Discovering French culture, Pétanque, and the Austin Francophone community
Ed Priest
An interview with an AFA Member, Donor and Former Board Member
The World Traveler Chose France
What do Nova Scotia, South Africa, Japan, Mexico, France, Sweden, Iceland, Ireland, The Bahamas, (the list goes on!) all have in common? You guessed it. Ed Priest has been there! Ed, a longstanding francophone community partner and former Board member of the Alliance Francaise, has been traveling the world with his wife since about 1983, making pit-stops at the most interesting places and always looking for another adventure.
If you know Ed, you’ll no doubt recognize his cover photo at the Legation Boules Club, where he is currently the Treasurer and avid player of pétanque. I had the chance to speak with Ed about his travels around the world, his life in retirement, and his love for the game of pétanque. I hope you enjoy getting to know him as I did, and getting to learn about his journey discovering French culture, pétanque, and the Austin Francophone community.
From West Texas to Austin
Ed Priest Is from Abilene and started college at Texas Tech in Lubbock. After two and a half years he changed majors and moved to New Braunfels and graduated from Southwest Texas State. He was an engineer for most of his professional career. He worked in manufacturing engineering, industrial engineering facilities engineering and was an facilities manager, primarily working with Lockheed Austin Sites and with an industrial lighting company in San Marcos called Wide Light.
Our department was very outgoing, and very–it was just a good group of people to work with, which I think is a real plus! I hope it still goes with people as they go to work, that they find out that they like the people they are around.
I was happy to find out that this line of thought, that meeting other people and working with them in a positive way, was a recurring motif in his life. It’s obvious when you meet Ed that he likes people and that enjoying others in a community is important to him.
He’s been enjoying retirement for a little over thirteen years now, but still works with his hands when he can, having moved recently to a different property, where he is currently working on renovations. The neighborhood near UT where he lives, he says, has a nice community of younger families and dog lovers, and they are glad to be there.
From Austin to Everywhere Else
Before moving to Austin proper, he mentioned that he and his wife were living in New Braunfels for a time, and that they would commute to Austin for work.
We commuted from New Braunfels for 8 years. And finally decided the heck, there’s more to life than I-35. We could get to work at that time in one hour. Kay [Ed’s wife] worked at 51st and Guadalupe, and she could get up there in an hour, so compared to what it is now, it was nothing. So we decided to move up here, and I worked for Lockheed here for 16 years. It’s been around quite a while!
Well put, Ed! I feel that any Austinite reading this post would agree that there is more to life than interstate 35! They moved to Austin in 1992 and worked in the area until 2008 when Ed retired, and have since then been taking every opportunity to travel the world, to meet new people and see interesting places and things.
We spoke about his trip to Canada to see the ‘Spirit Bear’, a mythical-looking creature brought about by an anomalous mutation in a brown bear’s gene that makes its fur white. He told me about his time in Japan at age 3 during the occupation, that he felt drawn there to revisit this place from his past. He had walked on uninhabited islands in the Bahamas, had seen the boats in Nova Scotia, had gone to Salt Spring Island in BC Canada, and the list goes on. He had a lot to share about these trips, and of course, some of the best stories came from his many trips to France.
First Footprints in France
In the year 2000, Ed’s wife retired from her job with the state, so they started a discussion about what they wanted to do going forward. They knew they wanted to travel, as they had been doing since 1983, and that his wife had taken French classes in college. They decided, then, to do a walking tour of Provence, and in that same trip went to Paris, Giverny and Rouen.
As with most of our first tries traveling in France, their trip was not without some hiccups. I had mentioned to him that I lived in Rouen for a time teaching English, and he told me he had a funny story to tell about the town.
With my West Texas accent, we were noobies, okay? So we rented a car– there in downtown Paris and left without a map. So off we took, we made our way out of Paris. And finally we came to one of the checkpoints and they said “Where are you going?” And we said “We’re headed to Giverny”, and they said that’s the other side of town. So we turned around and went all the way back.
Well we finally got to Giverny, and we were going to spend the night in Rouen! And so off we go and we just have no clue where we are. So we pulled up to this town, which had a, maybe you could say it was a ‘Sack-and-Pack’, and so I go in and say in my best French, I say, I’m looking for Roeun, they could not understand me so I spelled it out R O U E N and he looked at me, questioningly, and he said “You’re here!”
And I said, “Oh wonderful!” So I got to the town and I had no clue I was in the town!
Along with Rouen, Bretagne, Nice, Annot and Giverny would be some of the places Ed would visit, but perhaps the most portentous event was what happened before those visits, during his walking tour of Provence.
Pétanque and The French Legation
During this walking tour, Ed and his wife noticed that in the little communities they saw along the way, a certain game was being played.
And we would sit and we would watch and we had no clue how it was scored, or what was going on, or anything. So finally, we were in Paris and we went to the Paris flea market, and I purchased a set of boules, so I said hey, I’m gonna learn to play this game.
That game was Pétanque, a game that was created in the early 1900’s by an international player of a similar game. Ed showed me that what he purchased at the Paris flea market were actually for Boules Lyonnaise, that similar game from which Pétanque was created.
After their trip, they came back to the states and looked around for places to play pétanque. Finally, they arrived at the Alliance Francaise d’Austin group, who played at the French Legation, a community partner and historic building in Austin built in 1841.
Here he met Jérome Potts, a pétanque player and enthusiast, and Elisabeth McKay, a former President of the Board of Directors at the Alliance Francaise. Meeting these two people resulted in long-lasting relationships, in Ed’s tenure as a Board Member of the Alliance Francaise, and in the creation of the Legation Boules Club, which to this day meets twice a month for games that are open to AFA students and members.
Annot Vs. Austin
It was interesting to hear about the many games he played and the people he has met. He told me that while they enjoy playing at the Hangar at Mueller, they look forward to having Sunday Pétanque at the French Legation soon, which just had its grand re-opening last year after a two-year restoration period.
There was a tournament between France and Texas that was organized by one of his friends, Marion Bermondy, who had an AirBNB in Annot, in 2018. Here is a poster designed by Marion’s husband Jeff Brown to commemorate the event. An Austin team with Marion ended up winning the tournament, and the team Ed was on placed third. It was Ed’s opinion that the French went easy on the Americans, but that he enjoyed the competition all the same.
There was a tournament between France and Texas that was organized by one of his friends, Marion Bermondy, who had an AirBNB in Annot, in 2018. The image above was a poster designed by Marion’s husband Jeff Brown to commemorate the event.The Austin team with Marion ended up winning the tournament, the French team placed second, and the other Texan team, the team Ed was on, placed third. Ed told me he thought the French went easy on the Americans, but that he enjoyed the competition all the same.
What was also interesting, though, was the cliquish nature of Pétanque in France that Ed described. He noted that in France–whether from his own experience in Bretagne, not being allowed to play with a casual pétanque group he found as a tourist, or from the experience of Marion, the same person who organized a pétanque tournament, having not been allowed to play with certain groups in France–that in France the pétanque culture was exclusive in some ways, that people took these communities seriously in a way that excluded others.
It appears to me that, unlike the cliques in France he encountered, Ed latched on to the more interesting aspects of Pétanque: building communities, having friendly competition, and cultivating long-lasting relationships that help everyone involved learn more about the game, the culture, and each other. We’re happy that he did, and that the culture in Austin continues to be inclusive and an outlet for people who want to enjoy the sport!
AFA and Francophonie in Austin
The area we hooked into is France, we enjoy the culture, we enjoy the food, we enjoy the people we meet, it’s fun.
Discovering new places, meeting new people, and learning different cultural practices is what language learning and cultural education is about. Ed’s story is built on these tenets, so while it is no surprise that he has been a valued member of our community for so long, we are still very thankful and happy he’s here!
If you are interested in Pétanque, or just meeting some more people in the Francophone community, feel free to stop by the Hangar in Mueller Park every second and fourth Sunday of each month. They’ll be happy to show you the ropes!
It was a pleasure for me to speak with Ed about his travel stories and I hope you have enjoyed reading about someone who has been a valued member of the Francophone community in Austin for many years. We are happy to have Ed here playing the sport he loves and helping the Francophone community thrive in Central Texas.
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About the author, Evan Bostelmann
Evan is the School Coordinator at the Alliance Francaise d’Austin. He has studied and taught French for 10 years. He spent time in Rouen, Normandie before moving to Austin in 2017, and has a passion for second language acquisition and for learning about others’ journeys through Francophone culture.