Eddie Doucet

Biography

Doucet was born in New Orleans but moved to suburban Jefferson Parish, where he graduated in 1942 from Jefferson High School, which in 1955 was split into East Jefferson and West Jefferson high schools. During World War II, he served in the 1567th Engineer Depot Company of the United States Army. He attended Clemson University in South Carolina and Tulane University in New Orleans. He was thereafter a zone manager for International Harvester. In 1953, he and his late brother, Earl J. Doucet, founded Doucet Brothers Construction Company. He was the construction business for four decades but also opened a real estate company, a hardware store, and a travel agency. He retired from his businesses in 1994. After Doucet's legislative service, Governor Buddy Roemer named him executive director of the Louisiana State Licensing Board for Contractors, a position which he filled for four years. He was a member of the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the River Ridge-Harahan Kiwanis International, Lions International, and the Greater New Orleans Italian Cultural Society. He was a president of the Jefferson Rod and Gun Club in Metairie. He was a director of the Jefferson Council on Aging, Jefferson Beautification, Inc., the Jefferson Economic Development Commission, and the Colonial Country Club in Harahan. He was an active golfer.

Doucet sought a fifth term in the nonpartisan blanket primary held in October 1987. In a time prior to term limits for the state legislature, Doucet was placed into a runoff with fellow Republican Robert T. Garrity, Jr., a lawyer from Harahan. Doucet had been a Republican for less than two years at the time. Garrity led with 6,197 votes (48.2 percent) in a four-candidate field; Doucet followed with 5,348 (41.6 percent). Two other candidates, both Democrats, one of whom was former State Representative Clyde F. Bel, Jr., of Orleans Parish, held the remaining 10 percent of the ballots in the since heavily Republican district. In the second round of balloting, called the general election in Louisiana even though both candidates were of the same party, Garrity prevailed, 6,106 (53 percent) to Doucet's 5,407 (47 percent). Doucet failed in a comeback attempt in 1999, when he was one of three Republicans crushed by incumbent District 78 Republican Representative Shirley D. Bowler.

Doucet was the son of Yola Provenzano Palmisano and her husband, Joseph Palmisano. He and his first wife, the late Bettie L. Hofsteader (born 1926 in Ohio), had two children, Maria Doucet Corpora (1951-2009), who died a year after her father, and David E. Doucet (born 1953). From his second marriage to the former Faye Edwards Crawford, he acquired a stepson, Jack H. Crawford, Jr., who was living in San Diego, California, at the time of Doucet's death. Nearly seventeen years after he was defeated for the state House, Doucet died in 2008 of a brief illness at the age of eighty-three at East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie.