Sidney Dufrene leading “The Gay Southerners,” very classy in summer tux of white jackets and black trousers. The floor is filled with couples slow-dancing to the popular song.

An audience of mostly older women sits on benches behind a railing on the west side of the dance hall. One woman shields her mouth with a cardboard fan from Millet’s Funeral Home, then leans over to whisper something to her neighbor. Is her fan maneuver intended to foil any eavesdropping lip-readers who may be watching?

Meanwhile, behind the Paviilion, on the concrete-surfaced tennis courts, teenagers are dancing, oblivious to corn kernels under their feet, the corn used earlier as Keno card markers at the fair.

Taking the road north of the tennis courts, I walk a few blocks to “The Quarters,” the name given to an area of housing provided for African-American men who each year come by train from Mississippi or Alabama to harvest sugarcane. Single story, wooden barracks-style buildings line both sides of the dirt road. On the porches and steps,

men are sitting. They form a gauntlet of dark, questioning eyes as I walk by. The closer I get to Godchaux Refinery, ever increasingly I hear the “dummies” tooting. They are the narrow-gauge steam locomotives used by Godchaux to haul cane. The whistle of the

dummies, the screech of their wheels, the clank of railcars coupling and uncoupling — hauling and dumping cane upon conveyors to meet the mill’s giant crushers and grinders — these discordant sounds leave no doubt it’s grinding season. From October through December the people of Reserve are accustomed to air pungent with the smell of dry leaves burnt off sugarcane, and roadsides littered with crushed cane stalks dropped from overfilled cane trucks. It’s the season when each morning cane farmers and field hands look at the sky and hope the weather holds so they can harvest all of their cane before Christmas.

Crossing rows of railroad tracks in front of the grinding mill, I meet some workers hurriedly heading to Ricard’s Boarding House. Mrs. Ricard’s dining room caters to all, and my understanding is she’s a very good cook. It’s also known she has two beautiful daughters, and I wonder if the men go to the restaurant to satisfy their appetites or to admire the daughters.

Leaving the refinery, I pass under an enclosed conveyor belt bridge spanning the River Road. I feel the rumble of the belt above me as it transports huge bags of sugar to the wharf to be loaded on barges. A short walk ahead is a row of green Company Houses, and beyond is my next stop, Leon Godchaux High School.

Known as “Sam” to folks in Reserve, Salvador DeMarco is a retired Mechanical Engineer now living in Bartlesville, Okla.

Part 4 will be published on May 14.