RSS Feed

Winnie Bell Burr Armstrong was called home on July 28, 2018 at the age of 89.
Winnie was born on February 22, 1929 to Jim William Burr Sr. and Carrie Barber Burr. Maw, to all who knew and loved her, was the life of the party and always ready for a good time. She enjoyed dancing, telling stories, pranking people, fellowshipping with her family but most of all she loved being a wonderful mother, 2nd mom and grandmother!
Maw met her husband, Sol Edward Armstrong Sr. (Buddy), on a blind date and they were married for over 48 years. Together they raised 3 loving children.
During World War II she worked as a bomb maker in Mansfield, Louisiana and later became a caregiver. One of her many passions included quilting and she left each of her grandchildren a handmade quilt to cherish. One could always find Maw gardening, planting flowers, riding horses on trail rides, loving on her Boston Terrier Sarah or sitting behind a video poker machine.
She was preceded in death by her parents, husband, her daughter, Judy Armstrong and her brothers, Jim Burr, Jr., Jimmy Burr, Roy Burr, Thomas Burr and Louis Burr; her sisters; Bernice Burr Weeks and Clarice (Dee) Burr Ward.
Left to celebrate her memory are her daughter; Diane Armstrong, of Broussard, Sol E. (Pete) Armstrong, Jr., and his partner Pam Viator of New Iberia, Her grandchildren; Jennifer Sinitiere, Tommy and his wife Ashley Sinitiere, Nichole and her husband Stephen Sitz, Heather Stratton, Christine and her husband Ryan Gallet, Sol E. (Ben) Armstrong III, John Sinitiere and his partner Omar Gallegos, Jim Brandon and his wife Colette Armstrong, Brooke and her husband Victor Mire, Brady and wife Lehia Armstrong and former daughter in-law and friend Linda Armstrong. Great-grandchildren; Haley Gallet Trahan, Hannah Gallet, Collin and Kennedy Sinitiere, Connor Sitz, Rossi, Claire and Cole Armstrong, Mallorie and Mason Williams, Henry Armstrong, Dalton and Dale Gober and one great-great grandchild, Chloe Grace Trahan.
In celebration of her life on Wednesday, August 1st, the family will have a private viewing at 10 A.M. They will receive friends and family at 10:30 A.M. until the service at 1 P.M. at Ibert’s Mortuary, 1007 Main Street, Franklin, Louisiana, with Bro. Blaise Smith officiating. Following the service she will be laid to rest in the Franklin Cemetery.
Active pallbearers are Tommy Sinitiere, Connor Sitz, Jim Brandon Armstrong, Brady Armstrong, Sol E. (Ben) Armstrong III and Collin Sinitiere. Honorary pallbearers include Jennifer Sinitiere and John Sinitiere.
Family and friends may view the obituary and express their condolences online by visiting www.iberts.com.
Arrangements have been entrusted to Ibert’s Mortuary, Inc., 1007 Main Street, Franklin, La. 70538, (337) 828-5426.

“You pray for the hungry,” Pope Francis tells us. “Then you feed them. That is how prayer works.”
Praying for protection against hurricanes works like that, too.
You pray to be spared. Then you buy lots of AA batteries. That’s how hurricane prayers work.
Sunday night, the Confraternity of Our Lady Star of the Sea celebrated the 43rd anniversary of the day the Our Lady Star of the Sea statue was placed in the median of Brashear Avenue in Morgan City in front of the Spirit of Morgan City shrimp boat. Members pray at the statue each year for protection from hurricanes.
The good people at the statue Sunday night appear to be doing some good. It’s been 26 years since Hurricane Andrew, probably the worst storm in recent memory.
The recent predictions for tropical weather are more favorable than the ones that came out in the spring.
Colorado State University’s weather people, the protégés of the late meteorologist William Gray, now expect a below-average season with four hurricanes. The earlier prediction was for seven.
Atlantic Ocean temperatures have been lower than usual. Hurricanes feed and strengthen on ocean heat, so less heat means fewer and weaker storms.
We may also see the return of El Niño by late summer or early fall.
El Niño, the periodic pattern of warmer than average ocean temperatures in the south Pacific, causes all kinds of weather headaches across the country, from floods to droughts. But El Niño also tends to send winds eastward over the subtropical and tropical zones of our hemisphere, shearing the tops off tropical weather systems before they grow to dangerous proportions.
That’s no reason to be complacent. Almost by definition, the storms that get through during El Niño years are going to be bruisers.
One was Audrey in 1957, a storm that suddenly intensified one June night and came ashore in Cameron Parish to kill at least 500 people.
Andrew struck in 1992, also a year marked by an El Niño pattern.
I was raised in Missouri and came to Louisiana in 1990, so Andrew was my first hurricane. Memories center on aggravation: three days without power at the mobile home I rented in St. Martin Parish; endless traffic jams; waiting in line for gas, food and everything else; and watching Andrew move into the Gulf to zero in on south Louisiana after devastating the southern tip of Florida.
Working for the Lafayette paper, photographer Peter Piazza and I took off the morning after Andrew hit and drove to Abbeville, where the biggest troubles were downed tree limbs. After so many years without a big storm, even a small one can fling dead limbs around.
Some of them will strike roofs and powerlines. Coulees tend to get clogged, too, adding to any flood danger.
We cut east to U.S. 90, and then toward St. Mary. We saw a group of three or four mobile homes, one of which had its frame picked clean by the wind. A few yards away was a trailer that seemed untouched. To this Midwestern boy, that looked like damage from a small tornado.
In Franklin, the wind knocked down several mature cedar trees. The sight of those beautiful trees on the ground was awful. But they smelled great.
Pete and I ran into David Naquin, then with the sheriff's office. He told us how the wind had whipped through the driveway that runs beneath the courthouse. We heard later that an anemometer, a device for measuring wind speed, hit 160 mph before blowing apart.
For the first time, I got to Morgan City, where I would go to work 23 years later. The standout memory is seeing brightly colored birds flying around. We weren’t sure whether a pet store got wasted or Andrew had blown tropical birds our way from the Caribbean.
We drove back up La. 182 to Jeanerette, near which we found a young woman on a ladder, covering her roof with plastic. Her home was badly damaged. The rain had barely stopped.
In Jeanerette, we drove through the downtown area memorable for its old red-brick buildings. We saw one of those brick walls that had been nearly knocked down by the wind. That brought home the magnitude of what Andrew had done to our region.
Within a few days, we all had our power and AC back. We’d cooked or thrown out the food that had thawed. We’d bundled up the limbs and other debris. We’d negotiated with our insurance companies.
And many of us, even those who had it pretty bad, said our own kind of hurricane prayer:
Thank God it wasn’t worse.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.

BATON ROUGE — With a less-than-firm position on Louisiana’s use of the death penalty, Gov. John Bel Edwards has given his regular sparring partner, Attorney General Jeff Landry, a foothold to needle the governor in the summer’s political doldrums.
Landry, a Republican considered a possible challenger to Edwards next year, suggests the Democratic governor’s lackluster support for Louisiana’s use of capital punishment keeps Edwards from pressing to carry out Louisiana’s pending executions.
And Edwards’ lukewarm response to questions about his personal position on whether the death penalty is an appropriate form of punishment allows Landry to continue speculating that the governor is deliberately dragging his feet on enforcing state law.
Louisiana’s last execution was in 2010. Seventy-one inmates are on death row in the state.
The spark for this latest Edwards/Landry feud was a federal court order this month prohibiting Louisiana from carrying out any death sentences until mid-2019.
The Edwards administration asked for the extension, citing trouble getting lethal injection drugs. In response, Landry’s office said it was withdrawing from defending the corrections department against the lawsuit challenging its lethal injection protocols.
Landry said the biggest obstacle is Edwards’ “unwillingness to proceed.” He’s slammed the governor on the issue in letters released to news outlets, in interviews, and on social media.
Though reporters have continually asked, the governor won’t say if he personally supports the death penalty. He dodges when questioned about it.
Asked last week if he favored capital punishment, Edwards told reporters: “The law of the state of Louisiana allows for the death penalty, and it prescribes a certain method.” Then, he explained: “It is not possible to carry out the death penalty in the state of Louisiana because the drug cocktail is not available to use.”
Another reporter tried again, asking a similar question. Edwards replied: “I will do what I am required to do as chief executive officer of the state of Louisiana who takes an oath to the laws and to the constitution of our state.”
Landry claims the governor is using the difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs as an excuse. He points to other states that have found ways to access the drugs and execute prisoners. Landry said continued delays keep victims’ families from “getting justice” for horrific crimes.
Edwards administration officials said the ideas offered by Landry are unworkable. They said if Landry felt so strongly about restarting executions in Louisiana, he could have encouraged legislators to rewrite the laws as some other states have done, to expand available execution methods or shield information about the drugs they use and how they obtain them.
The governor accused Landry of trying to “score political points” by “using victims of crime.”
“The families of victims are not well-served by politicians who spout off about this issue without real solutions,” Edwards wrote the attorney general.
Landry’s office said it tried to work with the Edwards administration behind the scenes and only started hammering the governor publicly when the latest court filing showed Edwards wasn’t interested in carrying out executions.
If Edwards supported capital punishment, Landry said, he’d say so.
“The governor could put this all to bed. He could answer the question,” Landry said.
To be sure, Edwards faces competing pressure points on the issue. He comes from a family of law enforcement officials, stretching across several generations. He’s also Catholic, and church leaders oppose the death penalty, with Pope Francis saying it violates the Gospel.
Landry, too, is Catholic. But he’s direct in his support of the death penalty. He’s sent Edwards proposed draft language that lawmakers could use to allow Louisiana to execute people by nitrogen gas, hanging, firing squads or electrocution.
Asked if he’d support expanding Louisiana’s execution methods, Edwards said: “I’m not inclined to go back to methods that have been discarded because popular sentiment turned against them or maybe some methods that were deemed to be barbaric and so forth.”
“We have a law in place, and we will continue to try to search for solutions around that law, lethal injection. But for example, hangings and firing squads? No, I am not,” the governor said.

Melinda Deslatte has covered Louisiana politics for The Associated Press since 2000. Follow her at http://twitter.com/melindadeslatte