Smiley Anders for October 24, 2009

• By SMILEY ANDERS
• Advocate columnist
• Published: Oct 24, 2009 - Page: 1B

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Dear Smiley: In the late 1960s, the Air Force sent my friend Bill Brown, who now lives in Boyce, to Northwestern State University to take several classes.

Bill is from Wausau, Wis., and while at Northwestern he had boiled crawfish for the first time.

Bill says the roadside ditches in Wausau were crawling with crawfish, but people there did not know they were edible.

In fact, they were so ignorant of crawfish they called them “crabs.” (OK, remember this is the ’60s and they were Yankees, so we should spot them the short yardage.)

When Bill went home on leave, he and some of his friends netted a large number of crawfish and Bill introduced his friends to a Louisiana-style crawfish boil.

Four years later, upon his being discharged from the service, his parents brought him to a local neighborhood restaurant.

What was on the menu? You guessed it, boiled crawfish.

It did not take those folks in Wausau long to learn all they needed to know about crawfish.

HOWELL ANDREWS
Baton Rouge

Silly syllable
Dear Smiley: We moved to Louisiana from Chicago when my daughter was 6 years old.

She had a first-grade teacher with a very strong Southern accent.

One day Maddie came home with her graded spelling test, and she had missed the word “smile.” She had spelled it “smiole.”

I asked why she spelled it that way, since we had practiced her spelling words all week and she knew how to spell it.