Bob Hamm

A Baton Rouge newspaper once called him "the foremost commentator on the Cajun way of life." He wasn't born into it. He found it, fell in love with it, and spent the rest of his life giving it words.

Winnfield

Bob grew up in the red clay hills of North Louisiana — Winn Parish country, where Uncle Ditimus whittled sticks on the porch and sipped whiskey every twenty minutes with clockwork precision, where his grandmother reared back in her chair at the sound of a man hollering for his wife to do everything for him, and where a boy named Jimmy Lee showed up at his father's grocery store in the colored section of Alexandria one day, said "I works here," and started sweeping.

He was from Winnfield. His people were so non-demonstrative their lips didn't move when they talked. He was a redneck, in the original, unselfconscious sense of the word. He knew nothing about Cajuns. At that time, very few people anywhere did.

White Castle

When he left LSU, he went to program a little radio station in White Castle, down in Iberville Parish. The Hymels took him in. The Bajon brothers looked after him. And everything changed.

He landed in a world of swamps and bayous and oak trees, and it was a different world from the hard red hills and pine trees he'd come from. It produced a different breed of people.

He found a people who were volatile, animated, prolific, witty. Religion wasn't something that happened on Sunday but was woven into everything — they began the shrimp season and the cane planting by invoking God's blessing, then went and played bourrée in the churchyard. Their homes were full of crucifixes and holy pictures and statuary. They were overwhelmingly Catholic, but it was their own brand of Catholicism, adapted during generations of isolation when missionary priests came only a few times a year.

The food was the best in the civilized world, and parts of east Texas. The language was a third English, half French, and a third something he could only describe as a melodic babel — a linguistic jambalaya he fell in love with. Within a week he'd quit talking like a boy from Winnfield and was saying mais yeah and cher little heart and poo-yi and comment c'est dit, boug.

He wanted to know where these people came from. He couldn't learn it from them. If any of the Hymels or Bajons knew the story of their origins, they didn't find it interesting enough to talk about. So he researched it himself, and never stopped.

The Acadian Story

What he found was one of the great untold stories in American history. The Acadians were the first North American colonists — their first permanent colony in 1604, three years before Jamestown. Hardy people from Brittany, Normandy, and Picardy who settled in what they called Acadie, in present-day Nova Scotia.

When the British took over after Queen Anne's War, they couldn't govern the Acadians. The French before them couldn't either. The Acadians simply would not swear allegiance or bear arms against other Frenchmen or their friends the Indians. Queen Anne herself granted them freedom of religion, but after her death, the British governors grew harsher.

Then came Governor Lawrence — a man Bob described, with characteristic precision, as "a black-hearted, white-livered, back-biting sidewinder." Lawrence assembled the Acadians under false pretenses, surrounded them with soldiers, and announced that their lands, cattle, and all their belongings were forfeited to the crown. The men were arrested. As the families were driven from their farms, the buildings were burned to the ground.

The object was genocide. They were packed into cargo boats like cattle, ill-equipped to survive a brutal winter at sea. In New York, an account described them as "poor, naked and destitute." In Pennsylvania, three ships weren't allowed to dock — over half died of smallpox aboard. In Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, the freedom-loving forefathers who had fought the British for independence forced all Acadians under 21 into indentured servitude. The governor of Virginia wouldn't accept them. Only one in ten refugees sent to the Carolinas survived. In Georgia, they dropped the euphemism entirely and sold them as slaves.

Yet somehow, many survived. They heard of a place called Louisiana, populated by the French, where they might find their brothers. They made it to New Orleans — and found that the Creole French nobility wanted nothing to do with these country farmers.

It took a Spaniard, Governor O'Reilly, to finally open the doors. He gave them land grants in the harsh swamps and coastal marshes of Southwest Louisiana. They arrived after a brutal, horrible, terrifying experience, and — as Bob put it — "it was like they looked around and said, 'Okay, I'm through with that.'"

And they were. They didn't pass along animosity toward the British. They didn't keep the ugly memories alive. They went on with their lives. Bob found this remarkable. His own grandfather was Irish, and kept anger toward the British that was passed down through generations until the day he died. The Cajuns just let it go.

Lafayette and the Airwaves

Bob moved to Lafayette and went into broadcasting. He became news director at KATC TV-3. He was good at it — quick, funny, able to make live television feel like a conversation. When the anchorman's wife had a baby, Bob ad-libbed the announcement on the evening news: "Larry tried to report on the situation and started off with, 'Good ladies evening and gentlemen of the audio radiance.' So we let him off tonight to pass out cigars. Or just pass out, maybe."

The Writer

Away from the cameras, he wrote. He wrote for newspapers and magazines starting in the 1950s, long before Cajun was fashionable. He wrote about Cajuns before it was cool. Before, in fact, it was even warm.

Somewhere along the line, he wrote a piece called "What Is a Cajun?" — a poem that became the classic description of a people who had never been properly described. It was reprinted in hundreds of publications at home and abroad. Eventually it was published as a print for framing or decoupage.

Then he added a pair of companion poems: "A Cajun Toast" and "A Cajun Prayer." This trilogy, in print form, sold over 100,000 copies each — at 75 cents apiece.

He wrote the "Cajun Nursery Rhymes for Adults," a gift book that sold 10,000 copies before the rest of the world had even discovered Cajuns.

The Performer

His first performing work was writing material for Bud Fletcher, who performed as Cyprienne Robespierre — one of the great Cajun comedy acts. When Bud passed away, another performer, Justin Wilson, became the king of Cajun humor, but he got so successful he was too expensive for many events.

So Bob stepped in himself, performing as "Nonc Robert" — Uncle Robert — editor of the Passe Pas Rien Gazette, the newspaper of a fictional Cajun town whose slogan was: "Everyone in Passe Pas Rien knows what everyone else is doing. Just read to see if they got caught."

Audiences were surprised that their Cajun humorist turned out to be a redneck fellow from Winnfield. He wrote a poem explaining how he became a Redneck Cajun.

He sold an audio tape called "Nonc Robert Live" at his appearances for ten dollars — six dollars by mail. It included live performance of the Cajun jokes and stories, a brief history of the Cajuns, and a little Cajun music. "It's good stuff," he wrote in a direct mail letter to dealers. He wasn't wrong.

232-HELP

For 28 years, Bob served as executive director of the Southwest Louisiana Education and Referral Center — better known by its phone number, 232-HELP. It was the state's first comprehensive community referral center in health and social services, established in Lafayette in 1965.

It wasn't a bureaucratic job. When a 13-year-old girl named Nikki, born with Down syndrome, needed medical care her family couldn't afford, Bob coordinated volunteer support from the community — doctors, specialists, neighbors. When the calls hit 95,109 in a single year, he wrote the annual report himself. He treated every case like it mattered, because to him it did.

The PR Man

Bob did public relations for anyone and anything that served Louisiana. He handled PR for LAGCOE — the Louisiana Gulf Coast Oil Exposition — for over a decade, turning trade show press releases into stories people actually wanted to read. He promoted the Acadian Village and its Cajun Heritage Festival until it ranked in the Southeast's Top 20 events. He wrote profiles of Petroleum Helicopters, Inc. — the world's largest commercial helicopter operator, right there in Lafayette — and made 298 helicopters and 700 pilots sound like a neighbor's story worth telling.

He also served as editorial editor for the Lafayette Daily Advertiser, writing columns and editorials while continuing his consulting work.

What He Left Behind

Bob gave the Cajun people words for who they were at a time when they'd been told to be ashamed of it. In 1921, Louisiana had made it illegal to speak French in schools. Children were punished for speaking their parents' language. An entire culture was told it was backward, inferior, something to be hidden.

Bob — a redneck from Winnfield who wasn't even Cajun — saw what everyone else was too close to see. He saw a people with a heritage worth celebrating, a humor worth sharing, and a story worth telling. So he told it. In newspapers, on television, on stage, in framed prints that hung in 100,000 Louisiana homes.

He didn't just write about Cajun culture. He helped people see it as something to be proud of.