Jim Bradshaw: The cucumber truck and the new hospital

A scary accident in October 1945 is at least partially responsible for the establishment of Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Lafayette.

Bishop Jules Jeanmard, Monsignor A. F. Isenberg, chancellor of the Diocese of Lafayette, and Father Clifton Gaudin, vice chancellor, were on their way back to Lafayette after attending the 25th anniversary celebration for the St. Augustine Seminary in Bay St, Louis, Mississippi. They were about a mile west of the town of Livingston — midway between Baton Rouge and the Louisiana-Mississippi line — when their car slammed into the back of a truck loaded with cucumbers.

State troopers reported that the truck did not have its rear lights turned on. Gaudin, who was driving, said he was also blinded by the lights of an approaching car.

Gaudin suffered only minor bruises, but the bishop and Isenberg were taken to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in Baton Rouge. Newspapers reported the day after the accident that the bishop was “resting well,” suffering mostly from shock and bruises, and that Isenberg had a fractured hip and possible skull concussion.           

Their injuries required them to spend a few days at Our Lady of the Lake and during that stay Bishop Jeanmard became acquainted with the Franciscan nuns who staffed it.  

The order was well established in Louisiana by then. The first six Franciscan sisters came from France in 1911 to open a hospital in Pineville.  For some reason, that didn’t work out, but the nuns stayed and opened St. Francis Sanitarium in Monroe in 1913, then Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge in 1921. That history of work in Louisiana prompted the bishop to invite the order to open a hospital in Lafayette in 1949, but it appears that the nuns were reluctant to make the move.            

Isenberg, who well remembered the care he received at Our Lady of the Lake, was the one who finally persuaded them to come to Lafayette. His persuasion was powerfully helped by a generous donation from the Jewish businessman and philanthropist Maurice Heymann to fund much of the construction.
(Heymann, incidentally, was an ecumenical donor. In the 1950s, he offered land for a hospital in his new Oil Center to the Louisiana Baptist Convention. They declined the offer and the land then went to Lafayette General.)

Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, led by Sister Marie Brendan Donegan, opened its doors as a 50-bed hospital on St. Landry Street, not far from St. John Cathedral, on Aug. 1, 1949, It, like other Franciscan hospitals, has been growing since — so much so that Sister Barbara Arceneaux, a former provincial of the order said in 2011, on the 100th anniversary of their arrival in Louisiana, “They call us ‘Our Lady of the Perpetual Construction.’”

Although said tongue-in-cheek, it’s an apt nickname. In 1958 a four-story addition doubled the hospital’s capacity to 110 beds. Another  four-story addition in 1972 brought the capacity to 255 beds. Then, in July 2011, an entirely new, 300-plus bed, hospital was opened on Ambassador Caffery Parkway, and all but a few offices were relocated from the old St. Landry Street campus, The hospital’s website described that project as the largest construction project in the city’s history.

 A Catholic hospital would probably have been built in Lafayette even if the Franciscan nuns had decided not to do it. There were several orders of hospital nuns working in the state in the 1940s, including the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, who had been at St. Patrick’s Hospital in Lake Charles since 1908.

But it is interesting to speculate how the medical history of south Louisiana might have been changed if the tail lights had been working on that cucumber truck that night in October 1945.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.