I was leaving Crown Zellerbach after five years of service. In the computer field that was a long time. I’d never stayed anywhere more than two and a half years. It was a custom in these cases to give the valued, middle-management employee, a freebee business trip, as a parting gesture. I chose to spend three days at one of the company’s paper factories in Bogalusa, Louisiana, helping them to install new computer software. Coincidentally, Bogalusa was across the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge leading to New Orleans. It was also convenient that I scheduled the trip for March 3rd to 5th, 1978, three days before Mardi Gras. To cap this boondoggle off, I asked for and got permission to apply my airfare equivalent expenses to renting a twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza piloted by my friend Bill Campbell. It helped that he owned a key contracting agency, supplying our computer department with consultants.
We
planned to spend a long week for this trip; it wound up closer to 12 days. My girlfriend was Julie Nunes, a nurse who
lived out in the Avenues in San Francisco in a large flat with four female roommates. I met her through mutual friends, and she
invited me to a party at her house. We
clicked because I was Joe-Healthy at the time, on a vegetarian diet, no
drinking, and focused on the spirituality of my life and those around me. I was still in the healing phase after my
cancer surgery and felt I had my fingers on the pulse of life and could help
people just by being in contact with them.
Bill was living with
Lois Grushka. Lois was not having
success selling real estate after her two months’ training school. Bill, Lois, and I had been best friends for
five years. The duty fell to Lois to
arrange the travel reservations for everything except the airplane. We started planning this trip about three
weeks before Mardi Gras began. People in
New Orleans laughed at her to start with because Mardi Gras revelers had fully
booked all accommodations a year in advance.
But while experienced at this, Lois had perseverance and moxie. She checked with the French Quarter hotels by
telephone twice a day. With three days
left before we had to take off, the best she had found was a motel eight miles
out of town. Then, excited like she had
just won the lottery, she called Bill and me at work and announced that we had
hit the jackpot. A hotel smack dab in
the middle of the quarter had taken a cancellation five minutes before she made
one of her routine calls. We could have
two large rooms for the whole week.
The third couple going on this trip was Scott Peterson, Bill’s flight instructor for multi-engine aircraft, and his girlfriend, Ellen. This was Bill’s final cross-country checkout run and a great trip it was. It evaluated his abilities with a dozen mishaps, mostly severe weather problems. When the Tuesday rolled around that we were to depart, I packed my suitcase and a duffle bag then went over to Julie’s house to pick up her and her luggage. We arrived about half an hour late, parked the car and walked over to the plane where Scott and Bill stood with mouths agape. The limit for this plane was six people and that was with light baggage. Bill might have mentioned this to me, but I had no context to store the request, so if he did, it just went in one ear and out the other. Scott and Bill routinely carried tiny little cases with a change of socks and a clean shirt and mostly maps. They had trained their girlfriends to do the same; Lois just carried a large purse. Julie and I each toted large suitcases and stuffed duffle bags. The guys helped us carry all this into the tower area and weigh it all so they could re-compute the loaded plane’s weight and probable fuel mileage just to ensure we weren’t going to run out of gas over Death Valley. They cursed that we had better be ready to jettison things if they got in trouble.
When that panic was
over and Bill was stuffing these bags in crazy spots all over the plane, I
said, “Just one more thing in the car."
And I ran back and pulled out a bottle of champagne and six paper
cups. “To toast our big trip,” I
said. Bill had another fit. “Well, Scott and I are piloting the plane, so
we can’t drink for the whole trip.” I
stupidly decided to split the bottle with the three women. Our first trip leg was to get to Tucson,
where Bill and Lois’s parents lived, and I had gone to college. This was about a five-hour trip and we were
leaving about eleven in the morning. As
we passed over Fresno, the urge to pee was simply too great. Not just me, but the women too had been
increasingly fidgety for an hour. I
broke the ice by saying, “Julie will hold up this coat for privacy. I will pee in the paper cup and then pour it
back in the bottle.” Before another hour
had passed, everyone had completed the maneuver, except for Bill and Scott, who
spent this hour belly laughing.
We got to the Tucson
airport and Lois’s mother was there to pick us up and drive us over to her
house. She had set up a camping area in
her living room where the six of us could spread out blankets and sleeping
bags. She prepared a filling Mexican
dinner and we simply got a good night's sleep after staying up talking until
past ten PM. Lois’s mother was a kosher
caterer for at least twenty-five years in Tucson, whipping up a meal for half a
dozen weary travelers was nothing for her.
She cooked us a great breakfast and took us back out to the airport in
the morning.
I first met Bill ten
years before, in 1969, when I was back at the University of Arizona for a
Master’s in Computer Science. He was an
undergraduate there in Philosophy. He
worked at the Registrar’s computer facility as an operator. I got a job there as well to put myself
through school as a programmer. We
became friends because I was trying to date his sister.
Traveling from West to East, we had tail winds and they helped to get us into New Orleans ahead of schedule. This second leg was uneventful, and we didn’t bring drinks on board. I picked up a rental car since I was on a business trip and could write it off. We drove into town, arrived at the Hotel DuPuy, and had the valet park the car. The hotel was ornately swanky, wrought iron verandas off the rooms with leaded hurricane windows. The rooms were large and roomy. We had discussed breaking into girls’ and boys’ rooms, but finally decided that Scott and Ellen could have one room and Bill, Lois, Julie and I would share the other with the agreement that there would be no sex going on.
I had to get up the
next morning and Bill opted to come along with me to visit the Crown Zellerbach
factory. We decided to get something
fast to eat and wound up sucking up dozens of oysters with bread and beer, a
New Orleans specialty that I loved.
Bill and I snuck out the next morning before the women got out of bed. We set out across the 25-mile Lake Pontchartrain Bridge and wended our way for another 25 miles to the most depressed town to which I had ever been, as bad as the slums of Mexico City can be. I had always heard the term, tar paper shacks, but had no idea that this expression was literal. The other expression we confirmed while we were there was “a company town.” When we met with the plant manager for lunch that Thursday, he explained to us that there had been nothing here seventy years before when the Zellerbach Company decided set up a paper mill here to be near the timber land and the Pearl River. The company built the town and the little houses around the town. Workers were mostly poor blacks and whites. Nothing had changed in seventy years except time. Time had run down everything, the mill, the houses, time had run down the whole town. There were nice houses, up on the hill overlooking the town. The new car dealer, the plant manager, and the town sheriff owned these. The nice ,terraced houses down the hill started at the top with the plant manager’s house and worked down by socio-economic status descending the hill, in circular arcs.
Besides depressing, it
was desolate: 30-40 miles in every direction was nothing but scattered, small
towns. Bordered by Lake Pontchartrain
and the Pearl River, with mostly marshland, like Honey Island Swamp.
Where most businesses
might direct cars past a guard at a gate, this place had built a huge car
wash. You had to drive through the car
wash when leaving, at least once a day.
That was to wash all the toxins, chemicals, and glues that were thick in
the air all throughout the mill. “How
can you stand the smell?” I asked as we
were taking the management tour of the place.
“What smell?” came the reply. And
then, “Oh, I guess you get used to it. I
grew up here myself.” This was the Data
Center Manager who hosted Bill and me around for two days. We spent all day Thursday, “appreciating the
situation,” as Lawrence was told to do in “Lawrence of Arabia.”
We agreed that the next
day I would perform the function that Crown Zellerbach had sent me 2,000 miles
to do. Bill and I went back to New
Orleans and met up with the women to go out to our first formal dinner in the
French Quarter. New Orleans is a wonderful
tourist city anytime except Mardi Gras week.
Nobody can keep up with the chaos that had already set in. Bad service, mediocre meals, at inflated
prices, after long waits for seating. We
only did this once, the rest of the time we worked at finding out of the way
places.
On our way back from the Bogalusa paper mill the second day, we ran into the beginnings of a traffic jam just as we entered town. Not the French Quarter, just the outskirts of greater New Orleans. It was only a little after 5:00 PM and we had planned to meet up with the gang by six. Traffic thickened and then we realized that we had spent forty minutes and only progressed four blocks. I pulled the rental car up on the sidewalk and we got out and walked to the hotel. What a madhouse. The party had started, and we were late.
We met up with our
tourist contingent, changed clothes and hit the streets. We wandered from place to place, eating
little and drinking lots. The singing
and dancing were infectious. You can’t
be at Mardi Gras and remain a wall flower or spoilsport; you’ll wind up
partying no matter how you start out. We
rocked and reeled back to the hotel at midnight. Going up to the third floor in our crowded
elevator, two young couples were saying, “I can’t wait.” “I dare you.”
“Jamie?!” and the foursome
started taking off their clothes. They
were buck naked by the time we got to the third floor. “Isn’t this great party?” said one of the
girls when we all got off the elevator.
Next day we got up late and had strong coffee and those funny donuts
down by the waterfront. We watched the
parade on Saturday and continued partying that night.
We were supposed to
start back Sunday, but when they called in for a weather report, the airport
said a massive weather front was heading our way at low altitude. The pilots decided that it would be better to
wait. The plane could fly as high as
12,000 feet, but the plane did not have oxygen masks, so we could go no higher
than 12,000. There were deicers for the wings,
but nobody relished flying through snow, sleet and hail. We got it all, over the next few days.
We spent true tourist
time on Sunday and visited Tulane University a little west of town, then had
dinner in Fat City a little north of town. Fat City is famous for similar merry
making at Mardi Gras, but for half the price.
Monday morning was not
encouraging either, but we couldn’t stay forever, so we decided to take off
Tuesday morning, come hell or high water.
We got as far as San
Antonio before the weather forced us down.
It was slow going because we were fighting headwinds. We toured San Antonio; it was a gorgeous
town. We visited the suburbs and
shopping malls. We had dinner along
their new canal waterway system, which is the center of town.
We left in the
morning, Wednesday, but the weather forced us down again in Yuma, Arizona. We had tried to fly over the front and got to
12,500 feet. We could see the open sky
500 feet above us, but we just couldn’t break through. The wings had iced up and got so heavy that
we couldn’t climb anymore.
They tried a maneuver
where they go into a high-speed dive and the ice starts breaking up off the
wings because of the airspeed. Chunks of
ice were hitting this paper-thin fuselage that I could rattle just by pounding
my fist on it. The bombardment sounded
scary.
The winds at low
altitude were gusting at 80 MPH as we neared Yuma. As we took the turn for our final approach
directly into the wind, we were only advancing above the runway at about 15 MPH,
almost floating to the ground. Bill
screamed back to us, as soon as we stop after we hit the ground, everybody out
and grab tie-down ropes and stabilize the plane. It could easily blow over. After we were inside the terminal building at
this small airport, we watched a commercial airliner coming in for a wobbly
landing. The passengers got out and
staggered toward the terminal, all green and three throwing up. “See, it’s much worse in a large plane,” said
Scott.
Irony:
Thursday : again, the pilots called in for the weather report and the prognosis wasn’t good. Ellen and Julie were supposed to have been back to work by Tuesday and so was I. Another delay and we would be into next week.
I suggested renting a
car, driving to LA. Then taking the next
commuter flight to the Bay Area. Julie,
Ellen and Lois joined me, leaving Scott and Bill to go down with the sinking
ship. Ellen called her brother from LA
and had him meet us at the Oakland airport and take Julie, Lois and me to my
car at the private airport.
As it turned out,
Scott and Bill arrived four hours later; the weather had cleared just after we
left.
