Some of the leaders of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention are in town this week, I hear. Executive Director Emil Turner and DR leader Darwin Bacon have been some of New Orleans’ best friends over the past year. I regret not being around to welcome them. (see below)
“All the King’s Men” is the title of the Robert Penn Warren prize-winning novel of a couple of generations ago based loosely, we’re told, on the life and career of Louisiana’s Huey P. Long who was gunned down in our state capitol in 1935. Saturday night, a premiere of the new movie based on that book was staged at Tulane University’s McAlister Auditorium. Crowds lined the streets and cheered Sean Penn, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, James Gandolfini, and New Orleans’ own Patricia Clarkson whose mother Jacqueline Clarkson served as a New Orleans Council member until being defeated this year.
A few years back, Louisiana figured out some things it could do to make movie-making here easier and cheaper, so we’ve had a steady influx of Hollywood folks ever since. One day this week I noticed an item in the newspaper that a new Rob Lowe film is needing extras and citizens are invited to apply.
I suppose this is a good thing. Depends on the movie, I guess. Movie-makers hire locals and stay in hotels and eat in restaurants and that puts money into our economy which can use all the help it can get. On the other hand, this may not be the best time to remind the nation of Louisiana’s tradition of political deal-making and money-grabbing as held true in the Huey P. Long era. As a teenager, I read a magazine article which called Long the only dictator America has ever had.
Drive around the New Orleans area and one thing that hits you is the loss of trees, one of the most distinctive aspects of this city for generations. They’re still here, but certainly not in the profusion we formerly enjoyed. The storm destroyed thousands of trees, then those that survived became victims of overzealous utility workers who disfigured them clearing out rights of way for the powerlines. (Eventually, the government had to step in and order this abuse to stop.) In some cases, homeowners decided the trees in their yard would be detriments in the case of another hurricane, so had them cut down.
Sunday’s Times-Picayune has tree professionals and forestry activists calling for the community to get busy protecting our trees by putting new regulations into place and adopting a zero-tolerance policy regarding tree-maiming. This should be a critical area of recovery, we’re told.
Kathleen Fischer of New Orleans writes our paper that she just returned from Austin, Texas, where she looked for a house to buy and finally gave up. She could not imagine living in any of the neighborhoods she checked out, she said, and finally realized why. “”What was missing (was) avenues.” She goes on, “Our tree-lined avenues are as much an asset as the French Quarter–maybe more so, because they add so much to the quality of residential life. And they are everywhere in New Orleans, not just major (avenues) like St. Charles, Carrollton, Canal, Napoleon, Elysian Fields, Wisner, Robert E. Lee, Paris, Gentilly, Esplanade, Claiborne, Broad, Orleans, and St. Claude, but also the minor ones like Banks, Galvez, St. Roch, Jefferson, South Miro, Fountainebleau, Argonne, Prentiss, St. Anthony. The list is not exhausted.”
Our first reaction on moving to this city in June of 1964 as new students at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary was the beautiful streets and impressive trees. We’d moved from Birmingham, the lifelong home of my wife, and my home for the previous five years. We loved that city then and treasure it now. But there was something unusual about New Orleans. So many of the streets were divided with wide, green, shady medians (they call it ‘neutral ground’ down here). And it wasn’t just the major thoroughfares. As Kathleen Fischer points out, neighborhood avenues were also boulevards. Palm trees were everywhere, and City Park had these incredible oak trees with massive branches that spread in every direction, dipped down to the ground, and lived hundreds of years.
I did not have enough experience to conclude there was no city in America like this, but we quickly decided that no city in our experience could compete with this one. New Orleans was another world. And in a wonderful way, I hasten to add.
The “Women of the Storm” are headed back to Washington, D.C. This group of 100 local women whose homes and businesses were affected by Katrina has been actively working for months to get our nation’s lawmakers down here to see the need and how taxpayers’ dollars are being spent. More than a year after Katrina, only 55 of the 100 senators have been down, while 329 of the House’s 435 members have NOT been to the area.
Worship at the First Baptist Church of Kenner Sunday morning reminded me of a phenomenon being experienced by most of our “normal” congregations (those not disrupted by massive hurricane damage or flooding). The attendance is off by perhaps 20 percent, and the membership is changing rapidly. I pastored that church from September of 1990 until April of 2004. But looking around this morning, I noticed vast numbers of veteran members are gone, having moved away for one reason or another. And with a new, young pastor and staff, so many of the people throughout the church were new to me. Bottom line: it’s a new church. Like so many of our other congregations.
This week at the seminary, Pastor John Frame of McAlester, Oklahoma, was speaking in Professor Preston Nix’s ministry class. At one point, he referred to the hurricane’s effect on the seminary and the devastation it wrought on the lives of so many. He said, “Doctor Nix, how many years of sermons did you lose in the floodwaters?” Preston said, “Thirty.” From the back of the room came a voice: “That ain’t all bad.”
The effect on our churches with members moving away to other cities and new people joining locally–well, it ain’t all bad, I expect. But it will take a while to know. A pastor said to me recently, “I’ve lost ten deacons and their families since the storm.” Then he said, “And it’s not just their being deacons. They were key leaders in the church, and it’s going to be hard to replace them.”
James Welch was presented at church this morning as the new pastor of Sojourn, a congregation being formed in the Magazine Street section of New Orleans. This area of the city called “uptown” desperately needs a congregation of our people reaching out to the vast numbers of young adults living there. The Kenner church is contributing finances, prayer, and personnel to this effort.
Saturday, the World War II Museum on Magazine Street–formerly the D-Day Museum–brought together a group of authentic American heroes. These World War II veterans had been held in a German prison camp in Poland for much of the war before being freed and making their way across 340 miles of wintry landscape just before the Allied victory in May of 1945. Twenty-four of the 110 still-living survivors attended the weekend reunion in our city this weekend.
They told of the disastrous raid on the camp conducted by Captain Abraham Baum and his team which resulted in their being captured and thrown into the same prison. Two weeks later, a much larger Allied contingent arrived and liberated the camp. The report in the Times-Picayune said, “Although his mission failed, Baum was treated like a rock star by the veterans.” An 87-year-old retired captain from Columbus, Ohio, O.L.Bradford said, “He’s the only hero I know, an honest-to-God hero.”
What struck me about this hero, Captain Abraham Baum, was that he looks like your grandpa. Ordinary, benevolent, sweet, pleasant. You would never have picked this lovely old gentleman out of a lineup as a genuine American hero. And yet he is.
Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. You rarely can tell them by the outside.
But the King knows.
(This week, I’ve asked several local friends–yes, heroes, even–to write for this website. Margaret and I will be at our Baptist Conference Center at Glorieta, New Mexico, for most of the week, then relaxing at Taos until we fly home on Monday, the 25th. Meanwhile, my brother Ron and his son-in-law J.P. Hollingsworth, will be living in our house undoing some of the Katrina damage we’ve been postponing. Our own personal heroes!)