“We don’t curl up in a ball and cry about the situation,” said the executive director of Prize Foundation, which oversees Prize Fest. “We make lemons into lemonade. We immediately started to do that. There was never a consideration – ever – that we would be skipping a year.

Three generations of the Sparke family have overseen operations here. The latest is Anna Maria Sparke, no kin to the island. “My grandfather [H. A. Sparke] had it from 1956 until he died in 1984. And my father [R. W. Sparke] took over in 1984, and he ran it until his death in 2020.

He recalled meeting a graduate of the re-entry program on the streets of New Orleans. The man told Boone that his re-entry class had built a metal building from the ground up during the program. When the man was released, he moved to New Orleans, where a friend needed a metal building.

C & C Electric and Lighting had been at 2430 Line Ave. for years. The mom-and-pop shop was a go-to for lighting fixtures and repairs. This was still not a place to which you would go and hang out. Lingering was not what customers tended to do after purchasing.

The quickest way to enjoy his work is to go to YouTube to Brown’s pre-Pulitzer 2015 TEDx talk, “The art of words.” He greets with, “Where I am from, we always begin with a prayer.” But he blesses the audience with the unexpected: a Prayer of the Backhand.

One such person was Eric Hess, one of the glass artists at Sanctuary Art Glass near downtown Shreveport. He and his partner in glass, Michelle Pennington, were just two more citizens cast adrift on the shores of idleness. Hess was noodling around Facebook when something caught his eye.