LHS Sports Hall of Fame 2019
T Barrett Porter
The Leesville High School Alumni Association is pleased to announce that Mr. T. Barrett (T-Berry) Porter is the 2019 inductee into the Leesville High School Sports Hall of Fame. Mr. Porter is a 1945 graduate of Leesville High school. While at LHS T-Berry lettered in football and played in the marching band. As one might imagine, life was very different in Leesville and at LHS during the early 1940s.
Since World War II was being fought while T-Berry was in high school, gas was rationed until the end of the war in May 1945. Mr. Porter recalls that his family hauled garbage during the gas rationing period and thus earned more stamps for gas than many others. His mother, therefore, would drive to the away games, carrying five of the starters; the coach, Bill Turner, would carry the others. Once, while traveling to DeQuincy to play, one of the vehicles had a flat tire near Ragley. The team was picked up by a man driving a stump truck and rode in the back of the stump truck all the way to DeQuincy, making it in time for the game. Coach Turner was a Louisiana State Trooper and coached the Wampus Cats without being paid. Home games were played at Gilbert Field, which is located behind the “old school on the hill” (the former LHS building).
Economic times were difficult during T-Berry’s school years. The school board did not have funds to buy football uniforms so some of the local merchants bought the uniforms for the team. Also, according to Mr. Porter not every player had cleats, which meant that those players actually in the game wore the cleats, and when a player or players came out of the game, the cleats were given to the player or players going into the game. Mr. Porter did not have to swap cleats since he played both offense and defense. He weighed 135 pounds and was the starting center and linebacker. At half-time T-Berry changed out of his football uniform and played in the band, switching back into his football uniform to play the second half of the game.
Perhaps Mr. Porter is better known for his career as a professional rodeo athlete. In 1949, at the age of 22, he competed in bull dogging and calf roping at Madison Square Garden in New York. Mr. T-Berry Porter of Leesville, Louisiana, won the National Calf Roping Championship. This was an amazing feat, made even more amazing when one realizes that the calves T-Berry was roping outweighed him by 100 pounds. In 1963 Jimmy Bullock, Sports Editor for the Shreveport Journal, called T-Berry Porter the Pelican State’s “Mr. Rodeo.”
In addition to being the 2019 inductee into the LHS Sports Hall of Fame, Mr. Porter is enshrined in the National Rodeo Hall of Fame (2015) and the Louisiana All Sports Hall of Fame (2018).