Columnist Susan Snyder: New Orleans will never be forgotten

Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005 | 3:05 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursday and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

WEEKEND EDITION

September 3-5, 2005

The city on CNN is not the New Orleans any of us remember or want to see.

Flooding, looting and violent crime threaten to destroy what little Katrina spared on its initial pass. New Orleans, it seems, is gone.

I sipped my first real cocktail at age 16 inside the New Orleans Hilton, where Pete Fountain wailed on his clarinet some 20 paces from our table.

Looking back, I can't fathom how my best friend Suzie and I talked our folks into allowing us to travel unescorted to New Orleans to visit my clarinet-playing brother and his band of 20-something jazz musicians.

They played traditional jazz at the Famous Door and other joints around town. My brother and his drummer took us to see Fountain play at his new Hilton club.

The place seemed to operate on a don't-ask, don't-tell policy. They didn't ask us for ID, and we didn't tell the world we weren't old enough by doing anything that drew attention to our youth. A two-drink-minimum meant we ordered and drank two drinks.

Hey, rules are rules.

On nights my brother worked, Suzie and I roamed the French Quarter. There were still more jazz clubs than strip clubs, and music was more likely to swing than rock.

We drank coffee in the middle of the night at Cafe Dumonde. We saw kids younger than we were tap-dancing for money in the street. We saw girls not much older than we were hawking other talents. We walked among 200-year-old crypts and shops that sold voodoo stuff.

My brother lived in and out of New Orleans over the years giving me ample opportunities to visit. What happens there stays with a person.

One summer college break, when I was particularly glum about being unemployed and my brother was particularly glum for reasons I don't recall, our whine-weary mother bought a plane ticket and sent me to New Orleans.

"You can be miserable together, and I won't have to listen to it anymore," she said.

But true misery didn't find New Orleans until last week. As the present-day vignettes became more horrifying, memories returned in a flood.

The craziness of Mardi Gras. The quiet of Audubon Park. Riding bikes in the Warehouse District with my nephew. Teaching him to hang a spoon on his nose in the Court of Two Sisters restaurant. The mental postcards don't fit into anything we're seeing on CNN.

With a gallon of gas reaching European prices and our young people still dying for oil in Iraq, it seemed a good time to drag out the commuter bicycle. We now have selfish reasons to make a few sacrifices.

Wiping the summer's dust from the two-wheeler Friday morning, I spotted a small gold sticker adhered just below the seat. It reads: "Gus Betat & Son, New Orleans. Your great-grandfather bought his bike from Betat."

The things we forget.

Five days after the disaster, the aftermath hardly even resembled America. People were dying and hungry in the streets of a city that gave us Justin Wilson, Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse.

Federal officials are facing the first of hundreds of hard questions they will have to answer. Those of us watching from a distance can help with our money and prayers, but also our memories.

The more who remember New Orleans as it was, the less chance it will have of remaining as we see it now.