DOUGLAS MUNGIN: So what did the property look like when you first got there?

KEVIN FONDEL SR.: Nothing but woods, you know. A lot of trees, brush.

MUNGIN: Was that how most of the properties looked when you got here?

FONDEL: Yeah, yeah. We had . . . They had a house on side of us that a guy owned, and then we had the Thibodeauxs owned the property across from us. But behind us they had a house that were there, but it had torn . . . It was pretty much destroyed. I don’t know what happened to it. But all the way to the . . . Everything was pretty much still wooded. They had a few houses on Third Street, but across from us is pretty much the same that . . . like it was in 1980.

MUNGIN: Are your neighbors still the same folks?

FONDEL: No, they . . . Everybody moved out around ’96.

MUNGIN: So who were your neighbors when you first kind of moved into that area?

FONDEL: The Thibodeaux family. It was like six girls and one guy. That’s the first family that I met when I was in Mossville. I can remember the Bryants. You know, they had a lot of families here. That’s the thing that kind of . . . why I wanted to do this because we still own some . . . the property over there. And in ’96 they had the lawsuit and all with that. Then they bought a lot of people out, but my grandmother didn’t want to . . . She’s old school and she didn’t want to sell. Then when she passed away, my mom and dad they didn’t . . . They didn’t want to sell it. So we never got around to selling the property, but my little boy has a horse on the property now. And when we’re out there feeding the horse we always see old people that used to live in that area come by and say, “Man I sure miss being back here.” So and that’s kind of why I wanted to have a record of it. Because I’m . . . The way things going, eventually Sasol is going to buy us out too, so . . . And I just wanted a record of that: we were there at one time. Because I know we’re not going to be able to drive back there once they buy it out. [laughing]