In loving tribute to Bay
June 16, 2015
Donald McCullough
June 17, 2015
Barbara Dupre was a woman who lived two lives. The first was as a loving mother and housewife. The second was as a leader and pioneer for women in the Lions Club International.
Devoted to civic service until the end, Barbara died in her home as she was getting ready for a Lions Club function a week-and-a-half ago.
Barbara was the oldest of six children of Adam and Mary Bergeron in Houma. They say she was the responsible one of the bunch and helped to care for her younger siblings.
She met her husband, Norman Albert Dupre, when she was still a teenager as he rode his bicycle in front of Terrebonne High School.
At 17, she married Norman and so began her first life. Norman was a carpenter who worked on residential homes. The couple loved bowling and dancing.
Together, they raised three children, Mary Guidroz, Ferrel Dupre and the late Patty Dupre Breaux. She was a kind mother who was loving but commanded respect.
“We knew the rules,” Guidroz said. “She gave you that eye, and that was it.”
To her son and daughters, she was their mother, with whom they shucked corn and snapped peas with over a sheet at home. The family didn’t have a lot and would troll for shrimp and fish. They would get their produce from her father’s and father-in-law’s farms. Barbara would make tomato sauce from scratch and her daughter’s favorite: junk jambalaya.
“She would go to nationals and buy the end cuts of meat, like sandwich meat and all of that, like bologna, lunch meat, ham, whatever it was, and she would cut all that up and make a jambalaya with it,” said Barbara’s daughter, Mary Dupre Guidroz. “It was really good.”
But after Mary and Ferrel were grown, Barbara began her second life. One that would have her become the first woman in a number of leadership positions in the Lions Club International in Louisiana.
The international Association of Lions Clubs is a non-religious, charitable organization that provides a wide variety of services in over 200 countries.
Barbara’s husband joined the Lion’s first. At the time, women were not allowed to be full-fledged members. Instead, women were allowed to be a kind of associate member with no voting power as a “Lioness.” Barbara joined the Evergreen Sunset Lioness Club in 1985. Three years later, Lion’s International invited women to join their ranks as equals to men, which Barbara did.
Within 10 years of becoming a full-fledged member, Barbara had served as a member, club officer and president. She ran for vice district governor of the Bayou Region district of Lions Clubs in 1999 and won.
The following year, she became the district governor for the Bayou Region, making 2000 the first year a woman served as a district governor for Lion’s Clubs in Louisiana. She also served as council secretary in ’01 and as the council chairwoman in ’02, the first woman to serve as chairwoman in Louisiana.
Barbara was instrumental in the creation of the Schriever Lions Club. In 2007, Barbara became the first woman to become president of the Louisiana Lions Camp, a camp for children with special needs, diabetes, and pulmonary disorders in Anacoco, La.
“The significance of all this is the fact that this young lady from down the bayou, with little formal education or training for these positions, was so well respected that she was there to break the glass ceiling for women in Lionism in the state of Louisiana,” said Bob Ebberman, past district governor for Lions.
Ebberman even joked with Barbara’s children that for five years, they probably couldn’t even find their mother because every weekend she would travel from Lions meeting to function throughout her district.
“She missed a lot of our childrens’ functions for a couple of years when she was district governor,” said Ferrel Dupre. “But, it all worked out.”
Barbara’s children said they were shocked to hear how accomplished their mother was. They knew she was a district governor, but they had no idea their mother was the first woman in so many positions.
During her career as a Lion, Barbara was awarded 13 awards, including the Presidential Award in 2009 and the Life Membership Award in 2014.
“She’d sleep, eat and breathe the Lions Club,” Guidroz said of her mother. “That’s what she was about: always helping people.”
Barbara Dupre and her husband, Norman Dupre, pose for a photo at a national Lions Club convention in Hawaii in 2000. Dupre was the first district governor in Louisiana.
