A bona-fide member of the Fifth Estate, practicing Mobile Journalism (MoJo) every chance we get...
The city of New Orleans suffered one of the worst disasters in U.S. history when Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in 2005. Then when the Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010, the people felt like the city was back. But seven weeks later, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico.
An Interview with
photographer David Rae Morris
by Glynn Wilson
LocustFork.Net
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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the day the New York Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers story on the Vietnam war, I was going on 13, living in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama. About the only news I recall keeping up with in those days had to do with Alabama football and Atlanta Braves baseball.
Summer was fun then (before global warming had started to set in) and you could play outside without dying of heat exhaustion, although the air in Birmingham was pretty bad in those days. On CB radios truckers called it “Smoky City.”
On April 27, 1971, Hank Aaron had hit his 600th career home run, the third player ever to do so. On July 31 that year, Aaron hit a home run in the All-Star Game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. He would not break Babe Ruth’s all time home run record with number 715 until April 8, 1974, at a time when the end of the war in Vietnam was about a foregone conclusion.
Two big changes came to Alabama football in 1971. Wilbur Jackson was the first ever black player given a football scholarship to Alabama and John Mitchell, who made the team as a junior in 1971, was the first to actually play, eight years after the Alabama student body had been integrated. The Crimson Tide went undefeated that year, but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. I met Paul “Bear” Bryant in person around that time at an Alabama-USC basketball game.
I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs last week, to make sure readers check in with Frank Rich at the New York Times today, and to make a related point but a different argument about recent criticism of President Barack Obama.
Hoarse, hungover and happy, New Orleans woke up Monday wondering if that first ever Super Bowl victory really happened. In the French Quarter, stragglers — decked out in Saints jerseys and team colors — remaining from the all-night party turned to coffee and beignets as dawn broke, according to the Associated Press.
Overnight, the Saints became America’s team after marching over Peyton Manning’s Colts, 31-17.
There was hope the Saints winning season would help revitalize New Orleans, still not fully recovered from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
I guess the people at Bacardi thought the folks of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans needed a strong drink to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. You can see the waterline on the empty billboard space below the Superior Comeback sign. The flood waters ranged from 12-15 feet deep in places…
by Glynn Wilson
NEW ORLEANS, La. — On August 29, 2005, I watched from afar as Hurricane Katrina veered east once again, like so many storms before that took aim at New Orleans up the Mississippi River. I went to sleep that night, like so many, thinking the city had been spared.
I could have been there, on the payroll of The Dallas Morning News and The Christian Science Monitor. But I had just made it back to Birmingham from Washington, D.C., and the free-lance offers with no health insurance or guarantees of battle wages made me hesitate. I figured I could get down to the coast and cover the aftermath, like so many hurricanes before, including Isadore and Lili.
Hurricane Katrina was no ordinary storm, however. It turned out to be “the big one,” not so much for the category 4 winds that mostly lashed an evacuated Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was the one that breached the levees, filling New Orleans like a bowl.
Even if I had wanted to go down after the storm, I would not have been able to get into the city without a boat. Even with a boat, there was no way to communicate out by phone for days. No power either, no Internet access, and the cell phone towers were down for weeks.
Watching the coverage on CNN, I wrote then, Katrina was “no doubt the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.” But a big part of the disaster, we now know, was not natural at all.
Call it Hurricane George.
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| Photo by Glynn Wilson |
| Some people are serious about bringing back New Orleans… |
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| Photo by Glynn Wilson |
| Sometime in the past century, what the local people call “wild green parrots” from South America, smuggled in as pets, escaped, bred and thrived in New Orleans. They make large nests in the native and non-native palm trees by chopping off limbs and flying with the sticks in their beaks. It is fascinating to watch them perform this airborne balancing act. And it was good to see at least some of them survived Hurricane Katrina. I caught this one working on its nest in a palm tree on Carrolton Avenue in the Old Carrollton neighborhood near River Bend. Bob Sargent says it looks to him like a Monk Parakeet, which seems likely. Here’s a Gambit Weekly story about the invasion of the myiopsitta monachus. |
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