[Music] in the little town of [ __ ] there's a little post office from here you can mail off your postcards maybe one of them will feature the little town of [ __ ] I'm Jeff doña and in this latest edition of our continuing travel series I'm sending some word back to you that's why we're calling this lost Louisiana postcards there are all sorts of postcards some are just a picture sometimes not even a caption Patterson the old church Welsh not much here yet in this photo but Marksville is pretty much the same Alexandria home of army maneuvers before the big war and in this card booklet during its a hand colored shot one of the post-office there the postmark is 1942 Franklin parish is old Placid to the eye so is the [ __ ] post office and general store yet it's also the hub of activity the Charles Harris general merchandise Patsy Harris runs the post office the old way with an eye to serving one person at a time but then again only one person can stand at her window at a time and I've been postmaster for nearly 28 years 1933 when my more than law and father-in-law established the stoy didn't they've got the post office established they had to have a name for it so they sent in the name several names to the post office department and my husband who was the first grandchild in the first child in the family he they called him [ __ ] that was one of his nicknames his grandmother had quite a few farms but that was one of them and he said put down [ __ ] and she said his mother said no they won't select that he said please so they put it down and when it came back they had selected jerker and so that's where [ __ ] got its name my husband every day get her mail get to me I'll get your checks and get it come and get cocaine the cash register is old the scale on which she'll way you out a half pound of galvanized nails is old Patsy Harris's friendships are old - Allen Taylor comes every morning and brings my mail and he brings it and comes back by in the afternoon and picks it up and he's out of the winds of our office he's eight sea carrier and he takes Fort Necessity their mail and then delivers on the routes also when a letter gets here it hardly needs an address Patsy Harris knows where everybody lives and everybody's pockets people don't write like they used to you know letters in mail letters I have a cousin that song 86 years old and she writes the most beautiful letters and has the most beautiful hen right and you don't find many people that bright anymore that you know that kind of letter and it's so newsy and so in their English is so great you know but oh it really is a lost art I think that writing letters or email it's just such a joy to get a letter I think you know there's something to be said when you find the real lost Louisiana there's something to be pondered about the lost art of letters but the store the post boxes the safe made in Shreveport they say it better the banjo case the baseball cards soda pop bottles and Patsy Harry anyway I helped you just how can I help a Butterfinger that's too good to be true I thank you okay come back feeling better okay Baba now you know whose hands touched your postcard should it arrived from [ __ ] I'll tell you the nice thing that happened to the Postal Service's when they went to self-adhesive sales I really enjoy those this was the Baton Rouge Savings and Loan Association in the 1950s what great post Deco lines and dynamic placement of a public clock well a good thing lo and behold in Baton Rouge it's still here I like post offices utilities and service shops along our route across lost Louisiana we have to stop for gas and directions but this filling station hasn't a drop it stands alone on the Cajun Prairie a lost looking thing from a lost Louisiana if this were 1938 or 1948 it would not be so odd and Kermit do say would feel right at home well you've actually seen this particular model right here yes that's a national pump it's got porcelain panels stainless steel table stainless steel sides very durable and well made very well because it was made before 1950 I thought you know it was well made oh I'll tell you what it was well made because it was made to last well that's right the crank gas pumps out front the tire rims that hold the water hose the air machine that didn't dare charge good customers a quarter it's all here deuce a used to collect different brands of gas station stuff now it's the uranium orange and steel blue of Gulf oil all the way you ever actually go down like on the road when you're driving around or when you just tooling around and you see something I'm sorry oh yeah oh yeah and you stop and you know well I get a lot of times I'll see a station that's no longer a gulf station but I can see some of the paint peeling out and I can see the orange porcelain and you can nail it and you stop but I'm I stop to the station the other day and I told her guy said this is an old Gulf station he said yeah said you got anything Gulf he said no I don't have anything at all it's do you mind if I look around I said no we found all kinds of books in in the seventies we found two cans with the Gulf on it he found another oil drain can and he's got still a bunch of stuff this Gulf and I'm working on him get but he gave me most of the stuff you actually pump the oil with this pump into the quart bottle and then you put the top on it and as you serve the customer you remove this little top and poured it in the car mm-hmm now the drawback on this is you never were really sure what you were getting so go Finn 1928 were the first ones to go to the cans and they had tamper-proof refinery sealed so you were guaranteed on what you were getting from the court can very sturdy the reason that they rare is they cut them up for Kermit do say his garage is a fanciful figment of his imagination and a delight to our collective consumer consciousness the cars inside are big two and a half tons at least you have to pry him for a reflective answer though as to why this collector does what he does why anyone would want to hold on to such commonplace memorabilia 55 1955 Cadillac series 62 from I think probably that everybody likes to return to a time that they will remember as happy and they were comfortable with and when they think about their youth even if things wasn't real good when you were young you were healthy and you were able to tolerate more and when you look back on the problems you had when you were young they saw Manar compared to what you have today because as people grow their problems grow we always like to return to something simple families only had one car back then I had a bicycle I had a paper route I worked at a gas station things were very simple compared to what they I remember that price and now remember cheaper prices when they used to have gas was the goal companies with getting the wars on the prices and it get down to 16 17 cents a gallon when I was a teenager matter of fact I have a couple of prices here yeah that went on the visible pump this was six cents for a gallon of gas plus six cents tax and because it had gotten so low that the text was as much as the gas here's an eight and a seven and fifteen cent and when I was a kid I remember very well gas stations would have a sign that says this is a tax collection station and we also sell games as Americans we remember that logo on everything from sealing wax to bug spray this whole wall it's all gas this old insect repellent they sold car polish they'd sold fan belts sure anything for the car house whole wall lighter fluid penetrating oil electric motor oil this is the salesman sample that he brought to show you two different types of all and the refining process it's furniture polish this is part of your polish and then it's a household lubricant this is a fry Mae West visible pump a Mae West Mae West because of the shape well this is really heavy brass brass solid brass and the way this thing worked it was mechanical you pumped the gas from an underground storage tank into the glass cylinder all the way to the top and then the reason it's so tall that gravity fed into the car and you Sol even-numbered gallons and then you lift up the hose to get a little bit of get that extra as familiar as all the icons are it's still a lost looking place off the beaten path and maybe out of mind all this Gulf oil stuff funny thing you can't buy gas here this is just some common hardware but over time maybe it's come to represent what we'll probably not see again the service station dedicated to service and yet the girl both of us deal with five permit a deuce a proprietor well Parata sometimes you find lost Louisiana in a wrong turn you have to go halfway around the town square in Opelousas to enjoy the old parish Bank and Trust in Tallulah we swerved onto Bear Creek Road it turned out to be the right turn what was once lost now is found there's a rundown hunting camp on a back road in Madison parish the high porch is long gone but the wooden overhangs and rusted roof have kept the elements at bay for nearly a century this is the Lodge of the Bear Lake Club an old-style hunting Association from the last century now you can track far enough into the woods anywhere in Louisiana and come across old camps abandoned as well as still used in the season but this one is special would you believe this one has just this year been placed on the National Register of Historic Places Larry Bird is curator of the political history collection at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and he's come to Tallulah today to see this husk the hunting camp really what you're looking at is not necessarily a hunting camp but it's a fish and you know conservation camp significant well I think so if only because this is the only one that remains that has a Roosevelt association with it that you can actually come see in the first years of this century President Teddy Roosevelt was the leading spokesman for the conservationists philosophy for about 30 years gentlemen hunters had been forming clubs with attention to nature conservation Roosevelt status helped and was helped by the movement why does Roosevelt come to Louisiana well to hunt black bear he just wanted to kill himself a bar well now I mean there are political considerations you know in and he becomes president after the assassination of William McKinley the vice president becoming president and so part of what he's doing shoring up his southern flank of Republican support within the party certainly that's one of the reasons he came here in 1902 to Mississippi Louisiana for his first on the occasion of his first pair hunt when he didn't shoot one the locals brought a beaten-up cub to him all tied up but Teddy found no sport in that and when he spared the poor animal the National Press coined a craze for kids you guessed it the teddy bear and almost from that moment you can see the wheels and Roosevelt's head spinning to come back and really complete and have a successful hunt when Roosevelt returned to the Delta to finally shoot a bear even this Yankee was cheered in Vicksburg and eventually the tiny farm town of Tallulah this is the scene as everyone turned out to see the president in 1907 Roosevelt kept a journal of his hunts and wrote to his daughter all about this one he never actually says this is the exact building but his description fits this place perfectly martinwilliams will soon be 94 years old he was a good friend of the camp's caretaker and best guide Willie Goodall we talked I was Mary he must hit me present bear intelligent man use a good language no curse no he's a black man oh yeah okay your friend mr. Goodall the guide with Teddy Roosevelt what did he tell you about you made friends with him I think he talked me I'm going into black folks because you had a conversation you could tell the president something you make him laugh that's what their lack of that he was that kind of man and he was rich stock shooter see their practice like I hear $40 hunting it's taking a lot of dedicated attention phone calls and pleadings by Tallulah resident Maryland dead good to get the camp listed on the National Register she's called the press many times to come out and do a story yet doesn't want to be in the spotlight told me she had a Roosevelt pair camp you seldom get calls like that or have an opportunity to come to come see what you've looked at in photographs and what other people have just thought perhaps didn't exist so for you there is a thrill in in seeing this right it's the real thing you don't have to recreate it it's it's very it's very much here and you can see what it looked like in your head from Roosevelt's own writings of the way he described it you know on the steep bold Bank and the Bayou or the tents or river area and it's the real thing and one of the stories you heard of what a caretaker at this camp did what did he do every day well you know people do different man there's boy in Washington cooks he took care of pumps [Music] this way you just turn north of at the camp spouting it go ahead this snakes out thing is that nature the attention everyone around here agrees should be focused on preserving this landmark a little piece of political history you wouldn't know much about if people around here weren't so proud of it and so happy to recall one hunt one time such an exciting time so long ago lost Louisiana will continue browsing some old postcards [Music] grab the postcards and let's hit the road to see what's still standing Homer still uses its old courthouse Monroe offers a surprising number of landmarks in my card collection the Washita River always photographs well one afternoon we were enjoying the Washita in Monroe when I had to flag down Harry DeSoto issue these a visa for real with you I didn't matter where your battery with your feet a handmade paddlewheeler Harry DeSoto might have been happy with a speedboat or houseboat like people use on this side of the Washita but this welder made himself an old-time paddle wheeler with a new Toyota engine this is the throttle here this is the thrust they thought the hydraulic in gear this is your hydraulic champion hydraulic pressure here this is the forward this is reverse the reason I got it notched out to the place of the console so somebody chose it out of gear I won't go in reverse you see there's a safety feature this really looks like a fun boat to drive well it is I mean it's maneuverable in it you don't get tired I mean you can just walk back and you don't you're not gonna find you no no just the one place you know you can walk around just it's not you're sitting on a bad regular off they paddle fishing by night and taking in the scenery by day they've been to New Orleans 290 water miles from home port in Alexandria it took considerably longer up current they've been to Shreveport 143 miles as well as up to Arkansas when I Whittle the Washita Lake we should be there more postcards offer matter-of-fact views of things you've never imagined I don't know when there was a pontoon bridge across the Red River at Montgomery in this postcard the world's largest river barge carries locomotives at Avondale this is how a train crossed the river until Huey built a bridge there's a new slogan at the New Orleans engulf Coast Railway it says the city that brought us everything boiled in fried now pours on the steam this railway is the genuine article a short line freight company in northern Plaquemine parish now sharing the company's tracks is a blast from the past taking tourists school kids and romantics back in time a full century probably three dozen valves up there that you get to know what to do with the gauges that you're looking at are steam gauges and air gauges for the air brakes and you have two water glasses any one for the engineer in one of the firemen which are probably the most important things in the cab because you've got to know where the water level is in the boiler it can be a very dangerous machine if the water gets below the crown sheet of the firebox Johnny C help get this 1901 locomotive back on its wheels now he's living every kid's dream he's the engineer of a steam locomotive I always say a monkey could run a diesel it takes a real locomotive engineer to run a steam engine because of the field because of what's going on there in your head and in your head well it isn't a steam locomotive talks to you you can feel it you know you can listen to the stack and you can listen to the the valves or the you know the chug that you hear coming out the stack and that tells you what the engines are doing that heart is working and when you've got enough valve travel because you're able to set the valve travel with the what's known as the Johnson bar or reverser and when you're starting the engine off with a heavy load you put it what we call down in the corner and you're using a lot of steam when you do that and as you get the train moving you start working it back to the company notch they call it which is more economical you're using less steam and you're working off of steam expansion once you get the thing moving so there's a lot to listen to and go by you know from the sound of the engine Baldwin locomotive works number 17 44 was once a rusted Hulk about two years ago these steam enthusiasts founded in Texas Gary McCord is another of the dedicated restorers who tends the 85-ton engines huge maintenance needs she was in really bad condition when they first asked me if I would come to work for him I went over in Fort Worth and climbed up on her one day and looked around and I shook my head and I thought to myself there's no way they're ever going to restore this thing or put it back together in operating condition you're impressed by it though orange juice oh very much so the people back then that came up with all of this stuff were very smart and in 1901 this was the cutting-edge technology [Music] hold along our 1950s era passenger cars the double deckers afford of view of the Mississippi River over the levee the excursion down to Myrtle Grove is only 10 miles but takes two hours round-trip it's fun to watch the kids faces isn't it it sure is we need more young people that are interested in this so that as the older guys like John can teach me and then when I become older then there'll be some young person that wants to know that I can teach them because there are no schools that you can go to it's all you know on-the-job training you have to start out at the bottom as a hustler kind of like you know a grease monkey that gets a locomotive ready in the morning and then you move up to a fireman and then finally move up to an engineer but if you can't work on it you don't understand it you can't fix it then you can't run it the star of the show of course never lets the kids down the Big Easy as it's called belts out another note another blast of steam a lot of that's for show of course but deep in the hearts of the guys who brought number 1744 back from a rusty grave there's a genuine passion my previous career was on the 80 and SF or Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe and I quit them in 1993 just to operate steam locomotives because that's what I wanted to do I'm a fella that finds diesel locomotives distasteful we call them dismal dismal locomotive I'm I've left steam all my life I was born in 1940 and was lucky enough to see the last 20 years of steam and I grew it won the run steam engines and that's what I do now it makes you wonder who's having more fun the passengers are these aficionados of the good old days in stacks of old postcards you'll likely find a bunch featuring Bourbon Street less often you'll come across the Blue Room at the Roosevelt when in New Orleans this post card reads visit the top of the marked you can only visit that wondrous lounge in pictures now we showed up just in time for a final spin in 1964 the brand-new New Orleans World Trade Center was called the International Trade Mart and way up there was the top of the Mart Lounge it takes a second elevator to get up to the highly decorated Bistro at the top when those doors open you gasped great Jackie Gleason it's all still here look you're smart [Music] an odd thing about the top of the Mart is that it hasn't changed much in three-and-a-half decades the red velvet drapes gold swags and slingback chairs are all throwbacks to the martini and cigarette sophisticated set a la mode Dean Martin James Bond Las Vegas at Al [Music] from high above the traffic from the best view anywhere your own Steadman has watched his beautiful city spin at that time the senior proms were a big thing and all schools had them of course now no one has them that schools are concerned with a liability aspects of it and they they wouldn't think of even sponsoring one but at that time it was the big event and that was before tourism was really a factor and our business was probably 90 95 percent local business at that time and another factor there was no place you could see the river from the street level all the wars were straight just solid warps you couldn't you couldn't see it too fair even that there was no moon walk no River walk even on Canal Street there was a one of the United Fruit if someone had a banana warehouse there and if you knew the right people your run down that few bananas for lunch it revolves at what pace 3 3 feet per minute it takes an hour and a half to make a complete turn you can't feel it you can't hear it if you look at window frames you can see that the furniture is moving but an hour and a half to make one revolution that's really slow it seems very slow doesn't yes except that mechanically it must be a problem to make them any bigger because this is one of the largest rooms in the world it's 24 miles across the lake it's about 14 from here to there so you're looking at you know 3540 miles that's the best of all views on a clear day you can practically see forever you can see a Mandeville really yeah this is really nice to look at at night I'll bet because it's backlit and they can see yes lots of nice colors young professionals the yuppies we might call them are all interested in that Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra music and smoking the cigar and having the sophisticated martini it seems like you've got the built-in lair for that this is the sophisticated swingers bar that's right yeah I think they that's why everyone wants to buy the memorabilia now that's takes something home with them and and keep it there to remind them of the good times they had here in their special occasions the new owner some out-of-town celebrity married to one of those supermodels is going to replace all this authentic stuffing with new stuff to evoke the retro 60s martini and cigarettes of his de kado set a la Dean Martin at al didn't Disneyworld drained the Everglades to install mechanical alligators the circumstances of them discussing it for ten years it really wasn't a shock there were times when it looked like they would never get together and to do what they wanted to do so many people involved in trying to convert it to something else so it's not like we weren't aware of it which was in the newspapers regularly and when it did come I guess we all knew it was coming we just didn't know when after 35 years of spinning up there the top of the Mart took one last turn and closed forever in august jed Steadman was neither terribly philosophic nor saddened by it all his years in the upside-down lounge business before this gig prepared him to accept it as just another turn of events the hand-carved wooden medallions honoring the city's Mardi Gras cruise were sold off a few weeks after our visit gone are the huge paintings of early pioneers discovering and claiming the Mississippi River watching the river flow past his doorstep 33 floors below you can imagine how Steadman can be more accepting than most I have to look at the good side of it as it's been just a pleasure showing off the city and the state to millions of visitors something about that Old Man River that you can see so clearly from up here you know he just keeps rolling along postcards used to celebrate our crowning achievements this herald of the causeway bridge reminds us we may be too cool these days to enthuse over achievements like charity hospitals graceful Deco travel this state and you'll notice things are missing travel this states some more and you'll want to save them before the only place you can see them is on an old postcard Cheers though because our last site offers natural hope and this scene comes from the easternmost island James Harris is the senior biologist for seven natural refuges in Southeast Louisiana protected by the US Fish and Wildlife Service down at the very mouth of the Mississippi River in Venice he and two interns steer us out into the shipping channel aboard a small power boat today we're headed to the southernmost Chandeleur Islands a crescent-shaped chain at the very eastern edge of Louisiana's boot as much as we worry today about the erosion of barrier islands it's an inevitable course of nature that sands shift the grasses are essential because sea birds won't nest in plain sand their young have to have some cover Louisiana's state bird the eastern brown pelican gave up trying to nest here decades ago for a long time even going back to the 20s and 30s but until the the really dramatic declines of the 50s and then into the 60s I don't know that anybody realized there may have been a few but most people didn't realize that there was a problem with the wide scale use of a lot of pesticides in the 50s men into the 60s of course here in Louisiana our state bird was totally extirpated they're totally wiped out as far as nesting goes by the early 60s there were any pelicans nesting in Louisiana anymore common seabirds like these laughing gulls never left the fragility of a new hatched chick is astounding he's trying to find some shade at noon gulls and terns can make their nests nearly anywhere pelicans are more fussy for these elegant and ancient birds the loss of grassy strips in the Chandeleur chain made Louisiana's coast uninviting they weren't going anywhere they just they weren't producing enough young to keep up with the numbers that were dying as they got older so you had this a gradual decline and then at some point a very dramatic decline in the population itself they drop to very low numbers throughout the country right now I would say that habitat restoration and habitat protection is the priority the birds are protected by law you can't collect the eggs you can't collect the birds but they need someplace to go they need some place to nest and it's not just their nesting habitat that needs protection it's the entire watersheds the entire estuary systems the entire coastline that's what produces the food that supports the pelicans and the other sea birds that are out here there are some raccoons within the Chandelure chain are all protected within the referee National Wildlife Refuge System as part of Bretta National Wildlife Refuge we have pelicans nesting on four different islands right now this island here you can see the large groups in the background there has over 5,000 nesting pair on this island alone that's the highest number biologists have ever recorded the simple story you can see in here is that the pelicans are back but when you consider that back in the 60s there were no Pelican's nest Louisiana so this is this is quite a comeback for them this is a great success story beginning in the late 60s early 70s the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries took the initiative to bring birds in from Florida and in this part of the state they established them at North Island up at the north end of the chain and they started with just a few hundred birds and from that they have the population has grown and expanded and spread to other islands in the chain so that now will have anywhere from 10 to 16 thousand nests in a year and for me that's quite remarkable now that they're coming back the moral and the story is that we should just plain leave this corner of a nearly lost Louisiana alone join us again for another edition of lost Louisiana when you and I will be going in search of picture-perfect postcards boy I've got an idea the hotel Heidelberg is still standing in Baton Rouge this is awfully sweet Huey long used to stay here until next time having a wonderful time glad you were here [Music]