In private homes everywhere authentic information as to what the new laws would provide was available for the first time on this day. In New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Monroe, Alexandria, Shreveport, and Lake Charles the morning papers had carried full accounts of the introduction of these measures, giving the subject matter of each bill in summary form.
Thus the members of the Weiss family at last had before them full information about the measure which would displace the father of young Mrs. Weiss from the judicial position he had held continuously since before she was born. But the table talk at the senior Dr. Weiss’s home was anything but dispirited.
“My son ate heartily and joked at the dinner,” he said when referring to the occasion; and this was borne out in a statement by Yvonne’s uncle, Dr. F. Octave Pavy, who was in Baton Rouge for the session as one of St. Landry parish’s three House members.
In any case, while the gerrymander was not ignored in the Weiss family conversation, it was not looked upon as a disaster; and after dinner all five—three men named Carl Austin Weiss and the wives of the two older ones—motored to the Amite River where Dr. Weiss, Sr., had a summer camp.
Frequently on such occasions, but by no means always, Carl and Yvonne took with them the small-caliber Belgian automatic pistol he had brought back from abroad and customarily kept in his car when he went out on night calls. He and his wife would engage in target practice, shooting at cans either while these were stationary or as they floated down the placid current of the river.
But on this particular Sunday they did not bring the gun. Carl and Yvonne went swimming and had a gay time of it, while the elders, seated on the warm sand of the high bank, dandled their wonderful three-month-old grandson.
“While they were swimming,” Dr. Weiss, Sr., recalled later, “I remarked to my wife: ‘That boy is just skin and bones,’ and she said: ‘Yes, we have got to make him take a rest, he has been working too hard lately.’”
Seeing them there, that pleasant afternoon, any observer would have concluded that this was a family group whose members gave no indication of being troubled by forebodings of an impending disaster.
Obviously the wonderful baby must have had a feeding and an occasional change sometime during the afternoon, and no doubt he slept in his mother’s arms once the party tidied up the camp ground, got into the car, and headed homeward a little after sundown.
In his high apartment Huey Long, who had not left the capitol since Murphy Roden drove him to Baton Rouge from New Orleans on the previous afternoon, gathered his top legislative and political leaders for a consultation about the candidate his faction should endorse for governor. His brother Earl was not among those present, nor was he under consideration for any elective office. The breach between them stemmed from the time Earl ran for lieutenant governor on an anti-Huey ticket three years before.