Introduction
This blog will focus on my adventures in New Orleans (primarily 1895-1961). In the words of Little Dorrit I was born there. And unlike Big Dorrit, my father was born there, too-- in 1897. His father had come from Clayton, La, a little town where his father Capt. John M Clayton, CSA presided in magisterial splendor.
My grandfather was studying law and sired my father during this interval, also working at the Custom House still standing near the "foot of Canal Street" (where it meets the River). The family lived "uptown", near the river, Audubon Park, and Tulane, in an area that later came to be known as the 'Silk Stocking District'.
In due course (in 1926) I was born there. A few months later my father, who had "joined the La. Conference", that is to say given himself up to becoming an itinerant Methodist preacher, moved to North La to take up his first parish. (North La is about as different (culturally, ethnically, and every other way) as Michigan is from GA.). (I was to repeat this motif some 30 years later, which is to say, from the most wonderful city in the world- at that time- to Lower Slobbovia, in the course of "giving myself up to becoming an itinerant Methodist preacher".)
It was 13 years before Dad got appointed to a church in New Orleans, a little underprivileged church near the end of the 9th ward. This could be unofficially designated as the 'armpit of N.O. (with Katrinka it became the most deeply flooded and devastated area of the city). But it was New Orleans, and in that we all rejoiced.
That is to say, all but me; I felt a vague sense of dislocation; the day we arrived I put on my skates and made for Canal Street, some 38 blocks west. I looked at the exciting scene, turned around and skated back. In the words of Maria Sharapova, the great Russian tennis prodigy, I was only 13.
In the course of time I got used to the 9th Ward; there were compensations. It appeared at first that I would have to attend the boys' high school many miles away, but just in the nick of time, a new high school was established 10 blocks from our house, and it was coed!, positively the first public coed high school in New Orleans.
(My wife debates this, informing me that the school in Algiers where she attended was coed, but of course we did not consider Algiers as part of N.O., although the people there did. Much later in this story Ellie was to commute from her home right across the river from the foot of Canal to Newcombe College, the women's division of Tulane in the far west, a journey that included riding successively on the ferry, then the street car, then a bus. She did this for 3 years, and got most of her homework done in one of those vehicles.)
ETC. This blog will not focus on Katrina, except now and then as the occasion arises. Hopefully it will also be less wordy than this introductory post.
This blog will focus on my adventures in New Orleans (primarily 1895-1961). In the words of Little Dorrit I was born there. And unlike Big Dorrit, my father was born there, too-- in 1897. His father had come from Clayton, La, a little town where his father Capt. John M Clayton, CSA presided in magisterial splendor.
My grandfather was studying law and sired my father during this interval, also working at the Custom House still standing near the "foot of Canal Street" (where it meets the River). The family lived "uptown", near the river, Audubon Park, and Tulane, in an area that later came to be known as the 'Silk Stocking District'.
In due course (in 1926) I was born there. A few months later my father, who had "joined the La. Conference", that is to say given himself up to becoming an itinerant Methodist preacher, moved to North La to take up his first parish. (North La is about as different (culturally, ethnically, and every other way) as Michigan is from GA.). (I was to repeat this motif some 30 years later, which is to say, from the most wonderful city in the world- at that time- to Lower Slobbovia, in the course of "giving myself up to becoming an itinerant Methodist preacher".)
It was 13 years before Dad got appointed to a church in New Orleans, a little underprivileged church near the end of the 9th ward. This could be unofficially designated as the 'armpit of N.O. (with Katrinka it became the most deeply flooded and devastated area of the city). But it was New Orleans, and in that we all rejoiced.
That is to say, all but me; I felt a vague sense of dislocation; the day we arrived I put on my skates and made for Canal Street, some 38 blocks west. I looked at the exciting scene, turned around and skated back. In the words of Maria Sharapova, the great Russian tennis prodigy, I was only 13.
In the course of time I got used to the 9th Ward; there were compensations. It appeared at first that I would have to attend the boys' high school many miles away, but just in the nick of time, a new high school was established 10 blocks from our house, and it was coed!, positively the first public coed high school in New Orleans.
(My wife debates this, informing me that the school in Algiers where she attended was coed, but of course we did not consider Algiers as part of N.O., although the people there did. Much later in this story Ellie was to commute from her home right across the river from the foot of Canal to Newcombe College, the women's division of Tulane in the far west, a journey that included riding successively on the ferry, then the street car, then a bus. She did this for 3 years, and got most of her homework done in one of those vehicles.)
ETC. This blog will not focus on Katrina, except now and then as the occasion arises. Hopefully it will also be less wordy than this introductory post.
posted by Larry Clayton at 11:10 AM
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