Cecil R. Blair - Blair's Legacy and Obituary

Blair's Legacy and Obituary

Blair put his entomological skills to use with his successful Blair Laboratories pesticide business, which he operated for many years in Alexandria. Daughter Rebecca Tisdale said that her father was too independent to work for others; so he chose self-employment in farming and pesticides. She said that her father struggled as a youth and was dismissed as "white trash" because of his poverty. Such obstacles made him exceptionally determined to succeed: he was the kind of man who could not easily accept rejection. His life story fits the Horatio Alger mode. Ironically, he would years later serve in the Senate with another Catahoula Parish native, the anti-Long J.C. "Sonny" Gilbert of Sicily Island.

Blair was active in community affairs, having been a former president of the Alexandria-Pineville Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanis Club. In the late 1950s, while he was returning from church with his family when the Blairs resided in the Paradise community, he once saved from drowning two young men that he saw floundering in the Red River from an overturned boat.

Blair, who had smoked cigars since he was a teenager, died of heart failure at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston. He had undergone open-heart surgery for a valve replacement. While he appeared to have recovered from the surgery itself, his systems shut down thereafter. Politicos from throughout central Louisiana attended the funeral, including legendary attorney Camille F. Gravel, Jr., Rapides Parish Sheriff William Earl Hilton, then Alexandria Mayor Randolph, who had ended Blair's Senate career, and District Attorney James "Jam" Downs, the son of Blair's old rival C.H. Downs.

The Reverend Larry Taylor, pastor of Blair's Emmanuel Baptist Church, said that the first time he met Blair he thought that he had seen "a figure who had stepped out of the pages of southern literature." Taylor lamented that "Even someone with a heart as big as Cecil R. Blair's couldn't keep going forever. Cecil had a big heart that finally gave out."

Cecil and Susie Blair are interred at Greenwood Memorial Park in Pineville.