Legendary Locals of Shreveport chronicles fascinating people who have made a difference in the Shreveport–Bossier City area. Some are good, some are bad, and more than a few are wicked. There are movie starlets, entertainers, decorated war veterans, gangsters, preachers, madams, politicians, giants of industry, and humble folk who rose to greatness or infamy. Shreveport began as a rough and tumble frontier town that came late to being "civilized." A Baptist preacher shot one of Quantrill's Raiders when he rode his horse into church during a Sunday service. The most famous madam in the region was also a suffragette. The first successful bankers in Shreveport were immigrants from Prussia who developed a business model that extends into the modern era. Shreveport lost one quarter of its population in less than a month due to a yellow fever epidemic. And that is just the beginning.
Gary D. Joiner is chair of the department of history and social sciences at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of 16 books, numerous articles, and technical reports, and he is the recipient of several awards for research and writing. John Andrew Prime has been a journalist almost 40 years, more than 35 of them with the Gannett daily Shreveport Times. He has contributed to numerous anthologies on the music of northwest Louisiana and is coauthor of the Arcadia book Barksdale Air Force Base.