George M. Foote

George Messenger Foote, Sr. (November 4, 1919—June 21, 2010), was an American judge. For 30 years, he was the city judge and civic figure in his native Alexandria, Louisiana.

George Foote was born on November 4, 1919, in Alexandria, Louisiana, to Henry Dade Foote, Sr. (1882-1941), and the former Lois Jeannette Ray (1886-1974), who resided in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but moved to Alexandria prior to 1919. Lois Foote was a native of Americus in Sumter County in southwestern Georgia. Foote's brother, Henry, Jr. (1912-1955), was born in Hattiesburg and died in Alexandria; a sister, Ray Foote Schlaben (1914-2006), was born in Hattiesburg and lived after her marriage in Edinburg in Hidalgo County in south Texas, where she is interred.

The obituary of his friend, former Alexandria Mayor W. George Bowdon, Jr., indicates that Foote and Bowdon first met c. 1935, by which time Foote was a student at Bolton High School, Alexandria, Louisiana, from which he graduated in 1936, three years before Bowdon.

Foote graduated from Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Western Virginia. Later, he received his legal training after the war at Tulane University School of Law in New Orleans and was admitted to the practice of law in 1947.

Foote worked as a lifeguard during summers in the middle 1930s at Magnolia Park in southern Grant Parish north of Alexandria. According to copy desk editor Wallace Anthony (1936-2010) of The Alexandria Daily Town Talk, the chilly waters of Hudson Creek at Magnolia Park were dammed to form a large swimming pool. A bathhouse, snack bar, and as many as thirty summer houses were subsequently added. The park had shade from pine and beech trees. The pool had concrete walls. A wooden-gated dam included a large wooden water wheel placed as it developed for aesthetic reasons. Foote is listed in the 1940 U.S. Census at the age of twenty, still single, as living in Alexandria.

During World War II, Foote served in the United States Marine Corps, with two and a half years in the Pacific Theater of Operations. He attained the rank of colonel. While still a captain, he was awarded the Silver Star for "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity" on July 21–22, 1944, while as part of the Third Amphibian Tractor Battalion, he engaged in action against Japanese forces during the assault on enemy-held Guam in the Marianas Islands.

Foote began his law practice in 1947. For three years, he was a Rapides Parish assistant district attorney. He became the full-time city judge in 1955, a post he held until 1985. Judge Foote was particularly known for his commitment to juvenile justice and his role in the founding of the Renaissance Home for Youth, a juvenile offender facility located west of Alexandria. Joining Foote in 1972 in co-founding the Renaissance Home were Guy E. Humphries, Jr., a Louisiana 9th Judicial District Court judge who died three months before Judge Foote, and Dr. Glenn Earl Bryant (1922–2003), then the pastor of the Emmanuel Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in downtown Alexandria.

At the First United Methodist Church of Alexandria, Foote was a long-term member, the chairman of the building committee that constructed the sanctuary on Jackson Street, and a Sunday school teacher. He was affiliated with Rotary International and the Boy Scouts of America.

Foote was married to the former Antonia "Toni" Voelker, whose family in 1936 became the John Deere dealer in Alexandria. The Footes resided on Georges Lane in the Alexandria Garden District. There are seven Foote children—Evelyn Neill Marriott (David); George M. Foote (Jane); Edward S. Foote; William Ross Foote (Elizabeth); A. Lee Foote (Naomi); R. Hale Foote (Beth); and Ray A. Foote (Diana). Foote's surviving sister is Jane Ann Foote Culpepper (born c. 1926), the surviving widow of Judge William A. Culpepper of Alexandria, who served one four-year term on the state 9th Judicial District Court and twenty-two years on the Louisiana Circuit Court of Appeal for the Third District, part of the time as chief judge. He also instituted the United Way of America in Alexandria and in 1973 chaired the Alexandria Charter Commission.

Foote also had twenty-eight surviving grandchildren and twenty-two great-grandchildren. The Footes' oldest child and only daughter, Neill, and her husband, David Cannon Marriott, are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in Salt Lake City, Utah. They have ten children. An eleventh child, Judge Foote's namesake granddaughter, Georgia Marriott (1980-2002), was struck by a truck and killed while she was riding her bicycle near the Indiana University Bloomington campus, where she was studying violin.

Foote's son, W. Ross Foote, served for thirteen years prior to 2004 on the Louisiana 9th Judicial District Court prior to returning to his Alexandria law firm, Smith Foote. Since 2010, Foote's wife, George Foote's daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Erny Foote, a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, has been a judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, an appointee of U.S. President Barack H. Obama sponsored by U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu. Prior to her appointment to the federal judiciary, Elizabeth Foote was engaged in the full-time practice of law as a partner at Smith Foote. From 1978 to 1979, she was a law clerk for Judge William Culpepper.

Foote was a close friend and Bolton classmate of Howard B. Gist, Jr., the Alexandria city attorney during three municipal administrations prior to 1973. Like Foote, Gist attendede Washington and Lee and the Tulane Law School. Both were veterans of the War in the Pacific but in different branches of the military. Both were avid fishermen and hunters in the community.

Alexandria businessman Edwin Caplan said upon the news of Judge Foote's death at the age of ninety:

He made a difference in everything he did and every life he touched. [If one's] purpose in life was to set a good example ... George Foote certainly excels at that.