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Travis Joseph Blanchard, 43, a resident of Thibodaux, died Saturday, July 6, 2019.
He is survived by a son, Gage Theriot; father, Morgan Blanchard and wife Reba; two sisters, Tracy Parker and Charmaine Blanchard; a brother, Bronson Blanchard; grandmother, Lucy Blanchard; and a host of other relatives.
He was preceded in death by his mother, and paternal and maternal grandfathers.
Visitation will be Wednesday from 10 a.m. until services at 2 p.m. at Twin City Funeral Home. Burial will follow in Morgan City Cemetery.
Twin City Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

CHICAGO (AP) — Nearly one-quarter of Americans say they never plan to retire, according to a poll that suggests a disconnection between individuals’ retirement plans and the realities of aging in the workforce.
Experts say illness, injury, layoffs and caregiving responsibilities often force older workers to leave their jobs sooner than they’d like.
According to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 23% of workers, including nearly 2 in 10 of those over 50, don’t expect to stop working. Roughly another quarter of Americans say they will continue working beyond their 65th birthday.
According to government data, about 1 in 5 people 65 and older was working or actively looking for a job in June.
For many, money has a lot to do with the decision to keep working.
“The average retirement age that we see in the data has gone up a little bit, but it hasn’t gone up that much,” said Anqi Chen, assistant director of savings research at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “So people have to live in retirement much longer, and they may not have enough assets to support themselves in retirement.”
When asked how financially comfortable they feel about retirement, 14% of Americans under the age of 50 and 29% over 50 say they feel extremely or very prepared, according to the poll. About another 4 in 10 older adults say they do feel somewhat prepared, while just about one-third feel unprepared. By comparison, 56% of younger adults say they don’t feel prepared for retirement.
Among those who are fully retired, 38% said they felt very or extremely prepared when they retired, while 25% said they felt not very or not at all prepared.
“One of the things about thinking about never retiring is that you didn’t save a whole lot of money,” said Ronni Bennett, 78, who was pushed out of her job as a New York City-based website editor at 63.
She searched for work in the immediate aftermath of her layoff, a process she describes as akin to “banging my head against a wall.” Finding Manhattan too expensive without a steady stream of income, she eventually moved to Portland, Maine. A few years later, she moved again, to Lake Oswego, Oregon.
“Sometimes I fantasize that if I win the lottery, I’d go back to New York,” said Bennett, who has a blog called Time Goes By that chronicles her experiences aging, relocating and, during the past two years, living with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
Meanwhile, Americans have mixed assessments of how the aging workforce affects workers: 39% think people staying in the workforce longer is mostly a good thing for American workers, while 29% think it’s more a bad thing and 30% say it makes no difference.
A somewhat higher share, 45%, thinks it has a positive effect on the U.S. economy.
Working Americans who are 50 and older think the trend is more positive than negative for their own careers — 42% to 15%. Those younger than 50 are about as likely to say it’s good for their careers as to say it’s bad.
Just 6% of fully retired AP-NORC poll respondents said they left the labor market before turning 50.
But remaining in the workforce may be unrealistic for people dealing with unexpected illness or injuries. For them, high medical bills and a lack of savings loom large over day-to-day expenditures.
“People like me, who are average, everyday working people, can have something catastrophic happen, and we lose everything because of medical bills,” said Larry Zarzecki, a former Maryland police officer who stopped working in his 40s after developing a resting tremor in his right hand and a series of cognitive and physical symptoms he at times found difficult to articulate.
At 47, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Now 57 and living in Baltimore, Zarzecki said he has learned “to take from Peter and give to Paul, per se, to help make ends meet.”
Zarzecki has since helped found Movement Disorder Education and Exercise, a nonprofit organization that offers support and treatment programs to those with similar diseases and certain traumatic brain injuries. He has also helped lobby state and national lawmakers to address rising prescription drug prices.
He receives a pension and health insurance through the state, but he spends more than $3,000 each year out of pocket on medications.
“I can’t afford, nor will my insurance cover, the most modern medication there is for Parkinson’s,” he said. “Eat, heat or treat. These are decisions that people in my position have to make. When it’s cold out, or if it’s real hot out, do you eat, heat (your home) or treat (your ailment)?”
—EDITOR’S NOTE — Andrew Soergel is studying aging and workforce issues as part of a 10-month fellowship at The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which joins NORC’s independent research and AP journalism. The fellowship is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Ever wish you could throw your leg over a chopped hog and just take off, in any direction?
Ever wish you could put a little money into a little movie and make it to the big time?
St. Mary Parish will celebrate the convergence of those two desires this weekend with Bikers on the Bayou, which will mark the 50th anniversary of the release of “Easy Rider,” parts of which were filmed in the parish.
The St. Mary Chamber of Commerce and the Cajun Coast Convention and Tourism Commission have been working together on the event. It runs 9 a.m.-dark Saturday and promises music; photo ops; car, motorcycle and rat rod shows; pirogue races; and swamp tours. Bikers on the Bayou will be in downtown Franklin.
St. Mary has long owned a piece of Hollywood history. Elmo Lincoln’s “Tarzan of the Apes,” the first motion picture adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic, was filmed in the jungles of Morgan City for 1918 release.
And, of course, the Travel Channel’s “Ghosts of Morgan City” is in the middle of its eight-episode run on Friday nights. The show’s Facebook page is promising a season finale party 6-9 p.m. Aug. 9. Watch for details.
So every 50 years, our name goes up in lights. And maybe this is a good time in St. Mary’s history to remember “Easy Rider.” It started with a little dab of money and struck oil.
According to all the movie history I can Google up, the movie began as a project by actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and writer Terry Southern.
Southern had already shown a gift for satirical writing in “Dr. Strangelove.” Hopper was an Actor’s Studio product who had been close to James Dean.
Hopper appeared with his friend in classics “Giant” and “Rebel Without a Cause” and with Clint Eastwood in “Hang ‘em High” before he teamed up with Fonda for “The Trip.” Then “Easy Rider” came along.
Fonda was a big name in movies, of course. Peter’s father Henry was a bonafide Hollywood legend, and sister Jane was already famous for “Barbarella” and “Barefoot in the Park.” But Peter Fonda had been slogging along in biker movies and the work of B-movie impresario Roger Corman.
By reputation, Corman has a gift for making movies on the cheap. Maybe Fonda learned it.
Together, Fonda, Hopper and Southern managed to put together $400,000 to put their dream on celluloid. That wasn’t a lot of movie money, even in the Sixties.
Fonda and Hopper played hippies who buy cocaine in Mexico and sell it across the border. Then they set off across the desert on motorcycles for New Orleans and Mardi Gras.
Along the way, they encounter a free-love commune, various hippie-haters, St. Mary Parish and a whiskey-saturated lawyer with a football helmet and weird ideas about UFOs. That role was played with gusto by another young actor named Jack Nicholson.
If you find me in error, please leave an indignant post on Facebook. But a quick look at the movie (it’s available on Amazon Prime Video) reveals scenery from Franklin, the hump-back bridge and a swamp scene from Amelia, and a trek across the old bridge between Berwick and Morgan City.
One bit of text visible in the movie pinpoints a specific location: St. Mary Parish Waterworks District No. 2 in Centerville. It’s painted on a window.
The geography seems a little confused. As the hippies roll — maybe I should rephrase that, because this was before “just say no” — they seem to go through Amelia, then Franklin, over the old bridge and then what looks like Amelia again.
Call it special effects.
The movie turned out to be a smash, relatively speaking, and gets credit for being the first American mainstream hit about the Sixties counter-culture. It also kicked off the indie movie movement of the 1970s.
Along the way, “Easy Rider” made more than $41 million at the U.S. box office, or $100 for every $1 originally invested. The producers had to spend more than that in post-production to obtain music licenses.
And what music “Easy Rider” has. It includes “The Pusher” (written by Hoyt Axton, believe it or not) and “Born to be Wild” from Steppenwolf; the Band’s “The Weight”; Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s “Wasn’t Born to Follow” by the Byrds; and “If 6 Was 9” by Jimi Hendrix. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds wrote “Ballad of Easy Rider” and covered Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” for the soundtrack.
The cast, like the movie, included some interesting characters. Luke Askew, who plays the hitchhiker who leads our boys to the desert commune, appeared in Preminger’s “Hurry Sundown” with Jane Fonda as well as in “Cool Hand Luke.”
When Hopper and Fonda make it to New Orleans, they hook up with some shady ladies. One of them is Toni Basil, who was also a dancer and singer and had a bubblegum hit called “Mickey” in 1981.
Another lady of ill repute was played by Karen Black. A few years after “Easy Rider,” Black became famous in a TV horror movie called “Trilogy of Terror.” Her one-actor segment about a woman terrorized by a doll that comes to homicidal life was the talk of my high school the next day.
The little guy in the Nehru jacket who buys the cocaine from Hopper and Fonda was Phil Spector, the music producer who invented pop’s Wall of Sound. His hits include “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” by the Righteous Brothers and George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.”
Spector, now almost 80, is in prison for killing his girlfriend, direct-to-video actress Lana Clarkson, in 2003.
Without spoiling, the movie includes some on-screen violence, too. But it’s a way to hear some great music, relive a unique time and get a glimpse of St. Mary as it was 50 years ago.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.