At West Las Vegas market, it’s talk about down home

Friday, Sept. 2, 2005 | 10:56 a.m.

If you had to choose one place to go for news of Hurricane Katrina in the Las Vegas Valley, it might be Mario's Westside Market.

News of aunties, uncles, cousins, Momma and the kids. News of uncle's place in New Orleans or Momma's house in Biloxi.

Mario's, at Martin Luther King and Lake Mead boulevards in the heart of the historically black neighborhood known over the years as west side or West Las Vegas, has a sizeable population from Louisiana and Mississippi.

So these days, near the butcher counter and its sausages from Bogalusa, La., or in line to buy fried catfish from Greensboro, Ala., "Everybody's been talking about it," part owner Mario Berlanga said.

Berlanga said everyone in the store -- employees and customers -- have been trading stories for days about family members back home.

He also said his business may be affected further down the road, since the sausages, catfish and other products from that part of the South may not be stocked again soon in the Los Angeles warehouse that ships them to him.

"It's still too early to tell," he said.

On Thursday afternoon, Steve Cooper, butcher for the market, was waiting to get off work to wire some money to his two children and former wife, Denise, who were all right in Vicksburg, Miss., but without electricity and running out of food.

Denise, a histological technician at a Vicksburg hospital, has been helping tend the sick with power from a generator for days, he said.

Cooper, 50, was born in Tensas Parish, north of New Orleans. He has family on both sides of the Louisiana-Mississippi border, including a cousin who lost a house in New Orleans under the heavy hand of Katrina.

He said Denise described her neighbors fighting over batteries in a store for flashlights and radios.

"She said, 'Forget it, I'd rather be in the dark.' "

The butcher was "thinking of going down there to ease the tension a little for my kids" -- Steven Jr., 10, and Chandayus, 15 -- but had to stay in Las Vegas to work.

Meanwhile, in the back of Mario's, Terry Latchinson, 32, was rubbing white catfish in yellow cornmeal and tossing the fish into a basket to dunk into boiling oil.

His mother, Glenda Jenkins, had left behind her brick house Saturday morning, headed north of New Orleans to stay with other family members in Bascomb, La.

The brick house, Latchinson said, "is still there -- but the hurricane destroyed everything inside it."

As for family, "I got people all across Louisiana," he said. Luckily, he also has an unlimited long distance plan on his home phone. So he's been able to track everyone down, and they're all right.

A friend in Las Vegas didn't fare as well. Two of her cousins died.

Leaders from the area also have the same roots as the workers and customers in Mario's Thursday -- including former state Sen. Joe Neal, Las Vegas Councilman Lawrence Weekly and Chester Richardson, vice chairman of the Southern Nevada Workforce Investment Board, a group that decides how to spend millions in federal and state funds.

Neal and Weekly were both at a board meeting Thursday of the Economic Opportunity Board, the valley's largest nonprofit organization.

As they left the meeting, Lee Winston, general manager of the organization's radio station, KCEP 88.1 FM -- which broadcasts from the West side -- said he had gotten calls all week about the hurricane, including one from a former intern who had moved back to the area.

Neal, who recently left politics after more than three decades in the Legislature, said a lifetime of watching storms led him last week to call his daughter, Withania, in Kenner -- a suburb on the edge of New Orleans.

"I told her, 'If the storm stays east of the Florida peninsula, stay -- if not, get the hell outta there,. " Neal said.

Withania, a 30-year-old pharmaceutical school student with two children, left Saturday for Baton Rouge to stay with an aunt.

Within days, a levee burst near her house and flooded everything.

Neal and his family are all from Louisiana, as is his wife's, some of whom they haven't been able to track down, he said.

As well, he said, his daughter is "traumatized ... She doesn't know what she's going to do."

Only a year and a half from graduating at Xavier University, she had already paid for the semester's tuition, he said.

Weekly, whose ward includes Mario's, went to Grambling State University.

He sent money Thursday to his wife's family in Tensas Parish. His wife's father's brother had lost a recently-built house in New Orleans.

Meanwhile, Chester Richardson was frustrated at not being able to locate members of his large family scattered through the state -- some of whom had left for Houston, though not for the Astrodome.

Richardson was born in New Orleans.

An uncle, Emile, had left the city for Carencro, La., three hours away. Some members of his family had begun talking about returning to New Orleans with boats to hunt family down.

"I'm trying to discourage them," he said, between calls on his cell phone from Louisiana.

Richardson was also "trying to coordinate" pooling together money with those who were better off in his family to help those who had been driven from their homes.

Weekly said he thought it might be time to start thinking beyond families and would be looking into some sort of community-wide response -- particularly from fellow black Southerners.

"I think with the numbers of African-Americans from the South (in Las Vegas), we need to step up to the plate," he said.

"All of us have ties to the South. You're seeing people like you on TV ... and they need help. We need to do something."

Back at Mario's, Latchinson lamented the loss of "about 100,000 pictures" of family at his mom's house in Biloxi, Miss.

Then he tried to put a positive spin on the tragedy.

"We have a family reunion every year, in Bascomb, on July 4. She can take some more."