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Mardi Gras.

New Orleans.

When the high jinks roll higher and the night blooming jamboree is in full flower.

When an entire city rolls back the rug and kicks up at goodness of our heels.

When revelry runs from curb to curb on a ring tailed hoop to do with red Stripe wheels and the thickest organized taffy pull on the carnival calendar of America Mardi Gras, the big party When I was a child and we would go to a parade if we caught one pair of beads during the whole parade, we considered it to be a treasure.

We took it home and kept it in a special place, brought it to school, showed our friends you know, it was a big thing to have a costume.

You just didn't have any costumes.

And when my mother would bring this up about three months before, because she had this lady that made all these casting for us and said, Now, George, what do you want to be for Mardi Gras?

You know what costume for?

What do you want to be All I saw was kisses and was very gracious and blew kisses and said hello and smiled a lot.

A lot.

There was pain in my face.

By the time we got back to the party afterwards.

But it was a well-earned pain and I loved every minute of it.

So see the night parades coming through the quarter and it will flares and then Flambeau and snaking down Royal where the sidewalks were crowded, the balconies were supported and people were yelling and screaming and the bands were playing and it was a celebration of life.

Those are my best memories of my life.

We're in the float down of the Rex Parade where preparations are underway for another royal ride.

I'm Peggy Scott Laborde.

While carnivals, monarchs are always looking toward the future, they preside over a celebration rich in memories and tradition.

We'll be looking at both as we explore Mardi Gras, the passing parade it never ends for the entire year, and you're preparing for experiencing it or remembering it.

Carnival lives all year round.

Where does the word Carnival come from?

Well, it comes from the Latin word for meat.

And it is a celebration of eating meat for the last time before the beginning of the Lenten fast carnival is the fall season, which begins on 12th Night and ends with Mardi Gras.

Mardi Gras is one day Fat Tuesday.

It is the culmination of the carnival season.

What we have is a very moveable feast, a season that can last from almost a month to almost two.

Thanks to early leaders of Christianity, the date of Carnival actually goes back to the Council of Nicey.

And in 325, when they tried to determine a date for Easter and they decided that they wanted Easter to be on a Sunday.

So the formula they came up with by unanimous vote, by the way, was that Easter would be on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the vernal equinox, unless that Sunday happened to fall on Passover, and then it would be on the following Sunday.

So once you determine that, it's a matter of counting back 40 days, not counting Sundays, because Sunday is not a day of Lent, which will get you to Ash Wednesday, then the day before that is Mardi Gras.

It's not is there an easier way to figure it out?

No, there's not.

Luckily, some ancients did all the figuring out for us a long time ago, so we don't have to worry about it.

All we have to do is look in the book at the beginning of the season is January 6th, 12th Night, The 12th Night of Christmas, also known as Kings Day.

It's the feast of the Epiphany, the date that commemorates when the Magi or wise men brought gifts to the Christ child.

And that night has been celebrated in New Orleans since the earliest days of Creole society.

The parties were given in townhouses and plantations.

Whoever found the bean or the dog in their cake became the king or the queen of the next ball.

The king cake, I'm sure, came in the in the baggage at the the spiritual baggage of the Creoles, the French.

Because by certainly by the 17th century, the celebration of King's day had becoming a very important family day.

And celebration day.

Today, the one sure sweet sign that Carnival season has begun is the presence of King Cakes.

It is believed that the King Cake originated in Rome with a pagan festival called the Saturnalia.

They turned the civil order upside down and a slave became king for the day.

That slave was often chosen to reign as a king by being given a small cake with a father being as the token to indicate that this was the winner of this chance.

Eventually, the Catholic religion absorbed many pagan customs.

By the Renaissance, it became sort of a universal practice in Christian Europe, where king cakes and bow mosques were used And in the 19th century, it was a special day that bakeries celebrated and the bakers guilds paraded huge, enormous King Kegs Just what went inside the cake could vary.

There was often used a gold being, a solid gold being, sometimes a jewel, sometimes even a ring, sometimes even just a pecan or an almond here in New Orleans was used.

So anything that was handy.

I happened to have a number of porcelain favors which depict various things.

The most common is the swaddled baby, which of course, we get.

We also use in our contemporary King case, the baby to everything a season.

What about the consumption of King cake outside the carnival season?

If it's good enough, sure need anything out of season?

As long as it's delicious.

I would never eat king cake before the feast of the epiphany because it's a mortal sin.

Oh, that would be sacrilege.

Oh, well, I'd scrape the sugar off.

I'd say, is it whole wheat You know, we cracked my crown on the baby, you know, The King.

King plays a major role in the beginning of the carnival season.

Since 1870, the 12th Night revelers have staged their ball.

That includes a ceremony in which the debutante who has been chosen queen is acknowledged by receiving the gold beam from their version of an oversize pretend king cake.

To since 1982, another group has been selecting their royalty on 12th Night via King Cake.

But they do it on A Streetcar, adopting the name of a 19th century satirical carnival organization.

The Funny 40 Fellows have been parading up and down St Charles Avenue to the music of the Storyville Stompers riding the rails.

They proclaim to New Orleans that it is indeed carnival time to be king of a parade team for a day.

This rare footage of the 1929 Rex Parade with sand gives us the chance to hear the anthem of Carnival in every sense.

Tomorrow By the way, William H. McClellan was Rex that year the king or master of revels of each parade.

And Ball is elected by his society on the basis of all round service to the organization tradition Lee.

His identity is kept secret from the newspapers and the public.

Even when he reports to the costumers for the fitting of his regal robes, he maintains his anonymity by wearing a mask Eric Johnson was chosen to be Rex in 1991.

When Eric found out that he was going to be king.

He didn't tell me for a long time.

And one of the things I used to do and did for 20 years was to teach the royalty, the court etiquette and what to do with accept and why you do it and so and so forth.

Anyway, Eric came home one night and he said, I saw the Captain Rex today and he wanted to know, would you come out of retirement to teach this year's King?

I said, Well, why would he asked me to do that?

He said, Well, I don't know.

He just wanted you to take over this year's king.

And I said, Well, did he tell you who it is that it's me?

So I thought that was pretty cute the way you tell me about it.

Preparations for the royal ride include a bit of primping even by His Majesty.

We do have hair stylist.

They'll take care of our hair for that day, and it was accomplished before getting on the floor.

When we get off the float, you have a chance to take it off for a while.

The wig is then restyled and going out that evening, and I now can appreciate more the trouble that the women have as they go through life going to the beauty parlor every week.

But you had a good hairdresser?

I had a good hairdresser.

He performed very well.

He happens to be my head.

And we also had a makeup artist who tried to match the beard and the rex to his hair and wig.

And all of that takes a lot of time and a lot of patience with most of us don't have each society to choose as its own queen from among the season's crop of debutantes, the nominations and balloting are secret, but whoever wins gets gowned in more than $1,000 worth of silk, satin and sequins will be selected as a major social triumph.

And as our friends point out, no girl ever completely recovers from the honor and in 1949, Mrs. Eric Johnson, then Dolly and Suzanne was asked to be Queen of Rex.

I had a call at my home from the captain of Rex, who was Reuben Brown at the time, and he came over to see me and mother and dad he simply said, Put on a dress instead of jeans and you know, somebody is coming by to see us.

So I didn't know who it was until he got there.

And then he invited me to be queen.

And of course I was so excited because Rex was a big, big part of our lives growing up.

Rex is queen, had a busy day, including appearing on the balcony of the Boston Club on Canal Street for the traditional toast from Rex, who that year was Lester F Alexander, the queen's father, had already had a busy day himself.

Doctor Edmund Suzanne or Doc Suzanne, as he was known, was also a jazz musician and had to catch a glimpse of his idol before he went to the Boston Club with me, with my mother and Entourage, he went to Fine Zulu back in those days, Zulu sort of came out from South Claim and somewhere and they didn't have the landing at the river and all that.

And he had to go see Louis Armstrong before he came down to see Rex and to see me at the Boston Club.

He wouldn't miss that for anything in the world, and he didn't.

This is a recently discovered photo of Doc Suzanne meeting the jazz legend Armstrong's coronation as Zulu took place the Sunday before Mardi Gras in the auditorium of Booker T Washington High School.

Here's an excerpt from the ceremony which was broadcast on a national radio program.

You know, ladies and gentlemen, this has been my life's ambition.

To be the king.

Of course, I've been a member all my life, and right now I got a lot that is very and it's really going to be a thrill.

And I get all the way to the in the mountain on the day before Mardi Gras, New Orleans Mayor Della Seps Morrison, better known as Shep Morrison, pay tribute to Satchmo in recognition of your effort, your services to the people of our community, we want to present you with this plaque of honorary citizenship same time to give you the keys to the city Armstrong.

Thank you very much, Mayor.

This is really outrageous, the thrill of my life.

I've always wanted to be the king of the Hill.

I've been a member all my life.

And in the five year, I'm going to frame this and prove that anybody who the back of their mind.

I notice you said in your interview with Time that you had one great ambition in life, and that was to be King Zulu and after that, you could die.

That is OK. Well, I don't want the Lord to take me literally, but I of course, being queen of the Zulus is also a thrill.

Jeannie McCardell, later known as G. Tucker, had moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.

To be a queen was an invitation she couldn't pass up.

I came back in 77 the way All Hollywood actresses would love to come back to their home town.

I came back as queen of a Mardi Gras parade, and that was a lifelong childhood dream.

What was really exciting was that the Zulu Club met me at the airport, which they tried to traditionally do, a feeling of the Queen coming in for the first time.

Well, I think I was probably one of the first queens to really be coming from somewhere where I didn't have to go away and come back.

This transformation from actress to Queen would take place with a little bit of help from one of Tinseltown's most famous dress designers.

Bob Mackie was who?

The famous Bob Mackie who did Cher's things, designs and many, many, many other Hollywood actresses was a designer of both my both my my ball gown and my slow down.

Not only did the 1977 Queen of Zulu dress the part, she played it to the hilt I kind of put on a little show as the guys say I created this Hollywood Queen Zulu walk and just strutted my stuff all around the wall and it was lights and camera and action.

Very much Hollywood style.

Glamor outweigh tradition.

That year I was the first queen of Zulu to mount a float in a costume rather than a tiara and a white gown.

I had made it perfectly clear I did not intend to be the traditional Zulu queen that I wanted feathers and, you know, pizzazz.

You know, if the guys could do it, I certainly wanted to look more more ethnic, more like.

It didn't.

I don't know that it looked Zulu, but it was certainly a good take off on the African US.

You know, look, you are unique ceremony.

Is that not to call up someone to the floor by name?

Only a limited number of women guests are honored by an invitation to dance with the mascot You know, I have to say that it's it's more fun to go to a ball when you're unmarried.

Than it is when you're married, because people call you out and you have no idea who they are.

And you dance around the floor with a perfect stranger and you never do find out who called you at some time.

That happened to me when I was a widow.

Had no idea who was calling me out.

And so I experienced for the first time in my life, probably the the old charisma of the 19th century masking, which was designed really to conceal identity And I had people call me out.

And to this day, I don't know who they were.

That was fun.

Saturday night before Mardi Gras, the crew of Endymion Barrels down Canal Street.

Meanwhile, inside Municipal Auditorium, there is a much quieter celebration, one that's been a part of the New Orleans Carnival for over a century.

The annual original Illinois Club Ball While Night was the founder of the club 1894.

When he came to New Orleans, he had worked for persons who owned the railroad, which went back and forth from New Orleans to Chicago.

And he moved back to New Orleans in 1894.

And he found that there were no places for young as we call it, Negroes at that time to learn some of the social graces and really interact with each other there.

So he formed a school of dance, and this was open to both male and female.

So in 1895 they had a ball and after ball they decided, well, we want to remain together as a club.

And then they formed the club in October of 1895, and the club has been in existence since 1895 up to this, to this date The ball features really the presentation of young black girls to the formal society of New Orleans.

A number of them don't know how to offset how hard it was to talk about what they taught social graces.

They get contacts.

They then are formally presented to the society of the City of New Orleans and to the world too.

If you notice at the ball, when the girls are being introduced you see the club members talking with her all the time, keeping her smiling and things like that.

Now, when I ask, I would always say to her, This is your show.

You know it.

All the eyes on you.

Make use of it.

And, you know, keep their interest up and keep them alive.

So they get that kind of exposure The highlight comes at the end of the evening when the club's traditional dance, The Chicago Glide, is performed.

We always carried on this tradition of presenting.

As you can tell, there's a lot of people come here just to see our members and individuals do this.

And we got to be king of dance.

Creme de la Rosa This is your night.

And we dance and I dream of a lifetime this time.

What happened is right.

Oh, you're right.

Costuming is probably the most important part of the whole affair.

For in this Kingsley's and workaday republic, it was male citizens most proud of what color they can into their neckties.

Mardi Gras puts spangles on bankers and rhinestones on real estate men and offers the merchant his one chance to swagger in plumes and parley chromatic plans through his favorite voivod pages.

Of the Arabian Nights I was always a cowboy.

Oh, absolutely.

Cowboy Lash LaRue.

I belong, Cassidy.

People like that.

There was a movie made about 1952 called Knights of the Round Table.

Right.

And I'd gotten it into my head that I wanted to be so Lancelot Well, another time.

Let me think.

Some Toulouse-Lautrec is Toulouse-Lautrec.

And maybe this is where it all got started.

Don't you want to be short?

An alcoholic and a painter when you grow up, George?

Well, I became an alcoholic, and I'm a painter, but I'm not shot, you know?

But but Carnival is like this prophecy, you know, as prophecy.

And I have wonderful memories of New Orleans.

Mardi Gras in the neighborhoods I remember seeing people masked and the Indians coming through the neighborhood.

I do remember the ladies that used to dress up as the Barbie dolls with all the little pink fur and.

And the satin.

Yeah, they were delightful.

You know who else frightened us to death?

Was the guy that would play the skeleton, you know, all dressed up in a skeleton Some of Mardi Gras.

Most elaborate costumes can be seen at the Bourbon Street Awards, the gay costume contest.

Most of the costumes make their first appearance on stage at the gay carnival balls.

But as far as we can tell, although there was gay presence out on the streets masking Mardi Gras for probably centuries, probably the first organized gay carnival ball was the crew of UGA, which was probably founded around 1958.

And they gave their first ball that year in someone's living room on South Carrollton Avenue and did a little tableau apparently with a king and a queen and had a little party and invited some friends and had a good time.

And then it grew.

And by the fifth year they were renting a nursery school, a preschool building in Metairie, right off veterans behind the Schwag Museum.

And that was in 1962, that was their fifth year.

And someone complained to the Jefferson Parish deputies and the mall was raided and 97 people were arrested.

Names in the paper, it ended really very tragically.

And in 1962 New Orleans to be identified as gay and have your name in the paper was tantamount to losing your job, ending your career, maybe being disowned by your family but slowly denied it opened more and more and more and more and now everybody wants to come to a gay bar.

The early eighties was the golden age By then there were usually between 12 and 15 gay carnival clubs presenting a ball and inviting their friends.

And it peaked, I think about 84.

85.

And since then it went from about 1215 down to only the four that are remaining at Petronis being one of them has a membership of less than 20 people.

And people are surprised at that.

I'm told that I'm an RA has a larger membership but that Petronis and Armenia's and Lords of Leather all have really rather small membership.

So it's, it's on the backs of a very few people to, to put on the ball each year.

Formed in 1960 to the same year, the crew of UGA Ball was raided the crew of Petronis is now the oldest gay crew.

It is named after an ancient Roman playwright known for his erotic stories.

The most famous being satirical.

Not much is traditional during a gay bar.

All the costumes have to be coordinated with a theme, so it's automatically like an ongoing show and not like an ongoing review.

But huge cabaret show, the first costume with the ever had and that was my favorite one, which was like Narcissus.

And it was a big flower.

It was one of the funniest one it ever had.

And then the next huge cause.

And that was was also a milestone in the band was the first time that we used fire Rogue.

And it was me that became the Queen.

And we have huge fireworks display behind that costume.

That at the beginning everybody started going on fire because of the smoke and everything.

In those early years, a real challenge was finding a suitable location for the balls.

Municipal Auditorium was booked with traditional pageants, and there was another reason why that building wouldn't do a lot of gay people very, very closeted.

Somehow felt they would be less visible going down to St Willard than walking in and out of the municipal auditorium or the theater of performing arts on Rampart Street.

So why are there now only four gay carnival organizations left When you look back to the 1960s, when these clubs were founded, they were just about the only kinds of gay social organizations there were.

Now, of course, there's a whole range of wonderful kinds of organizations within the gay community that people can participate in social, political, health, arts, sports, all sorts of groups.

But also the third factor, sadly, is that the membership of the gay carnival clubs has been terribly, terribly decimated by the onslaught of AIDS.

The young generation is not interested to give the time and the dedication that that is needed.

They'll rather go to a bar at night and spend $50 a night on booze than pay $250 a year for those Gil's crew.

Along with the others, persevere.

It's hard work.

You have to suffer to be beautiful.

I have to wear pantyhose like at least two or three pairs.

And so shirts that don't see the hand and all the stuff, and then if you're slim enough, it's fine if not to attempt to tie yourself with a cause.

That depends on the costume too, and the makeup and the wig.

In the end, But the most the worst thing for me is to walk on high heels.

I could I can do that and try on visitors.

Vincent Vance.

I worked with high heels, and then they had jolly hearts the whole night, and I had cramp in my face.

And so I said, no, more hiking Playing a starring role in Carnival or of course, the parades for parade participants.

There could be a broad range of duties.

The Boy Scouts had a fairly important role in the early city parades.

One is that they were the sign bearers, and so that was my role Now, Mid-City really pioneered having animation on floats, having these moving figures and little things that turned around and then went up and down.

And that was powered by Boy Scouts who were inside the floats and just moving the various levers and the switches.

Someone who knows floats inside and out is Blaine Kern for a half century, Kern has been responsible for building the floats of many parades.

The son of a sign painter from Algiers Current combined a love for art and Mardi Gras.

He started helping his father, Bill floats for neighborhood crews and took art lessons.

Oh, yeah.

Leonard, Frederick, John Mccrady.

Oh, no.

Oh, admit, look, I worked with great guys, in other words, and I mean talented individuals apprenticing to longtime float builders.

Henry Soulis and Harry Crescents.

Kern learned his craft by 1953.

He was building the Wrecks Parade.

His big break came in the mid-fifties when the new captain of Rex wanted to add some visual excitement to the parade.

Tall and fat.

He was a very worldly man.

And he said, Blaine we're going to really improve, Rex.

I'm going to send you over to the original in Italy.

Carnival in Villa Regio is renowned for its animated figures made from papier maché.

He said, Blaine, I want to make this.

And after I'd come back from Europe, I want to make our parade look like that over there.

He sent me over and I don't know, his mid-twenties or something like that.

And my God, my eyes opened up.

I was looking a genius and they showed me how they did some of this animation and they were just something you never learned in a school.

But I went down and there I went to O'Connell, the niece.

I went to called a man's Frankfurt in Cologne, Prince Carnival and I went to a blend theme, as they say.

And anyway, but I got what a tremendous education.

I saw the incredible cut colors that the Italians have the walk in heads and figures in China.

Absolutely.

What?

Crazy about it.

But he did this out of his own pocket.

He paid the Rex organization.

Didn't pay.

He did this on his own.

He was more than just a stockbroker.

He was a very imaginative man, a guy who believed in the tradition of Rex and who who really ran that ran the group with a great, great eye to tradition and to originality.

The first year, we imported three or four figures.

I forget what it was, and we did some work ourselves, some of the animation.

But I also brought in the colors of Alphabet, which were much more brilliant and brilliant, rather stronger.

Karen's business kept growing.

Yet, if ever there was a temptation, it was a job offer from one of America's most famous creators of popular entertainment.

Disney offered me a job to come and work for him.

This is the true story.

But Darwin fantasies, son, let me tell you, you're going to do good art that says you're good and you're going to make it out there, but you're going to be a big fish in a big, big pond, he says.

You stay right here in New Orleans.

You'll be a big fish and a little part.

He says Mardi Gras is as opening to everybody This guy was a visionary, he says.

Everybody's going to be a part.

This is as it should be.

He said this.

He says, You'll be building more floats and everything.

You stay here.

And then Walt Disney was like a god to me, man.

I said No and that.

But yet, because he proved was proven so right By the mid 1960s, some Orleanians felt that Carnival had become tired and needed a boost for restaurateur owned Brennan Jr, known as PIP.

It was a mix of business and pleasure to do something about the celebration.

After the 1968 Mardi Gras season.

The hotel occupancy rate had dropped below 50%.

And if you remember back then we didn't have anywhere near the hotel rooms that we have in the city today.

So less than 50% of that figure was pretty dramatic.

So some of us professional men got together and said that we'd better do something about Mardi Gras from a visitors standpoint because obviously it was going down we weren't getting the visitors that we should have named after the Roman god of wine.

Bacchus had an earlier earthly incarnation.

Brennan's father had been part of a group called Bacchus that presented carnival balls for tourists in the 1950s.

The Sons new crew wanted to be different.

We wanted to put a very large parade on the streets with a lot of animation and and bringing in an international celebrity that would kind of boost the excitement and the interest for Mardi Gras.

So that's how Bacchus came about.

And we we think that we've accomplished our goal.

And a big departure from Carnival tradition would be a monarch chosen from that Mount Olympus of the West Hollywood entertainer.

Danny Kaye reigned as the first barkers.

Danny Kaye was a personal friend of ours.

He at the Register, a personal friend of my family.

And of course, Danny didn't know that much about the Mardi Gras celebrations.

He knew about Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but he really didn't know what it was all about.

Well, the first requirement was he wanted his head to be his designer.

So so that took place in California.

And then second of all, it was very cold that particular night.

I mean, really cool.

So he wanted a heated blanket on the float.

Well, as you know, that's very difficult because of floats.

Not that back in those days, the float was not prepared to plug in a warm, heated blanket.

So we got a heated I mean, we got a blank and I said, sure, Danny is plugged in, let's go.

And he said, man, it's cold.

Up there.

I don't know why.

But of course, when he got on that float and he saw all those people out on the street and of course, he thought they were all there just for him, then his adrenaline's started pumping and he got on stage and the rest is history.

He didn't know more to use that blanket than a man in the moon.

Pip Brennan's memories of Bob Hope's reign include the handling of a purely practical matter.

We had to stop the parade in front of the Junge Hotel and so Bob could go to the bathroom, and we had to take him off the float.

And you can imagine what that going through the throngs of people, because when the float stopped and he started to descend the float, and you can imagine what was going on with the excitement.

And then we had to get him through the crowd with the hordes of police.

And they were really tough into the Joan Lobby, into the menu of most barkers.

Celebrity Kings reign graciously with one notable exception well, one was Jackie Gleason, which disappointed us because everybody remembers Ralph Kramden.

And he really wasn't that bad.

But he was he was difficult and one of the main reasons he was difficult was he flew in on the Saturday early evening and just leaving the Bob Hope Golf Classic.

So he was tired.

Then he had just quit smoking and just quit drinking.

And then number three, he and his wife had a terrible argument on the way down.

So he was not in a good mood.

And it kind of it kind of rubbed off for the whole weekend.

He was a little difficult.

But when he got on that float, that adrenaline started pumping and that stage appearance came and he he really performed to me.

Now, are you having a good time?

Oh, the king commands that.

You have fun.

Yeah.

Oh.

Oh, the king commands that you enjoy yourself.

Not to be outshined by the stars are the floats themselves.

Yet another bacchanalian innovation floats linked together in tandem to create a much larger world.

I was at a plane and a delta plane at the New Orleans airport, and unfortunately, there was a plane that had crashed and I was inside our plane.

We were already on the way to a to take off, so they didn't bring us back.

We had to sit there for an hour.

So I was watching what was going on, and I saw all these little carts running around pulling luggage around.

And you might have five or six carts going behind a track.

And I said, Well, how can they do that?

Because when you turn the first machine, each one of them cut shorter and shorter.

So I investigated that, found out how they did it.

And then I got together with Blaine Curry and I said, Look, let's build these two floats.

Put them together.

Well, the back of Gator was the was the float that we ultimately, with our idea, put two folks together.

Then we put three floats together.

And the concept was to to build the biggest and largest float ever built.

And then we had the World's Fair going at the time, and I was involved in designing a wheelchair and Blaine had designed irrigate the World's Fair and built big alligators.

There were several big alligators after the World's Fair.

It ended.

We took that alligator head and the body, the front part of it, and we brought it over there and put it on a float signature floats such as the Boca Gator are the ones that we see in a parade every year.

Also included in Baucus's menagerie or King Kong and family our first year, we had the girl in Kong's hand, and the hand moved up and down, and we had to take her off not too long after the parade started because she got motion sickness and they put her in a chemise.

And God would have a gorgeous come in and say, But what do you think happened?

All the guys were laying out in the street in front of we couldn't get the floats through.

The size of the floats isn't the only thing.

The back has changed in Carnival.

According to one fan of the season, the tradition of throwing trinkets from the floats was forever changed.

With the coming of the Bacchus parade.

Prior to that, parades through favors from the floats and they were very rare.

When you caught a pair of beads from the float, it was like a treasure because very few were thrown.

Well, I brought some for my collection.

I think these were thrown in the fifties no later than the sixties, and these were the famous beads made in Czechoslovakia and in so many different varieties but once the super crews came, instead of throwing maybe one pair of beads per block, they now throw hundreds and hundreds and I don't even know, maybe thousands of beads per block.

And now they're really very valuable.

And of course, at one time we used to fight for these and break in your hands or wind up in the gutters.

But they really, I think, a much better quality than the plastic that we have now.

But when my children were growing up, if they didn't catch an entire bag full of beads at a parade, it was considered that the parade wasn't a success.

You might remember the I think they were called rice beads, and I don't really think they're made out of rice with they kind of look like it.

And if you have any of these in your attic, hang on to them because they're they're actually quite valuable.

Now, I'm not sure this is true, but they say that the reason all the houses are sinking in New Orleans is because the attics are filled with beads New Orleans police are now on strike.

What happened on the vote was unanimous.

What do you think what do you think of this strike?

It's good.

Why is it good?

Why is any strike good?

For so many years, the people have never cared about the New Orleans Police Department.

Finally, we're showing them that we live in a city and we pay taxes and we'd like to have a little benefits.

Instead of a mayor making $60,000 a year, why can't we make a decent living?

In 1979?

As Mardi Gras approached the New Orleans police went on strike.

They wanted more bargaining power and benefits.

They used the parades as leverage when the police strike first started, I think public sentiment was solidly behind the police.

Dutch Morial was was mayor of New Orleans he was he was the new mayor.

He was the city's first black mayor.

And so for a certain segment of population he was unpopular and in being tested and of course people just emotionally like the police News anchorman Dennis Walter covered the strike and recalls the first weekend of the parade season before the decision was made not to parade at all.

You wouldn't know if tomorrow's parade or even tonight's parade was going to be going on.

I mean, things things were that fluid.

We would find out an hour, a couple of hours in advance whether a parade was canceled or not.

We don't realize how many people have certain days as part of their traditions and as part of their rituals.

For example, back on Sunday uptown, I mean, there's people have been having parties for years in Endymion, Endymion Saturday along the Canal Street rope.

And of course, there were some parades.

Some Orleans Fair Paris parades that did parade in Jefferson Parish that that year.

But there were other parades, including the old line parades like MoMA's and produce and comas and Rex that then that being in New Orleans and being in Saint Charles Avenue was so much a part of their tradition and their culture that they just could not parade anywhere else.

Is the strike went on and on and as and has the police stood firm and as they brought in a Teamsters official from Detroit.

Gradually, sentiment shifted from the police side to the mayor.

WDSU news anchor Norman Robinson also covered the strike when he was a reporter for WWL.

The people who came in had no real understanding of local politics, of a local landscape.

They came across as as as dubious as rather shady.

And and the public was turned off and they made a lot of political blunders as a result of that.

One of the most uncomfortable things happened when a a band of striking police officers turned into a roving mob and went down to egged the mayor's house.

I thought that was rather, rather bizarre.

And and it got really touchy for a while because the mayor's bodyguards who were police officers themselves, put their hands on their weapons.

And there was almost a confrontation.

It could have really gotten ugly had cooler heads not prevailed.

So the Tuesday before Mardi Gras, I called together everybody that had not paraded at that point and proposed that we just call it off.

I remember the mayor called us all in and and asked us for it.

Ask us would we cooperate?

And there was no problems at all.

Very little discussion.

Everybody said, of course, with the decision to cancel the parades, the strike fell apart as the duly elected mayor of this city.

It would have been irresponsibility of the worst sort to go to that type of demand.

It would have been an abdication of my responsibilities in a repr to surrender that decision making authority to a union, not accountable, responsive to the electorate.

A very decisive moment.

And to me, one of the really important moments in the whole history of Carnival was this evening when the crew captains on television standing next to the mayor issued a statement saying, we will not be held hostage by the Teamsters Union.

We will not parade.

Now, part of the strategy of the police and the unions was they were thinking, look, people in New Orleans are so crazy about parading that that, you know, they're gonna run in parade, never do anything.

They're going to settle there to settle this just so they can parade.

At least they didn't carry out what they had tried to do.

And I think the I think the city was glad that we did it that way.

I think it was a big moment for Morial, too, getting the backing of, I guess, what you call the Mardi Gras establishment and getting their full support.

I think he always felt grateful to the carnival for standing behind him And in fact, Morial was a very good mayor and a very supportive mayor for Mardi Gras.

I thought he he he demonstrated superb statesmanship I, I think his actions during the police strikes set the tone for his administration.

Even though the parades in New Orleans were canceled, Mardi Gras was still celebrated.

That was my job, to go on the street to see what what it was like without without a traditional fat Tuesday.

And I approached this this figure standing in the middle of the street with a pig's head mask on And I thought that's really symbolic.

What's the significance of this mask?

What are you trying to say?

Well, I get called pig all year.

Long, so I'm going to mass like one.

It was hilarious and sad at the same time because the police were so dispirited by then.

We just out here, we want to try to get a contract.

Most of us want to be back at work.

We don't want to be out here.

Mardi Gras Day would rather be in front of the parade route.

With the people.

We all enjoy working.

And we're just forced to be out here right now.

On Fat Tuesday, a team of almost 1100 national guardsmen and state police troopers stood in for the New Orleans Police.

It was a little creepy to see the National Guard standing there with rifles.

It was just something rather menacing about it.

But they were good natured and they seemed to warm to the celebration.

And there were there were lots of jokes about them and what was going on.

I remember the National Guard a little bit.

I mean, it was like there were extra costumes, everyone.

That was the theme to some of the costumes color mass around their necks.

Were flowers in their lapels and they were totally relaxed.

And I thought then had the magic of Carnival had been able to even disintegrate their most severe stance in the French Quarter.

It was like a festival.

It was it was a street festival.

I think by Mardi Gras.

What happened is that the pressure was over.

I mean, there couldn't be any more damage done.

We lost the parades.

And so the day itself was a street festival.

But what people forget when they talk about how nice Mardi Gras was, was how painful the week and a half week there was.

It was really something that really tore at this community.

Over the years, Carnival has witnessed many changes.

By the early 1950s, the use of mules to pull the parade floats through the city streets was discontinued.

When he was pulling garbage bags, that's where the mules came from to power the floats.

See, the all year long the mules pull the garbage wagons.

And at Mardi Gras, the mules qualified.

And that was a source of power.

That was before the Russian tractor showed up.

I knew some of the mules intimately because we used to go back by the club in area and play around there and some of the music from the club.

And during the rest were from the city sanitation department and you'd have a mule.

Skinners would be leading a mule little team in the parade.

And he'd have a red cape on with the hood.

Look like the Devil's Apprentice or something.

The mules pull in this very elegant float.

And of course, the mules would leave behind their message every now and then made for a very earthy remembrance.

I remember one mule just sat down on the ground, you know, the pull pull on it.

But it was great.

That meant the parade wasn't leaving, you know, and it was not leaving.

He was enjoying it, not leaving.

It was really funny to watch.

This is this is this these crazy mules.

And I was very sorry to see the mules go.

Quite frankly, tractors have nothing on mules.

Many Carnival fans felt there was no better place to watch the parades than the French Quarter.

Traditionally part of the parade route this 1954 national broadcast of the Columbus Parade on Mardi Gras night gives us a glimpse of what it was like on those historic streets.

When you were watching that parade you were watching the scale the carnival of parades the the old time was I'm talking about that was scaled enough to go down that street that Royal Street against the backdrop of that in the sixties 19 is essentially a 19th century celebration the look of it in its 19th century setting it was magical because the sounds reverberated against the buildings, the backdrops of balconies, the intimacy of those old line crews which had such beautiful floats rolling down those small streets was really intoxicating.

Probably my best Mardi Gras memories are marching with the Warren East in high school man in the sixties through the French Quarter.

Now the minute we turn off Canal Street onto Royal, it was another world, you know, with the flammable lights playing off the buildings those 200 year old buildings in the crowd.

And so really right up on top of you, it was unlike anything I've ever experienced since then.

Many people saw parades in the French Quarter through television on WDSU.

This was mill level in a at the studios at 520 Royal Street and so what they did is stick a camera on the balcony and that would be there sometimes to have like a celebrity guest.

And so they would just be shooting them in the parade would pass.

And so each evening during parade season four is that the parades after the news at 1030 you have this half hour worth and the parade would melt with no telling about it.

So that was the viewpoint that many New Orleanians saw the parades and the waterfront that's the sunflower in the middle of your picture here the picture is governed by another quotation, that of Maude as the sunflower turns to her a guy that's when he said in 1969 when the crew of Bacchus premiered the size of its floats proved cumbersome for the quarter.

The crowd was so close to the floats and they were from wall to wall.

And then the noise and the whole thing I at one time I can remember this very well because at one moment I thought to myself, I said, you know, this is really serious and there's a danger, such a very dangerous situation here.

Responding to concerns from the police and fire departments, the city banned parades from the French Quarter after the 1972 season.

They knew larger parades clearly were having trouble navigating the French Quarter.

So there were the ones that should have been kept out it made no sense to ban the the old parades and it was a great loss but perhaps the greatest loss for fans of the old line carnival parades came in 1992.

What's before us today is discrimination.

An ordinance passed by the city council was intended to address allegations of discrimination on the part of carnival organizations.

Some of the oldest crews viewed the ordinance as government interference.

I think that what's happened with these crews that are pulling out is that they sort of say well if they don't want us then we won't do it.

In addition to feeling like perhaps some of that anger is what is really out in the street and perhaps they're not safe, I don't think the problems are as bad as it might appear to be.

I would think that maybe some members are saying that, you know, they don't want anyone to tell them what to do.

And I can appreciate that.

I understand that.

But on other hand, I think if you look at the law and tell us what's wrong with it, after several months of hearings and based on the recommendations of an advisory committee, the ordinance was rewritten and called for crews to sign an affidavit.

It was really a very complicated issue, but in its simplest form, the city council asked every parading organization to sign an affidavit that would promise they would not discriminate on any basis, really for membership.

And in good conscience, the line crews couldn't possibly sign that for 125 years.

They had used a blackball system where when someone applied for membership, any single member could veto that membership.

I think they felt that to do otherwise would mean the government was dictating to them how they should organize themselves and what their procedures should be.

And so that was one of the reasons they decided not to parade in 1992 moments and commerce ceased parading the next year.

Proteus did the same.

No longer a part of the scene of those three nighttime parades with a history and tradition that linked to the 19th century origins of the New Orleans style Carnival parade though they don't parade anymore, the three crews still staged their carnival balls, culminating in Comas Mardi Gras evening festivities the traditional grand finale of the season is the meeting of the Courts of Commerce and Rex, a ceremony that dates back to 1882.

The meeting of the courts means many things.

It is one of the great rituals in all of Carnival and certainly in all of New Orleans.

It's very imposing, it's very lofty.

It's also a little sad because you hate to see it in and around.

The meeting of the court's marks but then from the perspective of the ball floor is supposed to represent the beginning of the end of the carnival season when Rex and Commerce meet.

Good evening.

I'm Terry Gross.

Now, I think even more importantly is that with the television broadcast live, there's a whole generation that used to watch the broadcast going on on Channel six each morning waiting for a half hour.

We'd have a very stilted broadcast just showing showing the meaning of the two course, showing the ritual when they meet.

It was it was not great TV by any sense.

But it was happening.

It was something that was happening, was something that was us.

It was something that was New Orleans.

The last broadcast of a meeting of reports on Channel six was in 1991 in 1997 Louis began broadcasting the Rex Ball and resumed coverage of the meeting of the courts.

Sometimes it's is very slow, it's very ritualized, but it means something to people just to see it because it's something that's genuine, it's something that's a tradition that evolved that predated television, that predated the real emphasis on tourism.

It was just a way of people doing something.

And I think that there's an audience out there that just like seeing this because it is part of New Orleans, it's one more thing that just makes us a little bit different as a community.

You get up on Mardi Gras day and as a feeling it's a soap it's a certain something special.

It is deep down within, and it's a certain joy and a certain happiness.

Carnival is the cultural bedrock of New Orleans.

It embodies the city's passions for music, masquerade, dance, parades.

Our New Year begins on Mardi Gras.

We even say such things as I'll start my diet after Mardi Gras.

One year in college, I went fishing on Tuesday I think it's unforgivable.

Many years I had my guns on my side and I was Annie Oakley as somebody to me.

Chief Champagne.

The moon pie was the perfect way to toast the end of the carnival season.

The crowd has an odor itself, and those days a little bit different smelled more like Subrosa.

Nowadays, a spell smells more like a band.

When the last band marches past and the last confetti is thrown.

Little Old Orleans will settle down once more, but they'll have plenty to talk about until next year.

Mardi Gras.

The passing parade is made possible by the WYES Producer Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of Channel Twelves.

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