The Jack Marshall Collection™: Images of New Orleans

In addition to Paris, Rome, Alaska and Hawaii on the list of places you must visit some day, you dare not forget New Orleans. Ever since its founding in 1718, New Orleans has held a special place among the great cities of America and the world.

After I graduated in 1976 from the University of Missouri journalism school, my first job was as a copy editor at New Orleans's afternoon newspaper, The States-Item. I got the job while visiting relatives in The Crescent City. The editor asked me if I would mind trying out – "sitting in" one morning at the copy desk. Having nothing to lose and intrigued at the possibility of living in New Orleans, I agreed. A few hours later, they offered me a job.

On my first day I walked straight into a newsroom that could have been the setting for a top-rated TV show. It was like Barney Miller meets Mary Tyler Moore. Back then, the team of people who wrote, photographed, and edited The States-Item was an eclectic cast of characters with whom every day was an adventure.

The newsroom itself was a riotous marketplace of sights, sounds, words and ideas. Teletype machines clacked incessantly in a glassed room at one end of the floor, and conveyor belts whizzed overhead, carrying articles and photographs from the newsroom to the composing room and eventually to the press room. Telephones rang constantly. People shouted to each other across the room. There were no computers or even electric typewriters. We still used carbon paper (youngsters, look it up). And in the middle of the newsroom was the copy desk, a big horseshoe-shaped counter surrounded by a microcosm of New Orleans: men and women, young and old, black and white, sometimes crazy but mostly sane, all smart, savvy and experienced.

I reported to work each day at 5 a.m. to edit articles and write headlines for that afternoon's editions. Among the denizens of the newsroom were:

A hard-nosed editor who, not unlike Perry White at the fictional Daily Planet of Superman fame, delighted in throwing stories back on our desks and challenging us in very colorful and graphic terms to fix our mistakes or else. And the "or else" was usually even more graphic. He was always correct, of course, about the stories needing work, but still we trembled in our shoes when we fell victim to his wrath.
A "rewrite man," originally from Mississippi, who delighted in telling everyone, "I've been all over the world and to parts of Arkansas too." But when there was an airplane crash, or a ferry loaded with commuters collided with a tanker in the Mississippi River fog, or a particularly gruesome murder was discovered, he could juggle three phones simultaneously from reporters covering different angles and bang out a coherent story at the same time.
A zealous news photographer so competitive he once literally kicked a competitor out the open door of a chartered helicopter just as it was about to lift off, so that he'd be the only one to get a great aerial shot of a burning warehouse.
And most memorably, a crime reporter named Jack Dempsey (may he rest in peace) who referred to himself as "The Writer Not the Fighter," dressed daily in a seersucker suit and straw hat, and signed the bottom of each of his stories from the police blotter with the acronym "A.L.I.H.O.T." which I came to learn stood for "A Legend In His Own Time."

It was so much fun I found it hard to believe I was actually paid to do my job.

Today, 33 years after I started work at the now defunct States-Item, I find myself transported back to New Orleans as I sift through Jack Marshall's photographs of the city where he met and married my mother. Among the thousands of photographs in The Jack Marshall Collection™, I find myself strangely drawn to my father's photographs of this beautiful old city.

My favorite is "Boy In A Bookshop," the inset at the beginning of this entry. This photograph and the other two shown here are found on a precious few rolls of film Jack Marshall shot over several weeks in the summer of 1959. These three are the best – but by no means the only – memorable images my father made that summer. Looking at the contact sheets now, it seems he was in one of those brief but highly creative periods of work so many artists enjoy. Studying each frame is like finding a new treasure.

In my New York City apartment, I have hung an enlargement of "Boy In A Bookshop," always imagining I am the little boy in the window. The nighttime picture of Canal Street (top), with the illuminated streetcar and other remarkable details ("Essso Standard Oil Company" to the right, "Saenger" theatre on the left) was shot looking riverward from near Rampart Street. To me it is an iconic image of New Orleans. I also admire my father's unusual vision of Audubon Park (bottom), depicting not only the expected imagery of mighty oak trees draped in Spanish moss, but also the added drama of the tower of Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church, where he and my mother had been married 14 years earlier.

For our family, New Orleans has been home to lives both long and short. A place for births and marriages, careers and celebrations, growing up and growing old. Even for sorrows and deaths.

For Jack Marshall, New Orleans also served as the breathtaking inspiration for many beautiful, memorable photographs, as timeless and unique as the great city itself.