The Swinging For a Cause golf tournament, benefitting the Bella Bowman Foundation and area schools, was held Sept. 15, at The Atchafalaya at Idlewild near Patterson.
Patty and Lenny Armato received one of the Patterson Garden Club October Yard of the Month awards. Landscaping includes a bed of periwinkle, marigolds, fern, liriope, begonias, fern and more.
From now until April 2019, Medicare is mailing new cards to the more than 60 million Americans with Medicare. The 843,951 Louisiana residents with Medicare will begin receiving their cards this week.
The new cards will no longer have your Social Security number on them. Instead, they’ll have a new Medicare number that’s unique to you and will be used for only your Medicare coverage.
Don’t worry. Your Medicare benefits will remain exactly the same. Nothing about your health care coverage will change.
A recent federal law requires the removal of Social Security numbers from Medicare cards to help protect you from identity theft. Many people asked for the new safeguard, and Congress responded.
You don’t need to do anything or pay anyone to get your new card.
If someone claiming to be from Medicare calls you and requests your Social Security number or other personal information, that’s a scam. Hang up and call Medicare at 1-800-633-4227 to report the incident.
Likewise, if anyone tries to charge you a fee for the new card — or for processing a “temporary” card until your new card arrives — that’s a scam, too. It’s another scheme to get your bank or credit card information.
Medicare will never call you uninvited and ask you to provide personal information to receive your new card.
Medicare will send your card to the address you have on file with Social Security. So, if you need to update your mailing address, contact Social Security at ssa.gov/myaccount or call 1-800-772-1213.
Because of the many cards to be mailed, they’re being sent out in waves — several states at a time. Louisiana residents with Medicare will receive their cards over the next month.
When you do receive your card, destroy your old one. Don’t just toss it in the trash, where a crook can get hold of it. Cut it into small pieces so that your Social Security number can’t be read.
Then start using your new card right away. Doctors and other health care providers know the new cards are beginning to arrive in mailboxes and will ask for yours when you need care, so carry it with you.
Protect it as you would any other card with personal information. Removing your Social Security number will safeguard you against most identity theft, but thieves might still use it to try to get medical services.
One final note: If you’re in a Medicare Advantage plan, your plan’s ID card will remain your main card for health care benefits. Keep it and use it when you require care, though it’s smart to have your new Medicare card as well.
For years, people who mistakenly gave out their Medicare numbers have fallen victim to identity theft and discovered their bank accounts emptied. The redesigned Medicare cards should help prevent that.
Look for your new card in your mailbox soon. If you have any questions or need help, visit medicare.gov or call 1-800-633-4227.
The essence of crumb cake is the balance between the buttery cake and the thick, lightly spiced topping.
Starting with our favorite yellow cake recipe, we realized we needed to reduce the amount of butter or the richness would be overwhelming. We also wanted our crumb topping to be soft and cookie-like, not a crunchy streusel.
Don’t be tempted to substitute all-purpose flour for the cake flour, as doing so will make a dry, tough cake. If you don’t have buttermilk, you can substitute an equal amount of plain low-fat yogurt.
Take care to not push the crumbs into the batter. This recipe can be doubled and baked in a 13-by-9-inch pan. If doubling, increase the baking time to about 45 minutes. We did not like the result when we froze this cake.
NEW YORK-STYLE CRUMB CAKE
Start to finish: 1 hour, 15 minutes (Active time: 30 minutes)
Crumb Topping:
8 Tbs. unsalted butter, melted
1/3 cup (21/3 ounces) granulated sugar
1/3 cup packed (21/3 ounces) dark brown sugar
¾ tsp. ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp. salt
1¾ cups (7 ounces) cake flour
Cake:
1¼ cups (5 ounces) cake flour
½ cup (3½ ounces) granulated sugar
¼ tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt
6 Tbsp. unsalted butter, cut into 6 pieces and softened
1/3 cup buttermilk
1 large egg plus 1 large yolk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Confectioners’ sugar
Adjust oven rack to upper-middle position and heat oven to 325 F. Cut 16-inch length of parchment paper (or aluminum foil) and fold lengthwise to 7-inch width.
Spray 8-inch square baking pan with vegetable oil spray and fit parchment into pan, pushing it up sides; allow excess to hang over edges of pan.
For crumb topping: Whisk melted butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt together in medium bowl to combine. Add flour and stir with rubber spatula or wooden spoon until mixture resembles thick, cohesive dough; set aside to cool to room temperature, 10 to 15 minutes.
For the cake: Using stand mixer fitted with paddle, mix flour, granulated sugar, baking soda, and salt on low speed to combine. With mixer running, add softened butter 1 piece at a time. Continue beating until mixture resembles moist crumbs, with no visible butter chunks remaining, 1 to 2 minutes. Add buttermilk, egg and yolk, and vanilla and beat on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 1 minute, scraping down bowl as needed.
Transfer batter to prepared pan. Using rubber spatula, spread batter into even layer.
Break apart crumb topping into large pea-size pieces and spread in even layer over batter, beginning with edges and then working toward center.
Bake until crumbs are golden and toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes, rotating pan halfway through baking.
Let cool on wire rack for at least 30 minutes. Remove cake from pan by lifting parchment overhang.
Dust with confectioners’ sugar just before serving.
Servings: 8-10
—Nutrition information per serving: 410 calories; 150 calories from fat; 17 g fat ( 10 g saturated; 1 g trans fats); 82 mg cholesterol; 138 mg sodium; 60 g carbohydrate; 1 g fiber; 28 g sugar; 5 g protein.
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St. Mary Parish Council members breezed through their agenda Wednesday.
Diane Wiltz, representing the Red Ribbon Committee, updated the council on the upcoming Red Ribbon Drug-Free Week Oct. 19-28, and asked the council for a proclamation to that effect. The council approved.
An ordinance was introduced by Councilman J Ina on behalf of Councilman Craig Mathews, who was absent, to rename Cypremort Road in Four Corners to Joseph Tooney Davis Drive and Sorrell Road to Bosco Road.
Ordinances adopted on three rezonings, and on public comment procedures during council meetings.
Essentially, Councilman Dale Rogers’ ordinance would address the circumstances: Public comment on an agenda item, and public comment on a matter relating to parish government and upon which a vote is not to be taken.
In the first case, prior to a meeting, persons must sign up on a speaker participation sheet located in the meeting room, to include the name and address of the speaker, along with a brief description of the item or items to discuss. There will be a 5-minute time allotted, which may be extended by questions from the council and at the discretion of the chairman.
In the second case, a speaker must contact the clerk of the council and request to be placed on the agenda not later than noon on the Friday prior to the regular Wednesday meeting, or in the case of a special meeting, two hours before the deadline for publication of the agenda.
The same time allotted time and discretion of the chairman is included.
Chief Administrative Officer Henry “Bo” LaGrange’s report included receipt of bids for an asphalt project in the Centerville and Verdunville area, awarded to a low bidder of 887,774 by Barriere Construction; quotes for River Road were received and a low bid of $73,294 was submitted by Gray Construction Corp awarded; and quotes were received for cross-drain replacement on Victoria-Riverside Road, with a low quote by Frisco International of $34,480 awarded.
Murphy Pontiff was appointed the Port of West St. Mary commission.
And the council accepted the resignation of Dr. Natchez Morice from the Hospital Service Dist. 2 board.
Here we go again with meddling federal judges.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came down hard on Louisiana charter schools last week. Charter schools, which by definition are independent with major input from parents, now will have to bargain with teacher unions.
The 5th Circuit is well known for questionable opinions that are often overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
I hope this dubious decision will receive the same treatment.
In spite of a number of innovative proposals for reform put forth by concerned legislators, my home state of Louisiana ranks at or near the bottom in every national survey of educational achievement.
Just last week, a state educational department analysis concluded that 57 percent of Louisiana public schools have received an F rating for school performance.
There has been a growing interest in charter schools all over the nation, and particularly here in Louisiana.
Ninety percent of all kids attending public schools in New Orleans go to a charter school. These education facilities are independent public schools that are not constrained by the statewide one-size-fits-all requirements often placed on local schools. Charter schools are able to be more innovative in developing curricula, hiring teachers, and structuring the school day.
A key benefit of charter schools is that parents have a choice.
They pick the school and are not forced into making their kids attend a specific local school.
In just about everything else you do, there’s a choice. But not in where your kid goes to school. Choice fosters competition. For many, the lack of competition is a key component in the weakness of the American educational system. To be successful, schools have to compete.
That’s the key to charter schools. And the students are the beneficiaries.
I have observed first-hand how successful charter schools can be in New York City were my oldest daughter Campbell has been actively involved in the support of the Success Academy Charter Network.
To show how effective charters can be, Success Academy has opened 32 schools for 17,000 students.
And get this. The student achievement is remarkable. Students at Success Academy rank in the top one percent of all New York schools in math, and the top seven percent in English. The racial makeup always comes up, doesn’t it?
Only 3 percent of the kids are white. So much for not being able to close the racial achievement gap.
As Campbell told a fundraising gathering for the network of schools, “demography is not destiny.”
She did not mince words to those who, in many states, continue to try to put up roadblocks to stop the growth of charter schools.
“It’s a fight,” Campbell told the crowd last week. “We have to fight for these schools. I wish we didn’t. It amazes me that there could be anything controversial about the achievements of these extraordinary kids.
"It amazes me that anyone would dare try to choke one of the most exciting, innovative things happening in public education.”
And she answered some critics who say that all kids cannot attend charter schools.
“No one is saying that every public school student should be moved into a charter. All we say is that the excellence of our charters should be moved into every public school.”
Campbell has also founded The 74, a nonprofit news website focusing on educational issues throughout the United States. The 74 publishes hundreds of related articles a year, many that discuss the advantages of charter schools.
So it took a girl raised in Ferriday, Louisiana, to go to the Big Apple and lead the charge for public school reform.
Yes, this is a proud papa talking. But you cannot argue with achievement.
Right now, in a number of state legislatures across the country, there is an effort to curtail and limit the growth of charter schools.
What a mistake this would be.
Campbell put it this way. “You can tell who’s on the losing side of an issue when what they fear most is competition. By saving children and giving them a chance, these schools remind everyone what these kids are being saved from-an education system that has lost its way.”
Peace and Justice
Jim Brown
Jim Brown’s syndicated column appears each week in numerous newspapers throughout the nation and on websites worldwide. You can read all of his columns at www.jimbrownusa.com.
It’s a sure sign of the season when sandwich-board “We Buy Pecans” signs begin to appear in front of feed ’n’ seed and little grocery stores across Acadiana, but some county agents are a little worried that there may be fewer nuts to buy this year.
They say the wet weather we’ve been seeing is better for stinkbugs and scab fungus than for pecan trees, and that can mean fewer pecans and pecans with empty shells. We usually harvest about 20 million pounds of pecans each fall in Louisiana, but the same sort of wet conditions cut that crop in half last year.
I don’t have a pecan tree anymore, but pecan season is still a catalyst for two bits of nostalgia for me, and I do keep an eye on my neighbor’s tree to see if I can pick up enough for fruitcake at Thanksgiving and a pecan pie at Christmas. When I was a kid, though, our trees were also my ticket to Christmas cash.
The biggest pecan tree in our yard was huge and ancient. If it had been an oak it would have qualified for the Live Oak Society. Hurricane Rita finally banged it up so badly that it had to be cut down, but when I was a kid it shaded, and dropped pecans, over a third of the backyard. Several smaller trees also contributed to the harvest.
I’ll bet I crawled a hundred miles after school each fall, picking up pecans by the grocery sack full. These were emptied into the biggest cardboard box that we could scrounge from behind Swice General Mercantile — one that a washing machine came in was really great.
I’d almost fill the box by the time the pecan buyer came by in early November.
I can’t remember his name, it might have been Mr. Johnson, but I remember he’d lost an arm in World War II and I was absolutely amazed how he could heft and weigh the pecans with just one arm. He had a hanging scale that swung from the back of his Jeep Woody station wagon to weigh my harvest.
I think the going rate was a less than a quarter a pound in those days, but you’d be surprised how many pounds a washing machine box will hold. I’ve heard that a mature pecan tree can produce a hundred pounds of nuts each year, and that seems to be about right. I’d get $20 to $25 for what I picked up each year — a lot of money for a kid, or anyone, in the 1950s.
The first thing I would do after he’d peeled my pay off the roll he carried in the pocket of his khaki shirt was to hit the neighborhood drug store for a major comic book haul. But then it was straight to Kress’s Five & Dime to pick out Christmas presents for the whole family.
The other bit of nostalgia has to do with shelling the pecans for my grandma’s fruitcakes and my granddad’s pralines. We used a cast iron cracker that screwed to the table. One end of it was a fixed, circular piece of metal, indented so that the point of a pecan would fit into it. The other end had a similar head, but slid up and down on a bar when you pulled a lever.
The movable part pushed the pecan into the immovable part and cracked the pecan shell. Then the meat had to be picked from the cracked shell. It was something of a challenge to get just the right tension in the cracker so that the shell broke but the meat could be extracted whole. The other challenge was to get through a whole pecan season without crushing your thumb in the cracker. Bruise-blackened thumbnails were a common sight at our house by late October.
My grandmother’s general rule was that it takes about 3 pounds of pecans in the shell to turn out one pound (about four cups) of shelled nuts.
The folks at the home extension office say it really takes only about 2-1/2 pounds in the shell, but Mammaw had seen me work. She knew that 3 pounds of crackin’ involved at least a half-pound of eatin’.
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.
BATON ROUGE (AP) — Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards on Wednesday drew his first Republican challenger in next year’s governor’s race, a deep-pocketed Baton Rouge businessman who said he’s ready to spend millions of dollars challenging the Democratic incumbent.
Eddie Rispone filed state paperwork with the ethics administration office declaring his candidacy for the 2019 election.
“I am definitely running. This is it,” Rispone said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Asked why he’s opposing Edwards, the first-time candidate said: “I think we can do better. I know we can do better.”
Founder of an industrial contracting company, Rispone is a longtime donor to GOP and conservative campaigns and causes. The wealthy businessman said he plans to invest his own money in what is expected to be an expensive governor’s race.
Edwards, seeking his second term in office, reported $5 million in his campaign account earlier this year. Rispone said he’s ready to invest a similar amount of his own money in the race and will start fundraising immediately.
“I’m going to put in quite a bit. I’ve set aside $5 million to get started. We think it’s going to cost somewhere between $8 million and $10 million,” Rispone said. “I’ll start reaching out to my friends around the state raising money.”
Republicans have targeted Edwards for ouster since his long-shot election win in 2015. The West Point graduate and former state lawmaker is the only Democratic governor in the conservative Deep South, and he’s the first Democrat to win statewide office in Louisiana since 2008. GOP leaders contend that victory was a fluke, and they’ve hammered Edwards as out of step with the majority of his state’s voters on taxes, spending and other issues.
Edwards’ approval ratings have hovered around 50 percent in recent polls.
With news of his first opponent, Edwards defended his record.
He pointed to unemployment rates that have fallen below the rates when he entered office, a stabilized state budget and criminal justice law changes that helped Louisiana relinquish its title as the nation’s top jailer. He said his decision to expand the state’s Medicaid program has saved Louisiana millions of dollars, increased jobs and cut the uninsured rate in half.
“I’m proud of my record as governor, and I look forward to earning another four years by continuing to put Louisiana first,” the governor said in a statement.
Other Republicans are considering entering the race, including U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham, Attorney General Jeff Landry and state Sen. Sharon Hewitt.
Rispone said he’ll make an official campaign announcement after the November congressional elections. He said he’ll talk more then about his reasons for entering the race and his campaign platform. But he said he filed his paperwork to start fundraising.
“I didn’t want to wait any longer. I wanted to get it out, start calling my friends,” Rispone said.
The Louisiana Democratic Party’s executive director Stephen Handwerk quickly slammed Rispone’s campaign filing as an inappropriate step while Hurricane Michael was hitting Florida. He criticized the GOP candidate for his donations to Republican former Gov. Bobby Jindal and Republican former U.S. Sen. David Vitter, who Edwards defeated in the last governor’s race.
Rispone “has bought political influence and now he thinks he can buy the governor’s office,” Handwerk said in a statement. “Louisiana doesn’t need to go back to politicians who choose their political agenda over what’s best for the people of this state.”
Meanwhile, the president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry praised Rispone on Twitter. Stephen Waguespack, himself considered a possible GOP candidate for governor, posted: “Eddie is a man of great conviction, faith and integrity. He has been extremely charitable and civically-minded throughout his professional career ... proud to call him a dear friend.”
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Follow Melinda Deslatte on Twitter at http://twitter.com/melindadeslatte
Submitted Photo
Emily Berry of Morgan City was installed as president of the Kiwanis Club of East St. Mary during the club’s meeting on Sept. 20 at Café Jo Jo’s. Also installed were Vice President Reina Fernandez, Treasurer Jason Pye and Secretary Debbie Stevens. In addition, the following members will serve on the club’s board of directors: Blane Aucoin, Travis Richard, Amber Monceaux, Jeremy Callais and Calvin Carrier (lieutenant governor for Division 17 LaMissTenn District of Kiwanis International). The immediate past president is Brandon Monceaux. He will continue to serve on the club board for the next year. The Kiwanis Club of East St. Mary supports community projects. The club raises money for the projects by hosting its annual Trivia Night and Hurricane Booth to name a few fundraisers.
Franklin Banner-Tribune
P.O. Box 566, Franklin, LA 70538
Phone: 337-828-3706
Fax: 337-828-2874
Morgan City Review
1014 Front Street, Morgan City, LA 70380
Phone: 985-384-8370
Fax: 985-384-4255