From crafting museum dioramas to aggravating Elvis, Caddo Parish woman lives more than a century of local history

Lucy Dell Herring Trusty was born on a cotton farm on the banks of the Red River on Dec. 19, 1917.

The world was just getting used to the idea of automobiles and telephones. Rural folks took their wagons to church; a trip to Shreveport meant a ride on the train.

World War I was not over. Decades later Trusty would be at the Strand Theatre when World War II started, and she would be called upon to make uniforms for servicemen at a local garment factory.

Television had not been invented. Neither Elvis Presley—who she would get to know in downtown Shreveport—nor rock ‘n’ roll had been born. Women did not have the right to vote, and man had not walked on the moon.

A lot of history—and life—lay ahead for Trusty, who turned 105 this holiday season.

An easygoing, engaged conversationalist, she describes herself as “an ordinary person, born and raised in the country” and remembers many details of more than a century of life in Caddo Parish. Trusty, the widow of James William “Jay” Trusty, is known as “Aunt Dell” to most and lives with extended family in Shreveport.

A life rooted on a Caddo Parish farm

From the day she was born to Virginia Bounds Herring and Bill Herring, she became part of a quiet family that taught her lessons that would see her through the decades. Her mother was a gentle person, her father a quiet prankster. “They meant everything to me,” she said in an interview. A key lesson she learned? “Be yourself and let everyone else be theirs.”

With three sisters and a brother, all now gone, life on the farm was one of hard work, family and community. As a youngster, she picked cotton, harvested corn and stripped sugar cane to make syrup, a delicacy with her mother’s biscuits. “Our main family income was from cotton,” she said. “I picked a lot of cotton. It wasn’t a very pleasant job.”

They also raised pigs, cows and chickens, lived in a house without indoor plumbing and bathed in a washtub in the yard. They bought blocks of ice to keep their eggs, milk and butter—churned at home—cold. Laundry was done by hand. “We had a rubboard to wash our clothes and would put them in boiling water, rinse them and hang them to dry.”

The area 4H Club would bring a canner in, and the women would help each other put up food. “We never went hungry. When we went to town, we sold eggs or traded them for merchandise at the country store.”

When they weren’t doing chores, the children played with handmade toys and games and had a “pretend house” where they cooked potatoes over an open fire. As they grew, entertainment moved to the river. “We kids had lots of parties on the sandbars along the banks of the Red River,” Trusty said. “My cousins lived all around us…We would take a gallon bucket of eggs and have an egg boiling. We would roast a chicken on a spit. Someone would have a guitar, and we’d have cake, dance and sing.”

Getting from place to place

As a girl, she attended church in Mira, a trip usually made by wagon. “Everywhere we went we had to hitch up a team—and then had to tie them up so they wouldn’t wander off.” When the wagon wasn’t available, “a lot of us” walked five miles there, with “a five-mile walk back unless someone gave us a ride in their wagon.”

To go back and forth to Plain Dealing, across the river in Bossier Parish, the family took the Miller’s Bluff Ferry, and a trip to Shreveport meant riding the Texas and Pacific Railroad. “We called it ‘Tiptoe and Push’ because it was slow,” she said with a smile.

It was that train that brought her father to Shreveport to buy his first automobile. He did not know how to drive and told the salesman: “Take me to the city limits and show me how this thing works.”

The ‘new’ Hosston High School, class of ’38

Trusty went to elementary and middle school in a one-room schoolhouse—and graduated from “the new Hosston High School” in 1938, after being held back a grade during a bout with blindness. “When I was about 8, I lost my sight,” she said. “I woke up and I couldn’t see…My life wasn’t very good as far as seeing.”

Off to the city

Trusty moved to Shreveport in 1939 with her younger sister Lorene and held a variety of jobs, which would bring her right up against history:

—Through a federal New Deal program during the Great Depression, she lived in a dorm at the Louisiana Fairgrounds and sculpted historic wax dioramas for the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum, drawing upon her farm experience to get the small figures as accurate as possible.

—During World War II, she made $20 a week sewing uniforms for soldiers. “I made buttonholes in shirts, 780 shirts a day, seven buttonholes per shirt…”

—In a job at the Joy Theater “in bustling downtown Shreveport,” she regularly encountered Presley, performing at the Louisiana Hayride in those days. “I could take him or leave him. He was just someone I could aggravate,” she said with a twinkle in her eyes. “Elvis came in the theater every day because it was hot outside… He was always telling me that one day he was going to buy a pink Cadillac and drive up to the theater in it. Well, one day he came running into the theater, grabbed me by the arm and says, ‘Come on.’ Outside the theater was a pink Cadillac.” “Who’d you borrow it from?” Trusty teased him.

A country girl at heart

As she approaches 105, Trusty enjoys life, including a recent family trip to Branson, Mo., to celebrate her birthday. “I like to be doing something,” she said.

And she still relies on lessons learned on the farm. “You know how country girls are. We were brought up to do our best.”

This article originally appeared on Shreveport Times: Meet the Louisiana woman who just turned 105