James L. Cathey Jr.

Background

Cathey was born in Arcadia, the seat of government of Bienville Parish. In 1920, at the age of one year, he moved with his parents to Bossier City, where he spent much of the remainder of his life. He attended Centenary College in Shreveport and Kansas State Teachers College, now Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. In 1941, Cathey married the former Dorothy Louise Williams (1924-2006), the daughter of T. E. Williams Sr. and the former Margaret Mullinax of Jefferson, Texas. The couple had three daughters, Sharon Thorn (died 2013), the widow of Bobby Thorn and a school bus driver, teacher, and social worker who spent much of her life in Lake Charles and Benton, Louisiana, Karen Green and husband, Fred, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Kathe Newsome of Bossier City, an I.T. Database Administrator at Centenary College.

Cathey served in both the United States Army and the United States Air Force during and after World War II. He was a bomber pilot during the war and subsequently attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, having been assigned to Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City.

Cathey and his wife were long active in the First United Methodist Church of Bossier City. He was a past chairman of the church board and the Council on Ministries. He also attended the annual statewide Methodist conference.

Mayoral career

In 1949, Cathey joined the Bossier City Police Department and was soon named its first lieutenant. He was thereafter assistant chief and then the police chief from 1953 to 1957 under Mayor Burgess McCranie and again from 1961 to 1970 under Mayor George Nattin, who had been the police chief himself from 1958 to 1961.

In 1953, Chief Cathey reported the arrest of two members of the 10th Street Gang of Fort Worth, Texas, whose members wore a tattooed cross with three dots as their insignia. Bossier City patrolman Jimmy Walker pursued a car which ran a stop light on East Texas Street. In the vehicle were Joe O'Toole, Dwain Fisher, and a hitchhiker, Reuben L. Bass, then twenty, of Georgia. O'Toole, eighteen years of age, was under a five-year suspended sentence in California for violation of the Dyer Act and the Mann Act. He was also sought in Fort Worth for stealing an automobile. Fisher, then seventeen, had spent time at a reform school in Gatesville west of Waco, Texas. Bossier City authorities released Bass after questioning.

Chief Cathey was also known for strict enforcement of the blue laws, which then required many businesses to close at midnight Saturday. Cathey was a Bossier Parish deputy sheriff from 1957 to 1961 and 1970 to 1973 under Sheriff Willie Waggonner. He was also the first juvenile officer of Bossier Parish.

On April 30, 1968, Cathey's 49th birthday, five years before his election as mayor, he was honored with a Bossier City "Appreciation Day". He was active in nearly every civic organization in his city, beginning with the Junior Chamber International, which in 1953 named him "Young Man of the Year". He was a charter member and past director of the Bossier Chamber of Commerce. He was a member of Disabled American Veterans of Louisiana and a president of the Bossier Parish chapter of the American Red Cross. He was a member and past president of the Bossier City Lions International. He sat on the advisory board of Bossier Medical Center. He was a member of the Bossier Parish Industrial Development Board. He was a past chairman of the Bossier Parish Council on Aging. He was a board member for twenty years of the Northwest Louisiana Law Enforcement Commission. In 1966, he served on the advisory committee of the Louisiana State University Law Enforcement Training Program. He was a director of Bossier Parish Crime Stoppers. He chaired various fund drives, including the March of Dimes and the Heart Fund. He was a member of the Masonic lodge and a Shriner.

To win his election as mayor on June 12, 1973, Cathey narrowly defeated a Republican candidate, Raymond Bun Statham (1924-2004), a retired United States Navy lieutenant.

In 1975, The Shreveport Times published a picture by its chief photographer, H. Langston McEachern, showing Mayor Cathey destroying a pinball machine confiscated from the Turf Lounge, one of the nightclubs of The Bossier Strip, known for its Country and western music. The Strip was an entertainment district that flourished in the 20th century prior to the establishment of legal gambling and the construction of casinos along the Red River.

In 1976, Cathey and neighboring Mayor Calhoun Allen of Shreveport hosted U.S. President Gerald R. Ford Jr. in a question-and-answer session for local officials. Ford at the time was in Louisiana campaigning against former Governor Ronald W. Reagan for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination.

Cathey died in Bossier City in 1996 at the age of seventy-six and is interred alongside his wife at Forest Park East Cemetery in Shreveport.