Cannon, Dietzel, etc: Charles East Papers, Mss. 3471,
Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections,
LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, LA.
Primary reason that I chose to go to LSU was because I wanted to be governor of Louisiana. But the second reason, and it was a close second, was because [laughing] . . . When we moved to Lafayette, my parents always enjoyed athletics, as did I, and the best athletics in the state of Louisiana -- you have to realize, there were no [New Orleans] Saints or anything like that back then -- was LSU athletics. Even though USL [University of Southwestern Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette] had a football team, they were kind of minor league and LSU was big stuff. So we got . . . My dad got, even though we had no connection as a family whatsoever to LSU, my father got season tickets . . . football season tickets in Tiger Stadium. And we started going to the games from the time I was . . . we started . . . We won the National Championship in 1958. We started going in ‘55 or ‘56. So I was like nine or ten years old. And Paul Dietzel was hired then. We went through some miserable seasons, and then in 1958 we win the National Championship.
And 1959 was even more exciting because that was the Billy Cannon Halloween run against Ole Miss. And I was there with my dad and my mom. I mean, that was the most unbelievable sight! You never saw sixty-seven thousand people -- except for the few thousand that were Ole Miss fans -- act as one. And you know, I mean, for one fleeting moment that whole stadium was one. I mean you could have gotten any reform in Louisiana done, you know, in that one moment. I mean, the poor Cajun mechanic from Napoleonville [Louisiana] was hugging the banker from Homer, Louisiana, in north Louisiana. I mean, people were just . . . I mean, it was unbelievable! And everybody was crying. I mean it was just unreal. So, Billy Cannon became a major hero. Well . . . And was before that night, from the time he was like a freshman or sophomore, I had big scrapbooks and everything.
We went on a field trip up to Baton Rouge; I think it was our freshman or sophomore year in high school. I can’t remember when it was. But we went up to the [State] Capitol [Building] and did all the stuff, and I had asked that we go out to LSU. We did, and they let us go into Tiger Stadium and damned if Billy Cannon wasn't coming either to or from practice and stopped with a number of us. Of course all of the kids were saying, “Oh, Roger is just going bananas!” you know and . . . And I had my . . . still have somewhere in the scrapbook, a little Instamatic photograph that one of my classmates took of me and Billy Cannon. Billy Cannon up here and me down here. He was an All-American for like three out of his four years and I think this was like his sophomore year. So he was my great hero and LSU football was my love of, you know, of hero worship kind of stuff.
-- Roger Ogden, interviewed by Pamela Dean, 1994