New Orleans Stuff: February 2008 Archives
My buddy Steve (the engineer) sent me this photo, from when we were in school. The caption says it's the 1980 Homecoming Court, but it's actually the 1979 court:
Let's see, I don't know what happened to Gerry Stagg. If I remember, he was a fraternity guy, but not mine (Lambda Chi Alpha). "The Unknown Candidate" is a fraternity brother of mine. He and my friend Steve (the lawyer) were sitting around our house and came up with this idea. They wanted to run around with paper bags on their heads for an afternoon, and the thing snowballed from there to the point where Grant ended up on the court. The Queen, Jocelyn, was nominated by one of the black fraternities, Alpha Phi Alpha or Omega Psi Phi. The greek system was (and still is) pretty segregated. Charlie Tomeny was also a fraternity brother and a cheerleader. He passed away young, in his twenties. We were a homophobic lot at the time, and Charlie caught a lot of crap from the guys when he came out, but nobody wanted to see him get HIV.
Suzanne was the sister of another Lambda Chi, and she was an Alpha Xi Delta. She was dating a nother of my brothers at the time. That spring, her boyfriend got shot in an armed robbery at his dad's business. It happened the day before our fraternity formal, and she decided to go anyway. We always held a party at someone's house before the dance, and that year, my girlfriend offered her parents' house, since it's a great place to entertain a group. (That girlfriend is now my wife. :-)) It was still a rough evening for Suzie, and I spent a lot time walking up and down the block, talking to her and letting her cry it out, much to the chagrin and annoyance of my date. Tommy Russo, can't remember if he was in one of the other fraternities or not. Check out that shirt! Ana was a Sigma Kappa, and eventually married a guy I went to high school with. AnnaLisa was dating the guy who was SGA President at the time of this photo. They broke up and she started dating another brother of mine, whom she eventually married (and I think is still married to). George (her b/f at the time) counted the ballots for the court election himself. I don't think he wanted to rig things to be queen anyway, but it would have looked really bad had he done so and knocked off the first black queen in the school's history. Still, we did learn a lot about elections involving ballot boxes that spring.
Those were some fun days. I was the "legal aid" ombudsman for SGA that year (78-79). We had a program where a student could come to the ombudsman for help, and if s/he thought their situation warranted it, we had an attorney who would come meet with that student, and SGA would pay the attorney's hourly fee for a consultation. The lawyers gave us a good break on the hourly in the hope that they might stumble on a good PI case. I was also a member of the "election council" with George, and we supervised the SGA elections that spring. It was a hotly contested race, with three white guys and one black guy as candidates for President. One of those candidates was another of my fraternity brothers and a good friend. He won, what a coincidence. :-) That started all sorts of grief, since it was the first time a black candidate mounted a serious campaign. His supporters suspected fraud when they lost.
The judicial branch of SGA was called the Honor Council. They decided that there was no fraud, and we were very grateful to two fraternity brothers of mine, my girlfriend, and another guy who would have been a Lambda Chi had he not been pre-med for that decision. :-)
Ah, good times!
I wanted to wait until I could talk for a while with Kevin, my 13-year old, before weighing in on the Clearview Mall controversy. He and his friends are the direct targets of the mall's ire.
For those of you who didn't know this, we live pretty much directly across Veterans from Clearview Mall, three blocks up towards the lake. Kev's friends will occasionally stop by to drag him along to go to Game Trader, a used game-system software place. Once upon a time, when I was going to UNO in the late 1970s, I worked in the men's department of the Maison Blanche there (located where Target is now). Clearview Mall and I are old friends.
I used to be a high school teacher, and a high school soccer referee, so I don't fear teenagers. More importantly, they don't bother me. When I was teaching, I worked nights at the Radio Shack in Lakeside. We used to have hacker kids in and out of the store from 4pm until closing time most nights, and almost all the day on Saturdays. It wasn't a big deal, but these were geek kids. The true mall rats hang out in the food court. From a social standpoint, some of these kids are vain, petty, and disgusting, but that's common of teens. They're not all that annoying to people outside their peer groups.
Clearview Mall has evolved over time. In the 1970s, the big stores were Maison Blanche, Sears, and Gus Mayer (which was where the Bed, Bath and Beyond is now). There were hardly any food places, the K&B soda fountain (the last of its kind in the metro area), A&G Cafeteria (more-or-less where the movie theater is now), and a little snack bar in Sears. When Dillard's closed the MB store and Target came in, the dynamic of the mall completely changed. Now, the mall is more like an oversized strip mall, where people come for a specific purpose, go to Target, go out to eat, go to the show, go to Sears. That you can move through the interior of the mall is convenient but secondary to most shoppers.
This is where the mall and the store owners (other than the major anchors) come into conflict with the kids. The perception is that, if the place is teeming with packs of marauding adolescents, people will drive up to Target or Sears or BB&B, and bypass the Hallmark, candy shop, mobile phone store, etc., inside. Early teens (under sixteen) don't spend money like older teens and twenty-somethings, which is why they're the targets of the weekend ban--nobody sixteen and under after 4pm on Saturdays and Sundays without an escort who has to be over 21.
Naturally, the kids are pissed, and have organized a boycott. One teen even set up a MySpace page to support the mall's position. He's 18, of course, and most likely doesn't have much use for 13-year olds.
Is kicking teens out of the mall on Friday and Saturday nights a huge thing in the Grand Scheme of Things? No, not really. Apart from the kids themselves, the people most inconvenienced are the parents who willingly drop-kick the kids to the mall on weekends so they can get away from them for a while. It shouldn't take much imagination to come up with something to keep them busy on weekends, assuming they're really not simply using the mall as free babysitting in the first place.
And that's really the bottom-line issue: free babysitting. If adult shoppers want Friday and Saturday nights to be "adult swim" at the mall, they need to be imaginative. They need to get JPRD involved and come up with some less-structured activities at the playgrounds. Get the church parishes to sponsor some weekend activities.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Sheriff Normand and the parents of Metairie should be asking themselves where these kids are going to go if they're denied entrance to the mall. If Clearview Mall doesn't want the younger teens, fine, that's their right (and they're following a national trend). The younger teens don't spend money like their older brothers and sisters, anyway. Where the kids end up on Friday night isn't the mall's problem, but it should be something others consider.
Personally, my kiddo isn't all that upset about the closure. He's a band kid, so he spends a lot of Friday nights at football and basketball games. We often do things as a family on Saturday nights, so that about covers the ban times. His friends are part of the boycott. Other than the game store, Game Trader, and the food court, however, I don't see where they're going to have a big impact on the mall stores or management.
The Pitt Theater, located at Elysian Fields Avenue and Robt. E. Lee Blvd. The theater opened in the 1930s. This photo is from 1954.
My memories of the Pitt go back to the 1960s. My dad took us there a few times, because it was down the street from the University of New Orleans, where he worked. When I went to high school, down the street from the theater in the opposite direction from UNO, we'd go to the Pitt all the time.
By the late 1970s, the owners divided the theater in half. In 1977, I watched "Star Wars" three times in a row in one side of the Pitt. In the 1980s, the Pitt was sold to the Joy theater chain. That company divided the Pitt into four and turned it into a "dollar theater." The Pitt was sold in 1999, torn down, and a Walgreen's was built on the corner.
The corner of the building closest to the street corner is a drugstore, Parker's Drugs, in the photo. By the 1970s, that space was a Tex-Mex place, "Taco Tico." It's your classic local version of Taco Bell. There are still a couple other Taco Ticos in town, in Metairie and Kenner, but I miss the one in Gentilly.
The corner of Robert E. Lee Blvd. and Elysian Fields Ave. was a major intersection in Gentilly prior to the storm. Of the four corners, one was Ferrara's Supermarket, one a convenience store/gas station, the Pitt, and a nightclub/disco on the fourth. My fraternity's house was two blocks down from there, and my first apartment after graduation two blocks west. As a college student, grad student, and new high school teacher, the local taco place and cheap movie theater were important parts of my existence.
The Federal Flood dumped 10' of water on the corner of Elysian Fields and Robt. E. Lee. Of the four corners, only the Walgreen's is back.
Dillard University, located at 2601 Gentilly Blvd. This is a WPA photo of the campus right after it opened in 1935. The building on the left is Rosenwald Hall, and Kearney Hall is visible in the right background. The photo was shot from Gentilly Blvd., which was a one-lane road at the time. Now it is a 4-lane boulevard, and Dillard is a gated community monitored by campus police for the safety of faculty and students.
Dillard is an Historically Black University. It was founded by the United Methodist Church and still operates under the church's auspices. Dillard opened its doors in 1930, the result of a merger between Straight University and New Orleans University. The University is named after philanthropist and Tulane graduate, Dr. James Hardy Dillard.
President Bill Clinton will be speaking today, in support of his wife's presidential campaign, at Dillard's Lawless Assembly Center (formerly known as Lawless Memorial Chapel). The chapel is dedicated to Alfred Lawless, Jr., a leader in African-American education in New Orleans, and his son, Dr. Theodore K. Lawless, an internationally known physician.
Of all the colleges and universities in New Orleans, Dillard was hit hardest. The London Avenue Canal is the western boundary of the campus. Floodwalls along this canal breached on 29-August-2005, the result of a 40-year pattern of lies and perpetrated on New Orleans by the US Army Corps of Engineers that has brought shame and dishonor upon the United States Army. A large number of Dillard students evacuated to Shreveport, LA, and were taken in by Centenary College in that city. The university began the rebuilding process in the winter of 2006, operating out of an office building downtown. The main Gentilly campus is still undergoing renovation and repairs as classes and student life have resumed.
