“Dr. Maes had been called, I have forgotten by whom, and he was asked to fly to Baton Rouge as Huey Long had been shot; a chartered plane would be waiting for him at the New Orleans airport, and a highway car at the one in Baton Rouge. He asked me to go with him to assist him if he had surgery to do, and I told him there was no sense in flying to Baton Rouge, because I could drive him there in the time it would take to drive out to the New Orleans airport, and then, after the flight, from the Baton Rouge airfield to the hospital. This proved to be not right.
“We were in my car and I was driving. The road then ran beside the old O-K Interurban Line tracks, and just outside of Metairie an S-curve crossed the tracks, a black-top road with graveled shoulders. Just before we entered this S-curve another car, coming from the opposite direction, swept through it and put its bright lights right into my eyes. I was going about forty-five or fifty. I was not racing, in other words, but I got my right wheel into the loose gravel of the shoulder, and ended up skidding completely around and facing back in the direction of New Orleans on the old gravel road beyond the S-curve.
“My differential housing was caught on the high center of this old gravel road, with only one rear wheel on the ground. We did no damage to the car, but with only one wheel on the ground, a car is helpless. We finally flagged someone driving back toward New Orleans and asked him to send a wrecker to pull us back on the road. Actually they sent only a truck, but it took us off the high center and then we went on. I should say we lost not more than half an hour, but I think we would not have reached Baton Rouge until after the operation even if we had not met with this accident.
“We did not have permission to use the completed but not yet opened Airline Highway beyond Kenner, so I took the old River Road. As we finally drove into Baton Rouge, there wasn’t a soul in sight, aside from a policeman or two. No one was abroad on the streets; lights in the houses, yes, but no people or cars on the streets. To outward appearances, it was the most deserted community I ever saw, and going to Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium we had to drive right through the center of town.
“At the hospital we were met by highway police, identified ourselves, which was required, and then we were conducted to the entrance where someone else took us up to the ward where Huey had been placed....”
Word of the shooting of Huey Long had spread through the capitol’s corridors and offices with almost explosive speed. The minute she heard the report, Lucille May Grace (Mrs. Fred Dent in private life), Register of the State Land Office, tried to telephone Dr. Clarence Lorio, who, though not Senator Long’s physician, was one of his closest friends in the Baton Rouge area. Mrs. Dent (since deceased) was devoted to Huey Long, for he had supported her father for re-election to the office of Land Register, a post which he held for more than thirty years. Upon her father’s death Long appointed her to serve in Mr. Grace’s stead for the unexpired balance of his term, since she had been his principal assistant almost from the very day she was graduated from Louisiana State University.
Since she had retained, and even added to, her father’s tremendous personal following among the voters, Huey decided at the end of her term of office in 1932 to put her name on the Allen slate, which would carry his imprimatur as the “Complete-the-Work” ticket. Hoping to induce Long to rescind this decision, one or another of the rival aspirants spread a completely baseless rumor to the effect that Mrs. Dent’s ancestry was tainted with a touch of Negro blood.
Huey Long’s almost obsessive response to this sort of aspersion was a matter of common knowledge; it is only because what ensued may have some bearing on the motive behind the assassination that this particular incident is worth giving in some detail.
Though he had already consented to put the name of Lucille May Grace on the slate that would carry his endorsement, he lost no time in retracting this agreement, and made it crystal clear forthwith that unless she could show to his complete satisfaction that the rumor which had gained considerable circulation was without even the semblance of a foundation, he would place another’s name on the ticket for the position she, and before her her father, had held.
Miss Grace, the niece of an Iberville parish priest, enlisted the latter’s aid and that of the late John X. Wegmann, a universally respected New Orleans insurance man and perhaps the foremost Catholic layman in Louisiana at the time. Thus birth and baptismal records going back for generations along the Grace family tree were produced, and they conclusively demonstrated the utter falsity of the canard. Satisfied, Long restored her name at once to his personally approved “Complete-the-Work” ticket of candidates, headed by the name of Oscar K. Allen for governor.