Excerpt from Louisiana Conservationist, Vol. 25: November December, 1973

Essentially, Louisiana has never been recognized for its 'cajun decoy carvers by other areas of the United States, Charles W. Frank, Jr said as we perched on a couple of stools in what best might be described as a combination workshop, decoy storage room, trophy room, and gun room. There were power tools that he uses for his contemporary decoys and shore birds, trophies from safaris to remote places in the world, and cabinets of rifles that hold special interest because they bagged those and other trophies.

The long shelves of decoys contained hundreds that he had collected in various parts of Louisiana, as well as contemporary duck decoys and other birds that he had carved.

The East Coast, the West Coast, the northern part of the Mississippi Flyway around Chicago and Detroit, were the first areas to recognize decoy carving as an art form, and persons from those areas have made tre mendons productions of the existing collections as well as dissemination of information about decoys and decoy carving, he said.

He had a quick explanation for the early interest in decoys and decoy carving that is now apparent in the deep South and gaining more attention with each passing V981 Down here, he said, because of the language barrier and the reluctance or reticence of the bayou people to talk with outsiders, everytime someone from another part of the country came down to Louisiana they met a brick wall. You can't imagine a man from Boston or New York going down on Bayou Lafourche and being at ease with these people. They simply don't communicate. There's no understanding of one for the other, so the visitors walk away saying there are no wooden decoys and no carvers down here ever produced any decoys that were good.

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