The following is a presentation of WYES TV New Orleans.

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Well, that's a very broad expanse of time.

If you're talking about the 60s, because it was a a decade of great turmoil, of, of enormous tension in this country, particularly in the state of Louisiana and in the city of New Orleans.

There was an attempt to modernize the city of New Orleans.

Houston and Atlanta just took off and left New Orleans in the trailing, in the dust in the.

They figured there was something wrong here, so they had to try to catch up with it.

And now you go through Atlanta.

You kind of glad we didn't really catch up.

There were so many dances that came out right.

The twist and the frog, the Popeye, the types of dance.

We did have to keep them just short of a burlesque presentation.

No bumps, no grinds.

I never did drugs.

I never did marijuana.

I didn't do any of those things.

I had a job all the time, but the cops used to call me the king of the hippies.

Hello, I'm Peggy Scott Laborde.

New Orleans in the 60s.

What a time.

The city weathered some storms.

Storms of social change.

And storms forged by nature.

We'll be reviewing this decade of turmoil and change.

But let's begin with one of the more pleasant moments in which everyone was united.

New Orleanians frolic together on New Year's Eve 1963 because of a rare phenomenon.

For 18 hours straight, nearly four inches of snow fell on the city.

That was just fabulous.

Staying up all night and just watching that snow.

And then the next morning, like we always said, it snowed for a year because it was new Year's Eve into the next year.

And, just having a real ball with that.

There was a snow man on the top of a car.

And so I made a snowball and I threw it at the snow man.

Now, I'm not an athlete, right?

I mean, I don't know, but I threw it, and sure enough, the snowball hit the the the snow man's head off, right?

Well, this cop kind of woman cop comes rushing out of the safe company that was there.

She just put that head back on, are all.

I'll take you off to jail, she said.

Oh, yeah.

You're under arrest.

Put that head back on.

There's some kids in here looking at that snowman.

She said it was some kid and they were looking and I'd knock the head off.

I remember that.

At other times, the weather was far less kind.

If there was a night to remember in the 60s, it was September 9th, 1965.

The evening of the arrival of a hurricane named Betsy.

Winds of 145 miles an hour reached Grand Isle, which is only 100 miles from New Orleans.

Those winds created 12ft tides.

75 people died in Louisiana, and parts of eastern New Orleans and Saint Bernard Parish were underwater, particularly a subdivision named Carolyn Park.

It was a pretty terrific night.

My office in those days was on the ground floor of the Sheraton Charles Hotel, the old Saint Charles Hotel, and we had big plate glass windows across the front of my office.

And the way we were doing the shows, we were doing the shows remote from there, just as we we do them here.

And I had my back to the big plate glass window, and this was at the apex of the dome and some rocks from the roof of the Whitney bag blew off, went through my glass window and hit me behind the head.

And I thought I was cut and bleeding.

And I was doing the show and it was really wild.

Finally, all the water came into the front through the broken glass, and we were doing the show with all the cables and all spread all around it in about two inches of water, shorting out everything, and it was afraid they were going to get electrocuted.

So it was a pretty wild night.

That was a storm where Vic Cheryl was mayor of New Orleans at the time, and I managed to get Vic Cheryl to agree to come down to WDSU.

I said up, I got him on the phone, Mr. Mayor.

I said WDSU wants to offer you there are facilities to operate as your headquarters, where you can talk to the people of New Orleans for the balance of the storm.

But you come down here and use our facility.

Yes, he said.

And he and Chief Giarrusso, the police chief, showed up here at our studios.

The held forth wearing a little yellow slicker and a hat, and the roof fell in.

The roof actually collapsed and water started cascading.

And so there were squirrels standing there, and his little yellow slicker with his hat on, and Chief Jerusalem standing next to him.

And it was pouring, pouring down, raining on them and me as we covered this storm.

And that's the famous night that Vic Squirrel made.

The remark to the public of New Orleans to please don't be afraid.

And he said, don't believe any false rumors unless they come from me.

The real damage was done below the Industrial Canal, in Araby, in Chalmette.

And, the levee broke, the Industrial Canal levee broke and houses were up to the to the ceiling, really in the water.

And we actually took a boat all the way down to the Claiborne Avenue bridge to to pass Road, which is where the transmitter was, and then back again.

Elsewhere, the experiences were also frightening.

I remember that night vividly.

I had never been so scared in my life.

It was like my stomach was a block of ice.

the wind was blowing outside and the house, since it was on the corner, was lurching like this.

Christian was going, and we had these big chandeliers, these looks like a double parlor, you know, and these nice chandeliers.

And the thing would go Shriners.

Come on.

Both chandeliers were spinning like this.

It was Jesus.

And I went into my sister's room, and all of a sudden, right in front of me, the whole window was sucked out.

I mean, windows, the Venetian blinds, the window itself.

And the curtains shown right out in the street say.

And I remember spend the whole night under the stars.

And after that, I remember walking to my grandmother's house on Clover Street, off of People's Avenue, and walking through all those snakes and and all those things.

And finally it got so high to my chest that they put me up on someone's porch a few blocks away.

And I remember I was distraught because I had a miss, Miss America, which always came on that weekend of like Labor Day.

And I missed that because it was no TV.

No.

You know, like people just sat outside for that whole week and, you know, kind of commune together.

Now, uptown was just the the DBS was everywhere, you know?

I mean, it was like, that's the everything was out.

My father had an apartment and he said, I still have electricity.

My addition is still on.

So I decamped from my mother's a place, and I went to my father's and stayed the rest of the time.

But Arthur said, why don't we go join the Red cross?

We get to see all this stuff.

See?

So we did.

If you go to Jackson Square now and you look at the artists who display their wares on on the fence as they did back in the early 60s, when I work there, you'll see that, quite a number of them will do their French Quarter scenes on pieces of slate, which is a very attractive medium, and it works quite well for that particular type of painting.

After Betsy, there was so much slate everywhere in the French Quarter streets that these artists, one of them, took to the idea of picking up the slate and using it, and then immediately caught on because it was free.

I went down in the lower ninth Ward, and there was a lady sitting on a stoop.

There's no house, just a stoop.

And I sat down beside her and she says, kind of mournfully, you know, Mr. Levitt, you don't know what you got till you ain't got it.

Never forget that.

Four years later, Hurricane Camille, even stronger than Betsy, made a direct hit on the nearby Mississippi Gulf Coast.

By the time Camille Strug and Lee Gifford had moved from WDSU to Wvue TV.

All I did was sit in my office and turn on TV and listen and action.

As soon as Nash finished giving his report, which I consider to be the gospel according to Roberts, I would simply turn around in front of my camera, do the same thing, say exactly the same thing.

So I knew what coverage was good.

Terri Fletcher, longtime host of WDSU TV's midday program, was sent to cover the storm damage.

One of the cameramen and I went down to the Gulf Coast, which was practically decimated.

And, there was that there was an apartment building and a group of young people who didn't take the hurricane very seriously, decided they'd have a hurricane party.

And the hurricane, of course, blew them and the building to kingdom come.

And the next day, when Bill and I arrived, we were kind of going through the debris, and I looked down.

Something looked familiar, and there was a midday pen.

And I do have it.

I still have it.

The winds of social change were swirling by the early 60s, even past the city limits.

In 1960, Lakeside Shopping Center opened a response to the suburban population shifts that were affecting many major cities.

Jefferson Parish boasted of its growth, which included a new causeway spanning Lake Pontchartrain linking Jefferson with Saint Tammany Parish.

Suburban pride is evident in this film, produced for the Jefferson Parish Library system.

This, then, is the green Perry, the Parish of Field and Stream, the Parish of Smokestacks of Industry, without the accompanying smog.

The Parish of Great and Small Business.

The parish of a patriotic people who thank God for his endowment and are humble in the face of a destiny which has cast their parish in the role of the mayor.

Strong, wide awake, happy son of Lady Opportunity and his lordship.

Future.

There is Jefferson Parish, and this is just the beginning.

In 45 or 46, the veterans start coming back and the local and the domestic economy had to be built.

So we began to build this enormous amount of housing, which was to satisfy this pent up demand, because nothing had been built in the past 15 years.

And we did that by populating the suburbs.

And that was made possible only by the interstate highway system, because now you could live outside the city and still go to your job inside the city.

When you had these federal government programs that say you could get a, a mortgage, government mortgage at low interest, but you had to get it for a new house.

You could not get it for renovation.

It made it almost inevitable that the suburbs will be built and the central cities would fall apart.

Who could move with those people who had the resources could move?

Who was left in the inner city?

Basically the very wealthy who who could afford to stay in the inner city and who had a, and I'm clave, so to speak, and the poor and the elderly and the vast majority of the poor were black.

So you could see the cities, racial ratio changing.

You could see the economic ratio changing tonight, as you discussed in factual and straightforward in New Orleans, the beginning of the 60s was also the end of an era dominated by a popular mayor, de Lesseps.

Chip Morrison, viewed as a politician that triumphed over the old machine politics of the past and who initiated massive public construction.

Morrison was mayor for almost 15 years, though he dominated the city's politics.

Morrison was less successful at the state level.

Moon Landrieu worked in one of Morrison's three unsuccessful gubernatorial campaigns.

Chuck may have been one of the most charismatic men I've ever met.

Very handsome.

Dashing.

And he had a child like a little boy, kind of enthusiasm about things.

He was vain, cocky, humorous chap in many ways, was a was a superb politician.

In 1961, Morrison resigned as mayor after President John Kennedy appointed him ambassador to the Organization of American States, which focused on Latin America.

Three years later, Morrison and his young son Randy died in a plane crash.

When Morrison resigned, Councilman at Large Victor H. Sekiro was selected by the City Council to serve as interim mayor.

He was subsequently elected to two full terms.

You've heard of that movie called The Accidental Tourist?

Next year was The Accidental Mayor.

He really was.

he got in by a fluke.

In was a very kind man.

And Vic was willing to do anything really that was good for New Orleans.

That was his slogan.

If it's good for the odds of fart.

Mascaro did what he knew.

he came out.

he was a a product of his era.

Politics was, conducted in a through an organizational effort.

You either belong to the ideal, you belong to the CDA.

it was a system of of ward leaders and precinct captains.

Though not as effective as most people would have you believe, but still nonetheless, reasonably well organized.

By the time Sekiro took office, desegregation had become the dominant public issue during the desegregation crisis in the.

And I call it crisis because it was in the 60s.

I think New Orleans had some scary moments and I think it was, there was a lot of tenseness there because the city was going through a major, major social change.

And, it was a part of it was, it was rather frightening.

In 1960, Governor Jimmy Davis and the Louisiana legislature tried to override the court's mandates for integration by taking over school boards.

Landrieu was in the state legislature at the time.

Governor Davis called the legislature in a special session to thwart that integration or, those sessions went on.

I think, for several months.

and one special session would end.

We would immediately go into another special session.

It was all futile, of course, and embarrassing.

Judge Kelly, right, in particular, was putting out one decision after another preventing the Louisiana legislature and Louisiana officials from setting up legal barriers to prevent the desegregation of the schools.

And there was a lot of bitterness and a lot of upset about it.

In 1960, six year old Ruby Bridges entered the Fran's public school, escorted by federal marshals.

They were throwing things and I could hear things hit the pavement.

And later on, I knew that there were eggs.

You know, mother told me that.

And I remember being so afraid.

And, you know, I thought I was.

Just don't start that crying.

You're going to be okay.

I never really saw the people out there, but I could hear, you know, all these people and the noises they were making.

There was chance and two, four, six, eight.

We don't want it to look like I can remember the picket signs.

And I remember even as a child that was so sad.

I couldn't imagine that that, you know, some of that hatred there.

But I can remember large groups of of parents being outside and it's almost, unbelievable now to think back on it.

But, but that was the tenor of the time.

And of course, that was five years before the civil rights legislation moves through Congress.

There were injustices and protests, but New Orleans was able to get through the integration process with minimal disruption.

New Orleanians, I think I've always managed to temper whatever racial tensions there were with that, that that sort of Caribbean laissez faire attitude where really we really all love each other.

When we get all the B.S.

out of the way, we know we're a whole lot more alike as people than we are.

Unlike Belle's high school years reflected the evolution of race relations in New Orleans during the 60s.

I think one of the more significant things I remember about the high school experience was the fact that I was there, as Saint Augustine in particular, started to break down some of the barriers.

So I guess I was probably amongst the first groups of high schoolers in New Orleans who knew what it was like to mingle.

Quite frankly, amongst blacks, whites and other students.

And I think that was an it was it was an exciting experience for us as young black students doing things that we knew that our, our forerunners had never been able to do, to compete in speech tournaments and to sing in choral events with the guys and the gals from Jesuit and Chapelle and all the other schools who.

In the 1969 mayoral campaign, the black community became a critical part of Moon Landrieu's election to office.

This is when they first entered into the scene as a real major force in New Orleans politics.

Still, in return for the blacks electing him.

He opened the city government up to blacks.

When asked, the various candidates were asked if they would appoint a black department head.

He said yes, unequivocally.

And that solidified the black vote, which was a huge fold.

Landrieu said what was on his mind?

Now, a lot of people couldn't stand it because of that.

But a lot of other people loved them because of that.

So he was young and he was dynamic, and he said his peace.

And in a transitional mode that was very effective.

The social changes would even be reflected in a popular Saturday afternoon teen dance show hosted by John Peeler.

We had approximately, I'd say, 30 couples each weekend, each Saturday, come in to do the show.

You had to be a minimum of 14 years of age through senior in high school.

Once you got your diploma or left high school, that's it.

Could come back.

By the mid 60s, a decision had been made by management to integrate the show.

I recalled the friend of mine, Father Andrew Termina, who had been transferred from our parish at Metairie to a parish near Gentilly.

And, I coincidentally, I had bumped into him a few weeks prior to that, and he said he was really enjoying the experience of belonging to a parish that was both black and white.

So he put together, as I recall, about eight, 8 to 10 black couples and, brought him down to the studio.

And I had told the week before, I had told our regulars that we were going to do this.

And, you know, didn't bother them at all.

But we did not have one incident.

Not one incident.

You make you laugh.

Yes.

On the more whimsical side of local TV, New Orleanians of all types talked about Maurice the Magnificent.

Marcus was a mad scientist who conducted experiments while introducing the weekly horror movie.

Oh!

Oh, hello, hello, my dear followers.

Amplified plastic cup once again my feet.

You shall be put to a test before the entire during World success is only acquired through constant effort.

And today we are going to connect our patient here to our artificial heart machine.

Once he gets this heart connected to his body through this big tube over here, why he'll be able to float out to be about 200 years old.

All right.

Sterilize.

I got to get the glove on.

I see here.

well, I don't need that one.

All right, take it away.

Got to be sterile.

Okay.

Oh, crap.

Frame.

During the 60s, many cities had to face the horror of declining downtowns as the exodus to the suburbs continued.

The most visible attempt to keep New Orleans economically sound was the redevelopment of downtown's Poitras Street.

Poythress had been a street of small businesses, including a produce market in the middle of the street.

As early as the 1940s, plans from City Hall called for a widening of this already broad thoroughfare and eventual redevelopment.

People fought, you know, we're finally it's finally happening.

And they were excited that we were finally going to going to have this, this modern thing that was going to be like, what was the street in New York, Avenue of the Americas?

It's all the modern buildings.

And we were going to have and we're going to have a cultural center here, sort of like Lincoln Center.

And we were going to have everything that New York had that they were kind of chopping away at their urban fabric.

We were going to do it too, because that was considered.

It was considered just the way to go at the time.

Every one of those buildings that was built required something to be torn down.

And the question was, what are you prepared to give up to gain?

You know, this new improvement?

It wasn't just a question of of the building question.

Was there 5000 people that are going to work in this building and that will keep their jobs in New Orleans?

And if they cannot build a building to accommodate Shell Oil Company or Panam Life Insurance Company, then those companies will move to suburbia where they can be accommodated.

Now, these buildings will sit there and the old buildings, and they will be empty and they will die because they have no economic vitality.

On the other hand, if we do permit Phantom Life Insurance Company and Shell and Amoco, to build these buildings and hopefully they'll build attractive buildings.

And I thin yes, we will lose the buildings that fall under the footprint of those buildings, but also in the squares that surround it, which are equally historic.

Those little buildings will find life in terms of restaurants and pressing shops and stationery stores and watch repair shops, and enjoy the economic benefit of 5000 employees working in the neighborhood, rather than that neighborhood becoming an economic graveyard for some community leaders.

There was an economic need to compete with other cities, but a challenge lay ahead.

The term Houston ization was coined.

The problem is what made New Orleans famous and gave it its lasting value is that it is old.

I mean, we were going to eliminate what is New Orleans, Houston, you couldn't eliminate all because there wasn't anything that was old.

And of course, this Houston ization argument tore the city apart between the people that wanted to stay with tradition and the people that wanted the change.

And really, of course, both were wrong because you have to change, but you don't have to change to be like Houston.

Among the new buildings constructed during the 1960s was the International Trade Mart and the Plaza Tower office building in the works was one shell Square.

New Orleans saw the growth of oil related activity as well as the aerospace industry.

And while the creation of jobs and the influx of people helped, it soon became clear that the tourist and convention business was the city's future.

The Interstate Highway program did add to the tourism, I think, considerably, because much of the tourism then and now is really from these 5 or 6 surrounding states.

And then, of course, as with all cities, the 707 Boeing jet which entered service around 1960, that changed all of the transportation habits in this country.

And I think sort of because there was really nothing else.

Tourism became the golden idol.

A place for conventions and special events seemed essential to the future of the city.

The exhibition hall would be called the River gate.

Inspired by its proximity to the river, it was projected to become an anchor, a canal, and drew streets.

Selected to design the structure was the architectural firm led by Nathaniel Curtis and Arthur Davis.

With its free flowing roofline arches.

The River gate was considered a prime example of the 1960s expressionist style of architecture.

In fact, I think the River gate was the best building that our firm ever did.

From an architectural point of view and everything design, it was better than anything, better than the Superdome as a piece of architecture.

While the river gate was built to accommodate conventions, Orleanians soon discovered another use.

The building was definitely planned in such a way that it accommodated Mardi Gras balls very well.

Being a convention facility, it had to be designed in such a way that those big trucks could drive from the street, void of food, right in onto the floor of the building.

And the course that made it just perfect for parade to do the same thing.

So it became the headquarters for the parades where they ended and started a lot of times.

But some balls were held in.

There were the parades, came right into the building.

Gradually its usefulness would decline, considered too small for conventions.

The river gate would eventually be demolished to be replaced by a casino.

In keeping with the growth mentality of the 1960s.

A future riverfront expressway located alongside the Mississippi seemed to many to be a great idea, especially for a city that was unaccustomed to a view of the river.

An aggressive interstate highway program to link the country's major cities was initiated by the federal government in the 1950s.

Washington would be willing to pay 90% of the cost.

These interstates would include a loop around cities planned to bring those in the suburbs back to downtown.

The construction of a Mississippi Riverfront Expressway had been on the City Planning Commission's drawing boards since the 1940s.

The plan now seemed possible.

The Riverfront Express It wasn't an isolated piece of roadway.

It was.

It was merely a link, you know, in this massive interstate highway system that was being built.

The plan was quite ambitious.

As a highway move to elevate it in front of Jackson Square, six lanes wide, 40ft in the air, carrying 70,000 vehicles on the.

As that highway approached.

It was built in the Anvil Straits, the two now streets in the French Quarter, which are adjacent to Canal Street.

Those would have been on and off ramps for the expressway, and after it pass, Canal Street Expressway began, then decline, declining into a tunnel a tunnel that was built under the river gate facility at the foot of Canal Street.

A tunnel built Interstate standards six lanes wide.

the highway would descend into a tunnel on a canal and point a straight rise out of that tunnel and tie in to the greater New Orleans Bridge.

Federal funds for the expressway were not yet approved when the river gate was being built.

So the state and city had to pay for the tunnel.

When the council that I served on came in, we were faced with that as a done deal.

the million dollars was spent for the tunnel under the river gate, because they had to decide whether they were going to build the expressway or not, since they was holding up the river gate.

So went ahead and did the tunnel and put the river gate on top of it and closed the tunnel, waiting for the other stretch.

In 1965, attorneys Bill Guerra and the late Richard Baum backed joined the growing opposition.

It would have changed the whole atmosphere or as as a as a know, the judge said in an opinion in 1940, the $2 psalm of the court of that essence, that, that mystique that, that unique culture that the French Quarter is and we join people like Martha Robinson and the Louisiana landmarks, people like the Valkyrie property owners who have been in this fight for years was hugely controversial, hugely controversial.

This was an emotional issue.

This was, a fiery issue.

this is an issue that split families, that split businesses, that split law firms.

People, didn't talk to each other, not ten, 15 years.

The Chamber of Commerce, and specifically the Central Committee of the Chamber of Commerce, were the prime movers behind this highway.

They were the most prominent businessmen in the city, and they got all the political support behind it.

They got the city council.

They got the mayor and the governor, and they had a support of senators and congressmen from the state.

And, and they had the overwhelming support of the Times-Picayune, Times-Picayune embrace expressway, ocean Expressway.

Opponents tried to dream up creative ways to get their message across.

Martha Robson got on the phone and talked to senators and congressmen all over this country just by picking up the phone.

She was very influential person.

And so Martha dreamed up the idea.

One year she sent out Christmas cards, and the Christmas card had a picture of Jackson Square.

And as you flip the card over, it had Jackson Square, the Cabildo, the president, chair, and it had the elevated expressway right in front of it, and it said, Merry Christmas for New Orleans.

Stop the highway.

While most of the local news media was in favor of the project Rwdsu, the alternative weekly the Vehicle Courier and the Catholic Clarion Herald, two relatively small newspapers were opposed to the expressway.

The opposition distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets.

Archbishop Philip Hannan spoke out as time wore on.

Those who opposed the expressway realized that it had to become a national issue.

The key to that was to have the French Quarter, with its Jackson Square, be accepted as a national landmark.

The plan to gain national exposure took place during Mardi Gras of 1966.

They went out and draped the French Quarter with banners, doing Mardi Gras, and also covered those banners and black crepe paper with signs like don't come to the funeral in New Orleans, save New Orleans from the highway, stop the death of the city, and all these banners hung from the from the balconies in the French Quarter.

And news media came to the Mardi Gras and they saw those banners.

And lo and behold, we began to get articles and Newsweek and Time and New York Times and life.

In 1969, during the Nixon administration, and after years of persistence on the local and federal levels.

Opponents of the expressway got some good news from the office of John Volpi, Nixon's newly appointed Secretary of Transportation.

I turned to Dick van.

I said, I got would you believe it?

I just got a telephone call.

And they say the expressway has been canceled by John Volpe.

And both of us said at the same time, we said, we'll believe it when we see in the Times-Picayune next day headlines, Highway to Feed it.

And it was I can't tell you the joy it was.

Preservation has been battling this thing for years.

Some of them, like Martha Robinson, going all the way back into the early 50s.

You know, it was unbelievable.

Well, I think that in retrospect, clearly the Riverfront Expressway was a mistake.

But like all things, you have to look at what was, the thought process at the time and where it began.

I think we all learned a lot during the 60s.

It was the first segment of the Interstate Highway System ever canceled in this country for environmental reasons.

The first one, and after that there were others.

Gradually, thoughts of a riverfront expressway gave way to visions of riverfront development.

It really energized people who wanted traditional New Orleans to remain so, in particular the quarter.

And so it really, I think, to a large extent, gave the energy to the preservation movement.

Not every preservation battle was won.

In May 1964, the Canal Street streetcar made its last run, despite the protest of those who wanted the service to last forever.

The Canal Line was discontinued in favor of busses, which were considered a more progressive form of transportation.

During the 60s.

New Orleans displayed a modern urban passion by lusting after a National Football League franchise, leading the effort was businessman Dave Dixon.

For several years, he promoted the NFL exhibition games in New Orleans, with the hope of the city eventually getting its own franchise.

Finding the financing was the first hurdle, especially when the NFL insisted that one person have more than 50% ownership of a team.

Texas oilman John Markham Jr. Was selected.

His first coach was Tom Fiers.

It was one of the few promises that I extracted from John Markham when, when he, he when we supported him for, ownership of the Saints, and that he would name the team name, name the team the Saints.

And he wavered later and, sent his PR guy to try to talk me out of it, and, and, and we were having dinner one night.

this PR person and, another friend of mine and I and the new archbishop in town, that's that referred to him very respectfully.

Archbishop Philip Hatton came walking past our table, and to my horror, I reached out and grabbed him.

Sort of.

I said, Archbishop, I said, let me ask you a question.

And because this person was saying that it would be sacrilegious to name the team the Saints, how could that be sacrilegious, you said.

Anyway, I asked the Archbishop.

I said, would it be sacrilegious if we named our team the New Orleans Saints?

He says, no, of course not.

And he said, besides, I have a terrible premonition.

We're going to need all the help we can get.

With financing assured and Help from above, along with permission from Tulane University to use its stadium.

Dickson had one other issue to deal with.

He had to assure the NFL that black ticket buyers would be treated the same as white fans.

First of all, we had to get certain laws off the books that were clearly unconstitutional.

I had several meetings with the, with the, what one would call the black power structure of that time.

And wonderful man, just all Mr. Apter always been long gone.

Nice.

Nice gentlemen.

Revere sought the Supreme Court, later to be Supreme Court justice.

Young Dutch Morehouse.

There.

And as outspoken as ever, Dixon was gratified by the black communities reaction.

The look of a basement that would come over some of the, ticket buyers, blacks, that they really could buy a 50 yard line ticket of a 50 yard line ticket was available.

Almost.

It was it was touching.

It was, it was a very touching moment to me.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was touched deeply by it.

The injustice of such a a thing for so many years, you know.

Trumpeter Al Hirt team cheerleaders and elaborate halftime shows added to the excitement of the premier season.

Part of the pitch and attracting an NFL franchise was the effort to build a dome stadium in the city to pay for this kind of project.

The backing of the governor was essential.

It was very difficult to get it through the legislature because of the amount of money.

So astronomical amount of money at the time.

And of course, the continual perennial problem in Louisiana, it would help New Orleans.

So why should so much of the state's money, so much of the state's bonding authority, be given to New Orleans?

So it was extremely controversial.

That's why without a north Louisiana governor, John McKiernan, pushing it 100%, it never would have succeeded.

The legislature submitted a constitutional amendment to the voters that would create a dome Stadium district.

It was approved in 1966.

The building was on its way to becoming a reality in a downtown location.

In addition to Dickson and McKeithen, Moon Landrieu's role as head of the Dome Stadium Commission kept him in the forefront of the project.

Years of opposition to the dome by Public Service Commissioner John Wegman and others.

A nationwide inflation in construction costs, along with the decision to build a larger structure than originally planned, proved daunting.

It took a significant emotional toll on me, but, I certainly didn't by any stretch do it alone.

And we had a a commission of 11 members.

though many, though some because of that position, were virtually ex-officio.

There were many who worked every day on that thing to see that it it got developed.

It's the fact that it moves New Orleans into the major leagues and football and basketball, and made us a world class town.

Even though we were always a world class city, we felt somehow that we were slipping.

The architectural firm that designed the river gate at the river and to fortress was also selected to design the dome located at the other end of the street.

The outside is sheathed in aluminum.

That kind of gold colored aluminum because that's the lightest weight material that we could get.

And it's it's a permanent material that cleans itself when it rains.

That's how the look came about.

Coincidentally, another circular fixture in New Orleans, the Mardi Gras doubloon, is made of the same material.

The doubloon, originated by artist Alvin Sharpe, was first thrown during Carnival in the Rex Parade in 1960.

The Mask of Mardi Gras was a smiling one to most visitors to the city.

The movement to step up the event as a bigger tourist attraction fostered would have become known as the Super Cruise.

The concept of a celebrity king was introduced in 1969 by Bacchus, named after the mythological Roman god of wine.

The crew was organized by a group of local businessmen, many who were in the tourist service industry.

The new krewe introduced giant sized floats which rolled on the Sunday before Carnival, thereby drawing large crowds to the city.

Over the weekend before Carnival day.

During the 60s, a neighborhood carnival krewe called Endymion would also blossom into a super krewe.

Bacchus, along with Endymion, which was named after a Greek god, faded to a lifetime of sleeping, woke up the local carnival.

Until 1973, the route of many carnival parades included the French Quarter.

These scenes from a national broadcast in the 50s give us a glimpse of what it was like.

And now, coming into view, float number seven roses and Comus here is vying, I believe, with Omar Khayyam and through his theme of coupling poetry with visual presentation.

When you, Rezvani, you said this is the way it was meant to be seen.

I mean, this is the route the first comas parade took.

I think, you know, this is where it looked.

You know, the the, the people hanging over the balconies looking down on the, the floats and the lambos and the seeing those days or more lambos then and they gradually petered out.

But those days you get a huge amount of these torchbearers.

And so the place was just it was it was like staring at miracle.

It was the most beautiful.

public event, you know.

It was just a much closer, tighter experience.

You felt.

You felt, you know, much more of a part of the parade rather than if I'm more of a participant than an observer.

During the 60s, New Orleans began to flourish as a tourism and convention destination.

The Royal Orleans was one of the first hotels to be built in the French Quarter in many years.

And then there was the Royal Sonesta, built on the site.

It would had been the Regal Brewery.

More followed.

In addition to tourists and conventioneers, New Orleans greeted some visiting dignitaries.

In 1960, French President Charles de Gaulle George Schmidt, at that time a student at DeLaSalle High School, remembers de Gaulle's visit well.

We practiced every morning.

We played the, the, the, Rotterdam, the de rum, the, the, the, the talented and that at the time and turn, turn turn, turn that that that really your hair would stand up at seven in the morning and it was great.

And, did you all here.

You all.

Yeah.

We got out in front and they had draped this big tricolor flag from the school, you know, and there was Brother Auguste.

He's there like this is getting ready.

And here comes the motorcade.

Here comes the motorcade.

We're all ready.

Right?

And he said, okay, boys, let's go.

I you know what?

No way.

Downtown to dump the boom boom, boom.

Right.

And then the the guess what?

De Gaulle comes up and he's big limousine and he stops.

He stops, the car stops.

So he went to the he went to a, Christian Brothers school to well, a car stops in.

Brother August looks around.

He says, see you later.

But it just leaves a whole bad porno thing.

We tried to play the mass is the drum major came up and try to stop, get us going on the market.

But their brother organs ran out to the to de Gaulle, you know, and he came back.

He said, look, man, his hand shook the girls and it was great.

In 1962, President John Kennedy came to New Orleans to dedicate the Nashville Street wharf.

During his visit, he stopped at City Hall, where he talked to students about the space industry.

I don't know whether you realize how much, what is happening in this country and the world is going to affect this city and state and going to affect your lives.

The space age, which has been personified, fire Commander Shepard and Colonel Glenn is going to have the most far reaching consequences to all of you who live along the Gulf.

New Orleans would have another link to Kennedy, one that would prove fatal.

I was driving to work, one morning, and I saw a man who was passing out handbills in front of the international trade.

Mark and I got to the office at channel six.

And Bernard Rothman, I believe, was assignment editor then.

And he said, there was this guy down there passing out handbills, fair play for Cuba.

And, I said, yeah, that must have been the guy I saw.

So we covered him on, on TV.

And then we brought him into the station and all of us, chatted with him briefly, and Bill Schlatter did the interview with Oswald.

But are you a Marxist?

I think you did admit on an earlier radio interview that you do you consider yourself a man?

I would very definitely say that.

I, I, I'm a Marxist.

That is correct.

But that does not mean, however, that I'm a, communist kind of an innocuous little man, you know, unprepossessing, fellow who didn't really impress any of us very much, but very serious about himself.

He didn't seem to lack of sense of humor.

you know, take himself very seriously.

That film was almost lost by the time, Kennedy was assassinated.

And we learned the name of Oswald.

It was.

It was what we call it about almost a throw away game because we we have a limited amount of space of how much film we could save, and we saved what we thought was, viable interviews or still films or whatever we had of different people.

And Oswald wasn't scheduled to be saved.

It was he was just going to be to the place.

And but at the time Kennedy was assassinated, we all realized we had I think everybody hit everybody.

At one time.

We notified New York and New York, reversed lines, and we sent film up there instead of them feeling down here.

And I would say within a half hours broadcast over the whole United States.

ridiculous.

In 1967, District Attorney Jim Garrison charged Clay Shaw, recently retired international trade director, as a conspirator in the Kennedy assassination.

Terri Fletcher Rich and her husband Lenny, a noted New Orleans artist, were friends of Shaw's.

Fletcher, which had painted a tormented portrait of his friend, but then had second thoughts.

What you see there is the portrait that he painted that night.

Underneath that portrait is a totally other portrait.

So after Lily saw it, he said, oh, Clay, love the other one.

He's going to hate this.

I don't know how I can show it to him, but he eventually did, and Clay came over and he looked at it a long, long time, and he said, Lenny, you painted my soul.

That's a hunted animal, and that's what I've become.

After an ordeal that lasted two years, Shaw was found not guilty.

Obviously, that this sort of thing is a strange thing.

It was.

I understand, but I have tried, insofar as I can, to lead as normal a life or a life as much like the life and I lived before as the trial, however, injured his career and reputation, he died a few years later.

There was not only continued turmoil in the news during the 1960s, but also in the fortunes of the city's native music form.

Jazz.

However, there was one place where the music thrived.

The Preservation Hall got a lot of the, older black musicians that had sort of retired, and they got them out of retirement and gave them sort of like a, second lease on life.

Our second shot at fame, which many of them did, quite frankly, achieve more fame than they did in their careers originally.

Another music form, rhythm and Blues, proved aptly named during the 1960s in New Orleans.

The music during this decade, I experienced both rhythm and the blues.

Cosmo Metastases Recording studios spawned hits for performers such as Fats Domino, Aaron Neville, Ernie Cardo and Irma Thomas.

Well, I've gotten blamed for lots of pregnancies.

I've gotten blamed for meeting husbands that they're no longer with.

I've also gotten blamed for meeting husbands that they're still with and and, you know, various little situations that people relate to because of songs that they heard, they had some dance that they'd gone to that sung their favorite song, and they met a certain person.

So I get blamed for a lot of things that happened back in the 60s.

Among the many New Orleans music clubs where acts, both local and national, performed was the dewdrop.

Back then there there was always a variety show.

You had a featured vocalist, you had a comedian, and you had what they call a shake dancer.

a exotic dancer, whichever the title may fit.

and you had a complete show?

Yes, the Dew Drop.

I got the, when I was, about 17, and they had this female impersonator called Patsy, who called himself The Toast of New Orleans.

And he would dress in these gowns and feathers and have this grand entrance and long cigaret holder.

He really tried to do that.

Well, then Patsy would come out and say, what's going to happen for the night?

And Patsy always sing all of me and a couple of songs like I'm Going Up on the mountain to Face the Rising Sun.

If I find anything good, I'm gonna bring my sweet man some.

Because I'm a hip shaking mama.

Stuff like that.

And there were two old maids since, well, Pat's a he was saying that because Patsy was a cool guy.

generally at local bars, patrons could still choose from among four locally brewed beers Jack's, Regal, Falstaff, and Dixie.

Dixie is the only local brewery to survive from that time on the bar's jukeboxes, where many songs made New Orleans in 1964, that began to change mothers and fathers of New Orleans.

You may have concluded that your sons, but especially your young daughters, were growing restless this week because of the Nazi raid.

Hearings resume tomorrow.

Or perhaps you assume that Thursday's scheduled arrival of Senator Barry Goldwater was creating a stir among the teenage set?

What else would account for the wave of restlessness and the thrill of anticipation that have been making the rounds?

I, roving photographers, took additional pictures in the middle of the night that may give some meaningful clues.

For.

All the my local deejay, another British import, came in the form of fashion.

We were all wearing mini skirts, and there was a young married woman by the name of Minion Vijay, who's now a very well known jewelry designer, and I, she started out designing clothes, and this was a mini skirt.

Look at the piece, symbols and everything on it that I had miniature minion make for me for a happening that we put on in the 60s out, in an artist's studio.

And then I started wearing items like this to work every day for young men living in the New Orleans area during the Vietnam War.

There is one building that brings back vivid memories.

It is the custom House where the military draft board was located.

I had to go to my first draft physical.

Well, I stayed up one night with some friends.

I said, oh George, don't be afraid.

Just the physical side of it have been more physical in my life, much less in the custom house, you know?

Can you imagine the custom House?

God that I never had?

I never took my pants off in front of anybody.

You know, over 100,000 Louisianans served in Vietnam towards the end of the 60s, a city known for its culture was confronted by the counterculture.

New Orleans became a Mecca for hippies.

This was underscored in the 1969 movie Easy Rider.

The lead characters traveled by motorcycle across the country on their way to Mardi Gras by God, I had people calling me upheld, you know, Hells Angels A coming now in Phoenix.

They were cited in Phoenix.

Hells angels are coming while the police mobilized extra people and everything else.

Hells angels are in Dallas now.

They're coming down here.

They're heading for the bridge and everything.

Bill and I are trying to shit on this thing, bill Monroe, because we have no real knowledge that the Hells Angels are coming.

They never came.

Who did come?

Flour.

Children, hippies, visitors who in most cases had little means of support showing up on New Orleans doorstep posed problems.

The flower children stole all the sewer covers because they were using them as barbecues in the French border.

The sewer and water board covers that know of the manholes, and they were using them to cook.

And so that I remember helping these often homeless young people.

Was Mike stark, today a mask maker.

But then studying for the ministry, a chance overnight stay in New Orleans with his father in the early 60s made stock want to remain in the city.

He moved to New Orleans wearing business suits and soon underwent a transformation.

I never did drugs.

I never did marijuana.

I didn't do any of those things.

I had a job all the time.

I had done some of the things.

But, mostly the cops used to call me the king of the hippies.

A better description would have been minister to the hippies.

In the late 60s, stark organized a clinic to provide medical care for those who found themselves on the street.

It was called the Head Clinic.

Health emergency aid, dispensary, dispensary, and whatever you needed.

You came in asking if we could get you to something.

We would take you to charity and many of our doctors were worked out of charity, although we had all sorts of other, doctors, we had 12 or 13 doctors at a time volunteering.

No, no, nobody.

No.

Free and free everybody.

Not only it was volunteer.

I remember going to 11 and Organ Park and it was nice.

And I think they expected some kind of huge, and unruly group and they would tons of police.

I mean, there were huge amounts of policemen and it was just like a big picnic.

It was almost they almost turned into something like sort of an Earth Day celebration.

The 60s was a decade when there was a whole lot of shakin going on, social change, the weather, downtown, the suburbs, New Orleans in the 60s.

A time when New Orleans woke up after a Hard Day's Night.

We have gained probably a sense of our own worth, in other words, a sense of our own importance and, place in history as a city, probably more than we had.

And we at least know now what, important we might still destroy in any way, but we kind of.

We know it now.

Frankly, I think New Orleans came out of the 60s pretty well.

it was, despite the fact that there were riots all over America and what the New York and Detroit, there were none in the city of New Orleans.

we peacefully lived through that.

It was not a golden age by any stretch of the imagination.

And, Peggy, don't you dare try to turn it into one.

Dreams.

Dreams keep us going.

Dreams keep us growing.

Dreams keep us thriving.

Hancock Whitney.

Your dream.

Our mission.

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