Bogalusa High School - Bogalusa, LA
Talk about skating through the last semester of high school...
After St. Joseph's, this was a breeze. I hardly had to crack a book.
I was eighteen in March of that semester. That was the legal drinking age in Louisiana at the time. There wasn't much for teenagers to do in town, so drinking on weekends was the favorite way to pass the time. Capo's was one of our hangouts. We also spent some time in pool halls.
After graduating, I started working in the paper mill to save money to go to college in the fall. It was hard manual labor and gave me an incentive to get a college education.
I spent the first night in the mill working on the same paper machine my grandfather installed in 1918. He had a crew he took around the country installing paper machines. His name was Frederick Augustine. He married my grandmother, Elma Baham, and settled in Bogalusa.