The Southern Hotel soon after it was completed. Photo courtesy Rusty Burns.

The hotel was built in 1907 during the glory days of the “Ozone Belt,” when the area enjoyed immense popularity as a resort. The cool air flowing out of the piney woods was welcome in the days before air conditioning, and area waters, whether from springs or deep wells, were reputed to be medicinal. The Southern Hotel and others on the northshore thus attracted guests from all over the country.

Lisa Condrey Ward purchased the Southern Hotel along with her husband, Joseph, her brother Ricky Condrey and his wife, Gayle, in 2011. She is familiar with its history, noting, “It catered to northerners during the winter and New Orleanians during the summer.” They purchased the building last November, but it had been on her mind since she first saw it. “We moved here from New Orleans in 1999. I started talking about it, probably the day after we moved here, ‘Gosh, why hasn’t somebody turned that back into a hotel?’”

The Southern Hotel. Photo courtesy Rusty Burns.

Their plans are to renovate the mission-style, 34,000-square-foot building and open it as a boutique hotel. Ward has hired architect Peter Trapolin of New Orleans, a veteran of several successful historic hotel renovations.

While it’s still on the drawing board, Ward says, “It’s going to have 41 rooms and a restaurant on the New Hampshire corner. We’re looking for an exciting restaurateur to work with on the build-out.” She hopes her plans for the property spark as much interest in what the area has to offer today’s visitors as the elements did at the turn of the century. “I want people to come here and enjoy things like the bike path—we’re going to have bikes available and kayaks for the river.”

Renovations include facilities that Covington residents will be able to take advantage of as well as the hotel’s guests. “We’re going to have a ballroom and space for business meetings.” Ward notes the building is in the shape of a “u” that opens onto the alley that runs from New Hampshire to Vermont. “We’re going to close that in and have the ballroom and all those spaces spill out into a really beautiful courtyard. It will be a very nice party space. The hotel bar will be open to everyone, and that’s going to have access to the courtyard, too.”

Echoing Mayor Cooper’s optimism in the project’s role in the revitalization of downtown Covington, Ward says, “I think there’s going to be a renaissance. Covington is already a great little town. My personal vision is to expand the types and diversity of businesses into something similar to what Magazine Street has in New Orleans. If we put that together, get the movie theater open—and hopefully the hotel will be an ideal catalyst for that—it will become a really wonderful, pedestrian-friendly city that has a lot to offer.”

Napoleon's Death Mask. Photo courtesy Lousiana State Museum.

A historical constant, the land the Cabildo is built on has been set aside for government use since the first plan of New Orleans was laid out in 1721. Also designated at that time were plots for the church (St. Louis Cathedral and the Presbytere, or priests’ home) and the public plaza, now Jackson Square.

Built during the time of Spanish rule over Louisiana, The Cabildo, completed in 1799, was properly known as the Casa Capitular, or Capital House. The new home of “The Most Illustrious Cabildo” (the city council) was commonly called “the Cabildo building,” or, as we now know it, “the Cabildo.” Like the cathedral and Presbytere, it was financed by Don Andrés Almonester de Roxas, a member of the Illustrious Cabildo. While the religious buildings were gifts to the church, the city agreed to reimburse Almonester—in the end, his widow, as he died in 1798—for the Cabildo’s construction.

The later years of Spanish rule were followed by a brief period when Louisiana was returned to France, which famously sold the colony to the fledgling United States in 1803. That led to the most historic event in the history of the building—and, perhaps, of the country—the ceremony transferring ownership of Louisiana from France to the United States. Taking place on December 20, 1803, in the room on the second floor where the Cabildo had met (the Sala Capitular), this ceremony was the final act in a process which nearly doubled the size of the United States.

What’s remarkable is that we can stand today in that same room, under the gaze of a wall-size painting commemorating the transfer. After that historic day, the Sala Capitular was home to the New Orleans City Council and, from 1868 to 1910, the Louisiana Supreme Court. Several historic cases were heard there, including Plessy v. Ferguson and the Slaughterhouse Cases, which went on to become landmark constitutional law cases ultimately decided by the United States Supreme Court.

The Cabildo Today

The Cabildo, along with the Presbytere, the 1850 House in the Lower Pontalba building, Madame John’s Legacy on Dumaine Street and the U.S. Mint, are all historical properties owned by the Louisiana State Museum. The LSM is part of the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism under the ultimate direction of the Lt. Governor’s office—as is the committee planning the state’s bicentennial celebrations in 2012.

The Cabildo's second floor gallery provides a great view of Jackson Square.

Luckily for Louisianians, Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne happens to be a big history buff who has traveled the state giving presentations on our unique history. When asked about the Cabildo’s place in the LSM system, which includes properties in Baton Rouge, Patterson and Thibodaux in addition to the New Orleans properties, Dardenne said, “It’s the bell cow. It is absolutely the real treasure. All these great buildings in New Orleans, but certainly the Cabildo and the Presbytere, flanking the St. Louis Cathedral, are part of the iconic landscape of New Orleans and therefore of Louisiana.”

Standing in the gallery on the Cabildo’s second floor overlooking Jackson Square, Dardenne observed, “You look out of these windows and you see the first plat of land in New Orleans—Jackson Square, the place New Orleans was born. The Cabildo not only overlooks the magnificent river and the first settlement in New Orleans, it is also the repository for so many great Louisiana treasures that are representative of our colorful, unique and rich history and culture. This is the place where you find it all.”

Dardenne was speaking within a few feet of where, at least for me, one of the building’s most significant and tragic events took place. On July 18, 1826, a drunken wretch named Zephir Canonge staggered up the stairs to the building’s second floor. As he encountered Judge Gallien Preval, a Creole lawyer and veteran of the Battle of New Orleans—and my great-great-great-great-grandfather—Canonge chose to insult Preval verbally. Exactly what he said isn’t known; the insult rolled off Preval like the proverbial water on the duck’s back. Preval’s 19-year-old son, Theodore, however, took great offense at the slur and, on the Cabildo’s grand, curving staircase, challenged Canonge to a duel. It didn’t end well for the young Preval, as one of the local newspapers described:

“The friends of the family of Mr. Preval—the friends of virtue and justice—are informed that Mr. Theodore Preval, aged nineteen years, terminated his career yesterday afternoon at 4 o’clock by a frightful fatality. His corpse will be exposed at Mr. B. Marigny’s, Faubourg Marigny, from whence the convoy will start for the church.”

This tale was not far from my mind as I toured the Cabildo with the LSM’s historian, Dr. Charles Chamberlain. Chamberlain notes that the building now houses an exhibit of artifacts spanning the state’s history, from prehistoric times up until the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

The first-floor exhibit starts, interestingly enough, at the beginning. A history of the Cabildo including drawings and plans of the various buildings that stood on the site can be seen as the visitor walks in the entrance, as well as plans and photos of the present building as seen through the years.

Chamberlain points out that the Cabildo’s appearence, except for the 1840s addition of the third floor, remains basically unchanged from the day it was transferred to the United States. One change occurred almost immediately, however. The Americans didn’t appreciate anything to do with royalty, it seems. “They blasted the Spanish colonial symbol off of the pediment. It was blank for about 20 years, and they hired Pietro Cardelli, an Italian sculptor, to create the very patriotic scene we have now of an eagle, the flag, the cannons and cannonballs,” says Chamberlain.

One royal reminder that—maybe by design, possibly by ignorance—escaped the Americans’ ire was the iron balustrade surrounding the building’s second floor. “We know Marcellino Hernandez was the Isleño artisan who oversaw the balcony work, and he used a crown and a rosary design. That reflects the key Spanish institutions of the crown and the church. The funny thing is, I don’t think the American officials ever really got that. I think that if they tore down the Spanish seal, why would they also support the idea of a monarchy and the Catholic Church? Americans were greatly opposed to those ideas. Had they really known what those symbols were, they probably would have taken them away. I think it’s funny.” (Chamberlain also notes that local jewelry designer Mignon Faget has a collection incorporating some of Hernandez’s design elements called, of course, the Marcellino collection.)

The museum's third floor examines aspects of life in Louisiana from its founding until the 1870s. Photo by Stephen Faure.

Moving on into the exhibit, early artifacts include Native American baskets, one of which, Chamberlain says, is a Chitimacha basket considered one of the finest examples of Native American basketry in the country.

Stone left by Iberville to claim Louisiana for France in 1699.

Nearby is one of the most important artifacts that mark the beginning of European influence in Louisiana—a marble stone recovered from Fort Maurepas, the first French outpost, founded in 1699 at present-day Biloxi. More artifacts from colonial days include an armoire dating to the 1790s made by Celestin Glapion. “It’s one of the finest artifacts we have,” notes Chamberlain. “It’s an example of Creole-style furniture. The French influence, the cabriole legs, the scalloping of the bottom is Rococo, and the crown molding at the top is Second Empire style. It’s kind of a mixture. The Glapions are buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1; his brother married Marie Laveau, so it’s a very interesting story.”

These exhibits are housed in a part of the Cabildo that incorporates the arched walls and brick floor of the Corps de Garde, built in 1751. The structure survived the great fires of 1788 and 1794 that destroyed much of the city and were the impetus for Almonester’s building spree.

Portraits hanging in the first-floor foyer include one from 1822 of Father Anthony Sedella, “Pere Antoine,” who was pastor of St. Louis Cathedral for many years, and Phillipe de Marigny, father of Bernard Marigny, founder of the town of Mandeville.

The Sala Capitular is located on the second floor, along with its display commemorating the Louisiana Purchase and the Louisiana Supreme Court; this is also where Napoleon’s death mask resides. Next to it is an exhibit featuring the Battle of New Orleans. An enormous painting depicting the battle overlooks a display of artifacts. Chamberlain explains that unlike other exhibits featuring items that had been dug up after years underground on the field in Chalmette, “This is really the best Battle of New Orleans exhibit because it has large objects that were kept in the families and then handed down to us. So we have a rifle and bayonet registered to the Tower of London that someone recovered right after the battle, and an English drum major’s baton. We also have reproductions of uniforms that were handed down to us but are too fragile for display. We have a drum that belonged to Jordan Noble. In 1815, he was a 13-year-old slave who then went on to serve in three other wars. He won his freedom in the 1830s and was a military hero throughout the 1800s.”

The third floor houses a sprawling exhibit that illustrates various aspects of the commercial activity that drove Louisiana’s economy through the years. It’s a large, striking and open space. The Cabildo’s roof and the third floor were heavily damaged by a fire in 1988. It was rebuilt using the original mansard construction of heavy wooden beams and trusses and trademark dormer windows. The beams are left exposed so the public can see how this great space would have been achieved using building techniques that pre-date power tools and particleboard.

Painting depicting the raising of the U.S. colors signifying the transfer of the Louisiana Territory from France. Photo courtesy Louisiana State Museum.

The story of commerce and agriculture in Louisiana can’t be told without reminders of less savory times. A wooden block that was once used in slave auctions dominates this floor’s entrance. “New Orleans was the center of the domestic slave trade in the pre-Civil War years,” Chamberlain notes. Other artifacts, such as elegant furniture, clothes and bedding, are displayed among the more crude items. “Slavery produced the wealth and allowed planters to have china, silver, glassware and silk clothing. We also have the artifacts of slavery itself—the slave collar always elicits a reaction in people.”

A notable item is a life-size carving of an Indian maiden. “This would be put outside a tobacco shop to let people know what they sold,” says Chamberlain. “It is probably the most beautiful tobacco shop sign I’ve ever seen. Most people are familiar with crudely carved, male Great Plains Indians. This reflects a Southeastern Indian, and it’s female, in the most intricate and elegant presentation.”

Nearby is an interesting and odd piece of wood, rounded and with a hole in the middle. “This is an actual pipe from the Latrobe water works,” explains Chamberlain. “They basically used cypress logs, hollowed them out, made male and female ones and then joined them together. Benjamin Latrobe was the architect of the U.S. Capitol. He came here in 1819 to build a waterworks—a private, subscribed waterworks. It was located where Latrobe Park is now, by the French Market.” During his stay in New Orleans, Latrobe also designed the Louisiana State Bank building, now a reception hall called Latrobe’s on Royal, just a few blocks from the Cabildo.

Rounding out the third floor and ending the Cabildo’s collection spanning 200 years of Louisiana history are items from the Civil War and Reconstruction, including a lottery wheel from the great Louisiana Lottery scandal of the late 1800s and a display explaining one of the last struggles of Reconstruction in New Orleans, the Battle of Liberty Place. Chamberlain notes, “Honestly, it’s kind of awkward to end the exhibit of the history of Louisiana in 1877 because it’s an awkward time, the end of Reconstruction.” However, he explains that most of the museum’s artifacts are from the 1700s and 1800s and the exhibits are kept within that time period.

Secret History

An area not included in the Cabildo’s exhibit reflects its use over the years as a police precinct and prison. At one time, the city’s prison extended back behind the Cabildo along St. Peter Street to the corner at Royal. Over the years, it was demolished, remodeled and diminished, with only a few holding cells remaining in the courtyard once the large parish prison was built at the site where the Municipal Auditorium is presently located.

Known as the “Calaboose,” its most famous occupant was perhaps the pirate Pierre Lafitte, brother of Jean Lafitte. He escaped on September 5, 1814, and a $1,000 reward was offered for his return. At the same time, Jean Lafitte was in negotiations with the governor, offering his assistance in repelling the coming British invasion that culminated in the Battle of New Orleans the following January. Pierre was never returned to the Calaboose, and the pirates won pardons for their actions in defense of the city.

To learn more about the Cabildo, see The Cabildo on Jackson Square by Samuel Wilson and Leonard Huber. The Cabildo is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Visit louisianabicentennial2012.com for upcoming Louisiana Bicentennial events.

In 1922, the first charter created the New Orleans Council, which was later regionalized into the Girl Scout Council of Greater New Orleans and South Louisiana, extending its jurisdiction from three parishes to 15, including the northshore area. By the 1950s, troops from Slidell and Lacombe were camping in Fontainebleau. Of the more than 17,000 girls and 7,100 adults in the 23 parishes served by today’s Girl Scouts Louisiana East council, over 1,500 girls and 850 adults are in St. Tammany Parish.

Area events have been planned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Girl Scouting. They include a Centennial Extravaganza in Gonzales March 17, a fundraising luncheon in Baton Rouge March 15 and a FOREever Green Golf Tournament followed by the Rhapsody in Green Gala in New Orleans June 23.

In Juliette Gordon Low’s Footsteps

Today, more than 50 million girls have had the opportunity to build leadership skills through their participation in the Girl Scout program. But they didn’t do it alone.
Noel “Buddy” Anderson and Eileen deHaro are two of the thousands of adult volunteers who continue Low’s mission of helping girls to develop physically, mentally and spiritually.

If you mention Noel Anderson to anyone involved in Girl Scouts locally, you will probably get a blank stare. But if you mention “Buddy,” a light bulb goes off and a big smile comes on. Buddy, a long-time Girl Scout volunteer on the northshore, was also a Girl Guide in the Fourth Malvern Girl Guide Company in Australia, where she lived until moving to the United States in 1981.

Buddy’s mother had been a Girl Guide in the 1920s in New Zealand, her sister Sue was a Girl Guide in Australia and Sue’s three daughters were all Brownies in England. (Girl Guides in other countries are the equivalent of Girl Scouts.) With her own daughters’ involvement in Girl Scouts in the United States, Buddy says, “That’s three generations of Girl Guides in four different countries!”

After settling on the northshore, Buddy started as a volunteer leader for her youngest daughter’s Brownie troop of first graders—Mandeville Troop 147. Her oldest daughter was in a third-grade Brownie troop. Both girls went through Juniors, and one was a Cadette; Buddy was a volunteer troop leader for eight years.

Buddy recalls, “When my daughter asked, ‘Mom do you mind if I don’t do Girl Scouts anymore?’ I said, ‘Not if you don’t mind if I do!’ I had a lot of children in the troop who didn’t have many opportunities, so to come to the Girl Scout meeting was the highlight of their week.” One year, her troop had kids from seven different schools, so she made sure each meeting included time for socializing, and she even planned additional Saturday activities for the girls.

Only a year after Buddy started and only a few miles away in Lacombe, Eileen deHaro went to a meeting to register her daughter for a Brownie troop. But it wasn’t that simple—“The next thing you know, I’m a leader!” she laughs.

“I’m kind of a weird one,” Eileen says about her Girl Scout background. “I was in Blue Birds (a group similar to but not affiliated with Girl Scouts), but when it was time to move up, the leader said there were no Camp Fire Girl openings.” Instead, the girls and their leader decided to form a Girl Scout troop.

“It was awesome,” Eileen recalls. “We did everything. For Jamborees in City Park, we’d build the biggest bonfires and highest flags, and we did it ourselves. I’ve patterned my leadership on the way she led.”
Eileen spent two years leading a Brownie troop, three years with Juniors and three more years with Cadettes. “Those were the years,” she says. “I was having fun!” Remembering the sight of grandmothers walking down the highway in Lacombe to register their granddaughters for Girl Scouts, Eileen says all the hard work is worth it. “You know that you’re making it possible for them to take the program because …”

“Without the leader, you don’t have a troop,” Buddy finishes the sentence for her. “It’s very rewarding.”

Eileen agrees. “When people ask, ‘Should I be a troop leader?’ I immediately say, ‘Do it. You’ll never regret it.’”

Outside of the weekly troop meetings, there are many opportunities for the local Girl Scout troops to interact with each other. And since Buddy and Eileen were both very active leaders, their paths crossed many times at numerous Jamborees (camping trips), leaders’ weekends and other Girl Scout events.

Camping and Cooking

Many Girl Scouts have fond memories of camping at one of council’s properties, which include Camp Covington, Camp Marydale in St. Francisville, Camp Whispering Pines in Independence and the McFadden Cabin in New Orleans’ City Park.

Built in 1927, Camp Covington is the oldest Girl Scout camp in the United States that continues to function with its original design and location; it is also recognized as a Pioneer Camping site. Each cabin is a unique construction because individual civic groups each designed a cabin and supplied the material and labor. Actress Dorothy Lamour camped there in 1929, breaking her toe and passing the life-saving swimming test all in the same day.

For the camp’s 50th birthday, it got a new paint job (using donated paints in a variety of colors) as well as new electrical systems. And although 90 percent of the trees were lost in Katrina, the camp continues to provide a fun camping experience for each new generation of Girl Scouts.

Girl Scout encampments are weekend or day-long camping events open to all troops in the area who wish to participate. Before the leaders take the girls camping, they have to complete trainings for camping, canoeing, horseback riding, cooking and more.

In addition to camp activities such as hiking, cooking and canoeing, there are skits, costume contests and presentations. Buddy says, “One year, we decided we’d be Rockettes and started high kicking on the field!”

Eileen remembers, “We were always in Tall Winds [a campsite at Whispering Pines in Independence], the farthest unit … maybe they were trying to isolate us because we were too loud.” Her troop chose to be aliens for one campout, creating costumes from recycled items such as egg cartons and cookie boxes.

“The best camping we did was a joint camp. The Juniors showed the Brownies four different ways to cook—in a Dutch oven, a box oven, on the grill and in the coals. The Brownies were just stunned that we made all those things!”

Once, Eileen’s troop met at Chahta-Ima Elementary School to bake cookies for the public using a box oven made by lining a box with aluminum foil, putting coals in it and wrapping a blanket around it. “The head cook for the school came out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ We gave her a taste and she said, ‘You mean I wasted all that money on an Easy Bake Oven and I could have just given her a box?’”
Buddy remembers teaching her troop how to cook on a buddy burner. “We met at the fireman’s station, and everyone had a little fire on the driveway to practice with,” Buddy says with a laugh. “They had to cook on it and eat what they cooked!”

World Thinking Day

In her first year as a leader on the northshore, Buddy established a local celebration of World Thinking Day. Originating in the 1920s or ’30s, February 22 was picked in honor of the birthday of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Boy Scouts in England, and his wife, Olive, who recruited Girl Guides and dedicated her life to the international aspect of the movement. This special day was to be observed around the world as participants took time to think of each other and send greetings of friendship and peace.

Buddy started with a small World Thinking Day for her troop. Each child chose a country to represent, drew the country’s flag and put together a folder about the country. The parents cooked food from the countries their daughters chose. Buddy invited four local troops and asked each to bring a song or a game from another country to teach the girls.

The only glitch in the successful event was that other troops were upset that they missed out on all the fun! So in 1984, Buddy organized a larger World Thinking Day event open to every troop in the Mandeville and Covington Service Units that chose to participate. Each troop chose a country and educated the other troops through songs, dances, costumes and displays. Three hundred Girl Scouts participated in the fun, educational day. “And we’ve done it every year since,” Buddy says, adding that they now host two separate events in the Mandeville and Covington areas because of the large attendance. “It’s fun, and so rewarding.”

Though she is not a troop leader anymore, Buddy still leads the World Thinking Day events. This year, she is helping plan a council-wide event to celebrate both World Thinking Day and the 100th Anniversary of the Girl Scouts—the Winn-Dixie Girl Scout Centennial Extravaganza on Sat., March 17, in Gonzales, where Girl Scouts and their families will enjoy a carnival of rides, games, a parade of flags and other activities.

“The World’s Largest
and Longest Running Bake Sale”

In the 1920s, Girl Scouts baked their own cookies for the cookie sale each year, selling them for 25 to 30 cents per dozen. Today, although the cookies come from a commercial baker, the experience still requires effort from the girls. They learn important skills such as business ethics, goal setting, people skills, decision-making and money management.

Eileen laughs as she remembers a situation involving both business ethics and people skills. “I was a troop leader and the cookie mom, and my daughter was top seller. I told her if someone says they are on a diet, refer them to the shortbread because they have less calories.” But when presented with the situation, her daughter told the potential customer, “Well, buy these cookies. They have no calories!”

In honor of the anniversary celebration, Girl Scouts is offering Savannah Smiles, new bite-sized lemon wedge cookies named for the city where Girl Scouting was founded. From March 2 to 18, Girl Scouts will be selling cookies at various booth locations. (Call **GSCOOKIES or visit iTunes to download the Cookie Locator mobile app.) As an exciting touch, the girls will “bling” their booths for a chance to win troop prizes.

An Ongoing Commitment

Though they no longer have children in Girl Scouts, Buddy and Eileen have found many ways to stay connected with the program.
Buddy works behind the scenes in the Girl Scout Service Unit 681, which covers Lacombe, Mandeville and Madisonville, helping with registrations, summer camps and other troop activities—including, of course, World Thinking Day. And she still recycles aluminum cans for the Girl Scouts’ buddy burners.

Elieen, a member of the American Association of University Women, has invited Girl Scouts to participate in relevant AAUW presentations and events, such as Sister-to-Sister Summits and Vision 2000. She is also trying to find ways to encourage their interest and participation in STEM-related fields—specifically science, technology, engineering and math.

“I enjoy running into my old scouts,” Eileen says, mentioning Brandi Barrios Najolia, co-owner of Café Lynn in Mandeville, and Jessica Canik Lewis, a medical assistant at the Ochsner Clinic in Mandeville.
One of Buddy’s troop members, Trese Taquino Hood, now serves on the board of the GSLE. “I was very flattered; it was a tremendous compliment. Also, a lot of my old Girl Scouts have been troop leaders,” Buddy says.

Many times, experiences that girls have in Girl Scouts have shaped their future careers, Buddy adds. Her own nieces have followed career paths that started from badges they enjoyed earning as Brownies in England—one is a garden photographer and the other owns and runs a preschool. Also, another of Buddy’s former troop members discovered a love for gymnastics at a Girl Scout function. For Julie Ballard, that love developed into a gymnastics scholarship to Georgia State University and trying out for the U.S. Olympic team.

These successes may be a result of an important rule in Girl Scouting—the girls in each troop have to make the decisions. “We are allowed to guide them in terms of safety, but as they grow up, they take on more responsibilities,” Eileen says.

Buddy adds, “This is why Girl Scouts is a good program for girls—it’s so important for girls to excel and be their own leaders without pressure and distractions.”
And, “It’s the best fun!”

For more information on anniversary events, visit gsle.org. In addition to the anniversary, Girl Scouts has declared 2012 the Year of the Girl. This initiative will attempt to educate the public about the need for women and girls in leadership roles.

Sidebar:
Leaving a Legacy: Mary Jane Becker

For someone who has never been a Girl Scout, Mary Jane Becker is a staunch promoter and supporter of the program. As a child, Mary Jane wanted to be a Girl Scout. “I even had an old uniform, but there were no troops nearby,” she recalls.

Her involvement with the Girl Scouts began in 1978, when she volunteered as a troop leader for her daughter’s Brownie troop in New Orleans. She led Brownies and Junior scout troops until 1984. “We worked on earning badges, which is a very educational opportunity for them,” says Mary Jane, recalling the camping and first aid badges. “I took kids to Camp Whispering Pines once in the fall and once in the spring, and they really did enjoy that.”

After moving to the northshore, Mary Jane was elected to the board of the Girl Scout Council of Southeast Louisiana (now Girl Scouts Louisiana East) in 1996. After serving as treasurer and vice president, she was president from 1999 until 2003. “When I took over as president in early spring of 1999, our big concern was Y2K,” she recalls with a laugh. “It’s funny now, but it wasn’t a bit funny when we were struggling with it!”

Mary Jane founded the Juliette Gordon Low Heritage Society to attract planned gifts and bequests. She was also a founding member of the council’s Every Girl, Everywhere Society, a multi-year giving society established in 2001.

In 1999, Mary Jane received the Thanks Badge, a national Girl Scouts adult award that honors an individual whose ongoing commitment, leadership and service have had an exceptional, measurable impact on the Girls Scout mission. She also received the Minnie Finley award in 2003, for dedication to and service in Girl Scouting that personified responsible leadership, commitment to community and an undaunted belief in the potential of youth.

Although she no longer serves as a board member, “I certainly am at the beck and call of the Girl Scouts—especially for fundraising help,” Mary Jane says. A recent example is the Brownie troop that meets in her office building. When one of her employees asked for a space to have troop meetings, Mary Jane agreed. “It’s really cute. I can hear their little voices. It’s exciting to see that starting all over again,” she says.

As I stand in the cold misty dawn of a small Spanish town, my heart begins to race in a mix of anxiety and anticipation.

I stand with 3,000 other men whom I have never seen before, but I know exactly what is on their minds. We have all gathered for the same purpose, but for different reasons. Some are old, hoping to regain the thrills of their youth; some are young, seeking to gain the experience of a man.

We all know what may soon lie before us, but we have chosen to carry through.

As Ernest Hemingway said nearly 85 years ago in The Sun Also Rises, “Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.”

Michael and his dad prepare for the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

For months, I had eagerly anticipated the trip that my father and I were going to take after my graduation from St. Paul’s. We had planned every detail of our visit to Pamplona, Spain, to run with the bulls. But no amount of planning could have prepared us for the reality.

The Spanish simply call it “Encierro,” but it is more commonly known as The Running of the Bulls, which takes place during Pamploma’s annual festival of San Fermin. The festival began as a primarily religious event to honor the city’s patron saint. Its origins can be traced as far back as the 13th century, when it took place in October. The move to July 7 in 1591 is considered the first official celebration of San Fermin. (For perspective—the pilgrims wouldn’t step off the Mayflower for another 29 years!)

“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.” -Hemingway

Over the years, the festival of San Fermin has morphed into a celebration that rivals Mardi Gras with the infusion of music, dancing, food and copious amount of wine. Its resemblance to Mardi Gras was highlighted when the city of Pamplona and a major local tourist shop honored Mardi Gras with a special parade, complete with throws, floats and New Orleans Council-Member-at-Large Arnie Fielkow. The chief similarity to Mardi Gras is the amount of alcohol (traditionally, wine) that is consumed at the festival. Walking through the Spanish city, many New Orleanians would feel at home with the number of bars and restaurants available on each block. Many small convenient stores close down their shops and open a bar out front for anyone who needs a quick refresher. It is also very popular, especially with the many college students who attend, to spill more wine than they actually drink. Wineskins are commonplace, with many partiers shooting wine all over people during the celebration, turning white shirts purple.

Chaos reigns during the running of the bulls.

This brings me to the traditional dress of San Fermin. Many people have seen the iconic clothing of the running of the bulls, the solid white shirt and pants with the red sash around the waist and the red handkerchief around the neck. This is the traditional dress for the entire festival, even for those who don’t actually run, including most of the locals.

“I never had to choose a subject—my subject rather chose me.” -Hemingway

Possibly the single most influential event in the festival’s history was when American author Ernest Hemingway first attended the festival in 1923 and wrote his famous novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926. He returned to Pamplona nine times before his death in 1961. In appreciation of Hemingway’s contribution to the festival’s publicity, the people and city of Pamplona have erected a small monument to the author next to the bullring he made famous. He is also recognized in the names of many cafés and restaurants, as well as life-sized statues in places he is thought to have visited.

Hemingway was not the first foreigner to attend the festival, however. It is believed that in the early 17th and 18th centuries, word got out about how the local clergy was concerned about the abuse of alcohol and the moral flexibility of young men and women during the festival. This, of course, led to many people flocking to the Spanish countryside during the second week in July.

Pamplona

The city of Pamplona rests in the calmly sloping countryside of northeastern Spain near the French border. As my father and I flew into the airport, we saw hundreds of wind generators on top of the mountains that surround the city. The old part of town, where the celebration takes place, lies just south of the river Arga, which provides the perfect place for riverside walks in the cool Spanish summer.

We stayed in the town of Burlada, about two miles from the center of the old part of Pamplona where the festival takes place. We took a five-minute ride on what is possibly one of the cleanest city buses I’ve ever been on and arrived at the center of the downtown city square. I had expected a small dirt town where the only roads that were actually paved were cobblestone from the 17th century and the restaurants were small café-type places run out of people’s homes for the festival. I could not have been more wrong.

Pamplona reportedly spends about four million dollars each year to prepare the city for the festival, which generates about 60 million dollars each year and appears to put a large portion of that back into the city. The city is a beautifully modernized place with the cozy atmosphere of a small town. As we walk down the Avenida de Carlos III, a pedestrian plaza in the center of town, we begin to see upscale shopping next to street vendors and architecturally beautiful buildings with street performers out front. But the most impressive aspect is how the city of Pamplona mixes the modern so perfectly with the old. Many of Pamplona’s older buildings date back to the Middle Ages, and since the city was surrounded by a fortressed wall to protect it from attack, there wasn’t much room for expansion until recently. To cope with the growing population, Pamplona built inwards by making the city very tight and simply modernizing older buildings rather than building new ones. Most of the old town is pedestrian-accessible only, with many of the shops, bars and restaurants adapting to the inevitable influx of visitors that San Fermin brings.

The Running of the Bulls

“They’re only dangerous when they’re alone, or only two or three of them together.” -Hemingway

The actual running of the bulls during the festival of San Fermin was not always the major international event it is today. According to tradition, bullfights take place throughout the week. The bulls, which are bred and raised by nearby farms, need to be ushered to the ring each morning for that evening’s fight. The night before, the bulls are led to a small pen in the Santo Domingo area of town, about one-half mile from the ring. In early years, on the day of the fight only the bull drovers ran with the six full-grown bulls to the arena. Eventually, many of Pamplona’s young men decided they would run with the bulls in what can only be described as either a move of sheer bravery or one of blind arrogance. (She must’ve been pretty.) By 1852, a new bullring was constructed and a new route, which is still used today, was adopted. Eventually, many people began to run in front of the bulls instead of behind them as the drovers do.

The first thing most people think of about running with the bulls is the danger—and there really is no “safe” place to run. Though many groups have protested the event and requested that the mayor make the run safer, he reportedly responded that there is no way—nor is there any desire—to make the run safer at this point. Various safety precautions have been implemented over the years, however, including the installation of a second fence barrier along the route. Surprisingly, since 1910, only 14 people have died because of injuries incurred during the run. A lot of the injuries are not from the bulls, but from panicked people getting knocked around; many end up with concussions.

Pamplona holds eight different runs on eight consecutive days during the festival. Each morning at eight o’clock sharp, a rocket explodes to announce the official start of the run and the opening of the gates. A second rocket explodes to indicate that all six bulls and six steers have left the holding stable and are heading to the Santo Domingo portion of the route. This is considered by many to be the most dangerous part of the run because the bulls are fresh and are able to run quickly—very quickly; also, there is no place to hide for cover because both sides of the street are solid walls except for a few shops, which are required to block all doors and windows.

Each runner can start from anywhere on the route. My father and I chose a place near the beginning, in the Ayuntamiento area, a small square surrounded by shops that is dominated by an old church that hosts the opening and closing ceremonies. Many of the pictures of the revelry and debauchery that take place at San Fermin are taken in this square during the opening ceremony.

The most nerve-wracking part of the whole event was waiting for the run to start. Looking around, I saw each man nervously stretching and trying to loosen up. The clock ticked down to the final seconds, and many runners began to sing the traditional prayer to St. Fermin, asking for a safe run. As the bulls neared my section, sheer chaos and panic surfaced. I saw men start to run away before the bulls even reached us, and then I saw men waiting to get a closer look. Finally, I began to run, knowing that I definitely did not want to be standing there while the bulls ran past. I lost my father in the shuffle and turned back to see where he was. My heart felt like it was about to beat out of my chest at the sight—the group of six mammoth bulls and their steer counterparts were bearing down on me with their infamous horns pointing straight at me. Luckily, I was able to get to the side of them, just as they rushed past, with less than a yard between us. The realization of how much danger I had just been in hit me—the sheer size and speed of one of those creatures is terrifyingly breathtaking. As I stood on the side, I hoped that one of them wouldn’t decide to turn a bit and clip me from behind.

The whole run took only about 15 seconds for me. My heart was still racing, not knowing if it was over or if more were on their way. It was absolutely the most terrifying thing I had ever done, but I had made it—I had run with the bulls.

Though I was unscathed, the bulls were still on the loose and more runners were about to experience the terror I had felt. The next stage of the route, known as “Estafeta,” is one of the most famous portions of the run because it has the most dangerous feature in it—a sharp turn on the slippery cobblestone street. Inexperienced runners are advised not to run this portion. Running on the outside of the bulls is especially dangerous because many bulls slip and fall at this turn, crushing whatever is in their way and some bulls are separated from the herd. (The bulls stay relatively calm while they are together—fast, but calm.)

The next section, the short stretch of “Telefonica,” leads to the entrance to the bullring known as “Callejon.” Callejon is also a very dangerous portion of the route, because the whole path narrows to about 3 meters in width. All the runners as well as the bulls must squeeze through—although the bulls will make their own room if they need it.

The arena is the final stage of the Encierro. As the bulls run in, “dobladores” work to draw the bulls into the pen, and the spectators cheer the runners who have made it safely. The run into the arena signifies the end of the running for that day. It is an amazing feeling of accomplishment and invincibility as you realize that you have successfully run with the bulls.

I ran on Wednesday, July 13, 2011, which was the fastest running of the bulls ever recorded since officials started keeping track in 1980—2 minutes and 11 seconds. A typical run lasts around 4 minutes, with runs being drawn out if a bull becomes detached from the herd.

Once the run was over, the streets cleared out of all the partiers who needed to rest before the evening festivities. Some people were still out drinking, and small groups of local marching bands known as “penas” were around, but for the most part, this was the calm part of the day—a great time to walk around and explore the city or do some shopping without having to fight the drunken crowds. The party wouldn’t pick up again until the evening’s bullfight.

The bullfight

“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.” -Hemingway

A Spanish custom that can be dated back for centuries, the bullfight has been spread to many former Spanish colonies throughout the world. In Pamplona, the bullfights are held in the same local arena used in the run, which is one of the largest bullfighting arenas in the world. Each night the stadium is filled to capacity, with many of the local penas in attendance. The partying, including the tradition of throwing wine everywhere, continues inside the arena throughout the bullfight.

To many, the bullfight is a daring and courageous art form. Many Americans feel strongly against the sport, however, and end up cheering for the bull. PETA has held many rallies and protests against the sport and the running of the bulls. A few days before the festival begins, PETA holds its “Running of the Nudes,” in which hundreds of people walk through the streets of Pamplona—you guessed it—in the nude.

In a traditional Spanish-style bullfight, three matadors each fight two bulls. (The bullfight we saw featured the six bulls that had run through the streets of Pamplona earlier that day, each between 4 and 6 years old and weighing about 1,500 pounds.) Each matador has six assistants—two picadores, who are on horseback and use large lances; three banderilleros; and a “mozo de espadas,” which translates to “sword page.” Together, these men are collectively known as “toreros,” or “bullfighters.”

The modern bullfight is highly ritualized, with three distinct stages. The participants first enter the arena in a parade called the “paseíllo.” Torero costumes are inspired by 17th-century Andalusian clothing, with matadors being easily distinguished by the gold of their “traje de luces” (“suit of lights”) as opposed to the lesser banderilleros, called “toreros de plata” (“bullfighters of silver”). When the bull enters, the matador and banderilleros use special magenta and gold capes to lure the bull around the ring, not only to tire the bull but also to test his ferocity.

Next, the picadors enter the arena on horseback. A padding called “peto” surrounds the horse to protect it from the bull’s horns. The bull will eventually charge the horse, which allows the picador to stab at the bull’s neck and shoulder muscles. The manner in which the bull charges provides important clues as to which side the bull favors.

In the second stage, the three banderilleros each attempt to plant two “banderillas,” sharp barbed sticks about 2 feet long, into the bull’s shoulders by running at the bulls themselves and quickly dodging the bull’s horns right at the impact of the banderillas. This angers and invigorates but ultimately further weakens the bull.

In the final stage, the matador re-enters the ring alone, with only a small red cape, or “muleta,” and a sword. The matador uses his cape to attract the bull in a series of passes, which serves the dual purpose of wearing the animal down for the kill and producing a beautiful display, or “faena.” The faena ends with a final series of passes in which the matador uses his muleta to maneuver the bull into a position that allows him to stab it between the shoulder blades and through the heart. The sword is called “estoque” and the act of thrusting the sword is called an “estocada.” This final thrust will inevitably kill the bull,
ending the fight.

If the matador has performed particularly well, the crowd may petition the president of the event to award the matador an ear of the bull by waving white handkerchiefs. Very rarely, if the public or the matador believes that the bull has fought extremely bravely, they may petition the president to grant the bull a pardon and spare the bull’s life, allowing it to leave the ring alive and return to the ranch.

After each of the bulls has been killed, the penas and most of the audience begin the next phase of festivities by parading into the streets, which are filled with music, dancing and more wine. It is common for the bars to be empty on the inside because everyone is on the street dancing and celebrating.

Once a year, the small Spanish town of Pamplona becomes the center of international interest and holds the hopes and memories of thousands of people who flock to the city for that one week in July. If you consider joining them, remember this quote from Hemingway, “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguishes one man from another.”

It was an actual cannon ball, and it was fired from all the way across the Mississippi River, from the front gallery of one of New Orleans’ most notable landmarks—the Presbytere. A prankster, whose identity remains unknown, had loaded a Civil War-era cannon on display in front of the old building on Jackson Square with powder and a four-pound ball. The blast, which sent the ball sailing over Gen. Jackson’s head and over the river, was reported to have knocked out 60 windows and knocked down a night watchman nearby.

This might be the quirkiest story coming out of a building with thousands of stories to tell. It stands on ground set aside in the city’s earliest plans to house the clergy of the cathedral standing next to it and is the fourth building on the site that was called the Presbytere, or priests’ house. Construction on the present building started under Spanish colonial rule, after the fire of 1794, but was halted after the first floor was built in 1798 when Don Andres Almonester y Roxas, the philanthropist whose fortune financed its construction (along with the Cabildo and St. Louis Cathedral), died. It remained a one-story building until 1813, when the second story and roof were completed. The third floor and signature mansard roof and dormer windows were added in 1847.

The present building, while called “the Presbytere,” was never used to house the clergy, but was leased out by the church first as storage and retail space. Around 1822, it was leased to the city and became the home of the city’s civil courts, where they stayed until 1910. At that time, the Presbytere was turned over to the Louisiana State Museum. Following extensive renovations, it began telling the stories of Louisiana and has continued to do so ever since.

The first floor, once the home of two courtrooms, the Orleans Parish sheriff’s office and the Supreme Court’s law library, now houses the exhibit Katrina and Beyond.
But, as Al Johnson famously sings, “it’s Carnival Time, and everybody’s having fun”—and it’s time to take a look at Mardi Gras: It’s Carnival Time in Louisiana, the comprehensive exhibit on all things Mardi Gras housed on the Presbytere’s second floor.

The old courtrooms are now “krewe” rooms. Rooms where lawyers argued and judges judged and fortunes and liberties were won and lost as clerks furiously wrote down every word of it (for a time, one in French and one in English) now display costumes, masks, floats, doubloons, ball favors, invitations and beads—the trinkets, treasures and ephemera that represent the history of Mardi Gras, one of the many things earning New Orleans a place among the most interesting cities in the world.

The Presbytere. Photo by Jay Rosenblatt, courtesy La. State Museum.

Why do we have all these seemingly frivolous items, these souvenirs of passing parades and remnants of secretive and exclusive societies, housed in such a grand building that was built for a sacred purpose?

“The New Orleans Carnival is descended from ancient religious rites of the Greek and Latin World. Ovid described the Greek shepherds of Arcadia who, five thousand years ago, celebrated a spring festival in hopes of better pastures and the remission of sins.”
—Henri Schindler, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 1997.

As Schindler points out, Mardi Gras is a very deeply rooted tradition. What’s celebrated in South Louisiana on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday has its roots in ancient culture and is celebrated in some form or another in almost all parts of the world that are predominately Christian, particularly where Roman Catholicism prevails.

Carnival, from the Latin carne vale (farewell to flesh), is the season just before Lent, the religious period of penance and fasting during which the church in its earliest days forbade the eating of meat for the 40 days before Easter Sunday. The last day of the season became Mardi Gras, French for Fat Tuesday, because on that day the Boeuf Gras, or fattened beef steer, was led through medieval towns and slaughtered for a final “farewell to meat” feast.

What are the things that set Louisiana’s Mardi Gras traditions apart from those in the rest of the world? The items that hold the answer to that question are on display in the Presbytere.

Prior to 1852, Carnival here was celebrated haphazardly, with a combination of public and private balls held throughout the city, and a tradition had arisen of street thugs throwing flour, or worse things, at passers-by on Mardi Gras day. Starting in 1852, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, the first organized krewe in New Orleans, held a public parade on Mardi Gras evening and a very private ball after the parade. It served as a model for future organizations.

The Twelfth Night Revelers and Rex were organized after the Civil War. Although at the time Rex was merely 10 years old, a British journalist visiting the city observed:

“The first essential in the successful conduct of the Southern carnival is an entire and unswerving belief in the personality and supremacy of Rex…[R]egal edicts…are not only implicitly believed in, but as implicitly obeyed.”
—George A. Sala, America Revisited, Vol. II, 1882.

Sala wrote several volumes about his travels around the world. He observed Mardi Gras in New Orleans at a time when organized revelry was but 30 years old. Rex’s proclamations, declaring Mardi Gras a holiday and inviting all of his subjects to participate, were printed up and distributed throughout the country in hopes of stirring up interest for travelers to visit the city. Sala had seen one at the train depot in Atlanta.

Preparations underway for a ball in the old French Opera house. Courtesy La. State Museum.

Rex’s early proclamations, along with hundreds of other items of printed Carnival-related items—ball invitations, admit and dance cards, sheet music and parade bulletins—are in the museum’s vast collection, only a fraction of which can be displayed. Krewes seemingly tried to outdo each other in the golden age.

Examples of the elegance and splendor of those bygone days grace the Presbytere’s display cases, which are filled with the jewels, costumes and gowns worn by the kings and queens of various courts, as well as smaller items such as ducal badges and ball favors.

Wayne Phillips, the curator of Mardi Gras: It’s Carnival Time in Louisiana, says the Louisiana State Museum was founded in 1904 and began its Mardi Gras collection right away. “It’s significant that in the 1900s people realized its importance and began collecting items related to Mardi Gras,” Phillips says. “Mardi Gras wasn’t that old then; several krewes were brand-new and the oldest were only 50 years old.” He says the first items collected were ball invitations because they fit well with the museum’s system of archiving documents. Ball invitations are highly collectible for another reason—many are individual works of art, which Schindler refers to as “These beautiful messages from the gods…”

In 1873, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, known for satirical social commentary through its allegorical parade and tableaux ball themes, reached an infamous peak with its representation of carpetbaggers and occupying troops through the theme “The Missing Links to Darwin’s The Origin of Species.” The despised Gen. Butler, who led the Union occupation of New Orleans during the war, was depicted as half man, half hyena and President Ulysses S. Grant as a tobacco grub. A booklet printed by the krewe with drawings of the 100 animals and their satirized counterparts is on display.

Comus Ball 1873. Courtesy La. State Museum.

Parade bulletins, poster-sized depictions of the floats that were to appear in the parades, were handed out or published in newspapers. The earliest Phillips knows of was printed in 1874. “Their importance was not imagined at the time; they offer the only record of what the parades looked like,” he says. The museum has about 350 bulletins, and Phillips says, “What’s unique about the 1874 bulletin is that it’s not printed locally but by an illustrated weekly on the East Coast.” In the 1880s, local printers, notably Walle & Co., printed color lithograph bulletins, which often had advertisements for local business on the back.

The crown jewels of the old-line krewes like Comus and Rex are in display in a room reached through the last vestige of the Presbytere’s role as courthouse—a massive steel vault door that entered what was a fireproof room where court records were stored.

“Crowns and scepters represent a real important collection for us. The crown represents what it means to be a monarch more than anything else,” says Phillips. “A lot of the time, the crown and scepter would survive, but the rest of the costume would not. They’re really hard to collect because, until the 1960s, the krewes gave the jewels to the king and queen, who would donate to us. Now they keep the jewels to re-use every year.”

His favorite story involves Elizabeth Nicholson, who was Rex’s queen in 1948. “The early crowns and scepters that were going to be worn by the king and queen of Carnival would be displayed in a jewelry store window on Canal Street before Mardi Gras,” he says. The public did not know who the royals would be, but Nicholson knew months in advance that she would be queen. “She would go stand in the crowd of people ogling her jewels, because she knew she was the one who would get to wear them. No one else knew that secret yet. And we now have that crown and scepter in our collection for everybody to see.”

It’s funny how things don’t change. Nicholson’s story echoes the observation Sala made more than 65 years before:

“Crowds have been gathering, evening after evening, before the window of a jewelry store in Canal Street, in which Rex’s ‘Crown jewels’—his diadem, his scepter, his orb, and his ring—have been displayed. A leading hardware man gravely advertises that he has been appointed to construct a fireproof safe for the custody of the Royal jewels.”
—George A. Sala, America Revisited, Vol. II, 1882.

Phillips strives to acquire and maintain artifacts from all over Louisiana. He recently acquired a small collection of ball gowns from Morgan City krewes that had been displayed at a museum there.

Of great interest are the costumes and masks collected from the Acadian Mardi Gras tradition, the Courir de Mardi Gras. Towns in Acadiana, such as Mamou, Eunice and Church Point, host celebrations far removed from processions on city thoroughfares and masquerade balls.

“Rural communities don’t have a float-based parade tradition,” Phillips says. “It’s based on visiting households on horseback, trucks and wagons pulled by tractors. Participants perform music, working for ingredients for the gumbo.” Masked revelers travel on horseback or truck from house to house in the Acadiana countryside, dressed as clowns, thieves or demons.

“One thing that is really important is the extent of the disguise, because they are performing acts of mischief. Cajun Mardi Gras mask-makers have devised a variety of ways to make sure the wearer can see out of them but no one can see through to identify the wearer. As a result, you have a group of well-known mask-makers that people regularly go to for Acadian-style masks.” Fifty or so masks are on display from the museum’s collection of over 100.

Acadian Courir de Mardi Gras masks.

Many more items observing Carnival from different cultural perspectives are found at the Presbytere. The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club’s traditions are celebrated, as are the Twelfth Night Revelers, modern “super krewes,” marching bands and costumes from gay carnival clubs. Modern costumes made post-Katrina out of the then-ubiquitous blue-roof tarp material are displayed in the Presbytere’s Katrina exhibit.

Another item in the collection that’s become common at the parades is a ladder that’s been converted to have seating for children at the top (there’s no indication of whether its owners prefer the sidewalk side or the neutral ground side, though). We might think this is a new invention. But Robert Tallant observed in his 1947 book Mardi Gras that as he wandered from the French Quarter to view a parade on Canal Street, “Fathers held small children on their shoulders, or they held them high above adult heads in particular contrivances that appear in New Orleans only at Mardi Gras time—boxlike seats at the tops of long poles.”

So it is true that, at least with Carnival time in Louisiana, the more things change, the more they stay the same—but I’m guessing today’s ladders are safer.

The iconic Friendship Oak has held court in Friendship Circle for over a century. According to history professor emeritus and Southeastern lore connoisseur C. Howard Nichols, the tree earned its name when it served as campus courtship central.

“The women’s dormitory across the street (Senior Hall at the time and now Campbell Hall) may have contributed to the name since the tree’s spreading branches provided a somewhat secluded ‘courting place’ for male suitors who called upon the female co-eds,” he says.

Friendship Circle at Southeastern. Photo by Randy Bergeron.

The Kenelly family can attest to this. According to Ken Kenelly (’75), his parents began their courtship beneath the oak’s languid limbs. Pat (’47) and Bert (’47) Kenelly attended what was then Southeastern Louisiana College in the years following World War II. Pat was a Hall of Fame inductee for football, baseball and distinguished service as both a coach and an athletics director; Southeastern’s baseball diamond is named in his honor—Pat Kenelly Field at Alumni Stadium. An inductee in his own right for distinguished service as a football player, coach and administrator, Ken says there were countless memories from the baseball dugout and Strawberry Stadium, but Friendship Oak held a special place in his parents’ hearts.

“I remember my dad saying that Friendship Oak was the special place on campus because they didn’t have cars, so that is where they dated,” says Ken. “He used to say, ‘If that oak ever starts talking, I’m going to have to chop it down.’”

So while the name may only refer to friendship, it’s understood with a wink and a smile to mean romantic friendships, not the BFF kind.

State Senator A.G. Crowe (’73) is quick to point out that not only were he and Linda (’73) sweethearts in their college days, they’re still sweethearts today. “We stood under Friendship Oak, and I let her know she passed all the tests,” he says, jokingly. “I proposed and let her know that if she would have me, I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.”

It was also beneath the canopy of Friendship Oak’s branches that Brad Bendily (’96) proposed. According to the former Erin Buratt (’96), he couldn’t have picked a more perfect place. “We both lived on campus, so lunches and quiet walks under Friendship Oak were a regular occurrence, in addition to the numerous student events we participated in near Friendship Circle,” she says.

Friendship Oak was also a favorite nighttime stop after performances in Pottle Hall and Student Union activities for the couple. “The moonlight shining through the oak’s branches was a beautiful sight,” she says. “It always set the stage for a romantic kiss good-bye.”

One fall night in 2001, following a dinner to celebrate her job, Brad made a detour to campus to retrieve something he “forgot” in his office. “He parked in front of Friendship Oak, which didn’t seem unusual, given that his office was in nearby McClimans Hall,” says Erin. “But when we got out of the car, instead of walking toward McClimans, he led me under Friendship Oak, knelt down on one knee, told me how much he loved me and asked me to marry him.”

She said yes—and nine years ago, they were married.

Erin currently serves as deputy superintendent of the Office of Developmental Support for the Louisiana Department of Education and Brad is systems administrator for Administrative Computing Services at Southeastern. Once upon a time, however, they were both student workers on campus who met through their involvement with the Student Government Association. Apparently, during the mid-1990s there were quite a few “computer issues” in the Office of Career Services where Erin worked that required “fixing” by a certain student worker in the Office of Administrative Computing Services.

“Brad’s employment at Southeastern keeps us even more connected to the campus, still participating in various activities, enjoying the return of football and hanging out with our Southeastern family,” Erin says.

Their two-year-old son, Gavan, has already been introduced to the Southeastern scene—as evidenced by one of his first photo sessions that featured a Lions football helmet, a stuffed Lion and a Southeastern shirt. Erin says, “He’s made several trips to campus, including to our beloved Friendship Oak, getting to know the campus of possibly his own future college home.”

Friendship Oak in the 1930s.

In the case of Ellie Schroder (’83), her future husband could have been called for a blatant offsides penalty when they first met on Southeastern’s intramural flag football field—John (’84) was the coach of Ellie’s opposing team.

“I was editor of the Le Souvenir yearbook, and my office was on the top floor of East Stadium,” says the former Ellie Daigle. “I used to watch him walk across campus from my window.”

The couple dated on and off throughout their college years. A wrong mailing address threatened to thwart their long-distance courtship, but it was overcome, resulting in 26 years of marriage.
“John left for basic training after graduation. I was not happy that he signed up for the military and I didn’t know about it. When I started getting calls from him at basic training, I refused them. I didn’t know that he had been sending letters,” she says. “And then one day, either Scott Perriloux (’84) or Jay Barsenick (’84), who lived in the apartment next to me, brought me a stack of letters and told me that I needed to give Schroder my correct apartment number.”

“After reading the letters, she started accepting my calls,” says John, with a grin.

There was mention of a parking lot in what is now the Lions’ baseball stadium right field where students would go for “quiet time,” but the Schroders also found some time to actually go to the library and study in between courting and canoodling, as many college sweethearts tend to do. They credit Southeastern for providing them with excellent educations and have established an athletics scholarship in their names. Ellie is a technology resource teacher at Bayou Lacombe Middle School and has her bachelor’s-plus-30 and supervision certification, all from Southeastern. John received his bachelor’s in criminal justice from Southeastern, serves as State Representative for District 77 and is a small-business owner. “We love Southeastern for many reasons,” he says, which is fitting, since Southeastern happens to be where they met and fell in love.

Socializing in the circle continues a tradition that dates back to the 1930s, when Friendship Oak’s much younger branches sheltered a popular student hangout. At one time, wooden benches sat at the base of the landmark tree’s trunk, and a small frame structure housed a refreshments stand that dispensed coffee, soft drinks and hamburgers that cost a nickel each. Dubbed the “Pop House” by students, it was razed once the War Memorial Student Union was constructed in the early 1950s, according to Nichols.

By the 1980s, a circular bench that wrapped around the massive tree’s trunk had been installed. In 2004, a wooden deck was constructed to protect its root system from further compaction and damage.

Since the return of football in 2002, the Lion Walk has become part of the Southeastern game day tradition.  As the team makes its way to Strawberry Stadium two hours prior to kickoff, players and coaches are greeted by loyal Lion tailgaters who flock to Friendship Circle on game days. Students have also begun hosting Live @ The Oak on evenings before home football games. Plenty of music and food set the mood to kick off tailgating for the next day.

Registered with the Louisiana Live Oak Society, Friendship Oak reigns with arboreal authority over Friendship Circle and beckons passers-by to socialize in its shade.

Whether you believe in the legend of a kiss beneath its branches is up to you. However, the next time you stroll through Friendship Circle with your sweetheart, be sure to glance at the Spanish moss that graces the oak’s branches. When the breeze catches it just right, it can easily be mistaken for a bridal veil made of heirloom lace. Perhaps it’s trying to foretell many kisses yet to come.

It was his relentless prodding in getting the state government on board with his planned highway improvements that earned him “The Road Warrior” moniker. It was that same determination to make St. Tammany what it can be that has created unprecedented opportunities and ensured the parish would pull through the greatest challenges it’s ever faced.

It was 10 days after his wife, Maria, had given birth to baby John Clay when Davis joined the staff at the emergency operations center to prepare for Katrina. After the storm passed, Davis faced, he says, “a disaster like none of us had ever experienced.” Despite his family’s situation, Davis spearheaded immediate efforts to get everyone back home and rebuilding. It wasn’t an easy task, and his team faced unprecedented hurdles.

“I was in a building with a couple of hundred people and nobody had a house. These were the government workers, and nobody had a home to go to,” remembers Davis.
He set out to leap Katrina’s hurdles the way he’s always led the parish—by gathering his team, identifying the problem, coming up with solutions and working relentlessly until the problem is solved.

The first thing, he says, was “trying to stay calm, because, in my mind, everything else follows that,” Davis says. “We’re human beings, so it was devastating for us to stand in someone’s front yard with tears in our eyes and see their home is completely gone. You didn’t see the days we were really upset because we didn’t want that to be seen.”

A flood-damaged family home meant Maria and John Clay were living at the operations center, too. Certainly not the best of circumstances for a newborn and his parents, but “I got a great deal of strength from the quiet moments spent with my wife and the few minutes with John Clay,” Davis poignantly recalls.

“We had the 10 a.m. meeting every day, and everyone knew that. At 10 a.m., you met me at the Louisiana Heart Hospital in Lacombe.” Davis met with elected officials, agency heads, law enforcement and hospital administrators daily. “I’d ask each agency, ‘What’s the problem today? What’s your one problem? Don’t give me 50.’ It could be they needed another vehicle, or they needed a vehicle to go through water, so in the group we’d discover where we had more trucks and where we could move them to.”

Kevin Davis meets with Gov. Jindal at the St. Tammany Emergency Operations Center for Hurricane Gustav. Courtesy St. Tammany Parish Government.

Pressing problems were shelter and communications, areas where the federal government was involved and where Davis’ persistence paid off. “There were a lot of things coming from the bureaucracy that should have been common sense that didn’t happen. So we were making them happen on the ground here.”

“I remember one day we were on the telephone and we connected to FEMA. I said we need to get our residents here, but it’s a complete disaster, the homes are gone. We asked them that day, ‘Why don’t we bring down some camping trailers?’ They said, ‘No, no, no; we build big mobile home parks. That’s what we have always done in a disaster.’”

Davis knew that wasn’t going to work. People needed to be able to work on their own property. “I remember hollering and arguing with them to just give me the trailers and I would get them to the houses. They said, ‘We don’t do that, we’ve never done that and we’re not going to do that.”

The next morning, Davis says, “I got a phone call and they said, ‘We’re going to bring trailers.’ That was very early; no one had ever heard of a FEMA trailer.”

The other big hurdle Davis’ team faced in the first days after Katrina was the lack of communications. While parish government could communicate on its radio system, there wasn’t a connection to the outside world.

“People were trying to figure out, where’s my aunt? Where’s my brother, where are my parents? So I commandeered a radio station,” Davis says, recalling a bit of creative problem solving that made the feds uncomfortable. “It was off the air but still powered. The FCC, from my understanding, had closed it. We went over and opened the door, and our staff turned the system on and started broadcasting. They would broadcast all kinds of general information, what was happening, what was going on.”

Word was passed at the 10 o’clock meetings that people should listen to that station for information. “The team here had a lot of fun with it; they were radio announcers, talking about the issues and what was going on.”

Davis’ leadership abilities really shone through in responding to Katrina and subsequent disasters. But from the day he took office, he was faced with a unique challenge: shepherding St. Tammany through a change in its governmental structure.

He was the first parish president elected under a new home rule charter. St. Tammany had been governed, as many other parishes are governed today, by a police jury. St. Tammany instituted a home rule charter, creating the parish council and the office of parish president.

“The structure was completely different from what everyone was accustomed to,” says Davis, who had been a police juror. “It was always negotiating, compromising and trying to move forward. Many of the jurors got elected as council members. They were more in tune to running the system. We delicately got through that. I thought it was important that they play a role in some of the decision making so that it could be successful.”

Infrastructure Successes

As a police juror, Davis was closely associated with the rails-to-trails project, the Tammany Trace, which grew in size and popularity during his presidential tenure. “People love it,” Davis says. “They feel like it’s theirs, which is something I always thought would happen. Each community developed its own plans for its town center around the Trace,” Davis notes.

Roads and drainage issues were also at the top of the agenda when Davis took office. A comprehensive parish-wide drainage survey has helped in planning for new development; it also paid off in emergency situations, as flooding under a variety of scenarios can be predicted and evacuations ordered in advance of threatening conditions.

On the transportation front, Davis says, “We really pushed hard, because there had been no work of significant value done in the parish for 10 or 15 years. The first four years, we were doing a lot of work with infrastructure issues, without a lot of funding—and arguing with the state over funding of roads that they own.”

Highways 190, 21, 22, 1085 and 1077 are among the state roads that are critical to transportation within the parish that saw major improvements during the past 12 years. “I got tagged the ‘Road Warrior’ because we were constantly trying to maneuver through the state system to get projects done,” Davis says. “The way the state used to operate, and they don’t any longer, was to wait until you had a problem [with a state road], and then they would look at fixing it. That really meant that once you had a problem, it would be another 10 to 20 years before it could be fixed. We kept saying, ‘We need to do it ahead of time. We know where the growth’s going; we know all the issues; let’s do it ahead of time.’ That philosophy has been picked up more than it was 12 years ago.”

The early planning helped to smooth the way for recovery after Katrina and to ensure St. Tammany received rebuilding and stimulus funds promptly. “What we did in 2000 to 2004 was starting to pay off because we now had all this information and actual plans. As soon as we could get funding, we started all the infrastructure projects across the parish.”

Economic Development

Companies like LLOG, Chevron and Global Star—and their employees—became welcome additions to the parish post-Katrina, along with a number of new retail outlets. Davis explains, “Early on, we realized there was very little retail shopping on the northshore. We hired an LSU economics professor to do the study, and if I remember correctly, it found that 70 percent of our residents shopped outside the parish. That’s significant. So we embarked on some large developments that stirred a lot of discussion.”

Davis believes that with the infrastructure in and the retailers still coming on line, people can see what his administration’s line of thinking was 10 years ago. “Most parish residents then were shopping outside the parish, which doesn’t generate revenue, which doesn’t help us to do infrastructure, because you don’t have the revenue,” he says.

“Anytime you’re dealing with change, you get a lot of discussion,” Davis notes. “But I think in the long run, for the first time in our history, more than 56 percent of our residents work in St. Tammany Parish. Trying to move things along proved there was merit in those decisions, because now they can find work on the northshore and not have to commute.”

Energy and retail aren’t the only industries coming into the parish. “It’s technology, engineering, energy—all different fields—that have now relocated to St. Tammany Parish, and we’ve got more coming. That’s a big issue for the next administration, and she [incoming parish president Pat Brister] is going to be aggressively pushing that.”

And Now…

What will he miss most after 12 years as parish president? Davis says, “I’ll miss everybody, the team here, the activity of moving forward, putting the projects together and building a team, trying to get everybody on the same vision. As I think about it, I’ll miss everything.” He adds that before he accepted his current position as the state’s Director of Homeland Security, people asked whether he was retiring. “I’d say, ‘No, no, no; I’m not retiring. I have a 6-year-old son and a wonderful wife, so I’ve got to keep working.’”

The picture is of Jackson Square: the statue of Gen. Jackson atop his rearing horse; St. Louis Cathedral behind him; the church flanked by the identical façades of the Cabildo and Presbytere. To the left and right of the square are the upper and lower Pontalba buildings. This view has not changed at all since Jackson’s statue was dedicated in 1855. In fact, a drawing from 1726 shows the square and church in the same configuration they are today, nearly 300 years later.

Jackson Square. Photo by Thomas Growden.

Originally designated by the French, who founded the city, as the Place d’Armes, the site at the center of the city has witnessed all of New Orleans’ history, from the first landing of early colonists (and the Native Americans before them) to the celebration of the Super Bowl Champion Saints. In between, Jackson Square served as a meeting place for occasions both joyous and gut wrenching.

A national audience looked on grimly as President Bush addressed the nation from Jackson Square in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Wedding parties leaving the Cathedral second-line along paths where crowds have gathered for centuries to welcome dignitaries—presidents, royalty and celebrities. The square has been lit up by the soft glow of hundreds of candles as crowds have gathered in joy to sing Christmas carols and in the solemnity of silent vigils. In its earliest days, miscreants were publicly humiliated in stocks in the square and murderers and traitors were executed there.

Although it wasn’t the first settlement in Louisiana, New Orleans served as the colonial capital for France and then Spain, and as territorial capital and then state capital when Louisiana became part of the United States. It wasn’t too long ago that ships regularly landed at the levee in front of the square, discharging immigrants and transferring cargo to and from the growing port.

Jackson Square is the epicenter of New Orleans, and, in a way, of Louisiana as a whole. After the Louisiana Purchase was finalized in the Cabildo, the official transfer of Louisiana to the United States took place as the Stars and Stripes was raised over the Place d’Armes in 1803. Jackson Square makes a perfect jumping-off point to celebrate Louisiana’s bicentennial of statehood in 2012.

One Family’s Influence

If anyone is responsible for how Jackson Square and its surroundings appear today, it’s Don Andres Almonaster y Rojas and his daughter, the Baroness Micaela Almonaster de Pontalba.
The French founded the city in 1718. By 1726, land for most of the French Quarter had been cleared and the street grid established. In 1762, the colony of Louisiana was transferred to Spanish control, with a Spanish governor and troops finally arriving in 1766. The Spanish controlled the colony, and thus New Orleans, until November 1803.

Don Almonaster was a Spanish nobleman, a notary and town official who amassed quite a fortune and a great deal of land, including the property on the up- and downtown sides of the Place d’Armes.

After the devastating Good Friday fire burned most of the city to the ground in 1788, Almonaster pledged to build a new church and priests’ house (Presbytere). Before either could be finished, another fire in 1794 destroyed the Corps de Garde and the jail. An earlier Cabildo, or government house, next to the Corps de Garde had burned in the 1788 fire. In 1795, Almonaster pledged to build a new Cabildo as well, “…to the same plan as the Curial [Presbytere] … with the idea of making the front of the Plaza uniform, which in fact would beautify it, as they will form two equal wings to the Temple [the cathedral].”

Almonaster didn’t live to see his vision of symmetrical beauty completed. His death in 1798 complicated matters for the city and Almonaster’s widow and young daughters, one of whom died shortly afterwards.

Micaela, his surviving daughter, went on to lead a fascinating life that is the subject of a must-read book by author Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba. Her contributions would redefine the ancient Place d’Armes and transform it to the Jackson Square we know today.

Her name lives on in the rows of buildings she built in 1850 that flank either side of the square, the Pontalba Buildings. The red brick buildings with ornate ironwork featured storefronts on the ground floor and living spaces on the top three floors. They were a commercial investment on her part, yet the identical buildings completed the ideal of symmetry so important to her father in his philanthropically motivated vision of the square.

The Baroness’ buildings came as the city had undertaken to restore the entire area. By the late 1840s, the Cabildo, St. Louis Cathedral, Presbytere and the Place d’Armes—more commonly referred to as the “public square,” as French influence in this now thoroughly American state had waned—were all showing their age. The church was rebuilt, and the Cabildo and Presbytere were renovated, with each receiving an added third floor topped by a new mansard roof and dormer windows.

The Hero of the Battle of New Orleans

The Place d’Armes wouldn’t become Jackson Square until it was certain that a monument to the general’s memory would be erected in its center, although the idea had been around for some time. Andrew Jackson himself laid the cornerstone for the monument during a visit to the city in 1840 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, three years after completing his term as the seventh president of the United States.

Clark Mills statue of Andrew Jackson. Photo by Thomas Growden.

It wasn’t until 1851, however, when a committee was formed (with a not-small bit of influence, and cash donations, from the Baroness, who was a big fan of Jackson) to finalize plans for the monument, which would be part of an overall “makeover” of what had become a decrepit, almost bare patch of ground.

On January 28, 1851, the council officially proclaimed the square “Jackson Square,” with one member somewhat jokingly suggesting the name be “Pontalba Gardens.” In 1852, the state legislature passed an act appropriating $10,000 as Louisiana’s contribution to the memorial, declaring it was proper for the state to, “[C]ontribute to a work destined to commemorate the achievements of the Hero, to whose military genius, and patriotic devotion in the hour of her darkest peril, she owes the triumph which rescued her chief city from capture by an invading foe…”

In 1854, the monument commission contracted with sculptor Clark Mills to reproduce the bronze statue of Jackson that Mills had cast in Washington, D.C. It had been dedicated in 1853 in what is now Lafayette Square across from the White House (a second duplicate was erected in Nashville, Tenn., Jackson’s home state, in 1880). As the statue neared completion in 1855, there was a ceremonial re-laying of the cornerstone Jackson had laid in 1840. When Jackson had placed the cornerstone, a copper time capsule was placed in the brickwork around it.

For the 1855 ceremony, another time capsule was prepared containing commission documents, copies of the day’s newspapers, copies of the city’s laws and ordinances, and coins from 1855, including $3 and $1 gold pieces struck at the New Orleans mint. It, the original time capsule and Jackson’s cornerstone were incorporated into the granite pedestal that was then built to hold the memorial statue. The square’s makeover was nearly complete, the iron fence that still surrounds the square was installed and the pathways laid out in their current configuration.

Plans to dedicate the statue on the 41st anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1856, were thwarted when the ship carrying it was delayed. On February 9, the statue was unveiled. Sculptor Mills was on hand to describe his work for the crowd.

“General Jackson is there represented as he appeared on the morning of the 8th of January, forty-one years ago. He had advanced to the centre of the line in the act of review; the lines have come to present arms as a salute to their commander, who is acknowledging it by raising his chapeau…His restive horse, anticipating the next move, attempts to dash down the line; the bridle hand of the dauntless hero being turned under, shows that he is restraining the horse, whose open mouth and curved neck is feeling the bit. I have thought this explanation necessary as there are many critics who profess not to understand the conception of the artist.”

The Mark of the Beast (Butler, that is)

Jackson, patrolling his square, chapeau raised in salute and sitting upon his rearing horse, continues to be a defining icon of New Orleans. Through the years, however, he has not always received the respect he deserves.

After Union troops captured New Orleans in 1862, Gen. Benjamin Butler was placed in charge of the city. His extreme acts in response to the harassment and disrespect shown by local citizens to his troops earned him the nickname “Beast” Butler (also “Spoons” because it was said he looted silverware from local homes). One of his spiteful acts was to have the phrase “THE UNION MUST AND SHALL BE PRESERVED” carved into the granite on the sides of the statue’s base.

In 1868, a writer at the Daily Picayune posted a story about the discovery of buried treasure in the statue’s base. He wrote that a citizen noticed an iron pin in the blocks, pushed it in and a door opened, revealing a vault full of silver and gold coins, gold nuggets, diamonds and emeralds. The date of the paper? April 1. There’s no record of how many people that story fooled.

Jackson’s statue suffered continued indignities; his head came off when some boys were climbing on the statue in 1934. A worker found it lying at the base of the statue. The director of the Louisiana State Museum had a plaster cast made of the head before it was bolted back on to the body. In 1960, Jackson’s sword was stolen and never found. A replacement was cast from the third Jackson sculpture in Nashville.

Visit Jackson Square

A family could spend a good part of a day visiting Jackson Square and its surrounding buildings. After a walk in the square and a visit with Gen. Jackson, take the time to visit the Louisiana State Museum, whose properties include the Cabildo, the Presbytere and the 1850 House in the Lower Pontalba building. The Cabildo is home to a comprehensive museum of Louisiana’s history, while the Presbytere features the exhibit Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond on the first floor and Mardi Gras: It’s Carnival Time in Louisiana on the second floor. The 1850 House recreates life at the time the baroness built it. Tours of St. Louis Cathedral are also available during times Mass is not being celebrated.

As part of Louisiana’s bicentennial celebrations, Inside Northside will be featuring the properties of the Louisiana State Museum in upcoming issues during 2012.

For a full telling of the history of Jackson Square, please read Jackson Square Through the Years by Leonard V. Huber, the source for much of the material in this article.

People from all over the world make the trip to Tremé and Dooky Chase Restaurant, which is Leah’s domain at Orleans Avenue and North Miro Street. Founded in 1939 by Leah’s future in-laws as a small shop on the opposite corner of Miro—and named for her father-in-law—the restaurant moved to its current location in 1941. Leah married Edward “Dooky” Chase II in 1945, went to work there and began putting her stamp on the restaurant. She oversaw its expansion and success over the years and shepherded it through its rebirth after Katrina.

Despite all the achievements and accolades she’s garnered during her career in the city, life growing up “out in the county” in depression-era Madisonville is never far from her mind.

IN:        Do you still keep up with the northshore?

LC:        I’m really gung-ho about Madisonville, where I came up. They have grown so much, oh goodness! I still have family there.

I go across the lake and do fundraisers. I do St. Anselm’s Church every year and work with Mary, Queen of Peace. They even gave me a fundraiser in Covington after the storm. I still have northshore customers; they come across that lake all the time.

Leah Chase’s life story was the inspiration behind Disney’s The Princess and the Frog. This tribute from the director and artists graces the entrance to Dooky Chase’s Restaurant. Copyright 2011, Abby Sands Miller, abbyphoto.net.

IN:        We recently did a story on the Jahncke Shipyard in Madisonville. Was that part of the town when you were there?

LC:        Oh, the Jahncke shipyard. My dear, my daddy [Charles Lange] was a caulker. He worked at Jahncke’s. You probably don’t know what a caulker is. See, they built wooden boats and caulkers sealed the joints to keep out water. They had to first go with cotton, then go with oakum—it was a ropy-looking stuff. We used to ride our bike and take him his hot lunch in a little bucket every day.
When they had the launching of the boats, that was a big thing! That was your entertainment; it was really something.

IN:        Did you have a big family?

LC:        My mother [Hortensia] had 14 children. She raised 11 of us and we’re all 11 still living. I’m the oldest, but she had a little baby before me that died at 18 months.

IN:        She must have had her hands full.

LC:        But I never remember my mother taking a pill for nerves or nothing. She would tell us, “Go dig me some worms out there.” You’d dig some worms and put them in a little tin cup. She’d take her fishing pole and go down to the river or go down to the bayou and she would sit there and fish. That was her relaxation.

She would bring home those little perch, sometimes what we called a goggle-eye perch, and she’d fry ’em up. Sometimes she would say, “I’m going fishing now. Put on the grits,” because sometimes we had fish and grits—sometimes we just had grits!

You know, I think about that, and it was good living. Those were good days.

Leah Chase. Copyright 2011, Abby Sands Miller, abbyphoto.net.

IN:        Where did you go to school?

LC:        Daddy was a stickler for learning things. I learned how to tell the time on a Roman numeral clock when I was 5 years old. Can you beat that? He had no education himself, maybe third grade. People back then knew what they needed to know.

My mother was from New Orleans; her mother was a midwife and a registered nurse. My mother had 14 children, so she was pregnant all the time and she would come to New Orleans to have the babies. We had to go across the lake with her until the new baby was ready to come home. My daddy had me going to school when I was 4 years old here in the city when my mother would come.
They would send me to the little nursery school. Back then, kids did not go to school young; they started school when they were 7 or so. When I would get back home to go to school in Madisonville, Daddy said, “Now, don’t tell anybody how old you are.”

There was no high school for blacks over in Madisonville at all, at least no Catholic ones, and my daddy was more Catholic than the Pope! We had to go to Catholic school, so we came over here and stayed with my aunt to be taught by the same nuns that taught us in Madisonville, the Sisters of the Holy Family. The school, St. Mary’s Academy, was at Orleans and Royal in those days.

IN:        What was growing up in depression-era rural St. Tammany like?

LC:        People ask me, “What did you do then? What did you do in segregated times?” I was too busy fighting poverty; I knew I had to rise out of that poverty cycle. I was poorer than Job’s turkey when I came up. It helped me. I had to work. I had to pick strawberries, I had to come home after picking strawberries and then go to school. Then you surely had to wash your clothes and do your things around the house.

It didn’t worry me that I couldn’t go in this place or that place; I didn’t have the money anyway. But I knew if I had the money, I could do more. My daddy used to tell us all the time, “If you work, you can get anything you want.”

You know the Dendingers, the big white Dendinger house (the landmark home on Covington Street)? The Dendingers owned the whole town. What is now the Piggly Wiggly across the road from the big house was the Dendingers’ store then. We lived in the area behind there, and our house is still there.

You see, you live next to the wealthy people, but you know what? It was segregation time, but they would tell you, “Good morning” and “Good evening.” Nobody ever hated anybody; nobody hated them because they had all the money and you had nothing. People didn’t think like that in those days.

We didn’t think like that in the country. You knew you had to work, and you knew nobody gave them anything. They had a sawmill at their big lumber company in Livingston. You know, you didn’t feel like they owed you anything. You felt you had to work so that you could get something. I might not get what they had, but I’d get something.

IN:        How has Madisonville changed since then?

LC:        I enjoy that little town today. Some of the old people say, “Look at all these new people coming in and taking over.” Well, praise God they’re taking over, because you people are too old and the young people have moved out. It’s good they’re coming in; they’re bringing new things and new ideas and you can still enjoy.

They have this beautiful, big, new church in Madisonville, but no, they don’t like the church. But nobody explained it to them. St. Anselm is the patron saint of fishermen. You’re almost right on the river, where my mother and everybody used to fish. The church is like a big ship to me, and people don’t realize the inside of the church is like the belly of a whale. Nobody explained what the church meant, what the building meant.

I tell people all the time, “If you don’t like the changes you see, change the way you look at it.” I think the church is beautiful myself. It looks like a big ship. That’s exactly what it looks like, a huge ship. And that’s what it’s supposed to be. I think it’s gorgeous.

IN:        Let’s talk food. The holidays are just around the corner. You’re known as the Queen of Creole Cuisine. What were the holiday traditions you grew up with?

LC:        I can only talk about my side of the Creoles; they call themselves the Creoles de couleur, the Creoles of color. I think some of the same traditions in New Orleans go the world around. Maybe the Creoles of color have more traditions that came by way of the islands because a lot of slaves came by way of the islands; you pick up things as you come through.

IN:        I’ve heard people say they consider New Orleans to be the northernmost Caribbean city. What was the islands’ influence on Creole cusine?

LC:  My gumbo z’herbes, I think, is a derivative of what they call callaloo in the islands. Callaloo is a green that grows out there, but they put okra in it; the African people used a lot of okra. You chop up those greens, and put the okra in with crab and bang! We turned it around and used what we had.

Gumbo z'herbes served on Holy Thursday at Dooky Chase's.

IN:        Isn’t the gumbo z’herbes an Easter tradition?

LC:        At Dooky Chase Restaurant, on Holy Thursday, that’s all I serve: gumbo z’herbes and fried chicken.

Being superstitious, as we’re supposed to be—we came through the islands where people believed in voodoo and all that—even numbers like 2, 4 and 6 are bad luck. Odd numbers are good luck, so you have to have an uneven number of greens—5, 7, 9, 11. I use nine greens.

We put a lot of meat because that was your last big meat day before Easter Sunday. Heaven forbid if your daddy caught you eating anything on Good Friday. I put a lot of meat in those greens. We put brisket in it, and chicken; we put ham and two kinds of sausage.

In many communities, the Easter tradition is lamb, because that was the sacrificial animal. But in our community, we had things that were seasonal. We had crawfish. It was important to make crawfish bisque on Easter Sunday, and you had your baked ham and potato salad—those were musts.

The must-thing you had to have in the community of the Creoles of color was something called cowan. It’s a snapping turtle. You had stewed cowan. Why did you have cowan on Easter Sunday? Because that’s the beginning of spring, that’s when that turtle started crawling out of the mud. You had what was seasonal.

Oh, you’d go to the market and feel the turtle for eggs. You wanted a female with some eggs in it to put in that gravy. Oh, mercy! I still go back to serving that cowan with rice and potato salad on Easter Sunday. You just had those things; it was the things the Creoles had to have.

IN:        What did your family do for Thanksgiving and Christmas?

LC:        When I was coming up, I remember only one time we had a turkey: when my mother raised one. On Thanksgiving, you know what we had? Things that they hunted.

We had venison if someone hunted deer; we had rabbit and all those kinds of things. You always had gumbo. Gumbo was before any festive meal. You sat at the table and you ate that gumbo by 12 o’clock in the day. Then you got away from the table, you sat around and talked, the family was together and you had you a little wine. We had to make strawberry wine, because that was what we had.

On festive holidays, you’d clean up and have the holly in the window—there was something about it that came together with the food. I remember the cakes we had, jelly cakes, with strawberry jelly, and you’d put the icing on them. We had sweet potato pies, everything you had you made on that day and you enjoyed.

Christmas, you had everything, but the one thing the Creoles always had in New Orleans when they’d make market—and it was always “make market” and not “going to the market”—they had this big red snapper. They’d carry this cane basket and what you’d see sticking out of it was the fish’s tail and the celery. The red snapper, it’s a whole fish and you poach it and garnish it. You pull out his eye and you put an olive there and put a shrimp in his mouth. You just make it a pretty dish and that’s what’s on your table. You’d have that on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’ve got a customer that comes for that every year! He says, “I want that fish you always talk about!” So every year I do one for him to take to his party.

Celery was something we had only on holidays. They would take the hearts of the celery out, and they had a glass, a celery glass. You’d clean the hearts, take out the little strings on them and put that little glass on the table. We had olives only on Christmas; you had the celery and a little dish of olives, and that’s what you ate on Christmas.

You would have oyster dressing—you never had cornbread dressing. We have what we called oyster patties; it was like a stewed oyster put in a little patty shell, a flaky shell. Naturally, you had your potato salad and your rice and your sweet potatoes.

Here in this restaurant, I try to keep up those traditional things and people like it. Some things you don’t have to change. You can do what you do, and whatever you do, you do it.

IN:        You said your mother liked to fish, and your daddy hunted. What else did you eat growing up?

LC:        People say, “You sure like to serve quail,” and I do! But I remember my mother and the quail. That was so funny. The bobwhite quail, when they’re up in the tree, they sing “bob-white, bob-white,” but if they fly down, it’s a different song. When they would get in the strawberry patch, my daddy would shoot ’em. He’d shoot those little quails and my mother would clean them. We had these little plum trees in the yard and she used to make jelly out of them. So we’d take those little quails, and you know, the WPA would give you good butter, back then. She’d fry those quails in that butter and put plum jelly over them. It was the best thing in the world. Now I serve that, they think it’s high on the hog!

I’ll never forget—we were so poor—they had a grass that I don’t see anymore called purslane. It was a succulent grass, but if you cooked it, it was exactly like spinach. It was wild—what was that other thing you eat wild—poke, the poke sallet. My mother would tell us to go pick it—it would grow in the yard, in the fields and all over and she would cook it. But she would tell us, “Don’t let anybody know we so poor we eating grass.” But when my daughter was living in California, we went to a very elite restaurant. I paid 20 bucks there for my purslane that I was told not to tell anybody I was eating because it was grass!

IN:        How did your cookbooks come about?

LC:        When the publisher came to me, I said, “I can’t do that. I can’t do these recipes for you, I can’t do that.” She said, “We’re going to give you time; you just try.” They did give me time, but I thought I can’t be bothered with all that.

I remembered what I heard Dr. Howard Thurman say to a group at a women’s college in Atlanta one time. He said, “There’s a genius in every one of you. But you know, you’re just hustling and bustling and going around, and you just have to stop. Just stop for a while and let it all come out.” And sure enough, I did that. I just sat down one day. I was thinking about food, I was thinking about how I came up and I just started writing it on paper. He said you will be surprised, and I certainly was surprised I could write that book.

I wrote about things I did as a kid in Madisonville, and surprisingly, people liked those little stories. They read those little stories and say, “I can do this; I came up the same way.” That book came out in 1990, and it’s still selling. I still sign that book all over the place.

Dooky Chase's Creole Gumbo and fried chicken. Copyright 2011, Abby Sands Miller, abbyphoto.net.

IN:        You share your traditions every day serving food at your restaurant. Besides your cookbooks, how else are you passing along your traditions?

LC:        I’m trying to do another cookbook with my grandson, who’s also called Dooky. He went to the Cordon Bleu in Paris. He came to work with me, but went back to work with Entergy. He had gotten his MBA while working for Entergy and works there during the day. He comes to work here with me at night.

I’m a cook. I’ve never been formally trained; I do what I’ve done all my life. He’s trained; chefs have to be trained and it gives a restaurant a little more credibility. None of these old black men that were in these kitchens were trained; they just did what they had to do.

Then it came to the day when the chef became the big thing. If a restaurant is going to advertise, you better have some sort of training under your belt so they can say, “well, he’s qualified”—you know how people are. Dooky wanted to go to the Cordon Bleu. I said, “Cordon Bleu? We’re going to have to do some Cordon Noir; put a little black in that blue.”

IN:        Do you have any advice for cooks trying to keep their family traditions alive?

LC:        People say, “I can’t cook like my momma.” It’s because you’re not your momma! People who cooked all their lives, when they put something in their hands, they knew how much that was. That was their measurement, but they would get it right every time. If you make an oyster dressing, those old people would die if you put an oyster in a food chopper. You chopped it on the board. It’s a whole different ball game. For some reason it tastes different if you chop it than if you mash it up in that machine.

Your momma had a certain touch that was unbelievable, and that was that. You’ll never be that, because you will never be her. You can do your own thing, and it will be yours.

Why I was feeling a sense of déjà vu became clear: this is almost exactly the same scene that lies before you as you drive into New Orleans from Slidell—a road spanning over water, then rolling into the marsh, with an unnaturally huge building rising up on the horizon.

It’s not a big mystery, as the huge building rising out of the eastern New Orleans marsh, and the even bigger building looming over the Florida marsh, are inextricably connected by a path to outer space, and both have NASA’s distinctive logo emblazoned on their sides.

All of this hit me as I was driving to witness a milestone: the final launch of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program.

It Was Because of the Internet

I was invited to this historic launch through the magic of the internet and NASA’s adoption of social media. Out of 5,200 persons who applied for NASA’s latest “tweetup,” 150 were selected. Tweetups are what users of the internet social media service Twitter call their informal get-togethers, usually organized online through “tweeting” (messaging) on Twitter. I’ve been to many tweetups locally; they’re usually small gatherings for afternoon coffee or lunch or for an evening cocktail or two. NASA decided to take tweeting-up to the extreme and began hosting events in conjunction with its activities, which include space camp tweetups, tweetups during flight operations at Mission Control in Houston (as in, “Houston, we have a problem.”), tweetups for shuttle landings and tweetups, like the one I was invited to, for shuttle launches.

Atlantis roared into space for the last time on July 8, 2011.

NASA began using Twitter in 2008, when employees at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California realized the service would be a way to update interested people on the progress of the Mars Phoenix Lander. Soon, an employee was tweeting in first person as if she were the Phoenix Lander. She explained that because Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, and saying something like “the spacecraft has traveled …” took a lot of space, she simply began saying, “I traveled …” and a phenomenon was born.

Shortly thereafter, Mars Phoenix was up to 75,000 followers and NASA realized they had a great way to spread awareness of their mission. NASA has hosted over 20 tweetups since then.

NASA’s Stephanie Schierholz said the agency will continue to host tweetups as long as the budget lasts and people are interested in them. “Social media allow us new ways to reach out, which is especially relevant, as many traditional media outlets have been eliminating their space beat reporters. We’re hoping to achieve higher engagement and involvement in the nation’s space program and to get the word out as widely as possible about all the (in our opinion) very incredibly cool things we’re doing,” Schierholz says.

I got the word about the NASA tweetups late in the game. One of the people I’ve been following on Twitter for years attended the tweetup for the shuttle launch on May 16, 2011. About two weeks after that, she tweeted that it was the last day to sign up for the next NASA tweetup. I went to NASA’s website, filled out the form and promptly forgot about it. Two weeks later, I received the e-mail saying I had been selected.

Astro-Fanboy

“Space shuttle launch? I can’t think of anything more boring in the whole world.” That’s the actual response I got from a friend of mine when I shared that I had been selected for the NASA launch tweetup. I started to explain that I grew up watching launches on TV as a kid, I remembered the moon landing and … “Shush it. Boring.”

Unlike my unappreciative friend, I did grow up with a healthy appreciation for the space program. I vaguely remember (I would have been 3 or 4 years old) watching one of the Gemini missions launch on our black-and-white TV. When I was in first grade, my brother and I built a model Saturn V rocket that was taller than both of us, and we were this close (I’m pinching my fingers together with about a quarter-inch gap) to watching Apollo 11 launch Neal Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon.

We were living in New Iberia, La., and my dad was great at piling us all into the Country Squire and going on a long vacation every year. The summer of 1969 happened to be a Florida vacation. We were in Fort Walton when Apollo 11 launched. Then we traveled to Miami, where I fell asleep in front of the TV just a few minutes—I tried so hard to stay awake—before Neil Armstrong took his one small step and his giant leap all in one breath. Mom says she woke us all up and made sure we were watching, but I must have been asleep with my eyes open because I didn’t realize it until she told me. She was always making sure we witnessed space history and says she made certain my older brother was looking at the TV (he had to have been about 7 months old) when Alan Shepherd was the first American launched into space in 1961.

Through the 1970s, we watched all of the Apollo missions. Although I do have an independent memory of Apollo 13 being in trouble, at the time it just didn’t seem to me to be the big deal that it really was—as was depicted in the movie Apollo 13. The last Apollo mission was to meet up and dock with the Russian Soyuz space module orbiting the earth. I remember my great-aunt Gert was there, as was my grandmother. Gert (along with all my mother’s family) was a teacher and made sure all of us kids were watching: “Look, it’s the handshake in space!”

In 1981, I was a freshman at college and anticipated the first shuttle launch. I remember dreaming the night before the launch that I was somehow watching the launch from Baton Rouge (dreams are crazy, no?) and that I watched the shuttle launch but that it blew up in sky. That wasn’t really a premonition of Challenger; there was a lot of talk about the untried technology and how blowing up was a definite possibility, which must have crept into my dream. I was very happy nothing like that happened.

In 1984, I was working in a camera store in New Orleans in the photo lab. One of our customers worked at Michoud, where the shuttle’s main fuel tank was manufactured. He had gotten VIP employee access to one of the launches and let me keep a copy of one of his photos. His description of what it was like to feel the launch planted the seed, and I always kept in the back of my mind that I would make the trip to witness a launch.

I kept up with the shuttle as best as a twenty-something with a lot on his plate could do, but it was Challenger, unfortunately, that was the next milestone to stick in my mind. I really remember that day; it was cold, and I had ridden my bike to class. In class, I wondered if my mom was watching the launch, because she was a teacher and this was the one with the teacher in space. I decided I’d go straight home and catch the replay. When I got home and turned on the TV, it was the replay, but it wasn’t right. It was the replay of those two twisting pillars of smoke coming out of the solid rocket boosters as they started to fly apart uncontrollably after the main tank exploded, tearing Challenger to pieces. After a few seconds, I still hadn’t realized what had happened, but Dan Rather’s voice kicked in to tell me.

After that, graduation, work and life happened. The shuttle returned and became, once again, routine.

In 2002, I was reading about an upcoming shuttle launch. I thought, “I have some extra time. There’s nothing stopping me from driving down there and watching a launch.” And I was ready to do it, too, only to hear about some problems and a very long launch delay that was to extend way past my personal window of opportunity. Then the Columbia tragedy happened the next year, and I pretty much put any thought of traveling to see a launch out of my mind.

Which brings me back to now. When I got that e-mail that I had been selected, I realized it would be a great thing to share with Inside Northside’s readers.

The Gulf Coast Connection

Our designated parking area at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC; there are a lot of abbreviations used when talking about things at NASA) happened to be in the shadow of the very large building I saw driving in, the one that reminded me of the building rising out of the New Orleans marshland. The Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at KSC is by far the larger of the two. It’s connected to its Louisiana cousin, the Michoud Assembly Facility, by the Intracoastal Waterway. (They call it the MAF. I’ll call it Michoud as I’ve been doing all my life.)

That’s an important fact. The rockets that sent man to the moon got their start at Michoud, which manufactured the first (and most massive) stage of the giant Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo program and then placed them on barges for the trip to KSC. They had a stop to make just across the border in Mississippi at what is now the Stennis Space Center (which, out of habit, I’m just going to call Stennis) for live-fire testing. Stennis is also connected to the Intracoastal Waterway and, as its director, Patrick Scheuermann, told me, “There’s an old saying, ‘From Apollo to the shuttle program, to the future of space flight, if you want to go into space, you have to go through Hancock County, Mississippi.’”

STS-135 commander Chris Ferguson presents Stennis Space Center director Patrick Scheuermann photos & flag brought to orbit.

Both Michoud and Stennis will remain vital parts of the future manned space program. After telling him that I remember hearing the roar of engines being tested at Stennis from my home in Slidell when I first moved there, Scheuermann said he remembers the roar when the entire cluster of three main shuttle engines was once tested there. NASA’s next generation Space Launch System will require similar tests of multiple engines at once. “I’m looking forward to hearing that next cluster of engine tests because we test single engines a lot. Those clusters of three or four or potentially five engines will be making noises that this community hasn’t heard in a while.” It brings home, he said, the importance of Stennis’ 125,000-acre acoustic buffer zone, a national asset.

The connection between Michoud and the VAB remained vital after the Apollo program. The shuttle’s liquid fuel tanks are manufactured in New Orleans. Just as with Apollo, the giant components are shipped by barge to a dock a few hundred yards from the VAB.

It’s Elmo

Our tweetup began the day before the scheduled launch in a large and (thank God!) air conditioned tent that was situated not far from the big countdown clock we’ve all seen on TV in front of NASA’s extensive press site. For years, the major networks have had their own multi-story buildings there to use as platforms to film the best views of all the launches. Approximately 1,500 national and international media members were on hand for Atlantis’ launch. Although it’s about three miles from the launch pad, the press site is as close as most anyone (including the vast majority of NASA employees) can get.

The group of 150 people selected for the tweetup was a very diverse crowd from all around the country and the world. Everyone introduced themselves. There were many engineers and computer people, which one would expect for a NASA tweetup. There were also a model, a couple of Brits, a deaf lady, a man from Japan, six Twitter.com employees, a producer from MSNBC and a guy with a humidity-ravaged but otherwise perfect ’70s-era giant Afro who, it turns out, is the backstage host for the Jay Leno Show. At my table were a physician who researches malarial diseases in Melbourne, Australia, and an award-winning composer of dance music.

Astronauts Mike Massimino and Col. Doug Wheeler act as Elmo’s “wingmen” when the astonished Muppet is confronted by an overly adoring “cougar” of a fan.

Social media, from NASA’s perspective, “is primarily another way to fulfill our mandate and goal to communicate what the agency is doing as widely as possible,” says Schierholz. NASA TV is another. While NASA administrators and astronauts spoke to the crowd, the tweetup was broadcast live on cable and satellite systems as well as streamed on the internet.

A special surprise came as astronauts Mike Massimino and Col. Doug Wheelock (“Wheels,” or @Astro_Wheels, his Twitter name) hosted a talk with famous Muppet Elmo that was broadcast to schools around the country. It was a semi-serious Q&A with the astronauts answering questions any kid might have about being in space. The funniest moment of the day was when, despite being told to keep things family-friendly, a woman in the crowd asked Elmo, “Do you know what a cougar is?” Some quick thinking on Elmo’s and the astronauts’ part deflected the question into the realm of zoos and animals, but the woman managed to get in “Meet me out back and I’ll show you!” before they moved on to the next question.

Speakers ranged from administrators and planners to scientists and engineers working on space station experiments. Many touched on the future of the space program now that the Space Shuttle Program has been canceled. While there will be a gap before manned launches are seen again at KSC (2016 at the earliest, it seems), unmanned launches as well as the design and testing of the next generation of U.S. space vehicles mean KSC and the other NASA facilities will remain busy.

Wheelock, an old-school type astronaut, was a test pilot for the Army. Many post-Apollo era astronauts are not in the military; there are engineers, biologists, chemists and geologists. Wheelock flew on one shuttle mission and did a six-month tour on the International Space Station. During his missions, he accumulated over 20 hours in space walks. His firsthand accounts of being in space leave no doubt that the experience will remain etched in his mind the rest of his life.

I’m so glad he shared his observations with us. He wasn’t allowed to drive a car for a month after being on the space station because of the disorientation. Watching the sun set and rise every few minutes as the shuttle and space station orbited the earth at over 17,000 miles an hour. Watching from space as auroras danced around the earth’s poles, sometimes so high it seemed the space station was in them. Walking in space, looking back at the black-and-white hulk of the shuttle, then turning around and, he says, “Looking at earth, it’s like an explosion of color.”

He talked about performing a spacewalk when he looked away into deep space. He felt himself floating inside his suit—and then panicking, thinking he was not going to stop but float away—and kicking his heals inside his boots to remind himself that he was still tethered to the ship. What an unbelievable experience! It’s no surprise that he said he still has dreams that he’s in space.

Let’s Hijack a Shuttle!

Being invited to the tweetup meant we got to enjoy an array of perks not available to the public. We enjoyed the behind-the-scenes access to astronauts and administrators (and Elmo) and were to be taken on a special tour of the facilities. After lunch, we were herded onto buses and on our way.

By pure luck, astronaut Wheelock ended up on my bus. Another employee, our designated NASA escort, blurted out as soon as we left the parking lot, “We’ve got an astronaut on board. Let’s hijack a shuttle!” We got to listen as the two exchanged war stories, including the one about the employee who tried to sneak a parachute inside the VAB to make a BASE jump. He was stopped by a security guard who noticed he had a lunch pack he had never carried before. They said if he had only brought his lunch in that thing for a week beforehand, he would probably have gotten away with it. He was fired nonetheless.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis awaits the start of mission STS-135 on launch pad 39A.

Our first stop was the launch pad. The road to the pad runs alongside the 130-foot-wide crawlway that the giant crawler-transporters used to bring launch vehicles from Apollo to the shuttle out to the launch pad. We passed one of the empty crawlers on the way and passed a lot full of tour busses lined up to take the public tours to an observation tower about a quarter-mile from the launch pad, where Atlantis was in place being readied for launch. We were headed for a much, much closer view.

At about 2 p.m., the tweetup attendees and our hosts arrived just outside of the launch pad in an area that was roped off for our safety about 700 feet from the shuttle. Cape Kennedy is a marshy wildlife refuge on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. We were told that going outside the rope meant we would be exposed to alligators, snakes and who knows what else. As a card-carrying Looziana swamp creature, I ignored the hyperbole.

They timed it so that while we were at the launch pad, they would be doing a maneuver with the shuttle, retracting the rotating service structure. Sure enough, while everyone was taking pictures, a large structure that had been protecting the shuttle (and hiding most of it from view) slowly and silently swung out of the way, revealing Atlantis for everyone to see.

I asked Wheelock (after I got my picture taken with him, Atlantis in the background) what would happen if I were on that same spot during the launch. Would I be fried? He said no, but that my insides would be liquefied by the noise coming from the shuttle’s engines. (The next day, after feeling what that sound did when I was three miles away, I believed him.)

Our next stop was a rare tour of the Vehicle Assembly Building. They told us to get off the bus, go into the door, take a left, look up and say, “Wow.” This counterpart to Michoud covers eight acres and is 526 feet tall. One Shell Square is taller, but the VAB is hollow inside (it’s the tallest single-story building with the tallest doors in the world) and you can look up all the way to the roof of the cavernous building. The moon rockets were assembled inside, as were all of the shuttles, which, after returning from orbit, were refurbished and brought inside, lifted up vertically and then mated to the giant fuel tank and the two solid rocket boosters.

The building’s vast emptiness spoke literal volumes towards the finality of the Space Shuttle Program. A sign normally filled in with the status of the shuttle being worked on and its expected rollout date was blank. That really brought it home. The shuttle program was all over.

Afterwards, we were brought to the Saturn V complex, where one of the three moon rockets that were built, but never flown when the program was canceled, is on display. Suspended from the ceiling of its own cavernous building, it’s broken up into stages. You can get a feel for how really big the Apollo mission rockets were, especially the first stage built here at Michoud.

Launch Day

It had rained most of the first day. Thunderstorms peeling off a tropical wave south of KSC rolled through the entire time we were in the tent. The launch was scheduled for 11:26 a.m. the next day—Fri., July 8—and they said there was a 70 percent chance the weather would not allow a launch. The way physics works—I can’t explain further; that’s one reason I’m not an astronaut—there is only a 10-minute-per-day window that the shuttle can launch into an orbit that will take it to meet up with the space station. That window gets about 20 minutes earlier each day. Launch could take place Saturday or Sunday if necessary. If it didn’t happen on Sunday, it would have to be delayed for at least a week afterward, as an unmanned rocket was scheduled for launch that week.

Our hosts told us that NASA would meet at 1:30 a.m. to decide whether to start fueling Atlantis for launch. They would make an announcement at 2 a.m. If they were not fueling the tanks, the launch would be delayed until Saturday. If they were going to fuel, the launch still might get scrubbed, but we should start heading back to KSC immediately. One million people were expected to be crowding the roadways in and out of KSC to watch the launch, so we had better get going to beat all that traffic.

I was staying 40 miles away in Orlando at the same hotel as about 30 other attendees. We met in the lobby at 2 a.m., got the word that the tanks were being fueled, split up into carpool groups and headed to KSC.

Reaching the site, we were greeted with the stunning vision of Atlantis glowing on the launch pad, bathed in spotlights. At 5:30 a.m., everyone was gathered back in the tent for more speakers. Then we were scheduled to go in front of the countdown clock for a group photo after waving to the shuttle astronauts in the aptly named Astrovan on their way to board Atlantis.

One of our last speakers was retired astronaut Bob Crippen. It was a fitting choice for the last shuttle launch; Crippen piloted the very first shuttle mission and flew three more times afterwards. He went on to become director of KSC after the Challenger disaster.

As time got closer and closer to 11:26, we kept waiting for any word of delay and heard none. Then, it got to the point I was thinking, “Well, maybe this might actually happen.” But knowing how many times launches got scrubbed at the last minute, I still didn’t really believe it would launch on time.

I finally went outside and claimed a spot in between some shorter people and in front of some taller people on the edge of the lagoon to the right of the countdown clock. I had stayed up the night before and hadn’t slept for about 30 hours at that point, knowing we had to be ready to leave at 2 a.m.

The lack of sleep was a problem because it really didn’t register when people started counting down, “seven, six, five … ” At that point, I said to myself, “It’s really happening…” and raised my camera up just as I could see the white exhaust billowing out of either side of the launch pad and hear people screaming and clapping.

Listen to the author’s recording of Atlantis‘ launch:
shuttleblast.mp3

They had warned us not to watch our first launch through a viewfinder. I listened, but not that well. I wanted my own pictures and kept following the shuttle and pressing the button. I forced myself to put the camera down. I still couldn’t hear it, but as I put the camera down, I felt a puff of cool air hit. At the same time, the roar reached me. Within a second, I could feel it crackling in my chest, remembering what Wheelock said the day before at the launch pad about the noise liquefying your insides.

I was looking at the shuttle and saw that the flame coming out of bottom of the rocket boosters was the brightest white light I’d ever seen. I said to myself, “Wow. That is bright!” And then it was gone. Poof! Or boom! Just like that, gone through the overcast cloud layer that hung over KSC. We could still hear and feel the engines as the shuttle went down range, but that was it. The exhaust plume hung in the air, and its shadow from above the cloud deck reached out across the sky perpendicular to the smoke trail beneath it.

I looked around. A fellow tweetup-attendee, a guy well over 6 feet tall and built like an ex-linebacker, was bawling like a baby, reaching out to hug another of our fellows. People wandered around. “Wow.” “Incredible.” TV crews rushed around, trying to get people’s reactions.

Right before I found my spot, I had taken out my digital recorder I use when conducting interviews, turned it on and placed it on a concrete footing for one of the tents, out of the way so it wouldn’t get stepped on. I retrieved it and headed inside. There was silence as the TV monitors inside showed the rest of the launch, as Atlantis, now hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles away, continued its eight-minute flight to orbit, shedding the solid rocket boosters and liquid fuel tank along the way.

We waited a few hours for traffic to die down before heading back to Orlando. We exchanged photos, talked about how it all felt. I uploaded some photos to Facebook and kept watch on Twitter after carefully shepherding my launch photos from my camera to my laptop.

There was a get together at the hotel later that evening. I went to get something to eat, returned and heard the excited crowd in the lobby. I felt too tired and grumpy to socialize, but I heard one thing being said over and over as I waited for the elevator: “THE most exciting experience of my life!”

I answered, to myself in my inner New Orleanian dialogue, “Yeah, you rite!”

To keep up with and apply to attend future NASA Tweetups, visit http://www.nasa.gov/connect/tweetup/index.html.