BATON ROUGE, La. — Capt. Dale Dicharry, the commander of Homeland Security for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office, has heard plenty of strange calls in his time in law enforcement, particularly here in south Louisiana. But this one beat all the others.
Someone had called in about a wounded animal, and the call was coming from right in his own neighborhood.
«He said, 'A wounded moose,'» Dicharry said. «I said, 'We ain't got no moose around.'»
Then it struck him: That would be Kent.
Kent Broussard, Dicharry's new neighbor, was a retiree who had just moved to Baton Rouge determined to fulfill his life's dream: to join the Golden Band from Tigerland at LSU. And he was learning to play, of all things, the tuba.
Dicharry tells the story in the Broussards' living room, alongside his wife Dawn, Broussard's wife Cheryl and fellow neighbors Lynette Wilks and Barry Searles. They all immediately leap to Kent's defense. He wasn't so bad at the tuba that his playing was confused with moose noises, they say. It was just that confusion was natural; nobody in the neighborhood was expecting someone to be playing a tuba at all.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. But it turns out it takes this neighborhood, on the southern edge of Baton Rouge, to raise a 66-year-old tuba player. It was here that Broussard serenaded the neighbors from his porch, marched around the streets in a weighted vest to get his stamina up and avoided the heat by playing early in the morning and late at night.
Leaf blowers might be annoying at those hours. But nobody was ever bothered by Broussard's brass. He was bringing a little bit of Tiger Stadium into everybody's homes.
He soon became the envy of the neighborhood. He had a lifelong goal and
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