January 2012, Bonne Année

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

January 2012

* * *

www. LEJ. org

Bonne Année

(Happy New Year)

2012

You can not tell it all! That is the great pain of writers everywhere. Not being able to douse the fire that drives them to set it down.

"There lies writer's block, too," L. A. Norma said.

Forgive me for being late. I seldom miss deadlines, nor experience much writer's block not alcohol-related. But this month I sit indolently watching the morning window-garden shaking off last night's cold snap.

'Tis the season for falling off ladders and setting fire to one's house," L. A. Norma said, blowing Camel Cigarette smoke out the window.

And so January's story sat unwritten inside my computer alight with expectation.

"Write about the Sunset Limited," Norma suggested, navigating the sugar bowl across the table. "The Sunset Limited as 'Le Train Sans Souci' (The Train Without Concerns)."

Alas, no Amtrak train is without concerns. Ask anyone who has ridden one. And soon the dark clouds in Washington will gather to make it worse. You remember the recent solution to the post office budget woes? Make-it-worse will surely bring in the customers, they cried. And make it worse they did. A similar fate awaits poor limping Amtrak.

All that said, there is still something about a train that is cheap, comforting transportation. Less like driving and more like a land-cruise. On the train, like on a ship, you are with time enough to look out the Dining Car window while conversing with strangers. I once lunched with the King of Okeanos, sang with a woman who did studio work in Los Angeles with Elvis Presley, and described the scenery to a blind lady who bought my lunch just to hear me describe passing scenery.

We put Norma on an earlier train so she could be in New Orleans for the Second Line for Coco Robicheaux, who died 25 November 2011, on his day off, at the Apple Barrel on Frenchmen Street. He was 64.

Coco Robicheaux was a New Orleans musician we first met at a Voodoo Party with some lady Voodoo Priest from Haiti. As you know, he is now wooing the Hoo-Dooers in the clouds. He was in TREME, the great HBO show about New Orleans and Life therein. The night his segment aired, L. A. Norma and I were at a dinner party from where the host took the guests by taxi to Buffa's bar on Esplanade to watch (there was no TV at the host's house). There we chatted with Coco about post K. things.

The last time I saw him was in the Walgreen's parking lot on Saint Claude and Elysian Fields, Gateway to the Upper Ninth Ward. I wonder how he is dealing with the great FEMA in the Sky?

We missed Coco's Second Line to play Santa Claus at Buck and Johnny's Pizzaria in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. A little girl asked about Twelfth Night. "It is when the Kings came to the Baby Jesus, and the day the Phunny Phorty Phellows ride the Saint Charles Streetcar in New Orleans to open Carnival Season," Santa told the little girl. The Mother beamed. _______________________________________________________________________________________ © 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved

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December 2011 / A New Christmas

Yours Truly in a Swamp
by
Leonard Earl Johnson
December 2011

* * *
A New Christmas
by Leonard Earl Johnson

www. LEJ. org

The train to Lafayette
left New Orleans on-time and was sold-out! Lafayette is the first smoke-stop out of New Orleans, and L. A. Norma was ready for it.

We arrived in time for the Downtown Boudin Cook-off in Parc San Souci on Vermilion Street, two blocks from the train station. Norma kept us on the platform smoking with the other outcast smokers waiting beside the idling train.

"They don't let you smoke around food in Louisiana," she told a man-and-wife pair of chimneys from Los Angeles.

"They don't let you smoke around anything in L. A.," the woman said. "You can freely smoke in your car only. For Christ's sake. Your car!"

"That's a pure-air cure," Norma snorted through a smoke ring, "safely smoking while spewing car fumes." The train's whistle blew and the Los Angeles couple scrambled aboard and looked down at us from the observation car. The Conductor waved and we trudged off to Parc San Souci, which is French for "Park Without Concerns."

* * *

"How many times have you heard politicians and other preachers speak of our Judeo / Christian traditions?" Norma asked.
　
Tradition, the thing that passes our values from one generation to the next, and the next, and so on. We Christmas-celebrating Christians follow Gospel teachings about a Jewish Rabbi we have come to call Christ The King. He was born in the little town of Bethlehem two-thousand-eleven years ago this December twenty-fifth, according to tradition.
　
"Tra-di-tion!" The very thing Tevye sang and danced about in Fiddler on the Roof – the English script of which was taken from a story in Yiddish by Russian-American immigrant Sholem Aleichem. It is about events leading towards immigration and change. A story as American as apple strudel, and later told larger than life on Broadway and in the 1971 film by the same name.

Tevye’s lament was for Jewish traditions threatened by something new. Immigration. Change. For Christians, Jewish traditions became just that.
　
The Word. Those New Christian traditions were brought by the Romans to the Germanic tribes of Northern Europe. There was added Saint Nicholas, a. k. a., Santa Claus. The Germans had Santa Claus long before they had the Romans or The New Word of Christ. For the full skinny on this hefty subject see A NEW CHRISTMAS TRADITION in December's Country Roads Magazine.

In Memoriam: Raise it high for Coco Robicheaux who died in New Orleans, 25 November 2011, on his day off, at the Apple Barrel on Frenchmen Street, in Faubourg Marigny. He was 64. You now march for him, too.
_____________________________________________________________________________ © 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.Your comments are welcome, post them in the Blog.
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November 2011 / New Orleans Film Festival

Yours Truly in a Swampby
Leonard Earl Johnson

November 2011

* * *

New Orleans Film Festival

by Leonard Earl Johnson

www. LEJ. org

The Sunset Limited from Los Angeles was six hours late arriving in New Orleans on the first day of the 2011 New Orleans Film Festival. Passengers and on-board staff were flummoxed. The Festival films presumably had gone on an earlier train.

“They don’t send film on reels anymore, or by train,” L. A. Norma pointed out. “Everything is on those little plastic disks now.”

The hungry man who boarded at Shriver, Louisiana offered her a bite of his Baby Ruth candy bar and added, “Or sent over the Internet.” He was an elderly man with weak legs, a loudly proclaimed hunger, and a face sunburned from waiting by the tracks since eight that morning. Shriver is a flag-stop an hour or so outside of New Orleans.

“My ride could only drop me off then,” he told the Train Assistant. “There was no shade and nobody could tell me anything.” The T. A. found the man some things to eat from the dining car’s nearly empty pantry. He eagerly joined our car’s chorus of complaints.

The other passengers had all been given little packets of dried fruit, crackers, yogurt, cheese and a small bottle of water. These items were picked up in Lafayette, along with L. A. Norma and yours truly. We got them, too. “For free, to ease your trip,” said the beleaguered Train Assistant. “This train is plumb out’a food.”

“Free” helped, but not much. Most simply wanted the journey to end. No one takes the train for speed, but six hours hurts one's sense of achievement. The man who boarded at Shriver wanted revenge, but no one could think of anything that would not further delay the train.

We were just starting our journey and were still fresh. We fished two beers from our carry-on bag and headed for the Observation Car. We had spirted four Abita Ambers on board to lessen costs and, now, the disappointment that it would be too dark to see the Mississippi River. Anyway, the train’s bar had closed at Shriver. “So the bartender can count the bottles,” L. A. Norma reckoned.

Explanations were proffered as to why we were running six hours late. I bet on the one about a derailed freighter outside San Antonio. Norma chose the belligerence of passing oil tankers and freighters.

Unlike other Earthlings, Americans have but one track for all trains. “The magic of deregulation,” Norma snorted. When Amtrak meets a freighter the freighter has right-of-way, and Am-trickle whimpers off the line and waits for it to pass. Between Los Angeles and New Orleans this can happen a lot.

A derailment, on the other hand, stops everyone. “More democratic,” I said to Norma.

Norma said, “Screw equality.” Smoking is not allowed on Amtrak, and Norma, a chimney, is never in too amiable a mood when on the train. As far as our time was concerned, we would not be traveling any longer than usual, just at night.

“Welcome to The New Third World,” she said to the T. A., who handed her a free bottle of water and wrote “NOL” on the little tickets she placed over our seats.

We pulled into Union Station hours after our ride had given up on us, and taken himself off to the Film Festival’s opening-night Gala at the Columns Hotel on Saint Charles Avenue. There Louisiana red beans and rice were being served to celebrants while we hailed a taxi.

“We have been the week in Acadiana and we’re not in need of any red beans and rice,” Norma told the taxi driver, who did not care. He wore a T-shirt that read: “My Parents went to New Orleans, and all I got was this Lousy I. Q." He told Norma to put her cigarette out and drove us to Squalor Heights.

Next morning we awoke early, for the grand boudin breakfast at Cake Café and Bakery on Spain and Charters. Connie Castille, who, with Allison Bohl, won the 2007 Louisiana Film Maker Award for their masterful 25-minute documentary / drama / comedy / tragedy, I Always Do My Collars First, sat next to us and said hello. Another of Castille's films, King Crawfish, played as part of the 2011 New Orleans Film Festival.

“If you have not seen their film, put down your boudin and bagel and go get it from the library right now, ” Norma told our waitress – who, fortunately for us, did not.

“Forgive his modesty,” Norma said, when I suggested they catch Zachary Godshall and Ross Brupbacher’s feature film, Lord Byron, at Canal Place Cinema. I have a five-second flash on-screen playing a lump in a swampy hobo camp outside of Lafayette. “He is such a good actor Godshall said he didn’t need to wear make up,” Norma informed the ladies.

Not that I had more than those five-seconds to do with it, but Lord Byron was also screened and well received earlier this year at Sundance.

The best film at the Festival that we almost did-not-see was Flood Streets. “Who wants to see another Katrina story,” Norma grumped in the taxi ride up to The Prytania, on Prytania.

“Who, indeed,” we laughed on the way home. What a great work! Flood Streets is less a Katrina story than a well told story about New Orleans esprit showcased against a post-Katrina daze. Just the kind of film to thrill those who worship at New Orleans altar. And further perplex those dryland-ers who do not understand why.

Flood Streets executive producer and script writer was Michelle Benoit. Other producers were Glen Pitre (best known in these swamps for directing Belizaire the Cajun – 1986), and Harry Shearer, whose feature The Big Uneasy (where have we heard that before) is ready for release, but was not at the Festival. He makes a cameo appearance as a teaching dentist in Flood. The original story was written by Helen Krieger, and directed by Joseph Meissner, who also plays the film’s male lead.

A sweet back story: Krieger and Meissner sold their home to finance this great film of their very own post-K. story – the story of any number of us.
Flood Streets clip _____________________________________________________________________________ © 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.
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October 2011 / German Fest in Roberts Cove

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by
Leonard Earl Johnson

October 2011

* * *

German Fest

in Roberts Cove

by Leonard Earl Johnson
www.LEJ.org

Oktoberfest, in Roberts Cove, Louisiana. You laugh? It might tickle the lederhosen off a real German, but this is the best German Festival in the U. S. of A., that I have ever attended. There was beer, singing, Alpine horns, yodeling, white marble graves of original settlers decorated with bright German flags, and hot spicy (usually mild veal) Bratwurst sausages. Technically it was a Germanfest. Oktoberfest comes in September.

German immigrants were few to French Louisiana, but those who came left their mark. Notably there were the Germans said to have fed the indolent city folk of New Orleans from productive farms along the German Coast at Bayou Des Allemonds (French for "The Germans"). And Roberts Cove, this prosperous rice-growing settlement near Lafayette, where we spent our fine October Germanfest.

When I was a child, my Grandmother spoke German and English. My Mother spoke only English. My Great Grand Mother spoke only German. It was a time when immigrants to America were bent towards assimilation. It is sad that my Mother never talked with her Grandparents. We all lived, in our turn, in a German-American village in Illinois. It was named Ullin, after some early settlers, or the Daughter of the Polish Count Pulaski.

My Father, of Danish/Norwegion descent, did not like the idea of our village being named after Germans. Besides, descendants of the Ullins still lived there and he did not much like them. My Father owned a roadside establishment where he expounded frequently on this and other issues, such as the evils of FDR's New Deal. He must have won the argument because the resident family named Ullin dropped one "l" from the spelling of their name. "Out of fear people would think them Polish," my Grandmother laughed. There were, also, a few former slave families, one Irish, and a merchant family we suspected of being Jews passing as Methodist. The Africans were Baptist. The Germans and Irish were Catholic.

My antecedents had been citizens of Germany's Bavaria and Swabia, lands of mountains, Black Forests, German industry and people who liked to sing and yodel. They immigrated first as one Brother/Uncle, who sailed to New York, took a train to Saint Louis, and a raft one-hundred miles down the Mississippi, to the new German settlement of Ullin, at the southern tip of Illinois. (Incidentally I was born in Cairo, Illinois, the town at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers where Mark Twain's Huck Finn was headed to set free "Nigger Jim.")

My people arrived three years after Mark Twain had captained river boats to New Orleans, fled West to avoid the Civil War, and moved to Hartford, Connecticut to write. Twain came from Hannibal, Missouri, one-hundred miles upriver from Saint Louis. Growing up, my siblings and I read his books and thought ourselves better for it.

The German Brother/Uncle to first seed our New World became my Great Uncle -- though he never knew it. I don't know if he ever read Twain. His name was Wilhelm Stadacher. When he arrived on that first trip he secured land along the Cache River at Ullin, on the opposite bank of a sawmill. The next century, that sawmill’s offices became a roadhouse nightclub, named Porky's, and owned by my Father and Mother. The "hard road," U. S. Highway-51, was laid down in front of it, and the Cache River continued flowing behind -- with growing insignificance. My Great Uncle never knew any of this.

When Wilhelm returned to Germany, he gathered his extended family and led them to The New Promised Land. My Grandmother left behind a life for which she pined, I thought, and did not talk much about it. America's two World Wars with Germany tarnished her memories of "The Old Country." About all my Sister and Brothers and Cousins ever heard her say about Germany was that they had lived in a country village. In an apartment above the ground floor, where a family of cows and two horses lived. And a ghost walked atop the cemetery’s stone wall with a skull under its arm.

Swabia was a good land full of "Jovial people who liked clocks," she told us. It was Texas and Arkansas, it sounded to us. With a dash of Detroit -- in the days before Detroit became the first fallen star of America's fading industrial might. Swabia was, also, in the area of Germany where Hitler first arrived from Austria to save Das Vaterland from the Versailles Treaty. But that is another story, and you know how it turned out.

* * *

"Do you speak German?" asked an old lady a solid three years older than I. Her English was heavily tinged with the Cajun accent. We were inside the Song Fest Tent at Roberts Cove, singing, yodeling and listening to Alpine horns.

"Bisschen Deutsch," I said. She understood the "Deutsch," but not the "Bisschen". "A little," I explained. We raised our "bier" and joined in the Rucksack Song. Her husband wore nice lederhosen and sang with great gusto. I would bet money he had been a boyscout and sang these songs with the same gusto then.

We have all come a long way. Now, the person trying to fish your Social Security check out of your mail box is not some ne'er-do-well Nephew. It is the Con-servative people telling you 60 is the new 40 and you no longer need it. Don't believe it, folks. This is a strong YouTube dark humor rant from beyond the grave by George Carlin on America. Do not watch it if you do not want to hear harsh criticism of running our ship of state aground so others can steal the brass. Mark Twain would be titillated and my Grandmother would have understood the warning. And maybe shed a tear. LEJ

___________

© 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.

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September 2011 / Maureen Brennan

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by
Leonard Earl Johnson

September 2011

Acadian Impresario,

Maureen Brennan

by Leonard Earl Johnson
www.LEJ.org

Photo credits: Cité des Arts

* * *

It is a Wednesday in Lafayette, the day Pamplona Tapas Bar discounts wine and tapas.

"No wine for me during working hours," Maureen Brennan says, "but you may. Try it with the ciabatta loaf with chili oil and calamari?"

It is a working day for scribes, too, but who begrudges a tipsy writer.

She did not steer us wrong. The bread was Platonic, the calamari lightly dusted and fried to golden perfection. (The ciabatta bread was from the new Poupart’s French Bakery and Bistro, two doors down on Jefferson Street.)

Jerry Young, Pamplona’s congenial owner, waves to us from the bar. There is a comradery in Lafayette belying its boom town reputation. "The Hub City," a nickname derived from being at crossroads of highways, railroads and waterways, has become a major medical and oil center, and is now Louisiana’s third largest city. It grew by 40,000 immediately following the storms of 2005.

The exact population is a matter of local debate, but ranges from two hundred to five hundred thousand, and up. "Depends on how much hinterland is counted," Brennan says with clear civic pride.

She is a booster. A past president of Festival International de Louisiane, the largest festival in festival-crazy Acadiana, where music acts from the French world and beyond are invited to perform on open-air stages scattered around downtown, free to the public. (2012: April 25 - 29)

Childhood
"My very practical parents probably always had concerns because I was such an unrealistic dreamer, interested in too many things, going in too many different directions, hyperactive and stubborn as the day is long.

"Now the latter I inherited from both of them, and it was those traits that gave birth to the dream of Cité des Arts.

"I probably am crazy. But, having been raised in an ‘Irish zoo’ I seem to thrive on chaos.

We met Brennan again recently in New Orleans in the company of New York playwright, Michael Roberts, author of Simply Langston, a play about Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes first produced by Brennan’s production company, Benrose.

It is the day before the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and we are at a Faulkner Society party in the Presbytere remembering The Storm.

John Biguenet read his funny tale about the lady standing the night atop a chair, chin held above water, wishing she had bought nicer things to watch floating past.

Later, nibbling salty little tomatoes before fine tall fanned windows overlooking Jackson Square, Roberts tells us he is not evacuating to our cozy coast to avoid Hurricane Irene’s threat to the Big Apple. "This trip was planned before."

Outside, smoke from the huge marsh fire in New Orleans East is blanketing The City.

" ‘Not again by flood, saith the Lord'," so saith L. A. Norma, as she left us for Jackson Square. We watched out the windows as she lit a Camel cigarette and blew her smoke into the mix.

For the full conversation with Maureen Brennan see Maureen Brennan: Cité des Arts by Leonard Earl Johnson Country Roads Magazine, September 2011. Enjoy and pass a good time! ___________

© 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.

Your comments are welcome, post them in the Blog.

Frank Parsley's icebox magnet of LEJ

August 2011 / Six Years Post Katrina

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

Photo credit: Coleen Perilloux Landry

April 2011

* * *

Six Years Post Katrina

Where were you," asked the bartender, "when the levees broke?"

The bar he tended was the art deco Sazerac, at the Hotel Roosevelt. "In historic downtown New Orleans," as we used to hear WWL radio announcers say, in the 1950's, when we were doing time for the Illinois Board of Education. They spoke as Prophets over the "Fifty-thousand-watt voice of New Orleans," when New Orleans was a dream yet to come true.

"Where was I when the levees broke in New Orleans?

"Hammond. We left late, after the mayor's mandatory evacuation. Most everyone I knew had gone. And I don't drive. I got a ride out that Sunday evening, as the storm was moving in. The winds licked at our wheels as we drove across the bridges down near the Rigolets."

"The Rigolets?" He set a fresh bottle on the bar, then refilled my glass. "Not a good place to be when a hurricane's coming."

"No," L. A. Norma said, walking up to the bar. She was returning from her cigarette break out on Baronne Street, "Swapping lies with the doorman," she smiled at the bartender.

Norma said, "I left at the television's first rumblings of a hurricane. Even then I had the good sense to go west."

"When we left all the roads out were closed," I said, "except those going east. A friendly policeman told us we could turn west later, after we got out of Town. We were among the last to leave -- over bridges that washed out soon after.

"You know, we traveled the very path the storm took. But didn't know it, of course, at the time.

"So, I was in Hammond, Louisiana the next morning when the levees broke. Hammond took a bad hit, too. No flooding, but for days we had no news. No papers, no phones, no electricity. For a week, maybe more.

"It was stunning, the world changing, I mean. But at the time it was hard to see just where it was going.

"Tell you the truth, nothing I felt during those days jibed with what I later learned was happening."

"It's now six years since The Storm," the bartender observed, "and every day I think of something about that time. How the world changed."

"That's post-traumatic-stress," L. A. Norma said, from atop her self-confidence. She noted her credentials. She had been an appointment secretary at Cedars-Sinai, in Los Angeles.

"I worked for a bunch of doctors," she smiled. He polished a glass.

"When things happening are so huge you only realize them later, when it comes to you in bits and pieces, that's post-trauma!" Norma flipped her new cell phone open. The bartender set his shiny glass on the bar.

"Yes, I guess so," I said. "I didn't get scared about being on the Rigolets bridge till a year later.

"The first I knew something ultra-big was happening was when the Pentecostals opened a charity storefront in Hammond. I ate their hot dogs and beans without thinking I was 'needy.'

"A barefooted lady came in while I was there and asked for shoes. They gave her flip-flops. 'Gee,' I thought, 'what am I doing here?'

"When the levees broke," I motioned for two new glasses, "Norma was in L. A., and I was safe at the hearth of a fallen monk who taught English in Hammond.

"He was friends with an English teacher I met the year before at the Tennessee Williams Festival. She had a red truck and two psychotic cats. She was the last person I knew in Town with wheels."

"Buses, trains, airplanes?" a stranger sitting to our left asked.

"They had all stopped days before. The streets were deserted. Remember Amtrak's celebrated story about not being able to reach Mayor Nagin to offer a train out for evacuees? I was at Union Station knocking on their boarded up doors and they couldn't reach me either.

"From Hammond, the fallen monk drove me to Lafayette, where old Illinois colleagues took me in for six months. They saved me from the dreaded FEMA!"

"Think of that three-day-fish story," Norma said, wrinkling her nose.

"Eventually I rented a small apartment in an old railroad hotel renovated earlier by New Orleans developer Pres Kabacoff. Elvis Presley once stayed where now I lived.

"Now I divide my time between New Orleans and Acadiana. You might say, I live on Amtrak's Sunset Limited. I still see New Orleans as a religion, but less as 'The Universe' and more as part of the congregation of the Gulf. Do you know half our tourists are Gulf Coast locals?

"Many is the Cajun dreaming tonight of that 'playhouse' in New Orleans, 'On The Banks of The Old Pontchartrain,' as Governor Jimmie Davis once sang the Carl Butler written and Hank Williams made famous song. Davis was ancient and his back up carried the song. It was a sunny afternoon at Jazz Fest. When life was a pre-K. state of mind."

"A great way to think of The City," Norma said, laying her phone on the bar next to the bartender's polished glass, and punching up Vince Vance's music video, I Am New Orleans, on U-Tube.

_____________________________
Copyright, Leonard Earl Johnson, 2011
(This story first appeared in altered form September 2010.)

* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season Get a magnetized image of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator. Magnet size: 2 & 1/2 x 3 & 1/2 inches "It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!" ~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope
along with $5 for each magnet. Mail to:
Leonard Earl Johnson
302 Jefferson St., Box 202
Lafayette, LA 70501

July 2011 / Huey P. Long Bridge

Yours Truly in a Swamp
By
Leonard Earl Johnson
July 2011
Reprinted from
Les Amis de Marigny / New Orleans in Exile, July 2006

* * *
Photo credit from the top:
1 & 2: U. S. Government Public Domain
3: Coleen Perilloux Landry

The Huey P. Long Bridge by
Leonard Earl Johnson

www. LEJ. org
* * *

"The Huey," as old timers call it, is the first bridge in Louisiana to span the Mississippi River. It is an old bridge built with two narrow lanes of highway traffic on each side, and railroad tracks down the middle. (photos are before 2011 lane construction)

The Huey opened in 1935, the year its namesake, Huey P. Long, was shot and killed in the lobby of the State Capitol in Baton Rouge. As governor, Huey levied taxes on oil production in Louisiana. With that money he built both The Capitol and The Bridge. The Capitol building is the tallest in America. The Bridge is the highest.

Before the bridge opened, all trains crossing The River at New Orleans did so aboard ferry boats that landed on the Westbank at the town of Westwego, a descriptive name given the settlement, in 1870, by the Texas and Pacific Railroad. Incidentally a second bridge, built later and bearing Long's name, crosses the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. Both bridges have superstructures made of high-towered steel that looks, from a distance, like the skyline of a great modern city.

Huey, the man, was only made of flesh. But he was some powerful flesh. Nicknamed "The Kingfish" early in life, his political career gave the nickname special significance as top-feeder in the Louisiana political pond. Huey Long's first elected state office was Railroad Commissioner. He first ran for governor in 1924, and lost.

Four years later, in 1928, he won, and grew in office to became the era's second-most colorful politician. The first was his younger brother, Earl.

Love Thy Brother
Brother Earl occupied the Governor's Mansion, fittingly, after big brother Huey had moved out. And while Huey may have been something of a rounder while there, he was fabulously circumspect compared to Earl.

The married Governor Earl openly dated Blaze Starr, a popular Bourbon Street stripper, and he was widely regarded as fully in possession of a very loose screw.

He used to say of his trysts with Blaze that he wore cowboy boots in bed, "For better traction on them hotel sheets."

Hotel Roosevelt
Something of a forerunner of today's destination hotels, Hotel Roosevelt sat across Canal Street from New Orleans undulating French Quarter, and was mighty popular with both Long brothers. Huey even said he built the Airline Highway from his office in Baton Rouge, "To have a straight hard shot at the Hotel Roosevelt, in downtown New Orleans."

Nice, but not as colorful as cowboy boots on hotel sheets.

* * *

The Longs built their political dynasty at a time when most Americans thought government should solve problems by direct action, not through secondary problem solvers. No trickle-downers, those two.

Private health insurance's big bite out of today's health care dollar would strike them as laughingly overpriced, and inexcusably inefficient for the ones receiving the care -- the people casting votes.

When Huey took office the state of Louisiana was mostly illiterate, had few public schools, school books, hard roads, or hospitals. The Kingfish set out to remedy that.

He was an American seat-of-the-pants socialist who taxed business, including the sacrosanct oil industry, to pay for public schools, roads, hospitals, and more. In return, citizens voted for him in droves each election day.

When he left the Governor's Mansion, in 1932, before his term expired, it was to move up to the United States Senate.

In the Senate he launched his "Share-Our-Wealth Society," complete with its own theme song, "Every Man a King," while maintaining control of the Democratic party back home. (Still smarting over the Republican led "War Between The States," Louisiana had no Republican party in those days.)

Long had set his cap for the presidency occupied by another American seat-of-the-pants socialist, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, scion of the family from whom Huey's favorite hotel took its name.

Taxing oil and challenging an incumbent president can make one enemies. Huey had his, then and now. He ended up, after all, assassinated in the lobby of the new skyscraper State House his taxes had built.

Some crotchety opponents are said to have honored vows to never cross any bridge named Huey P. Long. (Such vows, though befitting their times, were more bombastic than practical, I expect. In any case, the bridge was so popular that every few years since it opened Louisiana has built another one.)

Thousands loved The Kingfish, and came -- even walked -- to Baton Rouge, from all over the state, to attend his funeral.

Today, Huey's life-sized statue stands on the state grounds where he is buried, in front of the Capitol building he built. Another of him stands under the dome of the United States Capitol, in Washington, D. C. It is part of program by which "Two-heroes of each state," are honored. The other sent by Louisiana is Edward Douglass White, a Confederate veteran and, later, U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice.

Another Spirit
Brother Earl spent time in the state loony bin during his term in office. Being governor, he cured himself by firing the institution's director and hiring a new one who released him. That tops anything Huey ever did. Even taxing Standard Oil.

Earl once strapped a crate of Texas grapefruits to the grill of his car. He had purchased the fruit while at a loony bin in the Lone Star State. He was there at his wife's behest, and against his will.

Of this incarceration, Fort Worth columnist, Molly Ivins, once told an audience at Tulane University, "Texas authorities took one look at Earl and said, 'Looks like a fine and fit governor to us,' and released him."

With those Texas grapefruits strapped to the front grill of his black Cadillac he drove back to Louisiana stopping along the way to give sweet grapefruits to grateful voters. This parade included his aides, the press, police and his wife, who wanted to lock him up again. I have never learned where Blaze Starr was that day, but I like to think she was in the Cadillac with the governor and the grapefruit.

Back to the Kingfish
Huey's construction projects, like the afore-mentioned bridge and State House, still stand.

The oil taxes, however, from offshore drilling -- negligible in Long's day, but huge today -- now go to finance the good causes of the federal government in Washington.

In other states, oil revenues are more equitably split with the state.

Big Charity
Charity Hospital in New Orleans was founded in 1736 by the Sisters of Charity, and derives its name from them, not the universal medical care initiated by Huey Long. It is -- was -- the second-oldest hospital in the United States.

Huey set out to build Charity into a skyscraper housing a model hospital, and making it the flagship of his statewide health system. The skyscraper opened four years after his death, and there is now a Charity Hospital in most every Louisiana city, but post-Katrina New Orleans.

Huey's twenty floor high-rise hospital still stands, but as a dark hulking ghost towering over The Big Uneasy.

After two hundred and seventy-five years, and countless "con-servative" plots to shut it down, Charity Hospital was felled by hurricane winds, faulty levees, and an unwillingness of the good people from Washington to spend Louisiana's offshore oil revenue to reopen it. But that is another story, maybe.
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© 2011, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.
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Frank Parsley's icebox magnet of LEJ