Ten graduating seniors. One thousand dollars each. Ten thousand dollars total, spread across St. Martin, Iberia, and Lafayette Parishes, handed out at a banquet with a sheet cake that read "Hall of Flame Smokers Scholarship Banquet" in blue and gold and a ceremonial check big enough to need two men to hold it up straight.
That is the headline, and it deserves to be the headline. We spend so much ink on what goes wrong that the good news barely gets a caption. So here is the good news, in full, and it is Black folks all the way through it. Men who fund kids. A man who came home to run a course that once locked him out. A mayor who found the money the city was missing. None of them usually make the front page. Today they do.
The men who started it
The group is the Hall of Flame Smokers. Yes, a cigar club. A serious one. Twenty-seven members in St. Martinville who meet, light something good, and figure out who to help next. "We smoke good ones," said Tyrone "Bucket" Jones, the club's president and co-founder, "and that's when we sit down and think about what we're going to do next. Who we gonna help next." There is a globe in the logo, on purpose. "I want to make Hall of Flame global," Jones said. The men laugh when he says it. He keeps saying it.
Their mission, the way Jones puts it, is to be the engine of the community, for the youth and the elderly both. And they do not just talk it. They run a whole calendar.
"The best thing we can do is do something for the community. The youth and the elderly."
Everything they do
Start with the party, because that came first. The Hall of Flame Kentucky Derby celebration is one of their oldest traditions, the members in their sharpest suits and hats, and it doubles as a fundraiser. Then there is the golf tournament, their biggest money-raiser, which we will get to, because the course it runs on has a story of its own. There is the scholarship banquet, the one that just sent ten kids to college. There is the back-to-school pool bash, where this summer the club cooked for and sponsored about 90 children at the Edna Landry Aquatic Center. And Jones says the elderly are next on the list, because "we definitely can't leave them out."
The scholarship itself has grown fast. The first year, the club handed out awards of $500. Then they ran the golf tournament, raised real money, and bumped every award to a full thousand dollars. It has stayed there. This is year three, and it is the biggest yet: ten students, ten thousand dollars. In 2024 the RHO Omicron Foundation, an Omega Psi Phi chapter, honored the club for exactly this kind of work.
The course, and the man who came home to run it
The Hall of Flame Smokers raise their scholarship money at their annual tournament held at the Jay & Lionel Hebert Municipal Golf Course, the city course at 1121 Mudd Avenue on the north side of Lafayette. It was built in 1926, which makes this its 100th year, and it is named for the Hebert brothers, Lafayette natives who are the only siblings in golf history to both win the PGA Championship, Lionel in 1957 and Jay in 1960. A century of golf in the same spot.
The man who runs it now is a story by himself. Chris Arceneaux grew up across the street from that course. As a boy he was not allowed on it. He tells about gripping the chain-link fence and watching, hands bleeding, praying he would one day get inside. In eighth grade he got a job washing carts there. That was the way in. He built a career in the game over 25 years in New York and Florida, and in 2020 he came home to become the head golf professional at the very course that once kept him on the other side of the fence. He is Louisiana's first Black head golf pro.
"I'm so grateful and thankful God blessed me with this opportunity to return home, closer to my mother and family after being in New York for 25 years."
He did not just take the job. He turned the place around. He put his hands into the grounds, ran cleanups, built out youth programming like the annual Take a Kid Fishing Day, and got honored by the Lafayette Parish Council during Black History Month. And he turned the Muni into something a public golf course rarely becomes: a fundraising engine for Black organizations that almost never get a marquee venue. The first was Holy Rosary Redevelopment, the effort to bring back Lafayette's historic Black Catholic campus. The Greater Southwest Louisiana Black Chamber of Commerce came through those fairways too. The Hall of Flame Smokers' scholarship tournament belongs to that same lineage. One man decided the course he was locked out of would be the place other people finally got let in.
Not just the 27
Jones is quick to correct anybody who thinks this is 27 men writing checks. It is not. It is a team effort, and he says so every chance he gets. The sponsors who back the tournament. The golfers who fill the foursomes. The course that hosts them. The families and the churches and the schools that push kids to apply. The City of St. Martinville.
The banquet day itself ran like a family affair. The recipients and the members started it together at Mass at Notre Dame de Perpetuel Secours, the St. Martinville parish that, established in 1938, became one of the first in the country led by African-American Catholic priests. Sit with that a second. A room full of Black men investing in Black kids' futures, in the pews of a church built on exactly that idea, before a single check changed hands. From there everybody moved to a reception at Adam Carlson City Park, one of St. Martinville's own.
The ten
Say their names, because they earned them. From Lafayette Parish, Tylar Nora of Southside High, headed to LSUE for nursing, and Trinity Robertson of New Iberia Senior High, headed to Southeastern Louisiana University for journalism. From Iberia Parish, Jazmyn James of Acadian Christian School, headed to UL Lafayette for mechanical engineering, and Nyjil Nora of Loreauville High, headed to Louisiana Tech for accounting and business management. From St. Martin Parish, Adam Augustine of Breaux Bridge Senior High, headed to Southern University for political science, then law school; Gavin Gary of Breaux Bridge High, headed to LSU for mechanical engineering; Ainsley Calais of Cecilia High, headed to Grambling State for criminal justice with a minor in counseling; Amiyah Fontenette of St. Martinville Senior High, headed to UL Lafayette for nursing; Chandler George of St. Martinville Senior High, headed to SLCC and Universal Technical Institute in Eunice for electrical and automotive technology; and Kyra Matthews of St. Martinville Senior High, headed to LSUE for nursing.
Ten kids. Four nurses, two engineers, a journalist, a lawyer-to-be, an accountant, and a tradesman. That is a snapshot of what Acadiana is about to send back to itself in a few years.
In their own words
Adam Augustine almost skipped it. "My mom sent it to me and she was like, you need to apply for this scholarship," he said. "And I said, let's take a chance." He applied to plenty and got turned down by plenty. He got this one. He leaves for Southern on August 10. "That thousand dollars come in handy for them loose ends."
Ainsley Calais has the sharpest read on the money in the room. "Some people think a thousand dollars is not a lot of money," she said, "but when you can spend it freely," and then she named exactly where it goes. Books. Tuition. The things that have to get paid. Her mother, Mona Batiste Calais, said it flat: "It's absolutely a blessing. Certainly the cost of higher education is outrageous these days. So the thousand dollars definitely will cover the cost of books, and we are extremely grateful for this opportunity."
You hear "loose ends" from almost everybody in this story. Adam said it. The mayor said it. Anybody who has ever packed a kid off to a dorm in August knows exactly what it means. Tuition is one thing. It is everything around the tuition that quietly breaks a family's budget.
The mayor who found the money
Jason Willis, the mayor of St. Martinville, does not treat this like a photo op. He says it plainly.
"You got a lot of organizations that raise money, but you get to see where this goes. They give it back to the community, back to the kids. So I definitely support them in every way."
He knows the value of a dollar because he went looking for the ones his city had lost. A Navy veteran and small business owner, born and raised in St. Martinville, Willis took office and went to work on the books. Under him the city cut its audit findings from twelve to five and its recommendations from twenty-six to fourteen. He brought in a chief financial officer, cleaned up old accounts, and grew the city's cash reserves from thirteen days of operating expenses to seventy-seven. Voters noticed. They handed him a second term with 66 percent of the vote. That is what it looks like when the person minding the community's money actually minds it.
Look
Here is what I want you to do with this. The next time somebody tells you nothing good comes out of small-town Louisiana, or that nobody is investing in these kids, hand them this page.
A cigar club turned smoke and a golf scramble into ten college funds, and they are not done, the elderly are next. A man came home to run the course that once locked him out and opened its gates to everybody who came after him. A mayor found the money and put it back to work. Not one of them called a press conference. They did the work, the way they do it every year, and let it speak.
Somebody just had to point and say look. So, chere. Look.
