Author: Emily Gautreaux

The World War II Museum Is Hosting a Birthday Card Drive

World War II Army Veteran Lawrence Brooks has celebrated his past five birthdays at New Orleans’ National WWII Museum with much-deserved pomp and circumstance, as reports an article by nola.com.  As Brooks turns 111 years old this year, making him the oldest living World War II veteran, both he and the museum have grown to cherish this celebratory tradition.

Due to the recent pandemic, however, this year the traditional gathering is unable to take place inside the museum, but that won’t deter the city of New Orleans coming together to wish Brooks a happy birthday, as museum officials have been asking the city and nearby communities to send Brooks birthday cards, commemorating his special day. The museum asked for birthday cards from throughout the community to help Brooks celebrate from a socially-responsible distance. Cards are to be mailed to the museum directly.

Lawrence Brooks was born on September 12, 1909, and he was raised in Norwood, Louisiana. During the United States’ second World War, he served the the predominately African American 91st Engineer Battalion, which was stationed in New Guinea and then the Philippines.

Private First Class Brooks was one of more than 1.2 million African Americans serving in the segregated U.S. Armed forces in World War II, a group striving for a dual victory over both tyranny abroad and discrimination back home.

During last fall’s celebrations for his 110th birthday, Brook’s annual party at the World War II Museum received widespread attention with reporters from national news outlets like Newsweek and CNN telling his history. When asked of his special status as the oldest living American veteran of World War II, Brooks reflected, saying that the news made him feel good, saying, “yes, indeed it does,” as reported nola.com.

As he turned 110 last year, that age placed him among fewer than 500 verified “supercentenarians” worldwide, though in Louisiana, Brooks is second in seniority to Napoleonville naive and Gretna resident Odile Washington, who was born only 81 days before Brooks in 1909.

The National WWII Museum in New Orleans hosted the event last year with a party in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion. Museum vice president Peter Crean speaks for the museum as they affectionately consider Brook to be “our veteran,” commenting, “we absolutely love Mr. Brooks.” In fact, in a remarkable gesture, the museum offered to host the same birthday party celebratory event each year, as long as Brooks continues to have birthdays.

While he greatly enjoys the community involvement, kindnesses, and gestures, the highlight of the event for Brooks is the oft-photographed attentive gathering of the World War II Museum’s vocal trip, the Victory Belles.

Until suffering a broken hip in 2018, Brooks greatly enjoyed walking through his Central City neighborhood, but now he uses a walker for transportation, understandably optioning to rest on the front porch of his Clara Street shotgun double, greeting friends and strangers alike. Living with his daughter Vanessa, Brooks spends most of his time in his large bedroom, reminiscing amongst the decorated walls and tables with pictures and other momentos, many of which have been gathered recently thanks to his newfound celebrity. This notoriety was brought on after a parishioner at St. Luke’s Episocpal Church brough Brooks’ status to the museum’s attention.

All in all, Brooks has had five children (two deceased), 13 grandchildren, and an impressive 22 great-grandchildren. He is not without love and attention, as he believes living with his daughter has greatly extended his time and enjoyment of it beyond all previous expectations, telling nola.com that he believes the reason he’s survived so long is “ because I’ve always liked people so much. Oh yes, I do.”

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Princeton Review Ranks Loyola as 7th Most Inclusive U.S. University

Many Louisiana students, parents, faculty members, and administrators took pride last month as the nationally-renowned Princeton Review released its rankings to include New Orleans’ Loyola University as the seventh most inclusive university in the United States, as reported in a MyNewOrleans.com article.

The Princeton Review conducted a survey that measured how frequently students at schools across the nation engage with one another across lines of socioeconomic class and race. Upon hearing this news, Loyola University attributes the ranking to their diverse national student body and the community created across their campus. The news also couldn’t have come at a better time as the same week of the ranking, Loyola welcomed to campus for its Fall 2020 semester, an undergraduate student body that consisted of 50 percent students of color.

In the Princeton Review’s “2021 Guide to Best 386 Colleges,” released on August 18, 2020, Loyola New Orleans was honored with five of the nation’s “Top 20” rankings. It should be noted that this guide only ranks approximately 13 percent of America’s 3,000 four-year colleges, highlighting outstanding schools across the country noted for their outstanding student programs, quality of life, and academic excellence.

Among these rankings was Loyola’s 97-year-old student-run newspaper, The Maroon, which achieved the ranking of being the 9th best student newspaper in the country, earning the title of “Loyola’s pride and joy.” In addition to this pretentious ranking by the Princeton Review, over the past few years, The Maroon has accumulated hundred of awards, including the best college media outlet in the country, according to the College Media Association, and a national Peacemaker Award from the Associated College Press, which is also known as the “Pulitzer Prize of College Journalism.” In fact, in just June alone, The Maroon took away 23 awards from the Louisiana Press Association, including 12 top prizes in the college newspaper category, being named the College Newspaper of the Year.

Apart from its journalism media accolades, Loyola’s Student Government Association was ranked 20th in the nation, in the brand new category, being praised for its strong involvement in matters of great importance that affect the campus community, ranging from racial equality issues to recycling, sustainability, and environmental measures. Loyola’s Student Government Association, or the SGA, also plays a big part in keeping campus morale high by hosting fun events, like its signature event, “Sneaux,” which blankets the Marquette Lawn each and every year.

As a whole the city of New Orleans continued to rank highly on the Princeton Review’s list, as it is known as the tenth best college town, with Loyola proudly holding the eighth highest ranking in the country in terms of “best town/gown relations within its city.” This highly-coveted category showcases the high quality of Loyola’s interactions within its local community.

As Loyola New Orleans is a part of Jesuit tradition, it should be remembered that a tenet, fundamental principle of Jesuit education is cura personalis, or the education of the whole person, mind, body, and soul; all of which was taken into account by Loyola’s own student body in the Princeton Review’s survey, as Loyola New Orleans earned a remarkably strong 92 out of 100 “quality of life” campus ranking.

When asked to comment on the school’s garnered accolades, Loyola University New Orleans President Tania Tetlowtold myneworleans.com, “our students come from every possible background, drawn here by common Jesuit values and shared passions.  They learn as much from each other’s diverse experiences and perspectives as they do in the classroom.  In an increasingly divided world, they provide a beacon of hope for the future.”

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Simple Ideas for an Organized Boxed Work Lunch

Dating back to ancient, Kamakura period Japan (1185-1333), the idea of packing meals in a small compartment container, known as a bento box, is always an appealing meal prep option, as the compartments often help to control portion sizes, keep food separate, and save you room with its minimalist design. Bento boxes are a perfect solution for a boxed work lunch, and with EatingWell’s list of diverse and easy to prepare recipes, you’ll soon start making your Sunday evenings a bento meal prep event, as you use the time to supply your stomach for the work week ahead.

Mediterranean Bento Boxed Work Lunch

Take a trip around the globe with a bento box lunch that has a MEditerranean-inspired combination of Greek salad, hummus, pita bread (or chips), and grilled turkey breast tenderloin or chicken breast. Your palette will be satiated and satisfied with this savory, diverse collection of worldly flavors.

 Deconstructed Sushi Bento Lunch

Lean into the asian-cuisine-inspired tradition of the bento box lunch with a deconstructed sushi roll that makes it simple, healthy, and (frankly) affordable to have sushi for lunch as often as you’d like! This recipe skips the rolling by placing sushi ingredients like rice, fish (think crabmeat or shrimp) with avocado, cucumber, and sesame seeds in its own compartment. Pair the deconstructed sushi roll with edamame, seasoned cucumber, fresh fruit, and easy-to prepare miso soup for the whole experience!

Picnic Bento Boxed Work Lunch

No matter the setting of your work lunch hour, you can access all of the flavors of al fresco dining with this simple and healthy lunch that gathers traditional picnic flavors for a satisfying meal. This recipe has you filling your favorite, decorative bento lunch box with small skewers of alternating peaches, mozzarella balls, and prosciutto slices alongside cherries, bell peppers, and sunflower seeds. Top it all off with an inclusion of a tossed salad of tortellini, carot, corn, basil, oil, vinegar, and parmesan for a savory, unforgettable flavor profile.

Salmon Salad Bento Lunch

This bento box is equal parts colorful and satisfying by have you add color to your lunch all while boosting your daily serving of fruits and vegetables when you add mixed grapes, and mixed vegetables (think different colored bell peppers and sliced carrots) to your crackers and salmon salad. The Salmon salad and crackers are separated by a tasty divider of watercress with its touch stems removed, as the ingredient acts as a colorful, and tasteful barrier to your well-rounded lunch.

Egg Salad Bento Boxed Work Lunch

Lean into and embrace tradition with the lunch-time favorite, the inimitable Egg Salad with this all-american collection for your bento box. This is a hearty lunch and a snack all in one, as you’ll spoon your delectable egg salad into a lettuce bowl, keeping it presentably pretty alongside cocktail bread, crackers, and veggies. For dessert, or even just a sweet treat, toss a banana and blueberries with your favorite yogurt as a way to combine ideal flavors as well as keep your sliced banana from turning brown, adding to the Instagram-ability of this picturesque breakroom scene.

Soy-Lime Tofu and Rice Bento Lunch

As its only right to end this list with a recipe indebted to the tradition of bento boxes, this boxed work lunch recipe consists of the classic bento ingredients of rice, tofu, and vegetables. When you cook too much rice for dinner, take the extras and roll them into sesame seed-sprinkle balls for lunch. Keep your vegetables crips and vibrant by cooking them briefly and dunking them into a bath of ice water. Lastly, cube and roast your tofu to give it an ideal texture.

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Travel To America’s Natural Hot Springs

Sometimes there is little else to do with the sweltering heat of the summer sun than to lean into it by visiting the naturally-occurring, calming waters of the American hot springs for their therapeutic and medicinal benefits. Detailed in a resource article from ReserveAmerica, the following is a list of American hot springs that naturally occur in nature for you and your family to visit.

Hot Springs National Park

Located in the aptly-named, Hot Springs, Arkansas is  this National Park devoted to the titular hot springs that are supplied by steam from the 47 natural springs that rises up through vents in the street, bathing the town in a geothermal fog. Over 3,000 years ago, Native Americans discovered this city, and promptly named it the “Valley of the Vapors,” which the contemporary locals proudly appreciate. Though it can be tough to distinguish the national park from the town, since they share a name, it’s playfully suggested that visitors plan to stay a while when visiting the first-come-first-served Buckstaff bathhouse and the upscale spas of the Quapaw Baths and Spas. Rest in ancient vapors and pure opulence with this unforgettable locale.

Bagby Hot Springs

Located in Clackamas County, Oregon, this locale was discovered in 1880 and is nearly as aesthetically primitive as when the hunter Bill Bagby stumbled upon it nearly 150 years ago. This hot spring is to be found in the dense and vibrantly green Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon, and visitors will find a soothing bathhouse of private and public log tubs at the end of just a 1.4-mile hike. Open year-round, these springs are supplied with scorching 138 degree water from the main spring that fills the plumbing and tubs that Bagby made himself from the cedar wood of the surrounding forest.

Deep Creek Hot Springs

Trek out to Hesperia, California with these rewarding springs  found in the northern Mojave Desert of the San Bernardino National Forest at the end of a (albeit difficult) 2 mile hike. Though, once at the end of the hike, traversers are rewarded with the picturesque scenery of rugged desert mountains covered in scrub brush and large natural soaking pools that are surrounded by gigantic rocks and sweeping views.

Wild Willy’s Hot Springs

Don’t be deterred by the name with this California-based, primitive hot spring found in the middle of the stunning, unpopulated Mammoth Lakes area. Visitors traverse an elevated .02 mile wooden walkway alongside excellent views of grassy plains and the expansive mountains behind them. At the end of the short hike, you’ll find two shallow pools, one comfortably warm, and one deeper, hotter, and heart-shaped. If avoiding the crowds, be sure to check these out on a weekday, as the weekends can be known as a vibrant party destination.

Homestead Crater Hot Springs

If you’ve ever wished to relaxingly soak in a hot spring on the moon, you won’t be disappointed by this down-to-earth equivalent found in Midway, Utah. At Homestead Crater, you’ll find an oasis that was formed when snow from the nearby mountains of Utah seeped deep into the earth. That snow met with internal rising waters to create a 96-degree geothermal pool that sits at the bottom of a 55-foot tall beehive-shaped crater that offers an underground, otherworldly soaking experience. For the more adventurous, you can even scuba dive into the crater, as Homestead Crater is the only place in the continental United States where you can scuba dive in warm waters.

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Step into an Illustration at the Acadiana Center for the Arts

Regular patrons of the Acadiana Center for the Arts’ already minimalist cafe will be literally stepping into a monochrome drawing come October, thanks to the mind of Lafayette illustrator, Aileen Bennett. As learned from a detailed profile piece by the Advocate, Bennett’s strikingly immersive public art project will be unveiled entirely come October, and it will turn the ACA’s already nominal coffee shop into a black-and-white scene straight out of a comic strip.

While the preview piece was unveiled in August to a warm reception, it’s only the beginning as soon the entire ACA cafe will be illustrated with furniture that looks to be made of paper, a fake wedding cake, a working piano, and a very real fireplace with hand-drawn fire. The scene to be set will be very surreal to visitors of the art gallery and performance space, who are already prepared to witness imaginative experiences by walking through the glass doors of the space.

When speaking of her piece, Bennett said, “”this is literally a different world you enter. It’s like stepping inside my brain or into someone’s very posh living room with some hidden humor thrown in.”

The installation at the Acadiana Center for the Arts will be a mixture of both 3D and 2D objects, so some patrons are expected to have a slightly difficult time determining what is real and not, such as the white tables and chairs outlined in black ink set against two-dimensional backdrops alongside similarly-colored props. It’s expected that the cafe will be a different type of tourist spot attracting those searching for some quirk in the Downtown Lafayette scene.

While the rest of the Acadiana Center for the Arts is regularly utilized to great extents during film festivals, Art Walks, and other notable events of the booming social and art scene to be found in downtown Lafayette, Jaik Faulk, visual arts director of the Acadiana Center for the Arts, sees the existing cafe as being a great, though un-utilized space. He told the Advocate, “We have beautiful, tall ceilings. We have a lot of space. It’s all sunlit. It’s basically a soft box that lights itself, so it’s perfect for photography.”

While just a fragment of the installation was unveiled in August to surprise and praise by the Acadiana Center for the Arts patronage, the full extent of the project’s undertaking is quite extensive as it requires sanding and painting of all existing furniture white, then outlining it strategically in black, and sealing it all with a protective coat that’s sanitizer-friendly.

Despite Bennett wanting to do the project for years, it became apparent that it would require many more hands than hers to complete properly, so she enlisted the help of dozens of community volunteers. Laughing in her reply, Bennett tells The Advocate that her team corrects her if she refers to the venture as her project, saying, “It’s now their project. It blew me away, that there’s like 100 people who are desperate to come and sand things and paint and donate.”

The installation was funded, in part, through an ArtSpark grant, an individual Artist Funding Project offered in partnership by the Acadiana Center for the Arts and Lafayette Economic Development Authority.  The grant is designed to directly support any Acadiana artists who are expanding their bodies of work as a professional as well as offering outreach to the community.

The mesmerizing, public exhibit will be in place at the Acadiana Center for the Arts from October through January, and afterward the illustrated cafe will find another home, as the project won’t belong to Bennett or the community at that point; it will belong to the community who helped envision, build, and appreciate it.

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Nicholls Foundation Receives History Making Donation

Nicholls State University received a generous donation last month that will benefit over a dozen students and faculty pursuing educational enrichment.  As announced in August by the Nicholls Foundation in a university press release, an impressive bequest from the estate of James and Mary Alice Van Sickle (BA ‘66) will produce 10 endowed professorships and 10 or more scholarships for undergraduates, graduates, and professors alike at the prestigious university.

The Van Sickle’s generous gifts will go to the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences, with the professorships, specifically honoring Mary Alice’s mother, Mabel Bollinger Toups, a lifelong Lockport teacher. The James R. and Mary Alice Van Sickle Endowed Scholarships will range from $2,500 to $5,000 per student.

Mary Alice Van Sickle is a Lockport native who majored in English education while at Nicholls, and the gift offered by the Van Sickles is sure to honor the educational legacy of Mabel Toups. Today, James and Mary Alice live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as she retired in 2014 after a three-decade career in marketing for a landscape architectural firm in Boston.

Mary Alice was quoted as believing “ that there is no better preparation for living a full and rewarding life than through education. I hope these scholarship students will enrich their own lives through learning and will graduate with the tools that will lead to success in their chosen professions. The bequest will also allow teachers to expand their own learning opportunities through research and study, and to continue to inspire the love of learning in students by serving as positive role models.”

While the Van Sickles humbly did not wish to announce the donation amount, their gift is recognized to be the largest legacy agreement within the Nicholls Foundation’s Oaks Society, an organization, which is comprised of alumni, parents, faculty and friends making a planned gift to Nicholls State University or the closely related Nicholls Foundation.

Named after the numerous and ever-present oak trees of the Nicholls campus, membership to the Oaks Society can be granted to any individual donating in an effort to further the mission of Nicholls State University, regardless of amount. Like the nearly 50 oak trees present at the university’s founding, and still providing shade and scenery today, these planned gifts have the potential to have a lasting generational impact.

Mary Alice is extremely fond of her time spent at the university, saying, ““I have always felt that I received an outstanding education at Nicholls, which provided me with the life skills that would equip me to succeed in my chosen career. Nicholls instilled in me a true love for learning, and a curiosity about the world beyond the bayou. The bequest is my way of saying thank you. This beloved institution placed its trust in me so many years ago and provided me with a foundation of knowledge, which has nurtured me throughout my adult life.”

The Nicholls Foundation’s executive director, Jeremy Becker expressed his excitement of the VanSickle’s gift and the “tremendous impact” that it will have for “so many faculty and students at Nicholls.” The Foundation, itself, is an independent university group that supports the mission of Nicholls State University by seeking gifts and grants and managing those funds and other assets to support the school through endowed chairs, professorships, scholarships, and other enhancement offers.

If any reader is interested in learning more about The Nicholls Foundation or making a bequest to become a member of The Oaks Society, it’s suggested that they visit visit www.nichollsfoundation.org or contact Becker at 448-4006.

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