NEW ORLEANS — I have all sorts of emotions as I leave New Orleans and WWL after 42 years working at the venerable station, first in the sports department with the legendary Jim Henderson until 2000 and then running the digital news operation since.
Just two months into working at WWL, I was with a crew on a shoot in Gentilly when we got word that a jumbo jet had gone down in Kenner. One of the first crews on the scene, what we covered is hard to describe in words. I left the station on a run-of-the-mill day with a slow moving newsroom to return to a whirlwind of activity, camera and travel gear from CBS everywhere and a makeshift story board on what to cover. What I was seeing and what I was part of, there was so much adrenaline. I heard the screams of excitement when first responders found a young child alive and I saw things you would never see if the scene had been roped off more quickly. It didn’t look real and the magnitude of the story didn’t hit me until I got home and saw the news reports and the photos of a couple of young children who had been killed. It was the most stunning story I would be involved with for almost 23 years.
I transitioned to the sports world after just a few months and worked with Henderson, Larry Matson, Chris Myers, Mike Hoss and more, where the rush of producing live sports shows like Fourth Down on 4, the eventual Fourth Down Friday high school highlights show, Saints pre-game broadcasts and Saints preseason games with Jim and Archie was hard to match for 17 years.
Looking for a new outlet, there was an opening to be a producer/writer for the WWL web site in 2000. Most people in the newsroom looked at it as a whim and weren’t exactly sure what to make of it. But for me, it was an opportunity. A chance to dive into the news game with an entirely new frontier. I grabbed it and a year later I was in charge of it.
At the time, most people didn’t pay attention to web sites. As long as we didn’t embarrass anyone or get the station sued, they were good with it. At the time I had a news director in Sandy Breland who just trusted me to do the right things.
The first several years we proceeded to break things and forge new paths. In 2001, WWL, like all national and local web sites broke on September 11 as servers were not prepared for the demand caused by a major international incident on our soil.
I was in the newsroom when the fighter jets left from Belle Chasse to escort President Bush’s flight from Florida to northern Louisiana and we heard the roar of the jets, distinctive so much in that all other flight was being grounded.
Then there were the hurricanes – Ivan in 2004 was the first sign that things were changing. It devastated the Florida/Alabama Gulf Coast that was a vacation spot for so many from the metro area. Eric Paulsen got into a helicopter and we streamed some of the first aerials of the devastation. Paulsen knew the area well and offered expert commentary. It was the first sign of how web sites were different and could contribute so much.
Katrina was the next year. Frankly, no one was really prepared mentally for what happened. As one of 2 members of the web site (what digital was called then) I relocated to LSU’s campus in case we were compromised. We got to LSU and most of the crew was assigned to dorms. There was no wifi back then and, instead of a dorm, I stayed with my computer at the LSU broadcast center and slept under the table we met at during the day.
My other employee, producer Kevin Held, was stuck back in New Orleans. In addition to keeping the web site up to date, I ripped and ran wire copy to Eric and Sally, who were anchoring. Back in the day the wire copy came on machines and printed on paper and that’s where you got the latest Associated Press news from around the world.
If it was breaking news, AP would sometimes send a one-sentence blurb, preparing newsrooms for more to come. One of those one-sentence blurbs stick to me to this day. The night Katrina struck. It simply said, “St. Bernard Parish is gone.”
With Kevin stuck at the transmitter in Gretna after the station was forced to bug out due to concerns over flooding safety, I had to update the site myself. I received help from corporate, who set up and maintained two forums for users – “I’m okay” to announce themselves “safe from the storm” and “Looking for” to announce friends or relatives they were seeking information on. Both exploded with views. They were ordered alphabetically and one of our most prolific forum users, a person I still only know as “Mr. Jamie” helped by organizing them, reshuffling posts put into the wrong category and such. I’ve never met him in person, but I, and several people in metro New Orleans owe him a debt of thanks.
I’ve cried a few times on this job. I cried the night I came home after the Pan Am crash when the extended newscast showed photos of the young girls killed in their home in Kenner. But it was video from one of the most renowned and talented photographers in New Orleans history – Brian Lukas – of a woman pushing what looked to me like the dead corpse of a baby down Airline Highway as the searing heat of post-Katrina baked people who were trapped with no way out and no food and water that really got to me.
I thought the child was dead. A truck came alongside and several men jumped out with bottles of water for the mother and child who shook awake from the badly-needed refreshment. We all had our moments post-Katrina in the WWL temporary newsrooms at LSU and later at WLPB. That was mine. I went out to my car, called my wife, who had evacuated to Dallas with our kids, and cried like a baby.
I returned to my post back at WLPB. I had days before given up any idea that I could keep up with the volume of stories and videos and images and decided to just write a blog (not sure it was even called that back then). I turned on WWL, CNN, CBS and watched the AP wires and our emails and put a time stamp on everything that came down. When then New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin broke down, I put a time stamp on it and added a link to the source. The blog went on for about two months, all the way past Rita. On its biggest day, it received 1 million views! Yes, a single story, extended as it was, was viewed 1 million times that day. I received hundreds of emails from people all around the world thanking me for the coverage and the no-nonsense blog.
My future was cemented. I was in news. I was on digital. Why? Because I cared.
I care about New Orleans. I care about all of the surrounding metro area. I care that we get proper drainage and was proud to be part of the Down the Drain team. I care that people have a chance to learn. A chance to grow. A chance to be their very best selves and make the determination for themselves what that is. I care that they’re happy and I still tear up watching replays of the city’s reaction to the Saints winning the Super Bowl, especially the video of Father Tony Ricard doing the second line at mass to “Get Crunk” as he led the congregation out the morning of the game or the people at Rock ‘N Bowl singing “We are the Champions” and seeing grown men, who never thought they’d see this day, crying uncontrollably.
I care about everyone I’ve ever worked with here. My employees, most of whom have gone on to do great things. The investigators who are so immersed in helping expose things and make them right. The desk assistants who were just coming into the business and wanting to soak it in.
I care about the bosses I’ve had, and I’ve been so thoroughly blessed with that.
My wife once said that “You want to make everyone happy.” That actually wasn’t meant as a compliment, it was her telling me that it wasn’t realistic and that it set myself up for disappointment. But I DO want that! Why would anyone want someone to be miserable?
I care about people and that’s why I do the job I do. It’s why I constantly play Devil’s Advocate and why I seek to have both sides find a resolution that each can live with.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to the realization that we all want the same things. We all want to be loved. We want to feel safe. We want those we love to be happy. We have so much more in common than we have apart.
We’ve polarized ourselves into anger and hate but we only do so from a safe distance. When we sit down and talk to one another, we see that commonality.
We tend to judge, but again, from afar. We’ll strike up a conversation at the doctor’s office or the DMV and we’ll exchange stories about kids who don’t know how to drive or what each of us is at the doctor for. We don’t think at that moment that we’ll go our separate ways – one to watch the liberal TV news and the other to watch the conservative one, each telling us how bad the other side is and how getting their way will lead to the destruction of mankind.
We judge from afar. If someone wears an orange hat, or carries a rainbow flag, if their skin is too dark or they dress poorly, we judge. We all want the same things, but commentators will tell us that the other approach is flawed.
My three daughters are cases in point. We were going to donate some Thanksgiving food to a poor family and my oldest – maybe 10 to 12 at the time – was along for the ride, not thinking much of it. When we got to the home and she saw the people, saw children who had on well-worn clothes – she couldn’t get the donations out of the car fast enough. From afar they were nebulous thoughts, in person, up close, they were people in need – actual people, who looked like her in many ways.
My middle daughter was only 4 or 5 when we sat in her older sister’s classroom as they were being taught about Ruby Bridges. She saw an illustration in a book of angry people shouting at a little black girl holding a police officer’s hand. She asked me, “Why are they so mad?” I told her that they didn’t want a black child at their children’s school. My daughter’s brow furrowed and she sat there looking and just couldn’t make sense of it. This beautiful little girl being yelled at by adults for no reason than the color of her skin. After what seemed like minutes but was probably 30 seconds, she looked at me and said, “Those people are stupid.”
My youngest daughter makes me so proud as a gymnastics teacher who befriends the bullied, the children who are maybe plus-sized and get snickers from others in the class. She’s especially proud to work with a 60-something woman who still does gymnastics.
They have seen the humanity. They get it.
We have so much in common. There is so much to do and it can all seem so overwhelming, especially in a city plagued by the threat of hurricanes that raises the cost of living and housing and insurance in an already economically-challenged area.
There’s crime. There’s poor infrastructure. There’s blight and there’s suffering. There’s also happiness and festivals and Carnival and celebrations.
I leave New Orleans with another assignment in another city. A first for me. A challenge. My life’s tank is not on empty but it’s certainly well past halfway.
I care. I care about you who have read to the end of this tome. I care about you in the bayou and on the northshore and in Chalmette, the Ninth Ward, Gentilly and on and on. I do want everyone to be happy. We all end our stories with at least a moment of sadness, but we can end them with satisfaction if we’ve each made the world a slightly better place than the one we came in to.
Good Bye New Orleans, and Good Luck.
