Good Old Boy Gone Good (Cont.)

Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Heroes
Good Old Boy Gone Good (Cont.)

ONE MORNING, Schoeffler and I arrived at Schoeffler Cadillac before eight. It's a compact dealership on the east side of Lafayette, squared off against a Mercedes/BMW lot across the street. In the large, clean-swept repair shop, Schoeffler poured coffee into a plastic cup. His hand shook as he brought it to his mouth, a slight tremor he's had since he was a kid. He stood with three mechanics, all of whom had Cajun accents. One said, "Hey, Mr. Harold, I saw you on the TV last night. You think they gonna make us buy a extra license to put a trap down in the bayou?" He was talking about the boundary case.

Harold drained the cup and threw it in a steel bin. "They gonna squeeze you every way they can," he said. "They deputizing fools right now to arrest fishermen. I told 'em, 'Y'all arresting people on property you don't own.'"

He went to his office and sat behind his cluttered desk, facing the polished,

"Hell man," Schoeffler told me, "there were at best guess less than 300 bears left in the whole state. What you gonna do, sit around and debate protection strategies until the last one is turned into a rug?"

speckled floor of the showroom. A huge trophy buck stared ruefully down from the wall at the World Wildlife Fund and Sierra Club stickers on the filing cabinet. Schoeffler picked up the phone and sold two used cars to area dealers. Then he and I went out to deliver a new Cadillac CTS to a customer on the other side of town. When we returned to his office, he called the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at district headquarters, in New Orleans, and hounded four different offices for water-level data from their gauge at Butte La Rose, in the basin. All this before 10 a.m. Schoeffler grew up in Lafayette. His mother was a local Cajun, descended from French "Acadian" stock driven from eastern Canada by the British in the late 18th century. His father was a German blacksmith who immigrated to the U.S. in 1910, first worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and then started an auto repair shop that evolved into Schoeffler Cadillac. Paul Schoeffler imparted to his five sons an almost religious passion for hunting and fishing. Harold grew up in awe of the power and beauty of the cypress swamps and islanded coast, seeing nature as the purest evidence of God's love for man.

"When I was a boy, we used to fish the west side of Vermilion Bay," he said. "There was a circular shell bank—must have been 200 acres across the top, at normal tide about two to three feet deep, all white clam shells—" The phone rang.

"Just a minute," he said. "How y'all doin'?" he called into the phone. "Oh, we makin' it. Had a good day Saturday out by Teal Island. Shot our limit in half an hour. OK. I'll bring it over this morning." He hung up. "That was the president of a drilling company. He just bought one of our new DeVilles. Where was I? The Cocshin shell bank. I was a boy. You could jump out of the boat and wade around in a circle, fishing off the side. It was fabulous fishing—we caught redfish, speckled trout, flounder. The speckled trout hit a bait like a freight train.

"I remember one beautiful August morning, about 1950—we got out there to the usual place and there were two of those big-ass dredges and nine or ten barges, and the reef was gone. It was sitting on those barges. We cried. What they were doing was wrong. I realized some years later that it was the biggest insult to water quality in the state of Louisiana."

The tragedy of the reef stuck with Schoeffler and worked on him slowly, like a grain of grit inside an oyster. He attended the Catholic, all-boys Cathedral High School and later the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he graduated in 1961 with a degree in business management and economics. That same year he married Mary Anne Mehaffey and entered the Air Force for a four-year stint as a supply officer.

The outdoors was never far from his thoughts. In 1963, at Robins Air Force Base, in Georgia, he became president of the largest rod-and-gun club in the state. "We were always dealing with conservation issues," Schoeffler said. In 1965 he returned to Lafayette and entered the family business. By then he had two young children, and his marriage soon ended. He later got involved with the Sierra Club's Acadian Group (which covers the southwestern corner of Louisiana) by leading canoe trips, and by the late seventies had become its chairman. Along the way, he met his second wife, Sarah Todd, with whom he had four more children.

One day in 1979 he walked down to Vermilion Bayou, which runs behind his graceful salvaged-cypress house in Lafayette. The river was covered with a sheen of oil. Schoeffler realized he had to do something. Now. The oil from every crankcase in town was ending up in the bayou. Only his dealership and one other, he says, recycled oil. He went to the library and dug out a little-known city fire ordinance that prohibited the dumping of volatile material into storm drains. Schoeffler brought the ordinance and the situation to the attention of the city fire marshal. "Within two months," Schoeffler says, "the bayou was cleaned up. All the stations were recycling their oil. Now you have the somewhat unique situation in which the fire marshal is enforcing environmental protection. He was afraid the damn sewer lines would explode!"

Schoeffler fishes out in the gulf at least once a week. He tends to his string of crab and crawfish traps. He also leads a local Boy Scout troop. But it's the environmental battles that are always on his mind. The sheer glee with which Schoeffler attacks these issues, and his unflagging commitment, make him a formidable adversary. His basic strategy is this: Know precisely who the enemy is, and know the facts, because 90 percent of them are on your side. God is, too.

Doing his homework has made Schoeffler a go-to guy in Louisiana environmental politics. Last year, when CNN wanted to do a story about oil drilling in national wildlife reserves, southern style, they enlisted Schoeffler. "John Breaux had made the statement that we do it so well in Louisiana, we can do it in the Arctic," Schoeffler says. He took CNN to southern Louisiana's Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge, where the marsh hydrology is similar to that of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and about 60 percent of the land is open to drilling. Where there was oil production, the land was dead. "It was so obvious," he says. "You literally couldn't find a lotus in the oil patch. Then we went into the wilderness zone, and the lilies and cattails and irises were everywhere."

The storm of activity and repository of knowledge that is Schoeffler makes him a universally respected, if equivocal, figure in the eyes of the community. Go to a Sunday brunch with him at Dwyer's, one of the best restaurants in Lafayette, and you can hardly eat for the stream of folks from the country club set who stop by the table to give him their regards.

Others are less polite. Dailey Berard, the fabricator of heavy marine oil-drilling equipment, said with unabashed vehemence, "The bubble in that man's head is not level. He's got a right to be wrong for 30 years."

"Do you drive a Cadillac?" I asked Berard.

"No! My wife does, from Schoeffler, which irritates me no end. I drive a Lincoln for spite."

Then he admitted that he and Schoeffler sometimes head off to eat dinner together after a contentious public meeting.

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