Dear Editor:

We have lost another of the citizens who helped build Bogalusa, at least during its second 50 years.

I am referring, of course, to Rand (R.R.) Porter, civil engineer and an extraordinary gentleman, who left us recently.

Mr. Porter served in the Philippines during the Korean War, under the difficult and rather primitive conditions that the South Pacific offered to our troops during that time, and then was able to enroll at LSU under the G.I. Bill, which enabled the education of many of his and my generation. I was there as an undergraduate during much of his time there.

He earned an engineering degree at a time when the college of engineering and the university itself were at what I would consider their crest.

As an engineer and surveyor, he spent much of his working life hacking his way through briers and yellow jacket nests, making accurate findings of distances, base points and bearings, without the help of range finders, global positioning devices, computers or anything more electronic than a slide rule and logarithm tables. His work was excellent.

His reputation rivaled that of the legendary Tom Pigott, who laid off the right of way of the railroad and helped the Goodyears establish the world’s greatest sawmill and our city itself.

When lawyers find a Porter plat in the land records, we are comforted by the knowledge that we know we are on safe ground.

He was a wonderful citizen, engineer, husband and father, and will be missed.

John N. Gallaspy

Bogalusa