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Beverly among vets chosen in Brookshire 17th Heroes Flight

Brookshire Grocery Co. will escort 19 World War II veterans and four Korean War veterans to Washington D.C. Nov. 8-10 on its 17th Heroes Flight. BGC provides the all-expenses paid trip for veterans to honor them for their service and sacrifices.
Franklin’s Stanley Beverly will be among them.
In addition to visiting the WWII memorial, the group will tour the U.S. Capitol with Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Texas). Other points of interest will include Arlington National Cemetery, the Air and Space Museum and memorials honoring the U.S. Marines, Navy, Air Force, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr. and Vietnam and Korean War veterans.
BGC has taken 440 veterans from Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas to Washington, D.C, since establishing the Heroes Flight program in 2010. Veterans who will be going on this next trip are primarily from the Lafayette, Louisiana, and Tyler, Texas-areas. Several BGC employees will also accompany the group to assist the veterans.
“Honoring veterans for their incredible bravery and sacrifices is very important to us,” Brad Brookshire, Chairman and CEO for Brookshire Grocery Co. said. “We consider it a great privilege to take this deserving group of veterans to Washington, D.C, on the BGC Heroes Flight.”

CCHS football game moved to Nicholls

The Central Catholic High School Eagles’ Division IV first-round football playoff game has been moved to Nicholls State University due to wet field conditions at Tiger Stadium in Morgan City, Central Catholic Coach Tommy Minton said. Central Catholic (6-4) will meet Ouachita Christian School (7-3) on the artificial turf at Manning Field at John L. Guidry Stadium in a 7 p.m. contest Friday.

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Police: Driver killed in Bayou Vista crash after car hits tractor-trailer

A two-vehicle crash Saturday morning on U.S. 90 in Bayou Vista resulted in the death of a 29-year-old man after his car struck the rear of a tractor-trailer, according to a state police Troop I news release.

Shortly after 5 a.m., troopers from Louisiana State Police Troop I began investigating a two vehicle crash that resulted in a fatality on U.S. 90 near Delmar Avenue in Bayou Vista. The crash took the life of Josue Lorenzo Sanchez, 29, of Morgan City, the release said.

The initial investigation by state police revealed that the crash occurred as Sanchez was driving a 2012 Nissan Altima west on U.S. 90. At the same time, Charles Criss, 38 of Seguin, Texas, was driving a 2010 Peterbilt tractor-trailer west on U.S. 90. For reasons still under investigation, the Nissan struck the rear of the tractor-trailer, the release said.

Despite being properly restrained, Sanchez suffered fatal injuries as a result of the crash. He was pronounced deceased at the scene by the St. Mary Parish Coroner’s Office. Impairment on his part is unknown at this time, but a toxicology sample was taken from him to be submitted to the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab for analysis. Criss was properly restrained and was uninjured. Impairment on his part was not a factor. Excessive speed on the part of Sanchez may have been a factor, and this crash remains under investigation, the release said.

Sanford, Jones reach career milestones this season

Mitchell Sanford and Josh Jones have taken plenty of varsity snaps and quarter-back and running back during their four-year careers as members of the Berwick Panthers. But ask them what it was like the first time and both quickly agree on the same adjective to describe their feelings: Scared. “The field is huge. … It’s definitely different now, but I was scared,” Sanford recalled Wednesday after practice. Sanford and Jones got their first varsity game experience in their first regular-season contests of their freshmen year. Sanford, splitting time with then-sophomore Collin Louviere in the season opener, a 26-7 loss to Berwick in September ...

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CCHS alum Paul scores in East Texas Baptist rout

Guaranteeing a fourth straight winning season, East Texas Baptist University earned their sixth win 62-7, routing McMurry University in American Southwest Conference play.
East Texas Baptist University’s offense finished with 793 yards while the defense only allowed 98 yards rushing and one score.
Offensively, the Tigers posted 793 total yards as Brian Baca was 18-of-29 for 292 yards and four touchdowns. He also was the top rusher with 144 yards on 18 carries. Jeremiah Robertson had three rushing touchdowns and 109 yards, while Justin Ward added 99 yards on the ground along with a touchdown run.
Richard Johnson led the wide receivers with 160 receiving yards on seven catches, while he, Kane Johnson, Tarek Beaugard, Jake Smith and Samarick Paul, a Central Catholic alum, each caught a touchdown. Paul finished the game with one reception for 2 yards.
On defense, the Tigers yielded 98 rushing yards while holding the War Hawks to one third-down completion. Zack Walker led the Tigers with seven tackles (three tackles for loss) and also recorded a sack along with Garrett Gibson. Garrett Lybrand also had three tackles for loss, while Derick Holt recorded an interception.
East Texas Baptist won the toss and elected to defer to the second half. Three plays into the game, the Tigers forced McMurry to punt.
East Texas Baptist scored on its first three possessions. Its first possession was a six-play drive ending with a three-yard pass from Baca to Smith at the 12:12 mark. Following another three-and-out by the War Hawks, Baca found Richard Johnson for 59 yards to make it 13-0 (10:33) on the first play of the drive. Their third possession was a five-play sequence ending with a 33-yard rush by Robertson making it 20-0 at the end of the first quarter.
Much of the second quarter was a defensive struggle as Holt intercepted the War Hawks on their first drive. McMurry had a chance for a field goal on their next possession but missed it. East Texas Baptist’s Gibson and Walker recorded sacks on the ensuing McMurry possession after East Texas Baptist gave the ball back. East Texas Baptist finally reached the end zone with 1:03 remaining as Baca connected with Beaugard to give the Tigers a 27-0 lead going into halftime.
The Tigers started the second half moving the ball, including big rushes by Baca to the red zone. Culminating with a second Robertson touchdown, East Texas Baptist led 34-0 with 12:05 remaining in the third quarter.
East Texas Baptist’s next drive started from its own five-yard line as it drove down the field, ending in Robertson’s third touchdown and a 41-0 lead (7:22).
McMurry scored with 6:13 remaining on a 12-yard run, making it 41-7. Baca finished the third quarter, scoring on a 28-yard pass to Kane Johnson to put East Texas Baptist up, 48-7.
In the fourth quarter, McMurry reached the East Texas Baptist two-yard line but was denied a touchdown when Walker deflected a pass by Hurley.
East Texas Baptist took over and drove 98 yards, their longest drive of the year, ending in a pass from Josh James to Paul from 2 yards out, pushing the lead to 55-7 (9:49).
East Texas Baptist’s final touchdown came from Justin Ward as he rushed in from 23 yards with 2:15 remaining, finalizing the score at 62-7.
East Texas Baptist will take on No. 2 University of Mary Hardin-Baylor at 1 p.m. Saturday in the final game of the year.

Bowling report

PROGRESSIVE BOWLING LEAGUE Nov. 6 – Week 10 W L Bowling Stones 25 15 Gutter Cleaners 21 19 Wild Ones 19 21 Putt’s Honky Tonk 15 25 High scratch series and game of 1158 and 469 were bowled by Putt’s Honky Tonk. High handicap series of 1214 was bowled by Bowling Stonesand high handicap game of 463 was bowled by Wild Ones.

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CCHS will host OCS in Division IV first round

Central Catholic will have its hands full in the opening round Division IV playoffs Friday when Ouachita Christian comes to Tiger Stadium in Morgan City.
Central Catholic (6-4 overall, 4-2 in District 7-1A), the No. 8 seed, closed the regular season with a 44-0 loss to Vermilion Catholic. Central Catholic had won four straight prior to its loss in the regular-season finale.
“I felt the last half of the season we played some pretty good football,” Central Catholic Coach Tommy Minton said. “And then we get to week 10 and we didn’t show up for whatever reason, but that’s the beautiful part of high school football. Everybody is 0-0 (in the playoffs). You win, you keep playing. You lose, and we start bouncing basketballs.”
Davidyione Bias leads Central Catholic with 962 yards on 211 carries with 12 touchdowns, while quarterback DeDe Gant has 71 carries for 591 yards and eight touchdowns. Hugh Hamer has 45 carries for 294 yards and four scores.
Through the air, Gant’s completed 50 of 89 passes for 837 yards with 13 touchdowns and six interceptions.
Brooks Thomas is Central Catholic’s leading receiver with 21 catches for 433 yards and six touchdowns, while Bryce Grizzaffi has 15 catches for 246 yards four scores.
Ouachita Christian (7-3 overall, 5-2 in District 2-1A), the No. 9 seed, finished the regular season with a 54-0 victory against Delta Charter in District 2-1A action.
“They’re a very, very sound program, and they like to play power football,” Minton said. “They will mix in a little play-action.”
Senior quarterback Turner Carr has completed 101 of 201 passes for 1,676 yards with 20 touchdowns and six interceptions. He also has rushed 97 times for 402 yards and 12 touchdowns.
Junior Will Fitzhugh leads the ground game with 154 carries for 1,188 yards with 17 touchdowns. He also has 21 catches for 383 yards and six touchdowns.
Sophomore Hunter Herring has 17 receptions for 308 yards and three touchdowns
Senior Grant Shepherd has 23 receptions for 392 yards and eight scores while junior Eli Extine has 24 receptions for 426 yards.
Kickoff is 7 p.m.
Additional reporting by Review Sports Editor Geoff Stoute.

Berwick is traveling to face Northwest in round 1

Berwick must travel to Northwest for the opening of the Class 3A playoffs Friday. Being in playoff mode, however, is nothing new for the Panthers. Berwick (5-5), the No. 22- team, had to win its last three games to make the playoff field, so the Panthers have had the postseason mindset for more than a month. “We have taken-the-win-or-go-home mentality, and we were fortunate enough to make plays to keep winning, and I hope that carries over to Friday’s game,” Berwick Coach Mike Walker said. “The kids never quit this season. They trusted the process. They could have easily said this new ...

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From the Editor: We hear echoes of distant battles

A war ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
We’ve heard the phrase so often we don’t think about it much, but it’s the reason Veterans Day is always on Nov. 11 and not observed on a Monday like Memorial Day or Labor Day.
Oddly enough, the first Nov. 11, the one in 1918, was a Monday. It was the day World War I ended 100 years ago.
Historian Barbara Tuchman’s “Guns of August” finally fell silent more than four years after they began raining shells on the more than 70 million soldiers who served.
World War I doesn’t grab the attention of history buffs the way the Civil War or World War II does. But it continues to affect us today in ways that, like Nov. 11 itself, we don’t often think about.
The war killed 16 million people in all, and 7 million of them were civilians — a sign of things to come.
About 110,000 of the dead were American soldiers, sailors, Marines and, for the first time, airmen.
The HonorStates.org website lists seven St. Mary Parish men who died in the war. Their names show that the parish was a melting pot even then: Alcide Hebert, Henry Higinbotham, Dave Fortinberry, Joseph A. Gregoire, Albert Hage, Thomas A. Boudreaux and Ike Bradley.
Boudreaux died 10 days before the war ended. Bradley passed away nearly four months after the armistice. Gregoire died July 19, 1918, when the Germans were retreating across the Marne River, spent and on the run.
Did you or a family member fight in Korea? Or Vietnam? Or did you serve in the Cold War military? Our adversary, the Soviet Union, was born in World War I.
The war killed not just people, but great empires: the kaiser’s Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman and the Russian Czarist empire. The latter gave way to a series of revolutions that led to the creation of the Soviet Union.
We struggled with Soviets from the end of World War II into the 1980s.
African Americans played a role in the fighting. An African American unit, the 369th Infantry Regiment from New York, was awarded the Croix de Guerre by France.
During their time in France, the black soldiers learned that Jim Crow didn’t live everywhere. When they got home, they helped build momentum for civil rights.
For more than half of the following century, a lawsuit would seek to integrate St. Mary schools and keep them integrated.
A former Patterson resident recently made a name for himself writing about an important but largely unknown American soldier. Lafayette attorney Steve Rabalais wrote “General Fox Conner, Pershing’s Chief of Operations and Eisenhower’s Mentor” in 2016. Conner, Rabalais writes, was a key player in the organization of America’s World War I American military.
Rabalais was invited to speak recently at the prestigious Pritzker Military Library in Chicago.
If you have a job, or had a job, in the oilfield, Saudi Arabia has had a big influence on your economic life. A Saudi-led oil embargo led to the sharp rise in energy prices in the mid-1970s, and the Saudi decision to lower oil prices in the 1980s turned boom into bust. We’re still in that feast-or-famine cycle today.
The nation of Saudi Arabia has its roots in the British attempts to unite Arabs against the Turks during World War I. That was Lawrence of Arabia’s job.
The Selective Service System, which created local draft boards that decided which of their neighbors would be conscripted into the military, began in World War I and lasted until the early 1970s. For the first time in our history, the draft operated even in peacetime just before World War II and from the end of the Korean War until Vietnam.
Ever hear news about the outbreak of a new epidemic? SARS? AIDS? Bird flu?
World War I helped give us the greatest killer since the Black Plague of the 14th century: the badly named Spanish flu.
The bug could have been called the Kansas flu, because one of the first cases appeared in 1918 in Fort Riley among soldiers being trained for World War I.
Farm boys from all over the world, many of whom had never been around large crowds, were packed together in barracks and troop ships and sent all over the world. The flu spread like fire. Before the epidemic ended, up to 100 million people were dead.
Do you like “Game of Thrones?” If you do, you’re part of a wave of popularity for fantasy fiction that began with the making of the “Lord of the Rings” movies beginning in 2001. The author of the original books, J.R.R. Tolkein, wrote about Hobbits, who were peaceful little rural folks dragged into a hellish landscape where men fought to the death against soulless multitudes.
Tolkein wrote the novels beginning in the 1930s. He’d lived in England and had seen a generation destroyed by World War I.
For America, the 1920s were a time of excess — flappers, short skirts, erotically charged dancing, speakeasies and bathtub gin. It was the Jazz Age version of “live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.”
World War I made them feel that way.
More than 30 years ago, I had the honor of interviewing a World War I veteran.
His name was Pritchett. I can’t remember his real first name, but he was the father-in-law of a co-worker. She called him Nother Daddy.
Nother Daddy, already in his 90s, lived in East Prairie in the very, very rural part of Missouri called the Bootheel. Like other young men of his time, his life had differed in no significant way from the lives of farmers going back hundreds of years.
But Nother Daddy was snatched up from East Prairie and sent to a Europe where airplanes, machine guns, tanks, trench warfare and poison gas taught the world what modern war would be like.
He told me about being drafted and being trained, and told me about going to Europe on a ship. Then he talked about wandering around Europe, looking for something to eat.
It occurred to me that he sort of skipped over his actual wartime experiences. His family said he never talked about it.
But he did give me one little glimpse of what his war was like.
He called me Whiskers because I have a beard. At one point, he leaned forward in his chair.
“Whiskers,” Nother Daddy said, “you don’t want none of what I had.”
It all ended on Nov. 11, 1918, 100 years ago Sunday. But we would get plenty more of what Nother Daddy had.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.

St. Mary gets B under new school grade formula

St. Mary Parish’s dream of becoming an A public school system will have to wait a while.
The new, more demanding formula used by the state accountability system means St. Mary public schools still have a letter grade of B for 2018, but 19.1 points lower than it would have been using the 2017 formula.
Under the old formula, St. Mary would have had an A grade this year.
The key change is that the new standard means students are required to achieve standardized test scores in the range rated as Mastery rather than Basic, as in the past.
The district performance score, calculated from factors including scores and graduation rates, is 81.9 for St. Mary. That’s the 23rd best among 70 Louisiana public school districts. Under the old system, the score would have been 101, up from 99.7 in 2017.
As a group, Louisiana public schools got a B grade with a 76.1 score.
Under the old formula, St. Mary would have been one of 21 A schools this year. Now there are just four: Vermilion, Lafourche, Ascension and Zachary, which had the best districtwide score with 93.6.
Locally, six individual schools would have earned A grades under the old formula. Under the new formula, St. Mary has three A schools: Berwick High (102.8), Morgan City High (91.3) and Patterson High (92.1).
Each of the three schools saw their scores drop 14 or 15 points because of the more demanding new formula.
Four St. Mary schools that would have been A schools under the old formula are B schools now: J.S. Aucoin, Bayou Vista and Wyandotte elementary schools, and West St. Mary High.
Ten of 21 St. Mary public schools had B grades. Two had D’s: LaGrange and Maitland elementary schools.
Statewide, more of Louisiana’s publicly funded early childhood education programs provided care and instruction last school year that promotes kindergarten readiness, state education officials said Thursday as they rolled out the latest data aimed at demonstrating how well schools and pre-school programs are preparing children for their next level of education.
They said 77 percent of the programs provided such care, a 7 percentage point increase over the previous year.
The data included annual performance scores — numbers and letter grades — for school districts and individual schools. The state’s overall score for the 2017-18 school year was 76.1. It’s down from previous years. But officials note that’s because there is a new scoring formula as the state adopts increasingly higher standards. It would have been a 93 — an increase over previous years — under the old formula.
Four of Louisiana’s 70 school districts received an A in the figures released Thursday; 35 districts earned a B; 25 a C. Four districts had a D and two, an F.
In a telephone news conference, Superintendent of Education John White said the rollout reflects changes the state has made to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. Changes include the requirement, being phased in, that the average student at a school demonstrate Mastery of content before the school can receive an A. Parents and others can find out how a school fared by using a new online tool dubbed the Louisiana School Finder. The school finder also includes information on each school’s course offerings and extracurricular activities.
White pointed to signs of continued progress in Louisiana public education, some of which had been reported earlier. A four-year state graduation rate of 78.2 percent in 2017 was the highest in the state’s history. Forty-eight percent of 2017 graduates earned college credit or career credentials valued in high-wage industries, up from 43 percent the year before. And ACT scores indicating college readiness are up 40 percent since 2012.
White said student performance in English and math was steady last year, but the percentage demonstrating Mastery in social studies increased.
School performance scores are based on student performance on standardized tests and on student improvement over a year. Other elements of the scores include dropout and on-time graduation rates, ACT scores, and whether students are taking college-level classes, according to the department.
Evaluation of government funded early childhood education — in early childhood centers, Head Start programs and pre-kindergarten sites — was based on 14,000 observations at nearly 5,300 classrooms, according to an Education Department release. Factors in early childhood education evaluation included a classroom’s emotional environment, classroom organization and instructional support. While improvement was measurable, the department said many children are still not getting proper preparation for kindergarten. And access is uneven. The department said most economically disadvantaged 4-year-olds are served but less than 10 percent of those 2 years old or under are served.

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