Jennifer Abraham: Tell us a little bit about going to the [1944] Orange Bowl your freshman year.
Charles Barney: Oh, what a great trip that was. That was really magnificent and . . . We played Texas A&M in the Orange Bowl. Texas A&M . . . I had three or four buddies that I knew before I went to LSU that went to A&M. And we kidded each other real harshly, you know. We . . . It was all in fun, but we kidded each other about the spirit of competitiveness between Texas A&M and LSU, which still exists today. And I . . . If I wrote him a letter, I would tell him things like, well, “You sloppy guys over there,” and, “You’re not getting an education, you’re getting a free ride,” joking, of course. And they’d do the same thing for me. But we were . . . We were real close friends. And so when we wound up be . . . winning our conference and they won their conference, and we wound up in the Orange Bowl, I . . . We had to win. That’s all there was to it. We had to beat A&M. And we beat ‘em good. [laughter]
Abraham: Okay. You’ve got to tell us a little bit about the game itself.
C. Barney: The game was a great game. I don’t remember the exact score but I think we won . . .
Frances Barney: Let me see.
C. Barney: . . . fourteen. Yeah, she’s got the record . . .
F. Barney: It’s on the banner.
C. Barney: . . . so there’s no need to be guessing. But it was a low-scoring game. And we had Y.A. Tittle and Jimmy Cason and Charlie Barney, who played a lot of the time, not all of the time. Joe Reid. Quite a few prominent, later professional players. And we beat them Aggies! [all laugh] And I think that it was a good game. I think, I don’t know, the score may have been twelve or fourteen to seven, or something like that. It was very good.
Abraham: So it was a defensive struggle, then, if it was . . . ?
C. Barney: Quite a bit. Quite a bit, yeah, which was unusual for us because we had some great offensive players in Y.A. Tittle and Steve Van Buren. We made the . . . We had to go all the way down the field and we made a touchdown.
Abraham: What kind of . . . Was it a running or a passing?
C. Barney: Passing, primarily. Y.A. Tittle and his passing and . . . Oh, no, no, no. Steve ran quite a bit of that. So it was both. It was a mixture.
Abraham: So he ran it to get down there, and then maybe it was a pass to get in the end zone?
C. Barney: Well, it took . . . probably took five minutes of play to do . . . to win the game. And in five minutes, you can do a lot of . . . run a lot of different plays, you know. But, anyway, that’s . . . We won it. We won the game [all laughing]. We beat them Aggies.
Abraham: Well how did you . . . How did you celebrate?
C. Barney: Oh, boy. [laughs] We really celebrated. I hate . . .
Merilyn Barney: Anything you can tell? No? Okay.
C. Barney: No. There’s nothing that . . . We went back to . . . We went back to Baton Rouge immediately. I think we went back on the train that night, so we didn’t do any celebrating. But when we got back to Baton Rouge, we did some celebrating. We really did it well. We enjoyed it. It was fun. And we had a crowd meeting us at the train station. And, you know, it was . . . It was inspirational. It was very nice.
-- Charles Barney, with wife, Frances, and daughter, Merilyn
interviewed by Jennifer Abraham, 2007