Floyd Douglas Culbertson, Jr. (1908-1989)

Floyd Douglas Culbertson, Jr. (April 15, 1908 – April 28, 1989), was a lawyer in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, who from 1940 to 1942 was the mayor of Minden, a small city in Webster Parish in northwestern Louisiana. He resigned early in his second term to enter the United States Army with stateside service in World War II.

Background
Culbertson's place of birth is uncertain. His father, Floyd Culbertson, Sr. (1879-1958), was living in Minden in 1894 at the age of fifteen. One of Culbertson's younger brothers, Roy Samuel Culbertson, Sr. (1911-1996), was born in Elk City in Beckham County in western Oklahoma, nearly four years after statehood. Culbertson graduated in 1927 at the age of nineteen from Minden High School. He is listed as a sophomore in the 1925 Minden High School yearbook, The Grig.

Career
Culbertson graduated c. 1937 from the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University near Dallas in University Park, Texas. He was admitted in 1937 to the practice of law in Minden in the office of Clifford Hayes. In the 1940 census, Culbertson was listed as a single 31-year-old lodger in Minden; he turned 32 two weeks after the census was taken.

In the 1940 Democratic mayoral primary election, Culbertson unseated Mayor David William Thomas, who was seeking a third consecutive two-year term. Thomas finished third in the balloting. In 1942, Thomas unsuccessfully challenged Culbertson for re-election. Mayoral terms, then for two years, were expanded to four in 1954. Soon after his reelection, Culbertson ran unsuccessfully in the 1942 primary for district attorney of the 26th Judicial District held on September 22, 1942. The position was decided in a runoff in which Arthur M. Wallace defeated Minden attorney Graydon K. Kitchens, Sr., a native of Stamps, Arkansas, who was reared in La Salle Parish and was a former law partner of future Governor Robert F. Kennon and later a Kennon appointee to the Louisiana Tax Commission. Kennon himself had served as mayor of Minden from 1926 to 1928.

In November 1942, in a surprising turn of events, Culbertson resigned as mayor to enter the United States Army National Guard. as a first lieutenant and then captain. His initial training was at Camp Wallace in Galveston County, Texas. His secretary, Zenobia Camp West (1919-2008), who later became a registered nurse, left as well to work with Edwin Richardson, the former Webster Parish school superintendent and past president of Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, in a program to find housing for workers flooding into Minden to take jobs at the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant, a since defunct munitions factory which was opened early in the war during the last few months that Culbertson was still the mayor. John Calhoun Brown, a member of the Minden City Council, served as mayor pro tem for the remainder of Culbertson’s term until the spring of 1944, when J. Frank Colbert, a former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, was elected to the position. Culbertson spent most of his military service in the Brooklyn borough of New York City before he re-opened his law office in Minden in December 1946.

In 1947, Culbertson joined Minden businessman Larkin L. Greer (1902–1991) and future State Representative E. D. Gleason as co-chairmen of the Webster Parish "Kennon Club" to support Judge Robert Kennon for governor. Kennon, however, was eliminated in the Democratic primary early in 1948. Former Governor Earl Kemp Long defeated in a runoff election former Governor Sam Houston Jones. In 1940, Jones had unseated Long, who held the office for the preceding year. Instead, Kennon rebounded to win his single term as governor in 1952.

Except for the years he was in the military, Culbertson headed the Red Cross in Webster Parish from 1938 to 1948, when Minden businessman Willard Roberts (1899-1994) assumed those duties.

In 1950, Culbertson and his erstwhile political opponent, former Mayor David William Thomas, were opposing lawyers in a legal dispute over a $196 debt deemed collectible to the plaintiff by City Judge R. Harmon Drew, Sr. The case was appealed unsuccessfully to the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit in Shreveport.

On March 8, 1952, Culbertson was admitted to the practice of law in Texas.

Family and death
Upon the death of Culbertson's father, the newspaper obituary lists the junior Culbertson as a 1958 resident of Fort Worth, Texas. The obituary names Culbertson's four siblings: John Grier Culbertson (1905–1977), then of Arlington, Texas, Roy Samuel Culbertson, then of Minden, James Edward "Jim" Culbertson of Dallas, and Mrs. George E. Reynolds of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

When Culbertson's mother, Mary Leana Alford "Mollie" Culbertson (1887-1977), a native of Cherry Ridge in Union Parish, died on September 19, 1977, at the age of ninety, Culbertson was listed as a resident of Keller in suburban Tarrant County, Texas. His sister was listed as Mary G. Reynolds of Shreveport. His brother Sam was a resident of Colleyville, also in Tarrant County. His brother Jim still resided in Dallas. Douglas, Sr., and Mary Alford Culbertson are interred at Gardens of Memory Cemetery in Minden.

At some point after 1977, Culbertson relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he died in 1989 at the age of eighty-one. He and his wife, Evelyn H. Culbertson (1915-2006), are interred at Memorial Park Cemetery in Tulsa. Mrs. Culbertson was residing in Ocala, Florida, at the time of her death at the age of ninety-one.