LIFE IN NEW ORLEANS

I went to New Orleans job hunting. I went back to see Mrs. Campbell, my old landlady, a devout Catholic and a warm loving soul. She had a man and his wife in her house as tenants, an employee of the Southern Regional Research Lab. He had married his wife late in life after maybe twenty years of courtship. Soon after they were married he had a stroke. He was chair bound, and it didn't look like he was going to get much more use of his body.

He sent me to Dr. Skau, his boss at the lab, and through him I got a job there. $3447 per annum, a perfectly nice income at that time. GS5, the entry level professional grade as a Research Chemist. I lived many places in New Orleans. Three houses with my parents in high school, all on the downtown side. Nashville Ave., Euterpe St., Milan St., somewhere up near Magazine and Audubon Park, S. Broad, D'Hemcourt, and on the uptown side of Canal St. These are the ones I remember. Finally Kenilworth: Mother and Dad had bought a pretty, new house there and rented it to me. This was after I got the job at the lab.

Prior to that I had a basement apartment on a great big old house on Canal between Jeff Davis and Carrolton. The landlord let me store my pirogue in the garage. I spent a good bit of time with that little boat. I tried to rig it for sailing on Lake Pontchartrain, but with rather poor results. Once I took it down to Lake Des Allemands, paddled about six miles, discovered I had a strong head wind coming back and got thoroughly exhausted before I got back to the car. Another time I was coming back from the north shore and crossing the lake in a storm; it blew the pirogue off the top of the car. I stopped of course and was able to reattach it and go on my way. These were all lonely excursions, which isn't to say I didn't enjoy them. I was able to see many places that just aren't available to anyone without a boat.

It must have been some time in 1956 that I moved into the new house on Kenilworth St. Seems like Mother and Dad lived there briefly, maybe while they were acquiring a parsonage at St. Bernard. But soon I had it to myself. It was certainly the nicest house we had lived in. Three bedrooms and a bath. A good sized living room, dining area. A laundry room opening out on the back yard. A pretty nice (though small) yard. In the back was a really nice pecan tree which the former owner had planted several years before. It gave good crops of pecans. Also a fig tree which also bore very well. Many, many banana trees, which sometimes bore small, but edible bananas. They multiplied rapidly and would have eventually filled up the entire yard if allowed.

 

One summer afternoon I was napping and overheard two of my neighbors talking about my yard. "He would have a beautiful yard if he would just keep it a little better." That amused me. Later when Ellie lived there with me we planted boucou small trees. Once I was bicycling out near the lake and came across a forked cottonwood twig. I stuck it on my handlebar, took it home and stuck it in the ground. A few years later there was a gigantic cottonwood there. We planted one of everything, and would have had a dense wooded area of 1/8 acre had they all lived. One day Daddy came over to cut the grass and finished off most of them.

I swam at the lake a good bit; on one occasion I swam three miles along the lakefront. It was more attractive in those days than it is now. Pontchartrain Beach was in full swing--a nice place to visit. The lab was just a few blocks from it. At the west end of the lakefront in Orleans parish is the New Basin Canal (which I suppose has now been covered over). It was built largely with immigrant Irish labor, and I read that more people died (mainly of yellow fever) in its construction than in the building of the Panama Canal.

New Orleans was a pest hole for many years. In my time there was no longer a health threat; they had one of the best water systems in the country. Someone told me about a conference of sanitation and water engineers in Chicago at which the northerners began talking about ways to limit the waste they put into the river. The engineers in New Orleans objected saying the waste was no problem; they wanted the water level kept up as much as possible.

We heard about the Old River threat to the Mississippi of course, and years later Rob gave me the McPhee book for Christmas telling about the tremendous struggle to keep the Mississippi River from changing its course. Many people feel like it's just a question of time until the river starts emptying into the Atchafalaya. We'll see.

At the present time the river is built up well above sea level with containing levees so that the city is actually below the level of the river. Once during the war an ammunition ship got loose and almost crashed into the Canal Street riverfront; it could have been a major disaster.

 

The river is serpentine for most of its length, and never more so than in the lower stretches below New Orleans. One New Years day we were coming up from South America. The pilot had a ticket to the Sugar Bowl game and was in a hurry to get there. He tried to plot as straight a course as possible so that half the time we were just off one bank and half the time just off the other bank. He got ashore in time to see the game, but we didn't clear quarantine, etc. until some time later.

That may have been the year Duke played in the Sugar Bowl. A boy in my hall in the Freshman dormitory at Duke, named Bear Knott, became an All-American tackle and played in that game. I didn't know him well; he was from Kannapolis, and he and others in the area used to wear overalls, much in keeping with the psychology of Duke students. They were always a pretty blase sort.

When I got out of the Navy, I was close to 28. I got the chemist job and proceeded to live a fairly routine life. One thing I did was to buy a piano. I bought it on time and spent a year paying for it. For the next two years I spent an average of 4 hours a days playing the piano. I was a really plodding student, but gradually built up my technique until I could play some Mozart and even one of Beethoven's Sonatas--at least one movement. I don't remember clearly my choral activities. The Cesar Franck choral society had given me a send-off party two years before, but perhaps they were no longer in existence. This must have been the period when I sang in the opera chorus. We did Carmen, Thais, several others that I can't recall. It was fun, but I was still not very socially adept. I must have been singing at St. Patricks during this period. I remember a boy named McClure that I buddied with a bit during the rehearsals although I had no other relationship with him. He father was the city manager. I got the impression he had also been socially backward, but he had "come out" recently and he was quite popular with the girls.

 

During part of this time I was going to the St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church. This was entirely for social reasons. A large group of young people, mainly in their twenties, mainly unmarried, met on Sunday evenings for about two or three hours of activities, eating together, informal groups, and some sort of worship. I met a number of pleasant people there, took Edgar Quillen there, and we were beginning to develop more of a social life than I had ever had before.

 

Somewhere along there I met Mary Fair, a nice young Quaker from Philadelphia; we might have developed a relationship if I had been a little more socially aware. And Marilyn Woodward fell in the same category, daughter of a doctor from Picayune, a student at Newcomb. I was attracted to her. She was musical, and as I recall gave an organ recital at the episcopal cathedral. Years later I saw her in the Blum (music) Library on St. Charles Ave., and she looked like she had become a dried up old maid. Life treats many of us unkindly.

One girl I vaguely remember was called Mary. (Mary was in the St. Charles Ave group, but I don't remember where I met the other two). Mary had some deficiencies that seemed obvious even to me. Nevertheless I had a date with her. Getting to her door at the end of the evening I proceed to give her a good kiss, but she fought me off as if I were trying to rape her. Edgar and I had a good laugh about that.

Thanks to the St. Charles Ave group and the various musical groups and my good job I was gradually gaining a bit more maturity. I had a pretty good car, a very nice house to live in, interesting pastimes, a nice job--just about everything I had aimed for. I should have been perfectly happy, but I experienced an increasing sense of spiritual dis-ease. I had everything I had aimed for, but I had nothing. I looked forward in my imagination forty years and felt like under these circumstances life would have proven to be awfully empty. In desperation I began to ask for something more. It was 1956, the beginning of my fourth decade.