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THE
OCT 4TH, 1964
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
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Let me Bayou a drink
New Orleans
BAYOU
BEER 2
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
THE Oct 4th, 1964
1 3 Dorothy Parker
Goings on about town Talk of the town
Lisette LeBlanc talks about the growing divide between political parties in New Orleans and the radical changes on the horizon.
entitled “Etiquette” by Emily Post.
Orleans- and some of these are a bit more exclusive than others. One of these secret parties is known as the Rex and Comus ball.
insight regarding the past, present, and future state of New Orleans.
4 Mrs. post enlarges on etiquette Dorothy Parker discusses a light-hearted book
6 New Orleans Royalty With Mardi Gras comes many festivities in New Ignatius J. Reilly
John Updike James K. Glassman
7 Stop the freakshow Sheriff candidate Ignatius J. Reilly provides us with his 12
A short story about a man and his insomnia.
15 I have seen the future and its houston For many who love New Orleans, the changes that
The dark
accompany commercial growth inspire fear—but in the meantime the city’s economy stagnates and its population declines.
October 4th - October 11th
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
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ith Fall comes chaos. The holidays are right around the corner which means taking off of work, hanging out with in-laws, and spending absurd amounts of money only because people expect you to. Well for some of these New Orleans locals, there’s a stress reliver unlike any other- backyard brawling. If the thought of wrestling disgusts you, there’s still hope. Many people come to this event as a way to show off their craftsmanship with unique and exiciting costumes that truly steal the show.
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THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
CONTESTS
ART Trash-to-Treasure Dumpster Crawl Canal Street Oct. 5th
Backyard Brawl New Orleans Botanical Gardens Oct. 4th
Let out your inner beast at NOLAW’s (New Orleans Amateur Wrestling) annual backyard wrastlin’ brawl. Hosted by ____________ , this is a fight you don’t want to miss. Be the last one standing and you could win your very own prize of $100 and a case of Bayou Beer. Stop letting people walk all over you, now is your time to shine. Contest begins at 1:00pm, and ends when you end it. See you there!
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Join us, as we scour the streets of New Orleans, and learn to see the city through a different lensean artisitic lense. Starting on the corner of Canal St. and Esplanade, we’ll make our way through the allies, stopping at each dumpster to discuss beauty, society, and many other deep topics, while water-coloring the entire time. By the end of this crawl, you are sure to be a true, nonjudgmental artist.
MUSIC Sextana and the Devil’s Dancer The Chrystal Belle Oct. 6th
Drag Night at the Night of Joy Oct. 5th
On October 6th the Chrystal Belle brings you a night of jazz that you won’t forget. Doors open at 7, and the show starts at 8. Food and drinks will be available for purchase once inside.
It’s almost time for a new watch.
The Night of Joy brings you a special event you’ve all been waiting for, Drag Night! Don’t be shy, bring friends and dress to impress! There will be special prizes for best attire, best makeup, and best impromptu performance. Come dressed in character for no cover charge and many drink specials. Law enforcement will be charged triple. Hosted by Lana Lee, this is a night you’ll never forget, unless you decide you to have a little fun.
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
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THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Notes and comment
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he candidates who hope to face the electorate this fall are bound to feel themselves trapped by a dilemma that is in some ways unfair to holders or would-be holders of public office. In a decade whose celebrated men seemed to be most generously rewarded not for their ability but for what was widely called their personality, quite a few of the men seeking or holding public office became convinced that they had to study, at least to some degree, the professional tricks of men who have been trained to play not one part but many parts, on the stages of the theater and in front of the cameras of the cinema and of television. In that decade, Eisenhower had hardly settled down into his first term when Robert Montgomery, a suave performer in all three mediums who had also proved himself a competent director, went to the White House to give the General tips on how to make up his face, how to enunciate clearly, how to dress, and how to comfort himself in situations to which he had been more or less unaccustomed on the battlefields of Europe. The president learned much from this course of instruction, and, following his lead, the Republicans who hoped eventually to succeed him studied themselves in 3
mirrors, if they did not actually study the biographies of the Barrymores and the Booths. The Democratic candidates did the same. Eisenhower himself was following a precedent. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been called a ham by his enemies, and his greatest admirers had been unable to deny that he was no slouch at exhibiting in public, on occasion, feelings that could not at the moments have been in his heart. It takes a certain amount of acting to survive in a competitive society, no matter who you are. There is a trace of imposture in each one of us. What man has never put a gay necktie around his throat and a cheerful grin on his face in order to try to fool, if not the public, those who he loves and who love him? But now, the candidates of both parties are trying to unlearn some of what they felt it necessary to assimilate in the nineteen-fifties. The public with which they seek to make a smash hit has learned that the small screen of television was big enough to hide a large company of willy and deceitful thespians-- people whose grimaces of perplexity and sweats of effort were not real. To a public grown suspicious of the show, the political smile and grin and guffaw are no longer proof of goodness and well-being. As the spring advances and the campaign gets warmer, the more will solemnity replace jollity on the faces of those who are trying to move into the White House next January.
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nd there’s the rub. The assumption of a smile or the imposter that embraces a simulated cackle over a hotdog is a cinch for the most dyspeptic actor compared to the putting on of a convincing frown. It takes a good actor to play the part of a serious man. A man trying to look thoughtful when his head is empty is likely to trip over a prop and face the audience with an expression in which there is a telling trace of earnest vacuity. This is likely to make the audience feel that he is a miscast as a straight man--
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
that he is, indeed, a promising comedian. On the countenance of our greatest Chief Executive since George Washington, the photographers and painters of Civil War times almost always found and recorded a melancholy and brooding expression. Abraham Lincoln was a man who could laugh uproariously when there was something to laugh about but who saw nothing hilarious, or even amusing, about sitting for a cameraman or a painter. And he was a bad actor. Then, as now, there was nothing for a man to laugh about when he sat staring into the depths of an incomprehensible future. It’s going to be a tough campaign all around.
One drop too much
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ne of our presumably reliable informants in North Bergen County tells us that it is the habit of the denizens of the area to let fallen apples rot on the ground during the Autumn. Early last week, a flock of robins moved in on one orchard and started pecking away at what are referred to locally as “the drops.” A few minutes later, we are advised, not one of the birds could either fly or walk. Seems that cider--pretty hard--had built up in the fruit over time. Toward the end of the week, the robins sobered up and blew town.
horrible examples, the confirmed pullers of social boners. They deserve no more. They go about saying “Shake hands with Mr. Smith” or “I want to make you acquainted with Mrs. Smith” or “Will you permit me to recall myself to you?” or “Pardon me!” or “Permit me to assist you” or even “Pleased to meet you!” One pictures them as small people, darting about the outskirts of parties, fetching plates of salad and glasses of punch, applauding a little too enthusiastically at the end of a song, laughing a little too long at the point of an anecdote. If you could allow yourself any sympathy for such white trash, you might find something pathetic in their eagerness to please, their desperate readiness to be friendly. But one must, after all, draw that line somewhere, and Mr. Jones, no matter how expensively he is dressed, always gives the effect of being in his shirt-sleeves, while Mrs. Smith is so unmistakably the daughter of a hundred Elks. Let them be dismissed by somebody’s phrase (I wish to heaven it were mine)—“the sort of people who buy their silver.”
Mrs. post enlarges on etiquette A book of many rules
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Dorothy Parker
mily Post’s “Etiquette” is out again, this time in a new and an enlarged edition, and so the question of what to do with my evenings has been all fixed up for me. There will be an empty chair at the deal table at Tony’s, when the youngsters gather to discuss life, sex, literature, the drama, what is a gentleman, and whether or not to go on to Helen Morgan’s Club when the place closes; for I shall be at home among my book. I am going in for a course of study at the knee of Mrs. Post. Maybe, some time in the misty future, I shall be Asked Out, and I shall be ready. You won’t catch me being intentionally haughty to subordinates or refusing to be a pallbearer for any reason except serious ill-health. I shall live down the old days, and with the help of Mrs. Post and God (always mention a lady’s name first) there will come a time when you will be perfectly safe in inviting me to your
house, which should never be called a residence except in printing or engraving. It will not be a gruelling study, for the sprightliness of Mrs. Post’s style makes the text-book as fascinating as it is instructive. Her characters, introduced for the sake of example, are called by no such unimaginative titles as Mrs. A., or Miss Z., or Mr. X.; they are Mrs. Worldly, Mr. Bachelor, the Gildings, Mrs. Oldname, Mrs. Neighbor, Mrs. Stranger, Mrs. Kindhart, and Mr. and Mrs. Nono Better. This gives the work all the force and the application of a morality play.
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t is true that occasionally the author’s invention plucks at the coverlet, and she can do no better by her brainchildren than to name them Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith. But it must be said, in fairness, that the Joneses and the Smiths are the
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hese people in Mrs. Post’s book live and breathe; as Heywood Broun once said of the characters in a play, “they have souls and elbows.” Take Mrs. Worldly, for instance, Mrs. Post’s heroine. The woman will live in American letters. I know of no character in the literature of the last quarter-century who is such a complete pain in the neck. See her at that moment when a younger woman seeks to introduce herself. Says the young woman: “ ‘Aren’t you Mrs. Worldly?’ Mrs. Worldly, with rather freezing politeness, says ‘Yes,’ and waits.” And the young woman, who is evidently a glutton for punishment, neither lets her wait from then on nor replies, “Well, Mrs. Worldly, and how would you like a good sock in the nose, you old meataxe?” Instead she flounders along with some cock-and-bull story about being a sister of Millicent Manners, at which Mrs. Worldly says, “I want very much to hear you sing some time,” which marks her peak of enthusiasm throughout the entire book. See Mrs. Worldly, too, in her intimate moments at home. “Mrs. Worldly seemingly pays no attention, but nothing escapes her. She can walk through a room
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
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N.O. L.A.W. New Orleans Amateur wrestling
without appearing to look either to the right or left, yet if the slightest detail is amiss, an ornament out of place, or there is one dull button on a footman’s livery, her house telephone is rung at once!” Or watch her on that awful night when she attends the dinner where everything goes wrong. “In removing the plates, Delia, the assistant, takes them up by piling one on top of the other, clashing them together as she does so. You can feel Mrs. Worldly looking with almost hypnotized fascination—as her attention might be drawn to a street accident against her will.” There is also the practical-joker side to Mrs. W. Thus does Mrs. Post tell us about that: “For example, Mrs. Worldly writes: “ ‘Dear Mrs. Neighbor: “ ‘Will you and your husband dine with us very informally on Tuesday, the tenth, etc.’
“Whereupon, the Neighbors arrive, he in a dinner coat, she in her simplest evening dress, and find a dinner of fourteen people and every detail as formal as it is possible to make it. . . . In certain houses—such as the Worldlys’ for instance—formality is inevitable, no matter how informal may be her ‘will you dine informally’ intention.”
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TAG TEAM only Let out your inner beast
Call today at555-555-1111
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ne of Mrs. Post’s minor characters, a certain young Struthers, also stands sharply out of her pages. She has caught him perfectly in that scene which she entitles “Informal Visiting Often Arranged by Telephone” (and a darn good name for it, too). We find him at the moment when he is calling up Millicent Gilding, and saying, “ ‘Are you going to be in this afternoon?’ She says, ‘Yes, but not until a quarter of six.’ He says, ‘Fine, I’ll come then.’ Or she says, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m playing bridge with Pauline—but I’ll be in to-morrow!’ He says, ‘All right, I’ll come to-morrow.’ ” Who, ah, who among us does not know a young Struthers? As one delves deeper and deeper into “Etiquette,” disquieting thoughts come. That old Is-It-Worth-It Blues starts up again, softly, perhaps, but plainly. Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness. The letters and the conversations of the correct,
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
as quoted by Mrs. Post, seem scarcely worth the striving for. The rules for the finding of topics of conversation fall damply on the spirit. “You talk of something you have been doing or thinking about—planting a garden, planning a journey, contemplating a journey, or similar safe topics. Not at all a bad plan is to ask advice: ‘We want to motor through the South. Do you know about the roads?’ Or, ‘I’m thinking of buying a radio. Which make do you think is best?’ ” I may not dispute Mrs. Post. If she says that is the way you should talk, then, indubitably, that is the way you should talk. But though it be at the cost of that future social success I am counting on, there is no force great enough ever to make me say, “I’m thinking of buying a radio.”
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t is restful, always, in a book of many rules—and “Etiquette” has six hundred and eighty-four pages of things you must and mustn’t do—to find something that can never touch you, some law that will never affect your ways. Once somebody gave me a book of French conversation; I looked through it, sick with horror at all I had to learn. But hope came to me, for on one page there flashed like a friendly smile one single sentence that I knew I should never need to study, one blessed group of words for which, though I lived to be eighty, I could find no possible use. That sentence was “I fear you have come too late to accompany me on your harp.” And in “Etiquette,” too, I had the sweetly restful moment of chancing on a law which I need not bother to memorize, let come no matter what. It is in that section called “The Retort Courteous to One You Have Forgotten,” although it took a deal of dragging to get it in under that head. “If,” it runs, “after being introduced to you, Mr. Jones” (of course, it would be Mr. Jones that would do it) “calls you by a wrong name, you let it pass, at first, but if he persists you may say: ‘If you please, my name is Stimson.’ ” No, Mrs. Post; persistent though Mr. Smith be, I may not say, “If you please, my name is Stimson.” The most a lady may do is give him the wrong telephone number.
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New Orleans Royalty Rex and Comus Provide Splendor for New Orleans Mardi Gras; Secret Societies End Carnival With Two Courtly Galas THE NEW YORK TIMES
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here’s nothing chic about a Mardi Gras street mob, what with people fighting over souvenir trinkets thrown from passing floats, but the splendor of the ceremonial, invitation‐only Rex and Comus Balls is something else again. They’re enough to make one believe that some New Orleans people really do have royal blood in their veins. The private galas, the finale of the New Orleans preLenten carnival, which started on Jan. 6, were held in separate sections of the Municipal Auditorium. Each group had an elegantly costumed king and queen who presided over the festivities, and although Comus, the older and smaller of the two secret societies, traditionally draws the crème de la crème of old New Orleans society, Rex had its share of aristocrats. Ernest C. Villeré and Mrs. Russell Clark, both of whom are progency of the Villeré who landed here in 1718 with Jean Baptist le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville were there.
“Everything’s so busy we always say we’re going to leave town at Mardi Gras time,” Mrs. Clark said, “but we never do. It’s been part of our lives since the beginning. We’re Creoles.” ‘She’s pure Creole’
hen a New Orleanian says he’s Creole, it means he’s descended from the children born here in colony days to French or Spanish parents. To be Creole is to have cachet. “She’s pure Creole,” said a friend who wanted to pay Mrs. Clark the nicest compliment. “She doesn’t have a drop of American blood in her.” It is a word often misunderstood in the North. Mrs. Clark had a special reason for attending this year’s Rex Ball. It was the 50th anniversary of her presentation as a maid in Rex’s court. Crawford H. Ellis, the 1914 Rex, King of Carnival was on hand, too. So was Mrs. Louis Sussdorff, the 1914 queen of Carnival.Mrs. Sussdorff, the widow of a Foreign Service officer, is the former Flores Howard. Her father and grandfather were carnival kings. Mr. Ellis, whose lapel is ornamented with a small commemorative gold crown, is chairman of the board of the Pan‐American Life Insurance Company. He is 91 years old.
“Of course I go to work every day,” he assured a young upstart who asked the question. “I was president of the company for 50 years, and then they insisted I take the chairmanship.” Darwin S. Fenner, whose father was the cotton broker who founded the brokerage firm of Fenner & Beane, now Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, was another of the distinguished guests at the Rex Ball. ‘I was about to walk away when a woman approached the mailbox’ “Some Rexes belong to Comus and vice versa,” Mr. Fenner said. “But only a Comus knows another Comus. Members are always masked at their ball. No one’s supposed to be able to recognize them.” Mr. Fenner is a member of Rex and a former King of Carnival. He probably belongs to Comus, too. So do Mr. Clark, a broker; Judge George Janvier, whose ancestors landed at Newcastle, Del., in 1686, and Hughes P. Walmsley, an insurance executive.
of the organization, knows the identity of all the members. Keeping the names secret apparently is half the fun. It also contributes an aura of exclusivity.
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he Rex and Comus also, like other postparade dances given during carnival officially began with pageants comparable to those held in the French court when Versailles was still a palace. Trumpets sounded while the kings and queens were escorted to their satin and brocade thrones. Courtiers wearing gilded tennis shoes bowed as if their monarchs’ titles and jewels were real. The orchestras played and replayed majestic‐ sounding music. It was a great night for the “Aida” march. Clayton L. Nairne, president of New Orleans Public Service, Inc., the gas and electric concern, was Rex, King of Carnival. Miss Claudia Tucker FitzHugh was his queen. John R. FitzHugh, her father, is in the oil business, and her mother is a member of an old New Orleans family. The Comus king’s expression was one of permanent surprise. His identity was concealed by a mask.
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ach ball had two kinds of guests, both formally clad. One group was invited to watch the proceedings from balcony seats. The other, including members of the host organization, their wives and daughters, sat in rows of chairs around the dance floor. When the pageants ended, persons in the latter group were permitted to dance if they felt like it, and most of them did. The dancing in both ball rooms came to a halt with the midnight meeting of the Rex and Comus courts. This ceremony was held in Comus territory because that society has seniority. It came into being in 1857. Rex, organized to provide extra‐ special entertainment for Grand Duke Aleksei Romanov of Imperial Russia, was not founded until 1872. About 9,000 members and guests attended the two gatherings.
It is considered rude to ask a man if he’s a Comus member, however, and if the matter ever comes up, he changes the subject. Theoretically, only the Captain, a sort of permanent general manager THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
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Stop the f reakshow N
Ignatius J. Reilly
ew Orleans, a name that at once brought a smile to every decent American seems, only now, to stir feelings of joy in those with some kind of a queer deathwish. To merely suggest taking a trip to the heart of this
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city is to reject all common sense. Only two decades ago the French Quarter had milkmen peddling from door to door. Recently, these good natured milkmen have been replaced with perverts, wearing their bright feathered scarves and
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
halfway soiled underwear, peeping through the shutters of any house that seems presently occupied. On any given day, all French Quarter passersby witness a host of ungodly sights that become unshakeable memories, surely to revisit them
at random moments throughout their day. In fact, you can tell the locals from the visitors quite easily just by looking at their eyes. New Orleanians carry a glazed, distracted look with them. No doubt this is due to the recurring flashbacks. I, myself, was forced to resort to practicing various techniques to keep these atrocious images away. The most effective technique is to hum a tasteful
tune. I find that Die Zauberflöte’s, K. 620: Act II, Scene VIII. No. 14 Aria “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” often does the trick. A perfect description of New Orleans can be found in any bible, but under a different name. Sodom and Gomorrah- may God have mercy on our souls.
for these characters. For too long our law enforcement has accepted the fact that our city has become the world’s hub for the sexually deviant. We let characters prance around our streets flapping their cheeks like chimps while we do nothing but turn our “cheeks”. As I have said many times before, the home is as to be as sensually here is no question as to why comfortable as the human womb our city has become a beacon supposedly is. With this being
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said, it is clear that New Orleans is in no state to be called anyone’s “home.”
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Take your favorite music anywhere with a Sony cordless radio.
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e citizens have turned ourselves into the laughing stock of those people that have been blessed by Fortuna and are living out the American dream. I have traveled to various cities around Louisiana throughout my life and can tell you firsthand that we are being actively mocked to this day. “America’s ass,” is a favorite among the many nicknames given to the city we used to be proud of. Of course, there are plenty of desirable hind-quarters in the world but I imagine the “ass” that is being referred to is that of America’s elder mascot- Uncle Sam. I shall not venture into the many nicknames given to us, the citizens of Asstown, but I assure you there is no shortage of defecation related epithets. Why, do you suppose, is our law enforcement allowing this to go on? Are they fearful of these characters? Maybe they enjoy watching these degenerates from afar, like a group of privileged tourists on an African safari- their badges serving as a barrier of protection from the savage inhabitants whom we share our streets with.
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
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ell one thing is certain, this will only continue to get worse, until every street corner is inhabited by these false prophets preaching acceptance of this rude and tasteless behavior. In fact, public indecency will become the norm! Clothes will be rendered useless, and your own homes will be overrun by squatters claiming rights to your property. Your dinner table will be used as toilets, your bibs and aprons as toilet paper, and your dishes will be made into instruments whose clanking will lead parades through your own front doors. These savages will stop at nothing until New Orleans has completely seceded from all of the world’s morals. We are already slowly drifting from the rest of society’s norms as it is. Here in New Orleans, it is considered abnormal to be sober anywhere in the French Quarter. By evolutionary means, the drunks of New Orleans have developed a keen ability to recognize, then chastise, the sober among them. They feel as though the French Quarter is their drunken domain, and to threaten this domain with sobriety is to threaten the very existence of such a godless place. Sobriety is a direct insult to the alcoholic forefathers before them, who spent their
entire lives slowly chipping away at this city’s moral compass.
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hat should we do about this circus? Well, for one thing we should wake up our police force from their thirty year hibernation. For too long has our hard-earned money gone to waste funding these policemen’s gluttony and sloth. When I am elected sheriff, all police on our force will undergo a rigorous training regimen involving physical and mental practices. If they fail to meet proper training expectations, they will be demoted to working in-house until time comes for them to reenter training. What good is our police force if they can’t capture our criminals? On top of this training, we should expand our force and make our presence known on every street corner of this city. Until now our focus thus far has been misguided, and now it is time that we hone in on what is really important to this city: you. We’ll tighten the leash on laws concerning public indecency and we’ll keep a watchful eye on all businesses that enable the habits of these broken people. No more harassment, no more squatting, and no more disorder.
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fter this plan is put into place many changes will become apparent. Firstly, the streets will appear to be much emptier, as a large-scale cleanup is in order. Any and all suspicious folks will be stopped and questioned accordingly. If they have committed no crimes, they will be released back into the public, though most of the people frequenting the current French Quarter must be up to no good. "Once the streets are cleaned of these
annoyances, and the jails fill, you will notice an immediate change in temperament throughout the city. There will be much less fear, much less crime, and much more decency."
All good mannered folks will find solace in our city once more. Elect me as the New Orleans Parish Sheriff. Let’s bring justice back to New Orleans.
It’s almost time for a new N5 watch. o
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Save it for a rainy day.
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THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
The Dark
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John Updike
he dark, he discovered, was mottled; was a luminous collage of patches of almost-color that became, as his open eyes grew at home, almost ectoplasmically bright. Objects became lunar panels let into the air that darkness had given flat substance to. Walls dull in day glowed. Yet he was not comforted by the general pallor of the dark, it’s unexpected transparence; rather, he lay there waiting, godlessly praying, for those visitations of positive light that were hurled, unannounced, through the windows by the headlights of automobiles pausing and passing outside. Some were slits, erect as sentinels standing guard before beginning to slide, helplessly, across a corner, diagonally warping, up onto the ceiling, accelerating, and away. Others were yellowish rectangles, scored with panes, windows themselves, but watery, streaked, the mullions dissolved, as if the apparition silently posed on a blank interior wall were being in some manner lashed from without by a golden hurricane.
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e wondered if all these visitations were caused by automobiles; for some of them appeared and disappeared without any accompaniment of motor noises below, and others seem projected from an angle much higher than that of the street. Perhaps the upstairs lamps
in neighboring homes penetrated the atmosphere within his bedroom. But it was a quiet neighborhood, and he imagined himself to be, night after night, the last person awake. Yeah it was a rare hour, even from two o’clock on, when the darkness in which he lay was untouched; sooner or later, with a stroking motion like a finger passing across velvet, there would occur one of those intrusions of light which his heart would greet with wild grateful beating, for he had come to see in them his only companions, guards, and redeemers.
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ounds served in a much paler way-the diminishing drone of an unseen car vanishing at a point his mind’s eye located beyond the Baptist church; the snatched breath and renewed surge of a truck shifting gears on the hill; the pained squeak, chuffing shuffle, and comic toot of a late commuting train clumsily threading the same old rusty needle; the high vibration of an airplane like a piece of fuzz caught in the skies throat. These evidences of a universe of activity and life extending beyond him did not bring the same liberating assurance as those glowing rectangles delivered like letters through the slots in his room. The stir, whimper, or cough coming from the bedroom of one or another of his children had a contrary effect, of his
consciousness touching a boundary, and abrasive rim. And in the breathing of his wife beside him a tight limit seemed reached. The blind, moist motor of her oblivious breathing seem to follow the track of a circular running of which he was the vortex, sinking lower and lower in the wrinkled bed until he was lifted to another plane by the appearance, longdelayed, on his walls of an angel, linear and serene, of light stolen from another world.
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hile waiting, he discovered the dark to be green in color, a green so lowkeyed only eyes made supernaturally alert could have sensed it, a thoroughly dirtied green in which he managed to detect, under opaque integuments of ambiguity, a general pledge of hope. Specific hope he had long given up. It seemed a childhood ago when he had moved, a grown man, through a life of large rooms, with whitepainted moldings and flowing curtains, whose walls each gave abundantly, in the form of open doorways and flung back French windows, into other rooms-- a mansion without visible end. In one of the rooms he had been stricken with a pang of unease. Still king of space, he had moved to dismiss the unease and the door handle had rattled, stuck. The curtains had stopped blowing. Behind him, the sashes and archways sealed. Still, it was merely a question of holding one’s breath and finding a key. If the door was accidentally locked--had locked itself--there was certainly a key. For all locks keys exist, by definition. A lock without a key is a monstrosity, and while he knew, in a remote way, that monstrosities exist, he also knew there were many more rooms; he had glimpsed them waiting with their white-painted and Polished corners, their invisible breeze of light. Doctors airily agreed; but then their expressions fled one way-cherubic, smiling--while their words fled another, and became unutterable, leaving him facing the blankness where the division had occurred. He tapped his pockets. They were empty. He stooped to pick the lock with his fingernails, and it shrank from his touch, became a formless bump, a bubble, and sank into the wood. The door became a smooth and solid wall. There was nothing left for him but the hope that the impenetrability of walls was in some sense an illusion. His nightly vigil investigated this possibility. His discoveries, of the varied texture of
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light, seemed at moments to confirm his hope. At other moments, by other lights, his vigil seemed an absurd toy supplied by cowardice to entertain his last months.
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e had months and not years to live. This was the fact. By measuring with his mind (which seemed to hover in fear some distance from his brain) the intensity of certain sensations obliquely received, he could locate, by a kind of triangulation, his symptoms in space: a patch of strangeness beneath the left rib, an inflexible limitation in his lungs, is sickly-sweet languor in his ankles, which his mind’s eye located just this side of the town wharf. But space interested him only as the silver on the back of the mirror of time. It was in time, the utterly polished surface, that he searched for his reflection, only thin-lipped and otherwise familiar. He wondered why the difference between months and years should be qualitative when mere quantities were concerned, and his struggle to make “month” a variant of “year” reminded him of, from his deepest past, his efforts to remove a shoehorn from between his heel and shoe, where his childish clumsiness he had wedged it. How impossibly tight the fit had seemed! How feeble and small he must have been!
H
e did not much revisit the past. His innerspace, the space of his mind, seemed as irrelevant as the space of his body. His father’s hands, his mother’s tears, his sister’s voice shrilling across an itchy lawn, the rolls of dust beneath his bed that might, just might, be poisonous caterpillars--these glints only frightened him with the depth of the darkness in which they were all but smothered. Everything in his life had been ordinary except its termination. His “life.” Considered as a finite noun, his life seemed unequal to the infinitude of death. The inequality almost made a ledge where his hope could grip; but the leaden sighing of his wife’s sagging mouth dragged it down. Faithlessly she lay beside him in the arms of her survival. Her unheeding sleep deserved only dull anger and was not dreadful like the sleep of his children, whose dream-sprung coughs and cries seemed to line the mouth of death with teeth. The sudden shortness of his life seemed to testify to the greed of those he had loved. He should have been shocked by his indifference to them; should have grubbed the root of this
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coldness from his brain, but introspection, like memory, sickened him with its steep perspectives, afflicted him with the nausea of futile concentration, as if he were picking in melting lock. He was not interested in his brain but in his soul, his soul, that outward simplicity embodied in the shards and diagonal panes of light that wheeled around his room when a car smoothly passed in the street below. From three o’clock on, the traffic was thin. As if his isolation had turned him into God, he blessed, with stately were wordlessness, whatever errant teenager or returning philanderer relieved the stillness of this town. Then, toward four, all such visits ceased. There was a quietness. Unwanted images began to impinge on the dark: a pulpy many legged spider was offered wriggling to him on a fork. His teeth ache to think of biting.
I
t was time to imagine the hand. He, who since infancy had slept best on his stomach, could now endure lying only on his back. He wished his lids, even if they were closed, to be pelted and bathed by whatever eddie’s of light animated the room. As these eddie’s died, and the erosion of sleeplessness began to carve his consciousness fantastically, he had taken to conceiving of himself as lying in a giant hand, his head on the fingertips and his legs in the crease of the palm. He did not picture the hand with total clarity, denied it nails and hair, and with idle rationality supposed it was an echo from Sunday school, some old-fashioned print; nevertheless, the hand was so real to him that he would stealthily double his pillow to lift his head higher and thereby fit himself better to the curve of the great fingers. The hand seemed to hold him at some height, but he had no fear of falling or any sense of display, of being gazed at, as a mother gazes at the baby secure in her arms. Rather, his hand seemed something owed him, a basis upon which had been drawn the contract of his conception, and it had the same extensive, impersonal life as the pieces of light that had populated, before the town went utterly still, the walls of his room. Now the phosphor of these walls took on a blueness, as if the yellowness of the green tinge of the darkness were being
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
distilled from it. Still safe in the hand, he dared turn, with exquisite gradualness, and lie on his side and touch with his knees the underside of his wife’s thighs, which her bunched nightie had bared. Her intermittently restless sleep usually settled into a fetal position facing away from him; and in a parallel position-ready at any nauseous influx of terror to return to his back--he delicately settled himself, keeping the soft touch of her flesh at his knees as a mooring. His eyes are closed. Experimentally he opened them, and a kind of gnashing, a blatancy, at the leafy window, which he now faced, led him to close them again. A rusty rippling, a kind of brown creaking, comfortable and antique, passed along his body, merging with the birdsong that had commenced beyond the window like the melodious friction of a machine of green and squeaking wood.
H
e smiled at himself, having for an instant imagine that he was adjusting his stiff arms around a massive thumb beside his face. Comfort ebbed from the position; his wife irritably stirred and broke the mooring. Carefully, as gingerly as if his body were an assemblage of components any one of which might deflect his parabolic course, he moved to lie on his stomach, pressing himself on the darkness beneath him, as if in wrestling, upon some weary foe.
P
anic jerked his dry lids open. He looked backward, past his shoulder, at the pattern of patches that had kept watch with him. A chair, with clothes tossed upon it, had begun to be a chair, distinctly forward from the wall. The air, he saw, was being visited by another invader, a creature unlike the others, entering not obliquely but frontally, upright, methodically, less by stealth than like someone hired, like a fine powder very slowly exploding, scouring the white walls of their moss of illusion, polishing objects into islands. He felt in this arrival relief from his vigil and knew, his chest loosening rapidly, then in a finite time he would trickle through the fingers of the hand; would slip, blissfully, into oblivion, as a fold is smoothed from a width of black silk.
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THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
14
New Orleans: i have seen the future and it is houston
F
James K. Glassman
or the past century or so, New Orleans has been a city that has gotten by on charm alone. Very few people here seriously consider New Orleans part of the “New South” or of the “Sunbelt” or of any other geoeconomic entity conjured up in the past two decades. And, until a few years ago, hardly anyone in New Orleans minded being left out. New Orleans might be poor, but it is happy. In fact, during last year’s mayoral race, one of the candidates ran TV commercials that showed a bustling skyline with a voiceover ominously intoning, “Do you want New Orleans to become another Houston?” Despite the fact that New Orleans has perhaps the finest natural location in the country for commerce, the city’s economy has stagnated for at least twenty years. Population has declined; unemployment is among the highest in the South; and New Orleanians have remained among the poorest in the nation. Little has changed since the 1960 Census, which showed that out of the fifty largest cities in the country, New Orleans had the highest percentage of families living below the federal poverty level: 21.6 percent, against 18.4 percent for second-place Newark. New Orleans also ranked last among the fifty cities in percentage increase in median family income between 1950 and 1960, and forty-third in median years of education per adult.
I
t wasn’t until recently, when James Bobo, a University of New Orleans professor, published a highly critical report on the state of the local economy, that the public began to pay attention to what was going on. Bobo’s report was entitled “Pro Bono Publico?”—a play on the motto of the most prominent Mardi Gras parading club, the Krewe of Rex, whose members are the sort of civic leaders that Bobo blamed for the city’s stagnation. Bobo’s thesis was simple: New Orleans had lost its industrial base. Manufacturing jobs were declining year by year, with the slack taken up by lower-paying, less stable jobs in service industries, mainly tourism. The steady fall of the economy had taken place with the acquiescence, if not the blessing, of
15
the city’s political and business leaders, who tended to like things the way they were and who probably feared the kind of social change that more industry would bring. The politicians, businessmen, and socialites who run New Orleans have through the years practiced their own brand of benign neglect. And the neglect—at least until recently—really has been quite benign. New Orleans, despite its tropical fecundity and its pervasive sense of impending violence (storms approaching from the Gulf, a murder rate about twice as high as the national average, as well as a major proportion of disasters highrise fires, mass lynchings, yellow fever epidemics, ferry sinkings, snipers, race riots, and hurricanes), has always been an easy city to live in—even if you’re poor.
“Bobo’s thesis was simple: New Orleans had lost its industrial base. Manufacturing jobs were declining year by year, with the slack taken up by lower-paying, less stable jobs in service industries, mainly tourism.”
Until five years ago, a ride on a bus or streetcar was only fifteen cents. In 1950, a plate of red beans and rice—standard Monday fare in the city and when well prepared, a culinary triumph, redolent of Tabasco, shallots, and spices, and the richness of long-cooked ham hocks, which turn the sauce to velvet—was only twenty-eight cents at Buster Holmes, a famous French Quarter hangout on Burgundy Street. Smoked sausage on the side brought the tab to seventyfive cents. Plentiful natural gas in the state made utility bills cheap: five years ago, the average monthly charge was around $20. And then there were free attractions such as Carnival—the two weeks of parades and drinking and balls leading up to Mardi Gras; jazz funerals; band concerts in Jackson Square; the smell of roasting coffee along Tchoupitoulas Street in the early spring; and the joy of standing behind the French Market in May and watching the turgid Mississippi rush by.
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
Haute cuisine ost of these pleasures still obtain. The nickel phone call—a relic of the Huey Long populist era—survives. A streetcar ride up St. Charles Avenue along a grassy median strip planted with camellias and azaleas is now thirty cents, and you can pull the windows all the way down and feel the breeze. No air-conditioning. A lunch of red beans and rice and sausage is now up to $2 in most restaurants, but you can dine for just under $10 on shrimp remoulade, fresh lake trout amandine, and dark chicory coffee at Galatoire’s, which, after a declining spell, ranks again as the best restaurant in the French Quarter and one of the best in the country.
M
People in New Orleans (which is
pronounced by the populace either “New Or-lee-uhuns” or “N’ORluhns”) still spend a good deal of their time arguing the merits of restaurants and not all the restaurant talk is about Galatoire’s or Arnaud’s or Antoine’s.
I
n recent years, most of the conversation has centered on two places on the West Bank of the Mississippi—LeRuth’s, in a Victorian cottage in Gretna, about fifteen minutes from the French Quarter, and Mosca’s, a simple roadhouse with a Budweiser sign out front, about fortyfive minutes from the center of town on the road that leads to Avondale Shipyards, the state’s largest employer. Mosca’s serves a Creole-Italian mélange of cuisine—oyster casserole with garlic and a touch of anise; broiled shrimp in pepper, butter, and rosemary; homemade sausage and homemade pasta. LeRuth’s cooking is more of the haute variety: oyster and artichoke soup, fried softshell crab topped with lump crabmeat in lemon butter, cantaloupe sherbet and mandarin ice.
T
he genius of LeRuth’s is Warren LeRuth, a product of New Orleans’s tough Third Ward (a largely residential and light industrial area called Mid-City) and of Jesuit High School. Practically every white Orleanian of note went to that school—from former Mayor Moon Landrieu to the popular local TV sportscaster Hap Glaudi, who spends about half of each show congratulating aged couples on their golden wedding anniversaries and giving out the scores
of CYO Biddy Basketball League games. LeRuth is the sort of local hero who belies Walker Percy’s claim in Lancelot that in 300 years of history, New Orleans “has never produced a single significant historical event, one single genius, or even a first-class talent—except a chess player, the world’s greatest. But genius makes people nervous, so he quit playing chess and began worrying about money like everyone else. It is altogether in keeping that the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over and was without significance.” (Percy might have pointed out that the battle was fought not in New Orleans but in Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish to the east of the city, today a blue-collar neighborhood that constitutes another world entirely.) And, oh yes, the chess player was Paul Morphy, the only world champion this country produced before Bobby Fischer. Morphy’s old house is now Brennan’s Restaurant on Royal Street. In the end everything here gets back to food. Gardens of the past
T
o food, or to buildings . . . In the past ten years or so, this city has rediscovered its past. Fortunately New Orleanians in the fifties lacked the energy to tear down their nineteenth-century architectural treasures and uproot the spreading live oaks. Now, most of the treasures remain. The new generation of young professionals in their twenties and thirties make a pastime of renovating Greek Revival cottages and Victorian shotguns (long, narrow New Orleans cottages exactly one room wide and four or five rooms deep, so called because you could shoot a shotgun through the front door and the charge would pass through every room and out the back). Much of the awareness of the value of old houses can be traced to a series of volumes begun in 1962 and published by the Friends of the Cabildo, an organization of supporters of the Louisiana State Museum. Each of the books—there have been six so far—catalogues historically important buildings in one neighborhood. New Orleans is, above all, a city of neighborhoods. A study made by the architectural firm of Curtis & Davis identified eighty of them. The two most important ones now being renovated are the Lower Garden District (the area between the Garden District itself,
where the city’s most glorious mansions were built, and the downtown business district) and the Faubourg Marigny (across Esplanade Avenue, downriver from the French Quarter). Both of these neighborhoods had been occupied by poor whites and blacks before the renovators moved in. The Victorian cottages are now painted in pastels with handsome contrasting shutters. Parks have been cleared and replanted, and both neighborhoods are fine places to live. But in the process of renewal the natives have been forced off their own land, and while the city’s architecture has been preserved, its folkways are being destroyed, especially in the Irish Channel area near the Lower Garden District. There are neighborhoods, however that remain relatively untouched by upper-middle-class civilization: genteel Gentilly, the setting for Walker Percy’s Moviegoer and the city’s first suburb; Bywater, downriver from the Faubourg Marigny and one of the earliest settled parts of the city; and Old Algiers, a tenminute ferry ride from Canal Street and still a part of New Orleans proper though it sits in splendid bucolic isolation.
Populous Suburbia
C
ompared to the charm of the city’s neighborhoods, New Orleans suburbs tend to be pretty desolate places. The largest, Metairie, consists mainly of a sea of tract houses built in the sixties and of singles’ apartments. Across the river, Gretna is much of the same. Metairie and Gretna are both parts of the great suburban parish of Jefferson, which will probably surpass Orleans Parish (New Orleans itself ) in population in another fifteen years. Currently the population of Jefferson is around 420,000, of Orleans, 560,000. Jefferson’s chief political figure, Assessor Lawrence Chehardy, for years attracted New Orleans residents to his parish with some of the lowest property taxes in the land. Then, in 1974, Chehardy managed to get the new Louisiana constitution to adopt an article that bars all property taxes on homes valued under $50,000. Chehardy has since stepped down as assessor in favor of his son, and devotes most of his time to trying to get the legislature to raise the property tax exemption to $100,000 homes. Meanwhile,
Jefferson
continues
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
to 16
distinguish itself as one of the most poorly run rich counties in the United States. Its schools and roads are as bad as those of Orleans Parish (even though Jefferson’s per capita income is much higher), and it has far more venal public officials (as an investigation of graft in public works by the U.S. attorney’s office continues to show).Still, there is a strange charisma that draws many native Orleanians back to the city after a few years of apprenticeship in the banks of New York or the law firms of Washington. The future of the city is, in great measure, in the hands of these prodigal sons and daughters. The ones who have returned in recent years have found that while the city’s charms have been kept intact, the world now is too much with New Orleans. Real estate prices have soared and rents have gone up; utility rates are much closer to the national average; and life has become more of a scramble, more the way it is in Cleveland or Schenectady. Finally, in the mid-fifties and early sixties, when the city felt itself forced to face the fact that so many of its people were poor, and without jobs, its solution was, of course, to erect a building—the Superdome, the largest covered stadium in the world.The Superdome sprang fullblown from the forehead of one Dave Dixon, a local promoter and former car salesman. Dixon managed to sell his idea to Governor John McKeithen. Dixon tells the story that after he described his idea to McKeithen, the governor “bolted out of his chair and said: ‘By God! That will be the greatest building in the history of man. We’re gonna do it!’
T
he Superdome did not, however, turn out to be the greatest building in the history of man, or even the second greatest. It was beset with cost overruns and political scandals. Voters were told that the Superdome would cost $35 million, the same as Houston’s Astrodome, which it would dwarf; instead, the final figure was $165 million. The Dome was supposed to make an operating profit its first year; instead, it has shown a large deficit for each of its three years of operation, and no one today seriously thinks the Dome will ever come close to paying for itself.
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"Last year’s operating loss was $5.5 million, not including debt service, which runs to $10 million a year. In fact, the Dome costs $50,000 a day to keep open—whether it is used or not."
C
ivic boosters in New Orleans tend to point to the Dome as the main impetus behind the city’s building boom of the past ten years. It is probably true that hotel chains such as Marriott, Hyatt, and Hilton have come to New Orleans in large part because of their expectations about the Dome. But it is hard to see how the Dome can take credit for office buildings such as the sixty-story One Shell Square (an undistinguished piece of architecture, a copy of a banal Houston tower) or for the $500 million Canal Place office-condominium project which local developer Joe Canizaro is building, with help from the shah of Iran’s Omran Bank, along the river at the foot of Canal Street.
A
t around the same time the Dome was being sold to the public, a forty-year-old financial wizard from Texas named Jimmy Jones was becoming president of the city’s second largest bank, the National Bank of Commerce. Jones brought in new deposits and put the money to work with aggressive lending, much of it in real estate. While his direct, abrasive style made him lots of enemies among the city’s gentry, it had a profound impact on the city’s other banks—profound but brief. After trying unsuccessfully to get the state to liberalize its banking regulations to allow New Orleans banks to branch beyond the city,
THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
Jones left town to become president of the Bank of California. Jones’s own bank suffered from some of its adventuresome real estate loans, and two others, the International City Bank and the Republic Nation Bank (the latter a blackowned institution nurtured by Jones himself ), failed in 1976 and 1977. These mishaps and the continuing disaster of the Superdome quickly brought the city’s effort at economic renaissance to a halt. It had lasted two years. The Carnival game
I
t is almost impossible to talk about the economy of New Orleans without talking about the people who are supposed to “run” the city—its gentry, its social elite. New Orleans is perhaps the only large city left in America where birth counts for so much. And it is hard to say just why—unless the answer lies in Mardi Gras, which is a highly structured social ritual rather than a pubic spectacle like the Rose Bowl Parade. Among the critics of the social order the theory goes that Carnival parades provide bread and circuses for the masses, who scramble for beads and coins tossed from parade floats by people of privilege. There is royalty in Carnival—a careful hierarchy of krewes (or clubs) which stage balls and parades and appoint kings or queens and princesses. The best-known krewe, Rex, holds its parade on the morning of Mardi Gras. It touts itself as the “civic krewe”; recent years Jews and non-natives and politicians have been taken into the membership. Blacks have not—but least a few of them have been invited to the
Rex Ball on Fat Tuesday night. Rex is still run, however, by the gentry, and the King of Carnival comes from its ranks. This year’s king was Edmund McIlhenny, a lawyer (two other members of his small law firm were past Rexes) and a member of the Tabasco family; the queen was Kitty Duncan, a Radcliffe sophomore whose father is an awning tycoon and one of the few socialites who was close to Mayor Landrieu.
C
arnival is a game that almost everyone in New Orleans plays; there are sixty parading organizations, each a private club and each numbering 200 to 500 members. There is a distinct social order to the groups—the krewes of Comus (the oldest krewe and one of the smallest), Momus, and Proteus are at the very top. Like the city’s leading downtown luncheon clubs—the Boston, the Pickwick, and the Louisiana—their membership is generally restricted to natives and to the circle of families that has dominated society, business, and the law here since the Civil War. This society, it should be noted, is quite distinct from Creole society—the descendants of the French and Spanish colonists who settled mostly in the French Quarter in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The locus of Creole society was Esplanade Avenue, the downriver border of the Vieux Carré, while Mardi Gras society was concentrated in the Garden District and the uptown area around Tulane University—what was called “the American Sector,” above Canal Street. Creole society is long gone now, but it doesn’t hurt at all in Carnival society to have a French or Spanish ancestor.
M
embers of this Carnival society have little political power themselves these days: the last serious attempt by a King of Carnival to run for office was Leon Sarpy’s in 1973; he was defeated for the state supreme court by Mayor Landrieu’s former law partner, Pascal Calogero. However, they still dominate New Orleans’s powerful nonelective boards—the Dock Board, the Board of Liquidation (which approves bond sales), and the Sewerage and Water Board (an important institution in a city below sea level).
from Texas, such as Jimmy Jones (or even a non-brash businessman from Texas, such as Jones’s successor at the bank, Rodger Mitchell), who would have been a definite celebrity in Houston, couldn’t make the Boston Club or the Dock Board in New Orleans. Along with top executives from Shell and Exon, Jewish real estate barons, and politicians, Jones would lunch at the frankly unsocial Petroleum Club or International House or the Sazerac Restaurant in the Fairmont Hotel (formerly the Roosevelt Hotel, Huey and Earl Long’s haunt).
T
he style of these nonnatives does not seem to mesh with that of the dean of Carnival society—men such a Richard Freeman, who owns the local Coca-Cola franchise, and Darwin Fenner, as in Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith—so they aren’t accepted into the inner circle. This sort of exclusion is practiced on a smaller scale every day in New Orleans, and it is cited by members of the city’s Economic Development Council as a major deterrent bringing new businesses into the city. New Orleans society is not rich or clever or fashionable or outrageous or any of the things that society tends be in more cosmopolitan cities these days. It is simply well-bred and bland and its blandness is reflected each morning in the Times-Picayune, the city’s leading daily paper (the other daily is the StatesItem, which has half the circulation and about a tenth the influence, though it does have a few very good writers; both the Picayune and the States-Item are owned by the Newhouse chain). The best adjective to describe the New Orleans dailies was used ten years ago by Calvin Trillin: “discreet.” One is rarely surprised by the papers, and rarely enlightened either. "The dailies are not well liked
in New Orleans, but they are enormously influential. “If it isn’t in the Times-Picayune,” says one local lawyer (influential himself), “then it hasn’t happened. That’s the attitude of people here.”
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The power of status quo But the main power of the gentry is a purely negative one. A brash businessman THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
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fly PA
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THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
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THE NEW ORLEANIAN OCTOBER 4, 1964
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