Having been to Russia twice, once actually on a Wick Company
venture, I have a fondness for the downtrodden people of that vast land. Thus,
it was not very nice that a woman named Katrina should bring such misery to me
and our people.
But she did.
I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes in my lifetime, riding
them all out whereever we lived at the time. But there has never been anything
like this … never.
Peg and I, my daughter Christie and her husband Rick, my sister
Doedy , my grandson, Paul, and my nephew’s wife Carolyn, gathered at my house in
Bogalusa, LA two days before Katrina actually hit the Louisiana coastline. We
were able to follow the storm’s path on television, but hoped against hope that
it would make that sudden northward turn and dip back to the east. It didn’t
happen.
It hit my small town with a fury. Less than a hundred feet
behind my house a tornado ripped through in the dark, leaving a mangled mass of
pine trees. As fate would have hit, not one of the 15 huge pine trees in my
front yard went down. Shingles were ripped from top story roof of the house, the
pool pump house was blown away and splintered limbs littered the entire
grounds.
But we were all safe, thank God.
My second house in Slidell, also two-story, was blasted by 176
mph winds and water surge. The entire bottom floor was destroyed, but somehow
the upper floor made it. My party barge is still hanging in the sling in the
dock area which is now a shambles.
But nobody in my family and no close friends were injured
(except for my broken index finger on my right hand suffered cleaning up the
mess).
The most difficult part of the aftermath other than the clean-up
was finding gasoline for a generator I was able to buy, and getting ice to help
deal with the horribly hot temperatures which followed Katrina’s unwelcome
visit. I spent many hours in line at the Bogalusa Industrial Park waiting for
local prison inmates and National Guardsmen to give me some bags of ice. My
routine was to make a visit every two days for two weeks.
The Duke Power Company from North Carolina sent in a huge
caravan of boom trucks and electricians to put our wrecked power system back in
place. At my house, there was no electricity for 17 days, every one of them with
temperatures in the mid 90’s. Our days were spent on the front porch with a
small fan run off the generator. Sleeping at night was virtually impossible
because of the heat and mosquitos outside made sleeping there out of the
question.
What softies we have become.
But above it all, in this small town, there has been an
outpouring of love and concern, one for another. Baptist Church groups from
Illinois seemingly turned up overnight to offer food and water and ice. Help
came from everywhere. The American Red Cross and the National Guard were
Godsends. I can’t say the same for FEMA, the federal agency which simply failed.
It was almost three weeks before they showed up at Bogalusa.
Our company CEO John Mathew has exhibited genuine concern and
love for our people down here, showing up regularly and being the visible sign
of strength that was so badly needed. Publisher J. Kennon of Covington and
Bogalusa, small in stature, but very large in leadership and stability, was
right there on the front line rallying the troops. My good friend and buddy
Terry Maddox, publisher at Slidell, lost his beautiful home in Eden Isles, but
like the vast majority of people who were temporarily bowed, will rise again and
rebuild.
There will be thousands of stories about Katrina, the good, the
bad and the ugly. She had it all.
She gave us her best shot, but we took it on the chin. We
staggered, but did not fall.
A Chat with Lou Major Sr.
There have been so many people to thank for all their help in
the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that it’s truly difficult to make an adequate
list.
Be that as it may, before another day goes by, I want to thank
some really great people from a personal standpoint.
All those men and women out at the Bogalusa Industrial Park who
worked hour after hour in that hot sun loading up my trunk with bags of
life-saving ice, cases of bottled water and the MRE’s. I don’t know who they all
were, but I do know the National Guard and the inmates from Washington
Correctional Institute were there day after day. I had a routine of every third
day for a little more than two weeks of making the drive from my house out to
the long line. But it was worth the wait. I have no idea how we could have made
it without ice and water.
All those great Baptist people from Illinois who rushed in
immediately to set up a food, water and ice center on Avenue F by the First
Baptist Church. Their dedication and hard work were incredible.
Lee Varnado from Baton Rouge, whose grandmother lives across the
street from me, must have been dropped out of heaven. We were sitting around on
the front porch in the blazing heat a day or so after the storm and he came over
and said he had an extra generator and would sell it to me if I needed it;
otherwise he was taking it back to Baton Rouge. He even took it out of the box,
set it up for me and got 5 gallons of gas for it to get me started. Wow. Lee is
the son of Don Varnado, formerly of Franklinton.
The Emergency Room staff at the Medical Center. I got in fairly
quickly with a badly broken right index finger the Saturday after Katrina. I
broke it removing a heavy metal boat from a trailer in my back yard.
Also, to young Caroline Heintz of Covington, who got her dad,
Dr. Ludwig Heintz, to take a look at my finger with no notice. And also to Dr.
"Lud" , who got an orthopedic surgeon friend of his at St. Tammany Hospital, Dr.
Celentano, to come out into the waiting room to take a look at my finger. He
said the ER people in Bogalusa did a good job.
Thanks also to the two of my boys who live in the U.S., Lou Jr.
in Virginia and Steve in Georgia, for coming over on Labor Day weekend to help
with some immediate clean-up needs. And to daughter Christie from Covington who
was there to help out with everything. Because we had no power, no phone, not
much of anything, Lou Jr. took Peg back to Fairfax, VA where she stayed until
last week.
Thanks to all those people from Duke Power in North Carolina,
those Birmingham, AL policemen, those Pennsylvania Guardsmen, the American Red
Cross and yes, even those nameless people from FEMA who came in to do a job.
Remember, the people who came here to help were not the ones making the
behind-the-scene decisions. FEMA came in for a lot of criticism, but the people
here on the front line were certainly not to blame.
Thanks for our newspaper company’s CEO and my successor, John
Mathew, for his on-going concern for all the employees at our newspapers in
Bogalusa, Covington, Slidell and LaPlace and later for our newspaper in New
Iberia, who were spared the brunt of Hurricane Rita. Also I appreciate the
concern shown for me by Daily News Publisher J Kennon and the new General
Manager, John Walker. They constantly checked on me to see that I was okay and
offered to do anything they could.
And without fail, I want to thank Count Alessandro Giuseppe
Antonio Anastasio Volta. The Italian scientist invented the electric battery in
1800 and I don’t know how any of us would have made it without him.
So thanks, Giuseppe.
And my final thanks is to all of our Daily News readers and
advertisers who have been so patient while gargantuan efforts were being made to
get the newspaper back on the street. The presses are rolling again at "The
Newspaper That Cares About the People."