Beloved newspaperman Henri Clay Bienvenu dies at 82

Henri Clay Bienvenu was born in 1941, but his story really begins over half a century earlier, around 1886, with a 12-year-old kid tacking obituary notices to telegraph poles in St. Martinville, notices that he had printed himself on a small hand press in the offices of a brand-new newspaper called the Weekly Messenger.
The kid was Lazaire E. Bienvenu, Henri’s grandfather. Lazaire’s older brother, Albert, started the paper with another fellow, but by the time he was 20, Lazaire was running it. He was followed by his son, Marcel (“Blackie”), who was followed by his son, Henri. Along the way, the name was changed to Teche News.
When Henri was growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s, St. Martinville was like Mayberry and surrounding St. Martin Parish was the epitome of the Sportsman’s Paradise. Henri’s sister Marcelle Bienvenu, famous for her books on Cajun and Creole cuisine, said their childhood “was always some big adventure.” They roughed it in various campsites around Catahoula Lake, had to melt the ice from the coffee pot in their duck camp near Gueydan, fished and swam in Bayou Teche.
Henri, who was a few years older, was often charged with bringing Marcelle along as he and his chums roamed the nearby woods and fields. 
“One time they were practicing their boy scout knots and they tied me up and left me in a cane field,” she said. “Their knots held just fine but they forgot where they left me.”
Blackie had to call the sheriff’s office to turn out a search party, by then after dark.
“But Henri was a good little guy,” she said. “He was no trouble at all.”
Like his father and grandfather, he started working at the newspaper at a young age. His lifelong friend Ray Pellerin (who followed his own father’s footsteps into the funeral home business) remembers Henri running around tacking funeral notices to the telephone poles, just like his grandfather. As a teenager, he fed lead to the Linotype machine and ran the presses.
But by all accounts, Henri did not want to be a newspaperman. He majored in business administration at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, where he met another St. Martin Parish luminary, Paul Hardy, former lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and state senator. 
“Henri was Mr. Cool at USL,” Paul said. “He had a BMW Isetta,” (A one-cylinder four-wheel covered motor scooter with the door in front and no reverse.) “but it was a car. Nobody else had a car. Gas cost him 68 cents a week, he told me. And he even double-dated in it one time!”
Paul met Henri through Phi Kappa Theta, where Henri had risen to president. They lived in a fraternity house on Jefferson Street, roomed together in fact.
“Henri, who was a year older, appointed me to my first responsible position, he made me housemother! Ten fraternity rats and a bulldog!” (PKT at the time housed the university’s mascot, Gee.) “And I’m responsible for keeping the place clean. It was a long time before I sought another responsible position, I can tell you,” Paul said.
Someone else Henri met at USL was Maria Comeaux of Lafayette. They met on a blind date in 1962, and married when Henri got out of Officer Candidate School, a newly minted second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. They began married life at the former Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, in North Carolina, where he served as an artillery officer.
“We liked the life,” Maria said. “Fort Bragg had lots of activities. There were seven golf courses, seven officers’ clubs. And even back then, we both loved to travel.”
The couple had decided to make the Army a career, until they came to the confluence of two events in the spring of ‘66. The war in Vietnam was ratcheting up, and Henri was fast approaching the time for him to re-up or end his tour of active duty. One by one they saw their friends being separated, wife and kids going home to family, husband moving in with Henri and Maria in their spacious triple-wide trailer until they received orders to ship out.
“Henri didn’t know what to do,” Maria said. “He called his father for advice, and Blackie said ‘Come on home, Son. I need you here.’
Thus, Henri became the fourth Bienvenu to head up St. Martin Parish’s journal of record. But that’s far from the end of the story. Henri and Maria went on to have four daughters, a son, and 18 grandchildren. But Henri was also married to the Teche News.
“Many, many times he would come home in the evening, watch the news on TV, eat supper, and then go back to work until eight or eight-thirty,” said Henri’s son, Gerard.
He remained in the Army Reserves for a couple of years, commanding a combat engineer company in Lafayette and rising to the rank of captain before his separation from military service. One of those quiet, steady fellows whose words have weight, Henri became a pillar of the community, serving as president of the Jaycees and the Rotary Club, and lending valuable editorial space to any number of civic projects. 
Up the road in Breaux Bridge, his old friend Ray Pellerin turned to Henri when he needed help with one of his many endeavors, like a parish-wide fire-fighting district, or an annual Christmas boat parade.
“Any project I ever did, Henri was right there,” said Ray. “Anything he could be involved in, he didn’t have to be asked twice.”
One might expect a business administration graduate and former commanding officer to be a good business manager, but it turned out that Henri also inherited a good nose for news. And sports. Following Blackie’s lead, he penned what became the first thing many Teche News subscribers turned to, his newsy, gossipy, and often dryly humorous column “Pense Donc!!”, which, after Blackie’s death, incorporated his beloved “This & That...” column. 
Perhaps because Maria became a teacher, Henri took a special interest in education, covering the St. Martin Parish School Board until he died. Burton Dupuis, whose many roles in St. Martin Parish’s civic scene included a stint at superintendent of schools back in the 1980s, remembers Henri as a very thorough and accurate reporter.
“Before my first meeting, my secretary told me to expect a phone call from Henri at 8 o’clock on Thursday morning,” Burton said. “And sure enough, at 8 o’clock, Henri was on the phone asking questions about the agenda. The school board didn’t always share the details, but that wasn’t going to stop him.”
Burton instructed his staff to give Henri the same packet of information board members got, a practice that continues to this day.
Henri also became a first-class news photographer, perfecting the art of tasteful, girl-next-door cheesecake in the monthly “Bayou Belle” feature whose subjects constitute an honored sorority in St. Martin Parish.
His impactful coverage of Mardi Gras, the Crawfish Festival, La Grande Boucherie helped them to thrive and put St. Martin Parish on the map.
His old friend and former roomie Paul Hardy continued to subscribe to and read the Teche News long after he moved permanently to Baton Rouge.
“I’d call people back home and tease them, telling them about one thing or another, and they’d say, ‘How do you know that?’ It’s in the Teche News, I’d say. If you want to know what’s going on, you gotta read the Teche News!”
Henri semi-retired in 2007, but he continued to cover the school board, and high school football, and write “Pence Donc!!” (translates as ‘Think About It!’), and of course shoot “Bayou Belle.” He had some health issues, heart surgery, cancer, but he kept on keepin’ on, until that Monday morning when he couldn’t make it to his desk without pausing to catch his breath. He was 82.
Henri’s gone, and it’s not just the end of a line of talented and dedicated newspapermen. In some ways it’s the end of an era.