Coaches' Corner

After 14 years as mayor, Hazel Myers—or Mayor Hazel, as the folks in Scott (pop. 7,800) call her—knows almost everything about her Louisiana map dot. So we asked her why three streets in the Gossen Heights section honor a certain football program and two of its great coaches, Knute Rockne and Frank Leahy. "I'll be darned," she said. "I'll have to ask Willie." Willie is Hazel's husband, who has a sister who has a son who attends Notre Dame, 1,033 miles, seven highways and four states away. But the streets were named decades ago, and when Willie didn't know the origin of Rockne, Leahy and Notre Dame drives, and when Scott's pharmacist and fiercest football fan, Ronnie Guidry, didn't know either, Mayor Hazel was stumped. Finally we reached 73-year-old Ronald Gossen, at his law office in Lafayette. Gossen and his father, Joseph, developed the subdivision in 1959 and named the streets after so many family Saturdays listening to Irish football on the radio. " Rockne had such an aura," Gossen says. So how about Willingham Way? "He has a way to go yet," says Gossen, not ruling it out.