A crusade against litter

Former executive director of Chamber of Commerce now leads a parish anti-litter movement
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For the past three years, one Ville Platte resident has made it her crusade to fight against litter. Her recent community involvement is nothing new as she was previously strongly involved with the community as executive director of the Chamber of Commerce.
This crusade against litter is spearheaded by Becky Buller who serves as director of Keep Evangeline Beautiful. This year at the helm of Keep Evangeline Beautiful, she has elicited the help of the Evangeline Parish school system.
“I met with Superintendent of Evangeline Parish Schools Darwan Lazard and Linda LaFleur about our newest project, which are special posters designed to bring attention to litter that will be posted in all elementary schools throughout the parish,” Buller said. “The mayors will also receive a poster for their offices. We are hoping that the posters will serve to remind young students that litter is a problem and that they can help in controlling this problem.”
Another new project this year is in conjunction with 4-H Achievement Day. As Buller explained, “Keep Evangeline Beautiful, with the help of the local LSU Extension Office, is sponsoring a poster contest that illustrates or advertises keeping our community clean and beautiful. These posters will be judged on Achievement Day, which is March 17. A monetary prize along with a Keep Evangeline Beautiful T-shirt will be awarded to the three division winners.”
Buller first got involved with Keep Evangeline Beautiful as a retirement project after reading an article in The Gazette. “Julie Darnall, who was an Ashlock, and her husband would pick up litter on their street all the way down to the end,” she said. “I read the article and wanted to compliment her, so I answered her article in The Gazette saying I was very proud of her.”
“Then I called a meeting together to pool people,” she continued. “I didn’t even know that they had already started Keep Evangeline Beautiful about two or three years before. It just fell apart, so I took off from there.”
Every year since then, Buller put on a different project to get the community involved in picking up litter. However, her first project did not go over as well as she had hoped. “I started with a Trash Bash the first year,” she explained, “and it wasn’t successful. Hardly anyone came. Waste management brought a big dumpster to Wal-Mart just behind Sonic. I think I received five bags of litter to put in that big dumpster. It was the first thing I tried, so I didn’t know how to do it very successfully.”
She took her lumps and rebounded a year later with a successful project. The project that year was a litter poster contest. As Buller stated, “We received 600 designs from students throughout the parish, and there were two different cash prizes awarded to the winners.”
Throughout her time leading Keep Evangeline Beautiful, Buller has focused her efforts on school children. “I can’t retrain mommas and daddies and grandmas and grandpas, but I can take the school children at a very young age and say let’s not litter because of all the different things it creates,” she explained. “It’s ugly, it’s nasty, you can’t attract business to your town, and people won’t want to live here or send their kids to school here.”
Upon graduating high school, Buller began her career working as a legal secretary. “I had taken Greg shorthand in high school, and that’s the only reason that I got the job, I’m sure, because the lawyers always dictated all the petitions and everything” she stated. “The first time I ever took dictation was for L.O. Fusilier when I was going in for my job interview.”
She continued, “He said ‘this Honorable Court.’ When I transcribed it, I put ‘dishonorable.’ We laughed about it, and he said that he was saying ‘this Honorable Court.’ I never heard the term before because I was just out of high school. He hired me, and from then on I just graduated to court reporting.”
The first judge that Buller worked for was Joe Vidrine, and then she worked for Don McGee, Burton Foret, and Emile Coreil.
“I loved the work so much,” Buller said about her time as legal secretary and court reporter. “I wish I could have been able to go to college and become a paralegal, but that came later. It taught me how to be out with the public and people and to learn what’s legal and what’s not right.”
Upon retiring from court reporting, Buller told herself she had to keep on working and that she was not old enough to quit. She said that in 1997 she was nominated to become executive director of the Chamber of Commerce. She worked in that position for 10 years.
“It was great, and it was fun,” Buller said about her time at the Chamber. “I enjoyed doing the banquets every year nominating the Man and Woman of the Year and having a guest speaker. I was about trying to get things into Ville Platte and people to come by visiting. I was trying to have all the gift shops stay open on weekends and trying to get people from Chicot Park to come to town.”
For all of her community involvement, Buller was named the Woman of the Year in 2016. However, her involvement that is most important to her is leading Keep Evangeline Beautiful. As she concluded, “It’s so close to my heart because I’m so determined to try to get litter off the streets and trying to teach our youngsters that it’s very ugly. I’m just very passionate about having a cleaner city.”