1944 Team: Gumbo, 1944. LD3118.G8 University Archives.
We enjoyed sports. I mean football and . . . like I said, I watched LSU since I was a boy. I think our great players in those days was like . . . Well, Steve Van Buren became one of the finest players. Alvin Dark and Sulcer Harris, a local boy, were great tailbacks. Who else? Well, Abe Mickal. Abe Mickal and Jess Fatheree, that’s all that bunch came up in the thirties but . . . I was a kid watching Jess Fatheree run 102 yards on a football fake punt behind the goal line, took off for 102 yards on the football field. And Abe Mickal was one of the top players they, you know, they had. Old Huey [Long], he pulled the strings of the football players and the coaches . . . And the band. Oh, Castro [Carazo] and the band, was million dollar band.
Anybody make that trip to Austin when we played at Texas University in Austin? They put out tracks and the train coaches from here on a flatbed barge and took us across to Brusly [Louisiana]. It is on Brusly’s side. We all went on the trip to University of Texas. They took the whole band. It was quite a . . . quite a thing.
It was just like when they went the [1944] Orange Bowl [played in Miami, FL, against Texas A&M. I think they had a . . . Where was I reading where Lewis Gottlieb [City National Bank president and University supporter] leased so many cars and got some gas cans? Football team, they had to go by train because they didn’t have any gas, or any way to get them down there. But, they still went down there to the Orange Bowl.
-- Billy Heroman, interviewed by Pamela Dean, 1994