Talking with Mister Sam at the KOA

DENHAM SPRINGS, La.-If I reach age 99, I hope to have the health, pluck, luck and smooth skin of Sam Bacot, who has every intention of celebrating 100 in November.
"I asked my cardiologist how long I could expect to live," Mister Sam says in his Gatling gun delivery.
"He said, 'Till you cut your own throat.'"
Mister Sam likes me, for some reason. It's not my politics. A few weeks ago, his right-hand helper Melissa Williams drove him to the Baton Rouge library on a rainy night to hear my book talk, but a fall cut his head and cut short our visit.
So here I am in his neat red-brick home behind the giant Bass Pro store and directly across from the KOA campground he started here nearly 50 years ago. He's proud of its paved roads and 105 campsites. He's also proud of the icons for motels, restaurants and, yes, campgrounds, on the interstate signs that he helped lobby into Louisiana.
With his South Mississippi roots and newspaper background-Mister Sam worked all over as a linotype operator-we find plenty to talk about. Well, he talks. I mostly listen. Every now and then Mister Sam yanks the hearing aid from his left ear and throws it to the table. "This thing is useless. I'd like to take a hatchet to it."
Are all proverbs Chinese? Doesn't matter. But the Chinese proverb that says when an old person dies it's as if a library burns is true. Mister Sam knows things. And, what's more, he remembers them.
He knows enough baseball lore to make George Will hide his head in shame. He knows about the filthiest public restroom in Louisiana-"Wouldn't have been no use for Kilroy to visit that one; there was no room on the walls for him to write."
He lays out a smorgasbord of colorful people: Billy Hall, a man from Pike County, Miss., who for years drove a school bus barefoot. Infamous Will Purvis, wrongly accused of murder in 1894 but who survived his own hanging when the knot slipped.
And Mister Sam talks a lot and lovingly about his late wife, Louise, who wanted a chicken pie in Indianola, Miss., for her honeymoon meal. The place they stopped wasn't clean, so they left. Louise made his life so good for 64 years it's almost impossible for him to understand the concept of divorce.
Some days are better than others, but Mister Sam wants to keep going. "I've still got a lot I want to do." Most everything he mentions has to do with improving the campground, his main goal for the last 47 years. It's a beauty, too, with lush flora, miniature golf, swimming pool and a pavilion for music.
Now and then Mister Sam bursts into song, everything from antique show tunes to Delta blues, and despite his protestations-"For me, a key is something that opens a door."-he's quite the singer. In his bright mustard-yellow KOA shirt and with a smile the width of the Mississippi River Bridge, Mister Sam receives guests the way you imagine the Pope would if he could mingle freely. Life still holds Mister Sam's interest, from Donald Trump to land purchases.
If all of us could be as engaged and entertaining at 99 as Mister Sam, well, the world would be a place.

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