Jimmy Strain

Background

Strain was the son of the former Lucy Stewart (1904-1963), a native of Robeline in Natchitoches Parish and the first wife of his father, the pediatrician/businessman Thomas E. Strain Senior (1898-1979).

Career

The Strains moved to Shreveport in 1926. Doctor Thomas Strain, Junior., graduate of C. East. Byrd High School in Shreveport and Tulane Medical School in New Orleans, served in the United States Navy during World World War II and the United States Air Force in the Korean War. A registered nurse, she suffered from depression in the last decade of her life and died in Shreveport of a drug overdose at the age of forty-five.

Two-and-a-half years later, Doctor Strain himself took his own life in Jacksonville, Florida.

The entire Democratic slate swept the state, including Caddo Parish. State Representative Taylor West. O"Hearn of Shreveport, one of the first two Republicans elected to the Louisiana House since Reconstruction era in the United States, was defeated in his bid for a second term at the time Strain was elected.

Strain did not seek a second term as state representative. Instead he ran in the last closed primary for governor of Louisiana held on November 6, 1971.

He finished last in a field of seventeen candidates with 1,258 votes (011 percent).

Achievements

• Strain won election to the state House of Representatives in the general election held on February 6, 1968. Victory ultimately went to Democrat Edwin Edwards, who won the first of his four non-consecutive terms in the office.

Membership

They were in partnership with Virginia Shehee, later a one-term member of the Louisiana State Senate from Caddo Parish.