When the media reported last week that the governor had named a Northwestern professor to the state’s census committee, I got to thinking about this process of counting everybody in the country.
It brought to mind the story I heard years ago about the census worker in Florida who wanted to reach residents of even the most remote parts of that state to be sure they were counted in the census.
She heard there was a little house on stilts at the edge of the Everglades that nobody had ever visited because it was so isolated. Her plan was to interview inhabitants of the dwelling.
After two days of travel, she stood in hip boots knocking on the door of the shanty. The old man who answered was surprised to see her or anyone else at his home and asked what she wanted.
The lady said she had flown by jet from Tallahassee to Tampa, chartered a seaplane to a nearby encampment in the Everglades, hired some alligator hunters to take her by airboat to the thick marshes where he lived and then walked the last mile through the swamp to his house.
She said she was there “because I want to find out the exact number of people who live in Florida and the United States.” The man said, “Lady, you have wasted a lot of time and money because I don’t have any idea.”
Census figures have always been sort of a mystery to me. On the internet right now are Louisiana’s 2020 census results. They show that the state has 4.65 million residents and the size of the average family in Louisiana is 3.29 people.
The census count reveals that 51.1 percent of Louisiana residents are women and 48.9 percent are men and that the median age of all those folks is 36.2 years. They could have left out that last statistic which just makes me feel even older.
There is even a breakdown in the census noting that 91.9 percent of people in Louisiana speak English and 3.71 percent speak Spanish. That made me wonder how I was classified.
As a journalism major, I was required to take four semesters of Spanish in college. The professor held a yellow pencil the first day of class. He said Spanish for yellow pencil is lapiz amarillo. That’s the only Spanish that stuck with me.
What’s baffling about this is that these census numbers for 2020 seem to be complete and we are just one month into this new census year.
Census people say their data is collected in large part by talking with people and sending them documents to fill out and return to the Census Bureau.
I am up in years, and I have never talked to any census takers or filled out forms for them. But that’s not surprising. I never deal with bills, insurance, taxes or any of that either. Regina does it.
Much of the information for the census apparently comes from things like tax forms and Social Security offices.
I am impressed with the fastidiousness of Social Security. When I signed up for those payments a while back, they had a record of my job at the swimming pool in Springhill in the 1950s. They knew I made $22 a week but didn’t show that I worked 84 hours for it.
When the census started in 1790, census workers went door-to-door to every house in America for information. It was sort of like those people who came to our house when I was growing up selling encyclopedias and vacuum cleaners.
Door-to-door business operations were common then. A yellow truck delivered Standard Coffee to our house, the Dutch Cleaners picked up and dropped off laundry, and Mr. Stewart collected insurance payments and kept the records in a black book.
If things still worked that way, people selling encyclopedias, pots and pans, vacuum cleaners, coffee and insurance house-to-house could probably help gather census information.
But the census folks rely on tax and Social Security records, questionnaires to people and things like that. Some citizens are probably falling through the cracks and not being counted.
If this local census committee member is open to suggestions, I recommend that the Census Bureau work with these robo call sales people who phone everybody in the country several times a day about their vehicle warranties. They know where all of us are.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES