Instructions from above

Now that the high-tech, multi-million-dollar, Super Pac-driven campaign for governor is over, you’ll probably notice the contrast in this story about campaigning a couple of decades ago.
I first wrote about it long ago enough that there is still some black in my hair in the photo accompanying the column. It’s a story that was told to me by Lafayette advertising executive Dick Barras. He got it from one of his old friends, the late political guru Pat Killeen, who swore that it was true.
As I reported back then, it was election time in St. Landry Parish and this fellow came to Killeen with a problem. The man wanted to support a political candidate among his farmer friends, but he didn’t know how to reach them.
“I want to get the message to the farmers,” he told Killeen, “but I’m not sure how. They don’t read the newspapers, they get up before the morning news, and they go to bed without watching television. How can I get to them?”
Killeen, who had a reputation as an innovative campaign director, came up with a solution. “Here’s what you do,” he said. “Rent a crop duster’s airplane, fly over the fields, drop leaflets, and talk to the farmers on a bull horn.”
That much of the story is easy enough to believe. The rest of it sounds to my ear like it might have some embellishment.
As Killeen related the story, the next week a farmer ran into the house from the field.
“Momma, get the truck,” he hollered, “We’ve got to go to town, now!”
“Mais, cher,” said the wife, “what’s going on? What’s got you so excited?”
“God just spoke to me,” said the farmer.
“God just spoke to you?”
“I was plowing in the field and the voice of God spoke to me from the sky,” he said again.
“And what did God tell you, cher?”
“He told me to vote for Armand Brinkhaus.”
I was reminded of the story last week, when Armand, who represented St. Landry in the legislature for nearly 30 years, found a clipping of the old column and sent it to me. That gave me the opportunity to get from the horse’s mouth just how much of the story Killeen or Barras made up.
Armand says most of it is mostly true.
“In my first campaign [in 1968], my childhood friend Curtis Sibille, who owned a plane, suggested in a campaign strategy session that he could fly his plane and drop leaflets as well as mount a loudspeaker onto the plane and make announcements about my campaign,” Armand wrote in an e-mail. “My classmate, his cousin, Frederick Sibille, would fly with him and dump the handbills and make announcements. To avoid the announcement being garbled up it would just be ‘VOTE BRINKHAUS’ as they flew over.”
The plane was “somewhere near Melville” according to Armand’s recollection, and all was going well, but then the plane banked too sharply and “whole bundles of 500 [leaflets] dropped, but did not open.
“This made cattle and horses run, and when people stopped working to see what the commotion was about they heard coming from the sky the announcement to ‘Vote for Brinkhaus.’ Since they did not see anything above, it had to be from God.
“Logical, right?
“Some went in to town to tell about it and others went inside, I guess to pray or spread the word or maybe just to get out of the way,” Armand wrote. “Back in town the stories of what had been heard created quite a stir. Of course, the fame of it all spread far and wide, and it was true.”
I don’t know just how much the instructions from on high had to do with it, but Brinkhaus did win that election and more than a few more. He served in the Louisiana House of Representatives from 1968 to 1976 and the Louisiana Senate from 1976 to 1996.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.