Bourbon Street Blues

The University of Tulsa in January of 1970 offered a one month option to earn 3 three credit hours or to not take classes that month. I was a Student - Athlete at the time there, though with good reason both sides of the hyphened title could have been justifiably questioned in my case. Therefore it was literally a no brainer to take the month off.


                                                                   

The University is the smallest school in the Nation to participate in Division One Athletics, a private school affiliated with the Presbyterian Church and most of the students are commuters. These factors contribute to why the level of on campus social activity is as dismal as their usual athletic team's won loss records.

Upon my returning to campus in early February and resettling in LaFortune Hall, the on campus exclusive asylum for all student athletes, my roommate and I realized we had 5 full days before classes and our brutal off season training began.

Mark Fuhrer had drawn the short straw and was assigned to be my roommate in a suite that had 3 separate rooms with two jocks in each room. Mark had been a star running back at Lincoln Park High School in Lincoln Park, Michigan; a southern suburb of Detroit. The first night Mark called home to talk to his father, his Dad asked who his roommate was; Mark told him a guy from West Virginia. His Dad said "Oh Mark that is Appalachia, be really good to him"

Mark had returned to campus before me after the "Interim Semester" and had brought two of his high school buddies with him who planned to enroll and get a place off campus.

We were able to have our own cars on campus after the first semester, so I had driven my yellow 1965 Ford Falcon cross country and was one of few underclassmen to have wheels available. The 1057 mile trip from Chestnut Avenue in Oak Hill, West Virginia had taken its toll on the car.  


                                                                   

The car which was known as the "Maize Blaze" reached a certain level of celebrity when former Dallas Cowboy All Pro Drew Pearson, who was one of my suite mates, mentioned it in his autobiography in the chapter were he was describing going on his first date with Marcia Haynes. the daughter of former Harlem Globetrotter Marques Haynes. In the book Pearson says "he borrowed a car from one of the white guys in the dorm" I didn't get a shout out, footnote. nothing. This is why I don't fret much that he has never been enshrined in Canto's Football Hall of Fame.

The combination of a car, free time and two new conspirators combined to create a perfect storm for a dubious plan throwing good judgement to the wind.

Someone in this brain trust realized that Lent was to begin in the next few days and with deductive reasoning realized that meant Mardi Gras would be happening. Further reasoning was that we were in the South as was New Orleans, ergo we cold not be that far from the Crescent City.

Assessing our abilities we needed a car, so we pooled our money to buy a new alternator for the Falcon. We had no idea how far New Orleans was from Tulsa. We theorized that most of the trip was through the East Texas oil fields and therefore gasoline would be even less than the 22 cents or so a gallon cost it was in Tulsa.

With a free road map we had picked up at a Phillips 66 gas station we headed southeast toward Texas then Louisiana; hours and hours of monotonous driving with nothing to see but flat barren land, longhorn cattle and oil wells.

About ten hours into the trip, I was behind the wheel on a two lane highway heading  due South into the bowels of Louisiana we came upon a tractor trailer that refused to allow me to pass. Each time I would make an attempt to pass, the driver would block the passing lane. Each time I would follow him closely he would run the truck over into the gravel shoulder and pepper our windshield with gravel.

This persistent highway harassment managed to awaken the other three in the car. The consensus was that this guy would eventually have to stop and we would have our opportunity to beat the hell out of him. Sure enough after backing off and patiently following him for about an hour and he pulled into a rest stop.  As he pulled his big rig to the curb we pulled up to his cab. Just as we were about to spring all four door open and send this Driver to his maker, the door to his cab opened and all we saw was the double barrel shot gun pointed directly at the car. We wisely made a snap decision that this was our perfect opportunity to get in front of him and I kicked the accelerator to the floor and we proceeded on to New Orleans,

Fourteen hours later and as sun was rising we pulled into New Orleans. The cumulative net worth of all  of the occupants in the car that morning was under one hundred dollars, therefore renting a motel room for two nights in New Orleans during Mardi Gras was not in the cards.

In that we had completed the entire goal of our plan by making it to New Orleans, so it was necessary to now figure out another plan of action. I was exhausted from driving 14 hours without sleep, crashing was my singular goal.

The quick answer was to find Tulane University, I would park there and sleep in the car while the others would go into a dorm and try to find free breakfast.

After three hours or so of sleep I was ready to take in the Big Easy, though we were clueless to what Mardi Gras celebrations were really about. We learned it was basically about parades with lavish floats and consuming alcohol. The drink of choice were Hurricanes, a sweet red fruity cocktail, but they were priced beyond what our meager budget would allow.

We learned that the real parties were not open to folks like us and the fun was the parades and darkness.

The crowds were like nothing I had ever seen before or since. It was truly a mass of body to body humanity. You were compressed so tightly had you collapsed you would not have fallen.


                                                               

This would have been a Claustrophobic's worst nightmare. The entire French Quarter was like this and fights and some violence,  Famous Trumpeter Al Hirt was hit with a brick while performing on a float during the parade that night.

Bottles of Ripple and locally brewed Jax Beer were within our budget  if the fancy red drinks weren't. We rationalized there would be a time in our future lives that we could afford a hotel room with a balcony overlooking all of this rather than in a car and drink all of the Hurricanes we desired. But that night we were satisfied to have a waterfront room on Lake Pontchartrain as the we pulled the car up to the shore as it slept four that night.

I have been fortunate to go back to New Orleans several times since that weekend, never for a Mardi Gras, but I have done a Sugar Bowl, eaten at most all of the great restaurants and the pleasure of staying in some of the finer hotels.

But the experience has never been comparable to the 1970 Mardi Gras as Laissez les bon temps roulez