LaCour overcomes disability with optimism By Tom Kelly On March 18, 2002, Darman Dean (D.D.) LaCour, of the Cotile Lake community near Boyce in Rapides Parish, was the up and going manager of Southland Tires, a company in Alexandria serving the logging and construction industry, as well as private customers. Farm-raised as a youth, he made it a point of pride that he did not miss work, no matter what. The following day, March 19, was a Tuesday. In the afternoon, his wife, Jackie, suggested they go out and get a sandwich for supper, since she had been working outdoors and did not feel like cooking. He agreed, and started to get dressed. As he leaned forward to pull on his socks, a sharp stabbing pain hit him in the lower left leg, bending him over in severe hurt, like nothing he was familiar with. In the subsequent diagnosis and treatment, D.D. was discovered to have a blood clot in his leg, and an amputation was done below the knee. More problems arose--including kidney failure, and a second amputation, above the knee. For a man accustomed to physical work from his childhood, the independence of successful self-employment as a heavy equipment contractor, and finally the responsibility of an executive position with a comfortable salary with new vehicle furnished yearly, D.D. found himself upon his gradual recovery to be unemployable, on disability, and in a state of mental depression. "Then one day I woke up, and realized, 'I didn't ask for this, and I'm not going back to where I was before. So, I'll make it with what I've got'," he said during an interview at his well-equipped farm shop on Gwen Parkway, not far from the Cotile Lake Recreation Area a few miles off Interstate 49 north of Boyce. I met D.D. in his shop, located outside the back door of his home, and noted at once the array of rolling stock, including five farm tractors, a plow, and five scooter chairs--one with "dually" rear wheels which he built and mounted when the single wheel model bogged down in the sandy soil around his four-acre "farm." Inside, the shop is equipped with a two-ton chain hoist, walls neatly arranged with a variety of power and hand tools, a home-built stove-pipe heater, chain saws, plus photographs of equipment which he has restored to show-room quality for himself and friends. D.D. and Jackie live in a comfortable home just up the street from Dr. and Mrs. Jay Huner, who put me in touch with D.D., mentioning that he is often favored with fresh vegetables from D.D.'s gardens--plural. Dr. Huner is the author of the bird features which appear regularly in The Piney Woods Journal. When I visited, he was off on a field trip to Cameron Parish on the Louisiana coast to check on a group of Whooping Cranes--but that's a story he'll write another time. Jackie and Judy, Mrs. Huner, were out together on a shopping trip while D.D. and I talked, returning with their day's haul as I was leaving. D.D. has his garden plots divided into five spaces scattered strategically around the rambling tree-studded lot, and rotates the planting to keep a fairly constant flow of produce. He built a chicken yard at the back of the lot, where he maintains a flock of 20 laying hens, which provide eggs for the neighborhood. D.D., who is coming up soon on 71, says he enjoys taking garden produce and eggs around the sprawling neighborhood for the "old people" who are his neighbors. "They enjoy getting it, and I like to give," he said. He says he comes out from the house at around 6:30 in the morning, works around the shop and the gardens until around 6 p.m., when he goes in. Among his activities before I arrived, he said, was climbing a ladder to do something which I have forgotten, but he assured me and I don't doubt, that he can shinny up a ladder with one leg better than I can with two. He was raised on a farm and attended school in nearby Grant parish, picking and hoeing cotton for $3.00 a day, plus fifty cents extra he got for sharpening the hoes. He and his wife, the former Jackie Vercher, have children from prior marriages, he a daughter who is marketing director for Mid South Orthopaedics in Alexandria, she a son who is chairman of an AFL-CIO union in Kansas City. As we spoke, D.D. tried to call his 20-year-old billygoat, Bill, over, to offer him a chew of tobacco, but it seems that Bill had already raided the pouch on the back of D.D.'s scooter chair. Bill moseyed around the back yard as we visited, carrying a sandwich board sign promoting "Chuck Wagner for Sheriff" of Rapides Parish. His man made it to the runoff. "We'll win it yet," D.D. said with confidence. |