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W e d n e s d ay, J u n e 4, 2025
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Jan Risher LONG STORY SHORT
Postcard Project returns When I started the first Postcard Project in 2022, I expected it to be a one-off thing. I was wrong. This year’s Postcard Project begins with Memorial Day and runs through Labor Day, Sept. 1. I anticipate an uptick in the arrival of postcards, but the truth is that these days, I receive postcards year-round from people I don’t know — and each one makes my heart go pitter-patter. Just last week, I received four from Dru Troescher. Because some people send postcards so frequently, I feel like I’ve gotten to know them — even if we’ve never met. In the last few weeks, I received four postcards from Troescher — from Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Arkansas. The first was from the Ohio State Capitol Building. Troescher happened to be there on the anniversary of the day President Abraham Lincoln laid in state there for eight hours. “He then continued on his train trip to Springfield, Illinois, his burial site,” Troescher wrote, adding that they were on their way to visit the Capitol building and Lincoln’s Presidential Library in Springfield next. Once there, she found another postcard, but not at the state capitol. “The Illinois Capitol did not have a gift shop, so we went to the Illinois State Museum. It was free and very nice — lots about fossils and natural history. We’re on our way to Independence, Missouri, to see the Truman Library,” Troescher wrote from Springfield. I did not receive a postcard from Troescher at the Truman Library in Missouri, but she delivered in Indiana, but, once again, not from the Capitol building, which did not have a gift shop. The intrepid Troescher went to the University of Notre Dame and found a beautiful postcard to send, representing Indiana. On her way back to Baton Rouge, she stopped at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock and sent a postcard from there. Her thoughtful stops and notes add to the fabric of this project. I’ve never met Troescher, but I appreciate her dedication to the project. There are a few people who have, through the years of this project, sent so many postcards or such interesting postcards and messages that I have become friends with them — good friends, in fact. Just yesterday, I had lunch with a friend in New Orleans who is a direct result of the Postcard Project! Each summer, the goal is to get postcards from every state and as many countries as possible. I encourage you to give it a try. Taking the time to write and mail a postcard on the road adds a different dimension to travel. Rifling through the bounty of the 2024 Postcard Project, in which we received more than 272 postcards from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and 34 other countries, I can’t help but be touched by the sincerity of the messages and amused by the obvious humor and ingenuity of some of the postcards sent in — not to mention being awed by the many vintage postcards people have sent in. As evidenced by Troescher’s effort to find postcards, the near relic from
STAFF PHOTO BY BRAD BOWIE
Marcelle Bienvenu prepares her Crawfish Stew-Fay on May 15 at her home in St. Martinville.
A LIFE IN FOOD
Marcelle Bienvenu dishes on étouffée, Ella, Emeril and a life steeped in Louisiana flavor BY JAN RISHER
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MARCELLE BIENVENU’S ROUX GUIDE
Staff writer
pending a spring afternoon with Marcelle Bienvenu in her St. Martinville kitchen and garden is like stepping into a Cajun waltz — colorful, unhurried, layered and playful. Volunteer zinnias are blooming thick as a polka-dot blanket. Nine different birds are singing. The grand dame of Louisiana Cajun cooking is making crawfish étouffée just the way her mama taught her. To be clear, her mother, Rhena Broussard Bienvenu, called it a “stew-fay.” “Everybody has their own way to do anything,” Bienvenu said. “As long as you think it tastes good, it’s fine with me, but as soon as I see a brown étouffée, oh no.”
How dark does Beinvenu like her roux?
A 1982 portrait of Marcelle Bienvenu and her beloved late mother, Rhena Broussard Bienvenu
“It depends on what I’m cooking,” she said. For seafood gumbo or crab stew, she says the roux should be the color of peanut butter. For a chicken and sausage gumbo, it should be brown, but not as dark as a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar. For meatball stew, it should be dark brown, “darker than chicken and sausage gumbo roux,” she said.
PROVIDED PHOTO FROM MARCELLE BIENVENU
ä See BIENVENU, page 2G
ä See RISHER, page 2G
Did Hitler send a WWII U-boat to the Gulf Coast? Robert Ballard’s exploration boat, Nautilus, documented the wreckage of the German submarine U-166 in the Gulf of Mexico in 2014. The wreck is considered a war gravesite and cannot be disturbed. PROVIDED PHOTO
BY ROBIN MILLER
forces who want to raise a sunken Nazi U-boat only miles from Loui-
Staff writer
Reality can be stranger than fiction, but sometimes the two intersect, as it did when Sharon Coldiron recently was reading James Lee Burke’s 1994 novel, “Dixie City Jam.” In it, the best-selling author’s main character, Dave Robichaux, finds himself at the center of a conflict between opposing
siana’s coast. Of course, Burke’s story is fiction, but Coldiron was intrigued.
Is it true? “Is there really a U-boat in the Gulf of Mexico?” the Deville resident asked. “If it is, why? And where, exactly, is it located?”
The story is true. The German sub officially was known as U-166. It was among a fleet of 23 sent to the Atlantic Ocean in the spring of 1942 on a mission called Operation Drumbeat, the Nazi code name for submarine attacks on Allied shipping off U.S. coasts. “Over the course of that summer, German U-boats stalked defenseless tankers and
ä See CURIOUS, page 2G