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It hasn’t always been easy, but through good times and bad and plenty of laughs, Stephensville residents Eroy and Leatrice Acosta have reached the 70-year wedding anniversary milestone.
The Acostas, who celebrated their anniversary on Jan. 28, 70 years after being married at Sacred Heart of Jesus Roman Catholic Church in Morgan City in 1951, are now the patriarch and matriarch of five generations that now have reached great-great-grandchildren.
“I feel like I’m old, but I’m not,” Eroy said last month at his daughter Peggy Fulker’s Stephensville home before they were surprised with a celebratory parade of family, friends, dignitaries and colleagues.
The Acostas had two sons and two daughters. One of their sons passed away.
Leatrice said like any other couple, they’ve had good times and bad, but she said they have had more good.
Eroy added: “And we’ve always had a fun life.”
When he was 14, Eroy started a band, and through money he earned with the band, he opened a grocery store at age 17.
Throughout his life, he has been involved in multiple other ventures, including the boat business, a washateria and rentals.
The Acostas also were instrumental, Peggy said, in the Stephensville Volunteer Fire Department as they raised money through fairs and auctions to build the fire station.
He serves on the board of the South Louisiana Electric Cooperative Association and Total Environmental Solutions Inc. and is a longtime member of the water and sewer district in Lower St. Martin Parish.
Meanwhile, Leatrice was a cook and worked at Stephensville Elementary for a few years. In the Acostas’ restaurants, she was famous for her white beans, friend catfish and crab burgers, Peggy said.
Throughout their marriage, they have made each other laugh, too.
“He always had my back,” Leatrice said, looking at Eroy and tapping his hand.
Peggy said it is “amazing” to see her parents reach this matrimonial milestone and celebrate it with them.
“Seventy years of marriage, shoot, that’s unheard of in this day and age,” Peggy said. “It’s just unheard of.”
Working together, Eroy said, is advice he would give to younger couples for being successful.
“The only way you’ll make it in life is to work together as a married couple,” he said.
Leatrice added, “And we did that a lot.”
The Acostas’ daughter, Betty Fusilier, said she can draw from her parents’ marriage in her own, which has reached 48 years.
“The strong marriage they got, it makes my marriage strong,” she said. “I was taught to hang in there and make it go.”

Submitted Photo
For Catholic Schools Week, students from Central Catholic High School brought a king cake to Ochsner St. Mary to show employees how much they appreciate all they do for the community.Pictured are Jennifer Wise, CNO for Ochsner St. Mary, and CCHS students Alanni Landry, Emily Adams and Katie Luc.

Bollinger Shipyards LLC has delivered the Cutter Frederick Hatch to the U.S. Coast Guard in Key West, Florida.
This is the 166th vessel Bollinger has delivered to the U.S. Coast Guard over a 35-year period and the 43rd fast response cutter delivered under the current program.
The USCGC Frederick Hatch is the final of three FRCs to be home-ported in Apra Harbor, Guam, increasing the presence for the U.S. Coast Guard in the Indo-Pacific Theater.
Additionally, in 2020, Bollinger delivered two of six FRCs that will be home-ported in Manama, Bahrain, which are replacing the Island Class patrol boats supporting the Patrol Forces Southwest Asia, the U. S. Coast Guard’s largest unit outside of the United States.
“Bollinger is proud to continue enhancing and supporting the Coast Guard’s operational presence and mission in the Indo-Pacific region with the delivery of the USCGC Frederick Hatch,” said Bollinger President & CEO Ben Bordelon. “Building ships for the U.S. Coast Guard provides critical assets to bolster our national security interests, both domestically and abroad. We are proud and humbled to be partners in the FRC program.”
The home-porting of three FRCs in Guam is part of the U.S. Coast Guard’s “doubling down on Oceania,” allowing more frequent and longer patrols in an area where the U.S. Coast Guard has increased its presence over the past two years and is aligned with the U.S. position on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific. In the early days of the new administration, President Joe Biden has assured U.S. allies in the region that the United States is committed to “maintaining a secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.”
The majority of the USCGC Frederick Hatch build occurred despite the COVID-19 global pandemic and six named storms impacting the Gulf region, all of which affected Louisiana and two of which made landfall in the state as hurricanes..
Bordelon continued, “Delivering vessels on schedule and on budget to the Coast Guard in these unprecedented times given the COVID-19 challenges that we are all facing shows the resiliency and dedication of our incredibly capable workforce."
Each FRC is named for an enlisted Coast Guard hero who distinguished himself or herself in the line of duty. Surfman Frederick Hatch was a two-time winner of the Gold Lifesaving Medal.  Hatch was awarded his first medal in 1884 for his actions as a surfman at the Cleveland Life-Saving Station for rescuing the crew of the schooner Sophia Minch. He was awarded his second gold medal in 1890, for his selfless act of courage as he rescued those on board the schooner Wahnapitae, which grounded near the Cleveland Breakwater lighthouse.

We’ve blamed unseasonable weather on all sorts of things over the years.
When I was growing up in the Cold War years of the 1950s there was a persistent rumor that the Soviets were manipulating the weather.
Before and since then, we’ve pointed fingers at all sorts of other things, sometimes with science to back the claim, sometimes not. It’s been that way for a long time.
When a rare snow storm struck in St. Mary Parish in 1852, at least one senior citizen who had seen much weather blamed the telegraph wires that were beginning to span the continent.
Cold weather latched onto the wires in the frigid North and followed them to the balmy South, according to that theory.
If the telegraph companies kept stringing wire, the man feared, Louisiana would get so cold that the bayous would stay frozen and sugar planters would have to move to South America to make a crop.
The report in the Planters’ Banner of January 18, 1852, said that on the Saturday before the snowfall, “the weather was warm, and seemed to indicate the approach of rain,” but that the wind started to blow from the north.
“On Sunday night … considerable cold was experienced, which continued to increase and the following morning ushered in one of the rawest and most disagreeable days ever witnessed in the South,” in the newspaper’s opinion.
“The sun had his cheerful face all day, but the atmosphere exhibited a murky appearance very unusual in this latitude, and the whole face of Nature portended that something more than common was about to transpire.”
The snow began to fall in the early afternoon, and “the flakes continuing to fall thick and fast throughout the afternoon and night, exhibited to the waking eyes of the citizens on the following morning a sight that would have done credit to the North — snow to the depth of several inches covered every spot of ground and every roof!”
The “oldest inhabitant,” which newspapers always sought out when unusual things happened, “rubbed his eyes with astonishment and for a time appeared unwilling to admit that even such a body of snow could possibly have fallen in Louisiana.”  
At length he exclaimed, according to the newspaper, “Well this beats all! Snow in Louisiana — and such snow! It is all owing to their new-fangled notions — them telegraph wires and their railroad schemes.
“It is no wonder that we have such weather, when we’ve got up so close to the North, as to speak to them quick as lightning!”
“After a while,” the old-timer speculated, “we’ll have our Mississippi and our bayous so frozen over that our summer heat won’t thaw them before they’re frozen again. And we’ll have to go to South America or some other out-of-the-way place to make our sugar.”
It is entirely possible that the Banner made up the old inhabitant’s remarks and offered them tongue-in-cheek, but maybe not. Sometimes things like that catch on.
It was only a few years later, for instance, that the Donaldsonville Chief reported that people were moving out of low parts of New Orleans and coastal Louisiana because of the prediction that an unusual alignment of the planets was about to cause a huge tidal wave that “would extend some distance inland, carrying destruction and desolation in … vast proportions.”
That forecast was reputedly made by “the celebrated Professor Agassiz,” and persisted even after another professor, Caleb G. Forshey of New Orleans, told newspapers that “no ‘conjunction of the planets’ or combination of causes known to science, can give the remotest guess when an earthquake will occur, or a volcano discharge its lava, at any place on the globe; and nothing short of a considerable upheaval beneath the sea, or a disturbance of its bed, can produce any such wave as is fancied in this absurd prediction.”
“OK.” the fearful said, “maybe you can’t say for sure that it will happen, but neither can you say that it won’t.”
That does sound a bit like some of our modern forecasts of a “fifty percent chance” that it might rain or snow, or that it might not. But at least we’ve moved past blaming the telegraph lines, I think.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, 'Cajuns and Other Characters,' is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.