==Lyons passes GOP baton to Treen==
Lyons had stepped down as party chairman in 1968 after working for the second nomination of Richard Nixon at the party convention in Miami Beach, [[Florida]]. He joined with the Mississippi state chairman Clarke Reed, the Alabama state chairman [[Alfred Goldthwaite (1921-1997)]], the South Carolina chairman Harry Shuler Dent, Sr. (1930-2007), and Howard Hollis "Bo" Callaway, Sr. (1927-2014), a one-term U.S. Representative who was the unsuccessful 1966 gubernatorial nominee in [[Georgia]] and Nixon's overall "southern coordinator," to hold the line for Nixon against weak challenges waged by Governors Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan. Lyons was succeeded as state chairman by his friend and fellow oilman [[Charles and Virginia de Gravelles|Charles deGravelles, Jr.]], of Lafayette. Charles' wife, Mary Virginia deGravelles, had been the national committeewoman from 1964 to 1968.
In 1972, Lyons supported Republican gubernatorial candidate David Treen of suburban New Orleans even though Lyons's younger son, Hall Lyons, was running for governor on the American Independent Party ticket, an organization founded in 1968 by former [[Alabama]] Governor [[George Wallace|George Corley Wallace, Jr.]] Hall Lyons withdrew from the race and endorsed Treen, who lost the general election to Democrat Edwin Edwards.<ref>In 1966, Hall Lyons ran for Congress in the Lafayette-based district, but he lost to veteran Democrat Edwin E. Willis, a moderate Southern Democrat who supported President Johnson. Willis was defeated for renomination in the 1968 Democratic primaries by a more conservative Democrat, Patrick T. Caffery.</ref> Unlike his son, Charlton Lyons had opposed Wallace, who had carried Louisiana's then ten electoral votes in 1968. Charlton Lyons instead worked for the Nixon-[[Spiro T. Agnew|Agnew]] elector slate, which fared poorly in Louisiana. Lyons had also held most in the Louisiana delegation for Nixon at the 1968 [[Republican National Convention]] in Miami Beach, despite Lyons's personal friendship with Ronald Reagan, who launched a brief presidential run on the Monday of the national convention