I'm a New Orleanean. Most businesses in New Orleans pre-katrina were locally owned businesses. Not too many big boxes and national chains understand the culture down here to break in. We were probably the last major city in all of America to get a Wal-Mart. It was open about a year maybe before Katrina hit and it was the first casualty.
I still remember all of the pretzel acrobatics Starbucks went through to get into the New Orleans market a few years ago. And even then, their biggest growth was probably out in the burbs. We're pretty loyal to our PJ's, CC's and Rue coffe houses.
The businessman profiled in this article is one whose signs I recognized as a staple in renovations and new construction sites before Katrina. Just a fairly successful small businessman who fiercly loved his neighbors and his home like all new orleaneans tend to do.
The full article is here:
http://www.nola.com/...
Some excerpts:
I am originally from Syria, and I came to the United States in 1973. I started my life from scratch, and worked my way up to where I am now. I am married to Kathryn M. Richmond, I have 3 daughters and a son with her.
So basically, the apple pie american dream....and in between saving neighbors who were too sick to save themselves in the flooded waters USING A TINY CANOE, he took time to save neighbors animals as well:
As I was getting in the canoe to go to my houses on S. Claiborne Ave., I noticed that the dogs were still barking. I decided to look for them. I found them at the house diagonally across the street from my house. I knocked on the door. No one answered. I thought that perhaps the owner of the house might be upstairs because of the water. So I climbed the tree and got on to the balcony. The dogs were still barking inside the house. I knocked on the balcony door. No one answered. Then I walked around the balcony, looking in the windows. I did not see anyone. However, I did 2 medium dogs in a cage with no food or water. I went back to the balcony door, pushed it open, and then took the cage outside on the balcony and let them out. They looked so skinny and weak.
and then he comes home during one of his "tours" of plucking elderly and infirm from their flooded homes and delivering them to "safety" and gets arrested by Indiana National Guard
I saw a strange man there. I asked my tenant who he was, and what he was doing here. My tenant said that he was with the search and rescue team, and he needed to use the phone. I told him, "Oh, ok." We heard people outside. My tenant went to talk to them. It was the military. They asked him if we needed water. We told him no thank you, we have some. Then they jumped out the boat, went inside the house with their machine guns, and they were yelling at us to get in the boat. One of the military persons searched the house, for what? Only God knows. They treated us like hard criminals. They asked to see our ID cards, we showed it to them, they didn't even look at it. They only returned it to us. I told them I own this house, and my tenant was trying to prove to them that he lived there. They didn't care. They forced us out by gunpoint.
This poor man went through 3 weeks of Gitmo style "detainment" with no miranda reading, no access to a laywer, no opportunity to place bond, no one phone call to alert his wife, and no medical attention even though he got a wound in prison that turned into a massive infection which he had to tend by himself with tabasco he found in an MRE - the first meal he was given after SEVERAL DAYS in the bus station "jail."
The whole story is just unbelievable, except that this guy is a well-known name here in the city and it got printed in the Times Picayune. Shame that it probably won't be covered anywhere else...