Friday, February 24, 2012.
First Radio Gig Revisited. Sassafras.
It's a rainy day, and I left my umbrella at Tujague's last night. If you're ever in a restaurant and it starts raining, ask them for an umbrella. They'll probably tell you not to be in a hurry to return it. Restaurants have deep stocks of the ones left behind by customers, most of whom can't remember where they last saw their bumbershoots.
I thought I'd need mine today, because it drizzled most of the day, and my destination after the show was the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans. Unless you are extraordinarily lucky, you'll never get a parking space closer than fifty yards from your target door at UNO, which is notoriously lacking in covered walkways. I didn't have time to stop at Tujague's, because Fred Kasten was waiting for me.
Fred has been an announcer on WWNO-FM for a long time. He's best known for the jazz shows he used to do on Saturday evening he says he's semi-retired, but I still hear his deep radio voice on the station often enough.
He and the management wanted to talk with me, because when I renewed my membership to the public radio station a few months ago, I told the person taking my info that I was a member of the station's original staff. This filtered up to the station management, which was working on a fortieth anniversary celebration. They asked if I could fill in some blanks. For example, did I know the exact date the station went on the air?
Do I ever! Sunday, February 27, 1972. 11 a.m. First program: a speech from LSUNO's Chancellor Homer Hitt. First piece of music played: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. All this was duly noted in the forerunner of this diary, already filling five composition books.
In 1970, I heard that LSUNO (as UNO was called then) was going to open an on-air radio station. I was a student there--math major. From the time I was about eight years old, I wanted to be on the radio. Here was a chance to get in on the ground floor. I changed my major to Drama and Communications and got a student job in the Audio-Visual Center. Both departments were involved with the radio station, triggering a bit of a turf war between the chairman of Drama and the director of A-V. Paul Doll--who headed the radio station project--was a professor of Drama, but his office was in the A-V Center. I took his classes and worked on his A-V projects. All my bases were covered.
A year and a half later, the station signed on. I kept busy cataloguing the library's record collection, running cable through the Liberal Arts Building for the studio, writing and designing the program guide, editing audio tape. Everything but on-air work. Paul Doll thought I sounded too much like an underage disk jockey. (Judging by the few tapes I have of myself back then, he was right.) It was a couple of years before they let me host a weekly program called "Save New Orleans," a talk show about historic preservation.
I think I'm the only original staffer who is still alive and still in radio. Paul Doll and his partner Tom Struve (who, after they left WWNO, opened a memorable restaurant called Flamingos) both died about ten years ago. All the main engineers are deceased. A few of the original program hosts are still with us--notably jazz sax great Al Belletto and bebop pianist Rhodes Spedale--but not on the air. I can see why the management had a problem finding primary sources for its anniversary bit.
I related all this to Fred Kasten in our interview, and cut a pledge drive spot for the station. Then off to dinner.
The UNO area has never had many restaurants, good or bad. But there seems to be a nascent row of neighborhood cafes on Filmore Avenue. One of those is Sassafras, which after six years of being the only white-tablecloth restaurant in New Orleans East at two locations has relocated to a new strip mall on the corner of Filmore and Leon C. Simon. I have been hearing good things about it since it first opened, and even more since it appeared on this side of the Industrial Canal.
It's a pair of long, nice-looking rooms decorated with portraits of the great jazz musicians, with Satchmo having the place of honor next to the kitchen door. American diner meets Creole café on the menu. Meatloaf and red beans. Hamburger steak and fried catfish with white beans. Gumbo and spinach-artichoke dip. Hamburgers and poor boys.
If I had been a bit hungrier, I would have started with a cup of gumbo. But my innards cried for a salad. Then a fried catfish special, starring the biggest piece of catfish I've seen in awhile. I'm a devotee of small catfish; the big ones sometimes taste murky. Not this. It was cleanly fried, nice and crisp, moist inside, thoroughly satisfying. It came with some overcooked green beens (like somebody's mother used to make, I'm sure; my own mother cooked beans this way) and a dish of macaroni and cheese. I seem to be the only person in the world who is not wild about mac 'n' cheese these days, and I was certainly not inclined to take more than a few bits of this.
What I really wanted was a side of red beans. But they only serve red beans in a big portion. I got it anyway. Good, if thicker than I like, and needing more onions and celery to my taste.
This looks like a bread pudding kind of place, and it is. Nice and light, with a heavy praline sauce over the top.
The pleasant servers had the sense to seat me well away from the front door (it's getting cold outside again). Prices are fill-the-house low. Indeed, the house was largely full, including a few people who sounded like tourists. I'll bet they get a lot of business from UNO.
Sassafras. Lakefront/UNO Area: 2501 Leon C Simon Ave. 504-288-3939.
