Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of a two-part series on the Levesques, focusing on Sidney. Part 1 focuses on George and can be found on reporternews.com.
Sidney Levesque is probably my oldest friend in this town, and now she’s leaving.
Well, that’s Abilene.
I met her in 2000, back when I first arrived at the Reporter-News. She probably only beats Brian Bethel (who now works for the city) by a week or two on my notorious friends list. Brian and I really didn’t hit it off until we discovered our mutual love of all things spooky.
But that’s another story.
Her husband George has been the Paramount Theatre’s executive director since 2017. But on June 10, he will take on the same role at Florida’s Tampa Theatre. Once the Children’s Art and Literacy Festival ends in Abilene, the family will join him there. CALF runs June 11-14.
Sidney, or “Sid” as she is sometimes called, is the marketing coordinator for the Abilene Cultural Affairs Council which presents CALF each year. Before then, she worked at Abilene Christian University performing prospect research in the fundraising office.
But in my mind, her standout role was her 10 years as a great reporter.
What makes a great reporter? It’s not just accuracy or writing skill, it’s also personality. You’ve got to know how to talk to people.
But my most vivid memory of Sidney Levesque is from Hurricane Katrina.
Not her first rodeo
Embedded with the 111th Engineer Battalion, we were there to report on relief efforts. The unit is a Texas Army National Guard unit stationed at Dyess Air Force Base.
This wasn’t Sid’s first rodeo with the 111th. She’d already ridden along with them to a different adventure in Bosnia five years earlier.
“I had to wear a bulletproof vest when we landed because even though the war was over, the locals would still just, kind of shoot off guns, randomly,” she recalled. “It was a week-long trip just to spend 24 hours at the camp in Bosnia.”
As unsettling as that was, Katrina was on a whole other level.
“It was just like in the zombie shows where the world has ended,” Sidney said. “You’re just seeing the remnants, and everything’s abandoned, and all the people are gone.”
We flew in on Dyess C-130s with other Abilene media. Embedded means sleeping with the troops, and that’s what we did on cots and under tents with the walls rolled up to let the air move through.
“The shower was just a tent they set up with water hoses,” Sid recalled. “I remember the zoo was nearby. At night we could hear the animals.”
We didn’t visit the zoo, but a soldier did drive us around the city in a Humvee. The devastation was everywhere with many places unreachable.
The encounter
We approached a long overpass made notorious earlier in the disaster when crowds, stranded by floodwaters, had written “Help” on concrete to hovering news helicopters. A lone portable toilet at the bridge’s crest was all that remained.
It was decided this would be a good opportunity for a pit stop, and so Sidney went first. I remained in the back of the Humvee but kept my eye on her as she walked the 60-foot slope to the portable.
I had a weird feeling, though. Like the tense, rising music from a Hitchcock film.
Sid gingerly reached for the flimsy plastic door and the wind caught it, blowing it wide open. She froze wide-eyed. Then with a scream, she jumped a foot in the air and ran straight back.
I remember thinking, “One day, we’ll laugh about this but probably not right now.”
“I was like, ‘I can’t do this, this is my worst nightmare,’” she recalled, indeed now laughing. “All I saw was this huge rat. It was the biggest rat I’d ever seen!”
Not gonna lie, I’d have probably screamed too.
A sobering reminder
We continued on, trying to lighten the mood, but it faded when we came upon the remains of a flood victim. Covered by a tarp in a yard, rescuers had coded the house with spray paint indicating the remains’ presence for later collection.
I looked around the Humvee as we left, the soldier continued to stare ahead while a somber pall settled on the rest of us. Sidney leaned against the door, the sun on her face didn’t brighten her mood, a reflection of my own.
It wasn’t only that we’d found a body. It was that there must be so many others that this one had to be left behind. And we had to leave it there, too. That’s when the weight of the entire disaster, and the reason why we were there, just dropped on our shoulders.
“It was quite the experience,” Sidney said.
Moving to Florida will be an experience, too, but not so much as to dim Abilene’s memory. Back in college she voted for a new public library, and it didn’t pass. Seeing the library’s new home, Abilene Heritage Square, open May 16 was a nice bookend for her time here.
“It’s a great time for this city, things are really happening for this town, and I’m so excited and proud,” she said, her voice turning emotional. “We’re, you know, proud Texans, and we’re gonna have ourselves a little adventure.”
This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: Adventures with Sid, told one last time before her next one in Florida
Reporting by Ronald W. Erdrich, Abilene Reporter-News / Abilene Reporter-News
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