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75th Birthday Party
Bulletin -- first comments from Jay Davis (more to come):
Below is
a group shot from the New Orleans 75th Birthday party taken in, of all places,
the St Louis Third Cemetery (the are 2 earlier St. Louis cemeteries), not
exactly where you'd think a group likes ours would care to celebrate our 3/4
century mark. But it was on our city tour, and as you know, cemeteries are an
big part of the New Orleans scene and jazz history.
The weekend -- called the French Quarter Festival -- had many wonderfully
entertaining aspects: the jazz bands performing throughout the Quarter; the
Creole food, our tours, and our final Birthday Banquet, and of course,
connecting in person again with classmates and wives.
But it also had a very serious and shocking side: the very visible after
effects of Katrina. Now, almost 2 years since the event, the clean-up of the
debris is almost complete, but the huge reconstruction of homes hardly started.
[See Jay's comments on Katrina below the photo]
Lastly, all the credit for putting this fabulous, once in a lifetime, event
together belongs to Steve and Carol Mullins.
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| Tom Tyler, Kay Tyler, Alec Gray, Bob
Osmond, Patty Osmond, Hugh Nolin, Debby Nolin, Diane Metcalf, Martha Davis, Carol Coffin, Anne Low, Jay Davis Middle row, left to right: Mary Gray, Carol Mullins, Mead Metcalf, Jerry Goldstein, Dorothy Goldstein, Rip Coffin Dana Low Top row, left to right: Sandi Novascone, Ted Novascone, Walt Anderson, Ellie Anderson Missing: Steve Mullins
Jay Davis on Katrina: "Katrina wasn't a natural disaster; it was a human disaster." This comment by our tour guide -- Anne -- refers not only to the human toll of suffering in the hurricane's aftermath, but also to the breaching of an inadequate, manmade levee system. Now, almost 2 years after the event, Katrina still haunts the New Orleans psyche. I'm not trying to be a psychologist, but Anne and others we listened to seemed obsessed and still traumatized by the memory of the event. And understandably so. When our tour van drove through two of the most damaged areas -- the lower 9th district and Lakeview -- the expansiveness and destruction we saw was much greater than I anticipated. In point of fact, the storm damaged the city as if it had been hit by 5 atomic bombs according to the local newspaper. 80 percent of the city was under water on August 29th, 2005 ranging in depths from 2 to 10 feet. Most damaged were the areas that could least afford it: the lower socio-economic areas -- the 9th ward -- and the middle class Lakeview area. The up-scale areas --the Garden District and the French quarter for example -- were least damaged. If the front door to New Orleans and its more affluent area is the Mississippi River side, the back door -- and its lesser affluent areas -- is the Lake Pontchartrain side. Katrina entered the city through the back door as the huge surge from the Gulf of Mexico flooded into the lake eventually overwhelming the levees. Two years of work have gone into bulldozing and removing the massive amount of residential debris left behind by Katrina leaving block after block of leveled, empty home sites. Very little new construction is underway other than a pocket of Habitat for Humanity projects being worked on by college students on spring break. Many former residents have not yet returned as reconstruction funds are tied up in the local political bureaucracy. It will take many years of work to rebuild the infrastructure and homes that once filled the vast washed out areas. The jury is still out as to whether it will ever happen. We were happy to contribute our tourist dollars to the New Orleans comeback, and the locals gave us an enthusiastic welcome. We had great fun and also a large dose of reality of how people's lives are continuing to be devastated by Katrina.
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