William Pike Hall Sr.

William Pike Hall Sr.^[1] (October 19, 1896 – December 16, 1945), was an attorney, civic leader, and Democratic politician from Shreveport in northwestern Louisiana.

Background

Hall was born in Mansfield, the seat of government of DeSoto Parish located south of Shreveport, the youngest of four children of Judge William Pike Hall (1851-1928), a native of Iredell County in west central North Carolina. Judge Hall presided over DeSoto and Red River parishes. The judge's first wife and Pike's mother, Lillian Ida Jack (1862-1898) of Natchitoches, died when young Pike was two years of age. The judge then married the former Elise Tally (died 1954), and they are interred together at Greenwood Cemetery in Shreveport.^[2]

Hall was a maternal nephew of Judge George W. Jack of the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana and a cousin of Shreveport attorneys Whitfield Jack and Wellborn Jack, the latter a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives for Caddo Parish from 1940 to 1964.^[3]

Career

In 1900, Hall moved to Shreveport, where he was in time educated at Methodist-affiliated Centenary College and thereafter the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, and the Columbia Law School in New York City. In 1922, he received his Bachelor of Laws degree from Columbia and was admitted that year to the Louisiana bar. He was affiliated with Kappa Alpha Order social fraternity and the legal fraternity, Phi Delta Phi.^[4]

In 1917 and 1918, Hall was a private with the United States Army ambulance corps in France. He was a captain in the Judge Advocate General's Corps during World War II but was discharged for a physical disability. He sat on the local Selective Service Board. He was affiliated with the veterans organizations, the Forty and Eight, American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was affiliated with the Masonic lodge, the Shriners, and the Shreveport Chamber of Commerce. He served on the executive committee of the Louisiana Civil Service League. He was a member of the Shreveport Country Club and The Boston Club of New Orleans. He was a member of the First Methodist Church of Shreveport.^[4]

From 1924 to 1932, Hall represented Caddo and DeSoto parishes in the Louisiana State Senate during the administrations of Governors Henry Fuqua, Oramel H. Simpson, and Huey Pierce Long Jr.^[5] One of his Senate successors was the Shreveport attorney Cecil Morgan, a leader of the anti-Long forces in the chamber. Hall was a partner in the Shreveport law firm of Foster, Hall, and Smith; he was also active in the Louisiana Law Institute and at all levels of the bar association, including the presidency of the organization in 1940 and 1941.^[4]

In 1925, Hall married the former Hazel Tucker, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. C. M. Tucker of Haughton in southeastern Bossier Parish. The couple had two children, Hazel, later Hazel Schaffer, and Pike Hall Jr., a subsequent judge who at the time of his father's death was attending C. E. Byrd High School in Shreveport. Hall died in a Shreveport sanitarium at the age of forty-nine from complications of a cerebral stroke. He is interred at Forest Park East Cemetery in Shreveport.^[4]

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