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December 25, 1967 -April 25, 2018
Jamey Lynn Grizzaffi, 50, a resident of Morgan City, passed away Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at Teche Regional Medical Center.
Jamey was born on December 25, 1967 in Eureka, Missouri.
Jamey had a special place in her heart for animals, but the biggest part of her heart was the love she had for her grandchildren. She loved to spend her days playing with them and loving on them. Her grandchildren and her son were her life’s treasures. She loved to shop and had a love for fashion.
She will be sadly missed and lovingly remembered by one son, Zachary Grizzaffi and his wife Brittany of Morgan City; two grandchildren, Jayce Grizzaffi and McKynlee Grizzaffi; one sister, Leslie Bridgewater and husband Robert of Metairie; stepfather, Neil Fears of New Orleans; her MawMaw, Yvonne Bailey; one niece, Bailey Bridgewater; two nephews, Robert Bridgewater and Lee Bridgewater; and cousins, Summer Bailey and Shelly Suire.
Jamey was preceded in death by her mother, Deborah Bailey; her grandfather, P.T. Nolton Bailey; and uncle, Butch Bailey.
Memorial services will be held at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, May 1, 2018 at Twin City Funeral Home with a memorial visitation being held from 10 a.m. until the time of the service.

BATON ROUGE (AP) — Louisiana’s plans to finance about $600 million in interstate projects got tangled up Thursday in a dispute over moves by two banking giants to restrict gun sales by their business customers.
The State Bond Commission, which regulates the roadwork financing plans, disagreed about how and if Louisiana should retaliate against Citigroup and Bank of America for their firearm restriction policies.
“Do I as your state treasurer want to do business with companies that impose these kinds of policies?” said Treasurer John Schroder, the Republican who chairs the commission. “And the answer to me was clearly no.”
The quarrel didn’t derail plans to jump-start the projects: a widening of Interstate 10 in Baton Rouge, a new exit from Interstate 20 into Barksdale Air Force Base and an I-10 interchange to serve a new terminal at the New Orleans airport. Louisiana will use federal construction bonds, repaid over 12 years with federal highway dollars.
Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration successfully objected to language pushed by Schroder and Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry that was aimed at keeping the banks from being eligible to work as underwriters on the interstate financing deal.
The Democratic governor issued a statement describing himself as “a staunch defender of the Second Amendment” and calling Thursday’s meeting “an ugly display of political posturing that could have jeopardized a massive infrastructure plan for the state of Louisiana.”
Anger at the banks is expected to emerge again as the commission works through the monthslong process to piece together the road deal, including when financing partners are chosen in July.
In March, in response to a deadly high school shooting in Florida the previous month, Citigroup announced it would end relationships with businesses and clients that sell firearms to people who haven’t passed a background check or that don’t enact restrictions on gun sales for people under the age of 21. The bank also will not allow its customers to sell rapid-fire devices known as bump stocks and high-capacity magazines.
Bank of America said it will stop doing business with certain gun manufacturers.
Schroder questioned whether those policies violate a provision of the state constitution protecting gun rights. Other Bond Commission members also expressed their doubts.
“When did Citigroup and Bank of America decide to get into the policymaking business, instead of the banking business?” asked Rep. Blake Miguez, a Republican from Erath.
Landry described the banks’ policies as “fascism.”
Representatives of both banks who appeared at Thursday’s meeting didn’t offer a defense of the policies or answer questions, but said they would take the Louisiana officials’ concerns back to bank leaders.
Schroder and Landry couldn’t rally enough support for their bid to prohibit Citigroup and Bank of America from being eligible to work as underwriters on the interstate financing deal. The Bond Commission voted 8-6 against including the language targeting the banks.
The proposal would have required an evaluation team that will review and grade proposals to block any companies with policies that “infringe on the constitutionally protected rights of the citizens of the state to lawfully keep and bear arms,” among other provisions.
Edwards administration officials said they don’t like the banks’ policies, but they raised concerns about whether Schroder’s provision could damage the financing plans or slow down the interstate projects. They questioned if the language was too vague and would improperly force staff members to determine what could be a constitutional violation.
“We would not like to be the test case for what’s being proposed,” Transportation and Development Secretary Shawn Wilson said.
Landry said the procedure for vetting financial partners would be “very simple.”
“I didn’t know our Second Amendment rights were up for sale or had a price on them,” he said.
Edwards’ chief lawyer, Matthew Block, replied: “This has not been well-thought-through as to how this would work mechanically.”
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His career was apparently winding down when Edward LeRoy returned to Lafayette to walk a wire strung high above the high school campus.
“Mr. LeRoy has been walking the high wire for many years,” the Lafayette Advertiser reported on July 5, 1941, “and states that he first learned to do this high-wire walking in Lafayette when he was a boy.” His act, the account said, “will consist of various tricks on the wire” and that “he states he is the only man who is able to perform some of the more difficult stunts.”
I’ve looked in vain for record of his birth and death and details of his early life. I suspect that Edward LeRoy was the performer’s stage name, and that when he was a boy in Lafayette he was known as Edward LeRoy Broussard or Thibodeaux or Hebert or some other last name.
The Advertiser said he’d “performed all over the United States from many high buildings,” and that was apparently true.
I found an advertisement in the Houston Post that in May 1914 proclaimed him “King of the High Wire.” The ad promised that the “sensational tight wire walker” would put on a “sensational act 50 feet in the air, amongst the tree tops.” They seemed to like the word “sensational.”
LeRoy had apparently performed in Natchez several weeks before. The Natchez Democrat reported in April 1914, that he would close out his stay there “with an exhibition of wire-walking that has never been equaled in this city.” He was first going to walk a wire strung on top of the Baker Grand Theatre, and then put on “a clever slack wire performance inside of the theatre.”
He was in Kansas in July 1919, when the Fort Scott Monitor reported that the “high wire walker extraordinary more than lived up to all advance notices when he performed on a wire stretched [from two tall buildings] across Main Street.”
“While a crowd of 1,500 people looked on, LeRoy did every conceivable stunt on the tight wire,” that account continued.
“He walked frontwards and backwards and then, to the astonishment of he crowd, he imitated a drunken man performing on a wire.”
There were shrieks from the crowd when he pretended to slip, but “it was all in the act, as not once did LeRoy lose his bearings, and seemed as much at home on the wire as on the ground.”
His name crops up regularly in old copies of Billboard, the show business magazine, and in the 1940s he sometimes performed with his wife.
A 1942 blurb referred to them as Edward and Helen LeRoy of the LeRoy High Wire Troupe. Their act included something called the “revolving ladder” routine. In 1944, another blurb reported that “The Great LeRoy, high wire,” had been signed by the Ray Brothers Circus for performances in Houston and New QOrleans. I presume that was Edward.
That seems to have been one of his last gigs.
Billboard recorded on Christmas Day, 1949, that “Edward LeRoy, former wire walker for 35 years, has been a switchman for the M.K.T. Railroad in Houston for several years.”
He’d dropped in to visit old friends at the Billboard office in St. Louis, according to that report, then as far as I can tell dropped out of the limelight.
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.

Morgan City High School’s Kennedy Hebert has made it look so easy on the softball field.
Too many no-hitters and one-hitters to remember and double-digit strikeout performances all wrapped — along with a lethal curveball — into a career record of 63-15 that includes nearly 700 career strikeouts.
And that’s just on the mound.
At the plate, the career numbers may be more daunting. A .500-plus batting average, 20 home runs and more than 160 RBIs.
It’s a body of work in which the Nicholls State signee certainly will be remembered after she and her Lady Tiger teammates conclude their season at the Allstate Sugar Bowl Louisiana High School Athletic Association Softball State Tournament this weekend. Morgan City, Class 4A’s No. 1 seed, is looking to bring home a state title.
But while the stats may be the story of her career publicly, what she has done behind the scenes to get here — all in preparation for a Division 1 future that awaits her next year — is much less glamourous but vitally important.
It’s a story of a teenager and her father who have put in countless hours perfecting her swing, whether it be through intensive film study, working in the cages or the use of a scarred tee in the family’s game room at their Morgan City home.
“She just really has more of a desire and a passion for the game,” said Morgan City Coach Tamara Keller, who hails from Texas and played college softball at Texas State. “Her work ethic far surpasses anybody I’ve ever coached.”
Following big sister’s crew
The story of Kennedy Hebert’s softball career actually began by watching, practicing with and following her older sister Tyler’s team when both were youngsters.
“My dad always coached her, so I was just watching them at practice, and I always practiced with them, even before I was even ready to play,” said Kennedy, who is three years younger than Tyler.
Kennedy got her start playing softball before most, too, as at age 6, her parents, Joe and Kitty, successfully petitioned the Morgan City Recreation Department to allow her to play on Tyler’s 7 –and-8-year-old softball team.
“She had been practicing with them, and she was always out there with them all of the time, so she was far enough along that she was able to keep up with the older kids at a really young age,” Joe said.
Joe said he recognized early that he had something special on his hands with Kennedy.
Love-hate relationship with pitching?
Growing up, and still to this day, Kennedy has not had a chance to play many other positions than pitcher because she was the only pitcher her teams had.
“She almost grew to resent it, because she had to work so hard, and she was the only pitcher we had, so she never really got the opportunity to go play other positions,” Joe said.
Kennedy said that she is best at pitching than any other position because she has spent so much time doing it. But she said she doesn’t know if she would say she dislikes it.
“Along the way, I think now that she’s realized how special her talent is at pitching, I think she’s come to understand, ‘hey, if I’m going to be really, really good, I’m going to be really, really good there,” so I think she’s grown to love it,” Joe said.
Kennedy got a break from the mound her freshman season as Tyler was concluding her standout career as a Lady Tiger on the mound.
During that time, Kennedy played shortstop and some first base but primarily second base.
She did pitch the second game of a doubleheader against Baton Rouge-based St. Joseph’s Academy, a Class 5A school, where she struck out senior and future LSU softball player Elyse Thornhill.
“Looking back at it now, I wish they would have made me (pitch), because we could have been so much better with me and Tyler in a rotation,” Kennedy said.
The curveball
When the Class of 2015 — which included Tyler — graduated, the Morgan City Lady Tiger softball team lost several Division I college softball players.
The team entered the 2016 season with plenty of holes that freshman and sophomore filled. Kennedy, a sophomore, took over on the mound.
Entering her new role as a sophomore and beyond, Kennedy figured the Lady Tigers would be in a rebuilding mode and never be as good as they were her freshman year when the team advanced to the Class 4A regional round because of the quality of players that they lost with that senior class.
In preparation for that season, Kennedy and her dad worked a lot on the mound, including on her curveball. It was a pitch that Joe said he didn’t know how good it could be until it was used during the season.
“When that pitch is good, she’s really good, and she’s just so tough to hit after that,” Joe said. “It’s just that curveball just she makes everybody look (bad), and then you put that combination of that changeup in there, it just really keeps people off balanced all the time.”
Berwick High School coach Heather Templet, who has led her team against Kennedy and the Lady Tigers the past three seasons, knows first-hand about the curveball and Kennedy’s talent.
“She’s one of the best pitchers in the state,” Templet said. “Her curveball, her off-speed is amazing, and then she can just blow it by you, so that’s real difficult, especially when the girls haven’t faced that all year. That’s the reason that we do play her, to get that experience against somebody that is good like that.”
So what is it that makes her four-seam curveball so effective?
It “actually bends,” Kennedy said.
“It’s not an angle pitch,” she said. “It’s actually moving out there.”
Tyler: “It’s just ridiculous. There aren’t many people who can spin the ball as fast as she spins the ball, and that thing breaks like a couple feet when it’s on, so those girls aren’t used to being exposed to stuff like that.”
Keller called Kennedy’s curve ball “one of the best she has ever seen at any level.”
Or, as Tyler said, “It just makes a lot of people look ridiculous, to be honest. It’s funny, really, but when it’s on, it’s just almost unhittable.”
A tireless work ethic
Kennedy and Joe, along with a co-worker of Joe, spent countless hours, through video analysis, working on changing Kennedy’s swing to mimic a baseball player’s swing. The process has included a frame-by-frame analysis of Kennedy’s swing against what they were looking for.
“You can put a true college softball player and a major league baseball player (next to each other, and) the really, really good one’s, you can’t hardly tell the difference” with their hand paths, Joe said.
That transformation has involved altering her mechanics, a process that has lasted three years.
“You’re just seeing the outcome of it over the last three weeks really,” Joe said Sunday. “The last three weeks, the video of what we were looking for, and the video of where her swing’s at are in line now. … I didn’t think it would take that long to change the bad mechanics, but it did. It took that long to get her swing to where we were looking for a Division 1 swing, not a high school swing, and I really believed we’ve gotten there now.”
The road, of course, has included lots of reps.
“A lot of swings in the cage, a lot of swings in the game room. A lot of swings everywhere,” Kitty laughed.
During the offseason, Kennedy will take swings about 2-3 times a week and five times a week during the season.
“When everybody else just sees the lights come on, they don’t see what she’s doing in the dark. … I just tell them all the time, it’s really, really easy to be average,” Joe said. “It takes a lot of lot of work to be great, and that’s really what we’ve set out to do with her as far as softball,”
This season Hebert is batting .614 with 16 doubles, six triples, six home runs and 57 RBIs. She has walked 17 times and struck out just five times.
Not to be outdone, she is 23-4 on the mound with a 1.42 ERA. She has walked 75 batters and struck out 232.
With her equally impressive talent on the mound and at the plate, how does one define Kenney Hebert: a pitcher that can hit or a hitter that can pitch?
“A hitter that can pitch, for sure,” she laughed. “Give me a bat.”