Floyd D. Culbertson, Jr.

Floyd Douglas Culbertson, Jr. (April 15, 1908 – April 28, 1989) served from 1940-1942 as the mayor of Minden, a small city in Webster Parish in northwestern Louisiana.^[1]

Biography

Culbertson graduated at the age of nineteen in 1927 from Minden High School.^[2] Culbertson became an attorney.^[3]He was admitted to the practice of law in Minden in the office of Clifford Hayes.^[4]

While barely thirty, Culbertson unseated Mayor David William Thomas, who finished third in the 1940 Democratic mayoral primary. Thomas thereafter unsuccessfully challenged Culbertson in 1942, when the mayoral terms were for two years but were expanded to four by 1958.^[5] Soon after his reelection, Culbertson ran unsuccessfully in the primary for district attorney of the 26th Judicial District held on September 22, 1942. The position was decided in a runoff in which Arthur M. Wallace defeated Minden attorney Graydon K. Kitchens, Sr., a native of Stamps, Arkansas, who was a former law partner of future Governor Robert F. Kennon and later a Kennon appointee to the Louisiana Tax Commission. Kennon himself had served as mayor of Minden during the middle 1920s.^[6]

In a surprising turn of events, Culbertson resigned as mayor in November 1942 to enter the United States Army^[7] for service as a first lieutenant in World War II. His initial training was at Camp Wallace in Galveston County, Texas.^[8] John Calhoun Brown (1879-1964),^[9] a member of the Minden City Council, served as mayor pro tem for the remainder of Culbertson’s term until the spring of 1944, when J. Frank Colbert (1882–1949), a former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, was elected to the position.

Culbertson returned to Minden to practice law after the war. In 1947, he joined Minden businessman Larkin L. Greer (1902-1991) and future State Representative E.D. Gleason, as co-chairmen of the Webster Parish "Kennon Club" to support Judge Robert Kennon for governor. Kennon, however, was eliminated in the Democratic primary early in 1948, as former Governor Earl Kemp Long defeated his first successor, former Governor Sam Houston Jones, to return to office in 1948.^[10]Instead, Kennon was elected to a single term as governor in 1952.

Except for the years he was in the military, Culbertson headed the Red Cross in Webster Parish from 1938 to 1948, when he was succeeded by Minden businessman Willard Roberts.^[11]

In September 1958, when Culbertson’s father, Floyd Culbertson, Sr., died, the newspaper obituary listed Floyd Culbertson, Jr., as having resided in Fort Worth, Texas. The obituary lists four other surviving children, John Grier Culbertson (1905–1977), then of Arlington, Texas, R. Sam Culbertson of Minden, James Edward "Jim" Culbertson of Dallas, and Mrs. George E. Reynolds of Fayetteville, North Carolina.^[12]

When Culbertson's mother, Mary Leana Alford "Mollie" Culbertson, a native of Cherry Ridge in Union Parish, died on September 19, 1977, at the age of ninety, Culbertson, Jr., was listed as a resident of Keller in suburban Tarrant County, Texas. His sister was listed as Mary G. Reynolds of Shreveport. His brother Sam was a resident of Colleyville, also in Tarrant County. His brother Jim still resided in Dallas.^[13]

At some point after 1977, Culbertson relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he died some eleven years later at the age of eighty-one.

References