Adoption and Early Years
Rainach was born as William Odom in Kentwood, a rural town in Tangipahoa Parish, east of Baton Rouge. His mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1917, when Rainach was four. His father placed Rainach and three other sons in the Baptist orphanage in Lake Charles. He and a foster sister, Leona Aron Rainach, were then adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Albert M. Rainach of Summerfield.
He was such an excellent primary student that he completed grades one through four in two years. He graduated from Summerfield High School and attended Southern Arkansas University (then Southern State College) in Magnolia, Arkansas, the seat of Columbia County from 1932 to 1933. He attended Strayer's Business College in Washington, D.C., from 1935 to 1936, when he also worked for the United States government. Thereafter, he attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, but there is no record in A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography as to whether he graduated.
Rainach wanted to be a baseball player, but in 1924, he was struck by a bat and later lost his sight in one eye because of the injury. Coincidentally, one of his 1959 political rivals, Bill Dodd, did achieve his own goal of playing professional baseball for a time.
In 1939, Rainach organized the Claiborne Electric Cooperative, Inc., based in Homer, which brought the first electricity to farms in northwest Louisiana. He founded Claiborne Butane in Homer in 1945 and was the company president from 1948 to 1977. In 1967, he became the president of the Arcadia Butane Co., Inc., in Arcadia, the seat of Bienville Parish. The Rainachs lived on a 450-acre (1.8 km2) farm near Summerfield.
Read more about this topic: William M. Rainach
Famous quotes containing the words adoption, early and/or years:
“Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, “Adoption, not Abortion,” although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I taught school in the early days of my manhood and I think I know something about mothers. There is a thread of aspiration that runs strong in them. It is the fiber that has formed the most unselfish creatures who inhabit this earth. They want three things only; for their children to be fed, to be healthy, and to make the most of themselves.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)