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Winn Parish Fire District 3 participated in live fire training with the Rapides Fire District 7 and Effie Fire Department to help the agencies build trust in working with their neighbors and to be ready for any emergency that arises.

Wednesday, December 14th, Winn Primary School opened its doors to our community again to sprinkle a little more Christmas spirit before kicking off the impending holiday break! Beginning at 9:15 that morning all local loved ones had the opportunity to participate in their Christmas Carol Sing-A-Long! From Santa’s sweetest helper’s seasons greetings at the entrance to the entire auditorium in unison as each carol came and went, our students and staff are thrilled that Santa’s on his way to town!

Thank you to all WPS staff for all of the time, effort and love that goes into making these events possible for our community! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Date: 12-13-22
Name: Chad E Johnson 
Address: Winnfield, LA
Race: White
Sex: Male 
Age: 48
Charge: Bench warrants 

Date: 12-13-22
Name: Demion Foster 
Address: Winnfield, LA 
Race: Black 
Sex: Male 
Age: 32
Charge: Warrants, Resisting an officer 

Date: 12-15-22
Name: John David Rogers 
Address: Alexandria, LA 
Race: Black 
Sex: Male 
Age: 48
Charge: Forgery of financial instrument (warrant)

Date: 12-15-22
Name: Hosea V Cara 
Address: Winnfield, LA 
Race: Hispanic 
Sex: Male 
Age: 25 
Charge: Simple battery 

Date: 12-16-22
Name: Dana Johnathan Smith 
Address: Winnfield, LA
Race: White
Sex: Male 
Age: 33
Charge: Hit and run, No insurance 

Date: 12-18-22
Name: Demarion Hall 
Address: Alexandria, LA
Race: Black 
Sex: Male 
Age: 35
Charge: Theft (felony)

Date: 12-18-22
Name: Alexis Carter 
Address: Alexandria, LA 
Race: Black 
Sex: Female 
Age: 24
Charge: Theft (felony), Theft, Expired MVI, No Insurance, Switched plates, No drivers license 

This information has been provided by a law enforcement agency as public information. Persons named or shown in photographs or video as suspects in a criminal investigation, or arrested and charged with a crime, have not been convicted of any criminal offense and are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

(Bob Holeman conducted this series of interviews with local World War II veterans as a lead-up to Veterans Day 2011. Virturally all of those 34 American heroes have passed away during the decade following these interviews).

When Gen. Douglas McArthur and his forces were driven from the Philippines by the Japanese during World War II, he vowed, “I shall return.” And when he did return, news film footage showed him boldly stepping ashore through the shallow waves to the beachhead.

But one young Navy radio operator from Franklin Parish knew a lot about farming and could realize when some wool-pulling was being done by the military’s media. The general with his corncob pipe faced no danger in his actions. “I’d been delivering mail to men on that same beachhead for three weeks,” declared Navy radio operator James Simons, now of Winn Parish.

The United States had declared war on Japan in 1941 but Simons’ service call would be deferred until he graduated from Crowville High School. That call came in 1943 and he reported to Fort Humbug in Shreveport. Since he was a graduate, he got to choose his branch of service and named the Navy. Life was suddenly on the fast track for this rural boy. Never on a train for long before in his life, he now found himself on a train bound for San Diego for basic training. Of all the possible training stations there, he was sent to Radio School due to being a graduate with typing skills.

Following his early training, Simons was sent north to San Francisco where he was assigned to the Philippines Sea Frontier, a commando operation to secure beachheads. From there they moved on to Fort Pendleton where training included hand-to-hand combat. It was July 4 when they went into town, only to return to grab their gear and get aboard another troop train. He received six immunization shots (including the Black Plague) and the next morning got six more.

Again in the San Francisco area on Treasure Island, Simons and his fellow seamen got word that there had been some confusion and they were supposed to have been in New Guinea two weeks earlier. “In effect, we hitched a ride on, the USS Mizar, a refrigerated provisions ship modified to also carry troops and headed to New Guinea. It was a fortuitous choice. “They pulled me aside and said they needed someone up in the radio shack there. I quickly learned I never had to fight that chow line. We just sent down for steak and eggs and whatever we wanted. When we reached New Guinea, I never had to chip paint or any of that kind of work.” We saw action all along our way. When we arrived, McArthur was there, preparing for the invasion of the Philippines.

“When we were there, the New Guinea bush was still in the Stone Age. I came into my tent one time, with nothing more than a flashlight. I thought I saw something and popped my light on a native, standing in the corner, grinning, with a bolo knife on his hip.” The intruder slipped out with no incident, other than a lasting impression for Simons.

“At the time, the capital, Manila, was very much in the hands of the Japanese,” said the Navy veteran. “We went ashore in Tacloban Leyte, on one of the major islands in the Philippines. Army Ranger units were securing those beaches. We brought equipment into Quonset Huts and got generators to set up power. There we were the communications center for the entire South Pacific. The Navy’s No. 2 admiral was there and you had to have top clearance to get into certain buildings.”

It was about five months after their arrival at Tacloban Leyte that Germany surrendered and the full force of America’s military strength was now focused on Japan. Simons knew Morse code and could both code and decode messages. “It was the beginning of all the electronic equipment that we have today. The fighting was so intense that when President Roosevelt died, his son John, who was over there, could not return home for the funeral.”

Simons noted that at one point in 1945, about 10 days prior to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his name had been posted to a duty roster for a small mine sweep vessel—a mission from which he expected to not return. The minimally manned vessel was being sent to help clear mines from the Tokyo Harbor to permit US ships to enter. He borrowed a jeep from the motor pool and went over to the Army Hospital on Leyete where his cousin, Mabel Fussell, was serving as a nurse. Simons told her that if he did not return, to explain to his family what had happened. When he returned to his unit about three hours later, he saw that his name had been removed from the radioman position on the mine sweep vessel. At that point, he began to think that there was a higher purpose for his life.

The major turning point in that area of the war came with the destruction of the Japanese fleet in the Manila Bay, he said. Later, he was sent to Manila where “I fully expected to be given a leave to return to the States for a visit. As it was, I had earned enough points to muster out. I actually enrolled at the University of Manila but never attended classes.”

After the Navy, Simons returned to Franklin Parish and farming. Then, in his 30s, he went on to Clark Junior College in Newton, MS, and began preaching. He finished his studies at Louisiana College in Pineville. He also returned to the girl he’d known back home. He and Audie Ulmer were actually engaged before Simons went off to war “but I didn’t know if I’d be coming back, so we decided to wait until I returned to get married.” Audie went on to work in Jackson, MS, at a large wholesale drug firm in support of the war effort while she was waiting for him. He returned for her and marry they did in 1946.

They had two children, son Wendell (deceased) and daughter Hedy Pinkerton. Simons continues to preach, serving as pastor of the small Sharon Baptist Church in Winn Parish.

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “For any American who had the great and priceless privilege of being raised in a small town there always remains with him nostalgic memories.”

Nostalgic holiday memories is exactly what has been created over the past week with the residents of Goldonna.

The Store of Goldonna hosted its First Annual Gingerbread House Competition. There was a larger than expected turnout for this sweet occasion. The competition was broken down into age categories. Winners for this banner event were as follows:

Age 19 and Up-
1st Place Julie Evans
2nd Place Anna and Daniel Rachal
3rd Place- Kim Whatley

Ages 13-18
1st Place- Rebekah Dupree
2nd Place- Addison Weaver

Ages 8-12
1st Place – Kayden and Mackenzie Dodge

Ages 4-7
1st Place – Braxton Young

Ages 3 and under
1st Place – Braden Lawson

The judges for this event had an extremely hard job but fun was had by all of the participants and spectators. This new village holiday event will definitely return next year as organizers are already planning for another successful year.

Goldonna Baptist Church and Goldonna Assembly of God Church joined holiday voices for an evening of extraordinary fellowship and fun. The churchgoers bundled up in their warmest winter gear and rode through the village singing Christmas Carols and shared God’s love to area residents. They were met with smiling faces and offers to come inside where it is warm. This too will be added to the list of annual Christmas events that must be repeated.

There will be a Community Church Service at Goldonna Assembly of God on Friday, December 30th at 6:00pm. There will be a meal served afterwards, so bring your favorite tasty dish and join the fun.

Merry Christmas to you and your families!

If you have news to share please email Reba Phelps at jreba.phelps@gmail.com

In 1910, Pietro and Lucia and their six children emigrated from a small town in Italy to Canonsburg, Pennsylvania where Pietro earned meager wages as a millhand. Two years after their arrival, they added their seventh child, Ronald, to their ever-growing family which eventually totaled thirteen children. Ronald was the seventh son of a seventh son and the first of the children to be born in America. Ronald’s family spoke Italian at home and Ronald only began to learn English when he entered elementary school, although he had picked up a few words here and there.

In 1922 or 23, sources vary on the exact year, Ronald began working in Steve Fragapane’s barbershop to earn extra money for the family. At the barbershop, he built and tended to the fire in the fireplace and swept up hair clippings from the floor. Ronald quickly learned that he could make more money if he were to become a barber himself, so he watched Steve and the other barbers closely. He convinced the barbers to let him try his hand at taking a few snips here and there off of the customers. Their confidence in Ronald grew quickly because he had a steady hand, a good eye, and he showed no outward appearance of nervousness, if it existed at all. Ronald was always calm and cool. Eventually, he began learning how to cut hair in all the popular styles and how to give a good, clean shave although, at his young age, he had not begun shaving himself.

Within 3 years, by the young age of 13, Ronald earned his own chair at Steve’s barbershop. In 1926, Ronald’s father became unable to work due to a severe heart condition. It became the responsibility of Ronald and his brothers to earn enough money for the family’s survival.

Ronald never complained and often sang the popular tunes of the day while giving a shave or a haircut, much to the delight of his customers. Within a year, Ronald had more customers than his single chair in Fragapane’s shop could accommodate. At the young age of 14, when most children his age were busy being children, Ronald opened his own barbershop where he employed two helpers. On weekdays, he worked after school until midnight. He worked longer hours on the weekend. Ronald’s ambition was to become the best barber of Canonsburg, and he was well on his way.

It certainly seemed as if Ronald’s path in life was set. In 1933, Ronald and some friends went to the Silver Slipper Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio, to see Freddy Carlone and his orchestra perform. During the show, Carlone invited people from the audience to sing with his band. Ronald’s friends urged him onto the stage. Most of the people from the audience who sang with Carlone’s orchestra had more faith in themselves than they had talent, except for Ronald. Carolone was so impressed with Ronald’s singing, his casual movements while he sang, and his general coolness, that he offered him a job. He made more money as a barber than Carlone had offered to pay, but, with the reassurance of his father that he could always return to barbering, he joined the band.

The chance performance at the Silver Slipper Ballroom set into motion an unexpected career change for Ronald, a career which lasted the remainder of his life, a career in which he sold millions of records, acted in numerous Hollywood pictures, hosted numerous radio and television variety shows, and hosted yearly Christmas shows from 1948 until 1994. Rather than being known as the best barber in Canonsburg, as he originally wanted, he became known as the best ex-barber in the world. In 1955, Franklin Avenue, the street where Ronald was born and grew up, was renamed in his honor. In the 1960s, Ronald became the highest-paid performer in the history of television to that date. You may recognize some of his songs such as “Till the End of Time”, “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes”, and “Catch a Falling Star.” Nowadays, he is mostly associated with Christmas due to his recordings of Christmas songs. In 1954, Ronald introduced a Christmas song in which he mentioned his home state. He sang, “From Pennsylvania folks are traveling down to Dixie’s sunny shore, from Atlantic to Pacific gee the traffic is terrific.” The song was “Home for the Holidays.” Ronald’s full name was …Pierino Ronald “Perry” Como.

Merry Christmas!!!

Sources:

1. Star-Gazette, November 27, 1955, p.44.

2. Albuquerque Journal, December 13, 1980, p.19.

3. Tyler Morning Telegraph, August 1, 1983, p.11.

Although the answer seems a paradox, the debate over Santa’s best reindeer is easy: it’s Rudolph, by a nose.

Deciding the best Christmastime movie, that’s a whole other sleigh full of toys.

Any sane person would of course say the warm but comedic Scrooged from 1988 is the best. It stars Bill Murray as a rotten, entitled TV exec, a modern-day Scrooge who sees the light after experiences with three unforgettable spirits of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future.

But then any person with Christmas truly in his heart would say that’s not even the best movie based on Dickens’ book, A Christmas Carol. That spots belongs to The Muppet Christmas Carolfrom 1992, the brilliant comedy musical starring Michael Caine as Scrooge, Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy as his wife, and you get the picture. (The Rats stole the show. I love a funny Muppet rat. In a top hat. And a scarf.)

But then a person with anything more than figgy pudding for brains would agree that even the 1984 made-for-TV drama A Christmas Carol starring a George C. Scott as Scrooge was the best — unless you go another route entirely and raise your hand for A Christmas Story from 1983, now a Christmas classic thanks to Ralphie and his quest for the Red Ryder, and thanks to the late Jean Shepherd, who wrote the story in his 1966 book, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.

And we haven’t even mentioned The Grinch or Charlie Brown yet. Gee whiz …

To each his own in Christmas movies. One man’s Top Gun: Maverick (good!) is another man’s Top Gun (the original: booo!). If we’re choosing reels for reals, I shouldn’t even be given a vote since I’m the only American living or dead who has never seen Christmas Vacation or Home Alone or Die Hard all the way through.

Maybe one of these lonely days …

But maybe on this we can agree. Our favorite movies, should we think about it, were lacking in production value, were grainy and hardly in sharp color, and had no script. They weren’t pretty, but they were authentic. My favorites were filmed in the 1960s, a less-than-celebrated decade marked by indoor wood paneling and shag rugs and shaggy hair and bright colors. The ’60s put the “T” in “Tacky.”

But boy, did it turn out some great Christmas movies. All filmed live.

Dad in the T-shirt with “the camera,” a projector with two-big bulbs. Looked like he was filming with a giant insect. In nearly every shot, the “actors and actresses” — us and our aunts and uncles and cousins and Christmas morning friends — are shielding our eyes from the double deadly bright Lumen Rays of Death emitted from this contraption our father was shooting us with. (The smarter children of that era decided early on to become eye doctors and specialize in the treatment of “Holiday Retina Burn” — and they’re retired today and have no clue how much money they have stashed, all because of those torturing Christmas bulbs.)

In those filmed-at-home movies, I see in my mind the old scene with a 4-year-old boy and the bike. My baby sister holding a doll, and big sis, Sissy, with combs and a pink dress. A chihuahua dragging wrapping paper across the wood floor.

That archaic filming machine captured us with magic sets and footballs and Hot Wheels and Barbies and E-Z-Bakes. Captured Christmases cold and Christmases warm and Christmases wet. Scenes around the table with grandmothers and grandfathers, year after year, older as we grew, but still grainy, shading our eyes, as if trying to squint into the future, with no idea as to how much these movies would mean to us when we finally got there.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or on Twitter @MamaLuvsManning

One of the greatest gifts of American citizenship—a principle anchored in the bedrock of the 1^st Amendment—is the guarantee that as long as one’s political speech doesn’t pose a “clear and present danger of imminent lawless action” we may say whatever we wish, and no government entity may stop us.

This promise, of course, includes the most vile, despicable, racist, bigoted, and hate-filled speech we can fathom.  It includes Westboro Baptist Church protesting at the funerals of American soldiers chanting that the deaths of our patriots “was God’s punishment on America for homosexuality.”   It includes the Skinheads effort to march in Skokie, Illinois for Naziism or the Klan advocating hate in support of white supremacy. 

No matter how vulgar or offensive, the U.S. Supreme Court has held in a long line of free speech cases that such speech was permissible within the guidelines of local ordinances.

The First Amendment, our judicial precedents, and our cultural and political traditions have clearly established that non-violent speech we hate is at the very core of 1st Amendment protections.  As Justice Hugo Black wrote in a 1972 school speech case, protections established by the First Amendment “must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later, they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.”

In this same line of thinking, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis held that “the answer to speech we hate is counter-speech”—more speech containing arguments that persuasively refute the speech we hate. 

John Stuart Mill claimed that the free competition of ideas in a “marketplace of ideas” is the best way to distinguish truth from falsity.

Justice William Brennan wrote that “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open” and said that vehement criticism and even mistakes were part of the price a democratic society must pay for freedom. (Sullivan).

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a 2017 case involving “hate speech” that “the idea that the government may restrict speech expressing ideas that offend … strikes at the heart of the First Amendment.  Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”

The idea, obviously, is that if ordinary American citizens are presented with a full range of ideas that are not limited or censored by the government, we will accept the ideas that are true and reject the others.

Like voting, free speech serves as a vital social safety valve which relieves political pressure such that, Americans whose votes or whose speech may not win the day in the marketplace of ideas nevertheless know that they had a ‘seat at the table’ to utilize their constitutional rights to participate in the democratic process and to make their voices heard. 

But much of this has changed dramatically.  How so?

Because the truth is not what it used to be.

Today, “the truth” is that social media is a monolithic presence in our lives through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other powerful platforms that purposefully use complex algorithms to “push” forward certain information and suppress other information.

We cannot arrive at the correct conclusion—the truth—if we are not presented with all of the relevant ideas because powerful tools are being used to mislead us and limit the scope of our search. That’s not a “marketplace of ideas.”  That is pre-approved speech and Group Think directed and permeated most often with a Left-leaning bias.

As free citizens, we cannot discern the best path if we don’t have all the relevant and probative information available.   That’s why the revelations we have seen lately of increasingly integrated involvement by government and government officials in social media censorship are so disturbing.  

For example, if the Biden White House leans on its federal agencies to threaten Big Tech companies to censor certain speech—like Covid dissent, election fraud, etc.—then we have Gov-Tech censorship—with the tech companies acting as arms of the government to do what the government could not itself do under the U.S. Constitution.  That’s a conspiracy and very likely illegal. 

May this critical inquiry into the Unholy Alliance between Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Government continue beyond Twitter, and include all the huge social media platforms—and may it begin soon!

Merry Christmas!

Pictured above: Royal Alexander is an attorney, writer, and former politician in his native Shreveport, Louisiana. In 2007, he was the Republican candidate for Louisiana Attorney General. In addition to his law practice, Alexander is an opinion writer, a guest lecturer at public events and education forums, and a frequent guest on various TV and radio outlets.

The views and opinions expressed in the My Opinion article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Winn Parish Journal. Any content provided by the authors is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Gabe Firment joins Billy West Live to discuss the upcoming Governor’s election in Louisiana, as well as the recently reported budget surplus and the upcoming Legislative Session.

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