[Dixielandjazz] The Coroner of New Orleans

[Steve barbone]

Neat Story.

Cheers,
Steve


For Trumpet-Playing Coroner, Hurricane Provides Swan Song

By SHAILA DEWAN - October 17, 2005 - NY TIMES

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 12 - "I went down to St. James Infirmary/Saw my baby
there/Stretched out on a long white table/So sweet, so cold, so fair."

If this tune, made famous by Louis Armstrong, happens to be a favorite of
your local coroner, then either you are alarmed, or you are from New
Orleans.

If your coroner also plays the trumpet, is known as Dr. Jazz, and marches in
funeral processions wearing a white suit, then he is Dr. Frank Minyard, a
living illustration of the intimate connection between music and death in
New Orleans. 

Dr. Minyard, who has been the elected coroner of Orleans Parish since 1974,
has dealt with capsized riverboats, plane crashes, frequent murders and
police brutality investigations. On the slab in his basement morgue, he has
seen friends and mayors and people who were both.

Now, he has met his greatest challenge: the hundreds of bodies collected
from New Orleans and its neighboring parishes since Hurricane Katrina.

At 76, on the brink of a retirement that was supposed to combine oyster
dinners at his favorite restaurants with a simple life on his cattle farm on
the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, Dr. Minyard has found himself living
in an R.V. on the grounds of a temporary federal morgue in St. Gabriel, a
small town just outside Baton Rouge, grappling with the still-increasing
death toll, the bewildering red tape and the urgent calls of bereaved
families.

The process of identifying Hurricane Katrina's victims has been criticized
as painfully slow, and amid the parceling of blame state officials have
accused Dr. Minyard of obstructing the process by declining offers of help
despite a staff decimated by displacement and layoffs.

It is criticism he shrugs off, saying in an interview, "If they need someone
to point the finger at, that's O.K. with me." Sometimes he views the current
challenge as the natural culmination of his life.

"This is something that I was just destined to do," he says.

Other times, he sounds less certain, as on a recent day when he paid a rare
visit to his French Quarter apartment. Above the sofa, against the baroque
burgundy wallpaper, were photographs of Duke Dejan, Milton Batiste, Danny
Barker and other musical mentors, and a blow-up of a snapshot that has
become the popular Dr. Jazz souvenir shop poster - and once, during his only
contested election, was a campaign sign.

It shows Dr. Minyard circa 1980, standing on the levee in his white suit,
playing the trumpet. Of the people on the wall, he is the only one still
living.

"God has given me this swan song," he said, "to see if I am - to see if I am
up to it."

In the kind of twist that might strike New Orleanians as perfectly natural,
their coroner began his medical career as an obstetrician. Before that, he
was a tall, blue-eyed pretty boy: a lifeguard in the summers and, once,
second runner-up in a Mr. New Orleans bodybuilding contest. During medical
school, he said, he spent his summers in New York City giving "nightlife
tours." 

By the late 1960's, Dr. Minyard had a successful practice, a family, a
tennis court and a swimming pool, beside which he was sitting one day when
he heard Peggy Lee singing, "Is that all there is?"

"Prior to that I was very selfish, like most young doctors and lawyers and
dentists," said Dr. Minyard, who gave up his private medical practice soon
after he became coroner. "I was just trying to get the Cadillac and the
country club membership."

His pursuit of the coroner's office had nothing to do with the dead and
everything to do with Sister Mary David Young, a Catholic educator who ran a
breakfast program for poor children and called Dr. Minyard for fund-raising
help.

"She told me, 'The mothers of these kids, they're all prostitutes and
shoplifters,' " Dr. Minyard recalled. "I said, 'Well Sister, nobody's
perfect.' "

But it was worse than that. Some of the women were heroin addicts, and to
help them Dr. Minyard and Sister Mary David eventually founded what he says
was the city's first methadone clinic. Soon, he wanted to give methadone to
addicts in jail, and learned that in Louisiana, whose legal system is based
on the Napoleonic Code, the coroner was responsible for the medical care of
prisoners. The coroner at the time opposed methadone treatment for inmates,
Dr. Minyard said. 

The first time Dr. Minyard ran, in 1969, he lost to the incumbent. But four
years later, he and a slate of other candidates viewed as reformers -
including Harry Connick Sr., the "Singing D.A." - were swept into office.
Another of those candidates, Edwin Lombard, now a state appeals court judge,
recalled his befuddlement the first time he saw Dr. Minyard campaign: "I
said, 'This guy's a nut.' He's walking through the audience blowing the
trumpet - off-key, too."

As a child, Dr. Minyard learned to play the trumpet by ear. His mother and
grandmother were ragtime piano players. His father was descended, he says,
from one of two Minyard brothers who were sprung from the Bastille at the
onset of the French Revolution.

"I never did learn how they got into prison," he said. "They were probably
thieves and cutthroats." His parents met on a riverboat.

In a city obsessed with heritage and hijinks, this history helps make Dr.
Minyard a classic character. "In any other city," he says, "I couldn't be
elected dog catcher."

Instead of pursuing a career in music, Dr. Minyard went to medical school at
Louisiana State University. He did not pick up a trumpet again until his
late 30's, when he was guest on a radio talk show answering medical
questions and his mother called to say she was having his old horn
refurbished for his 12-year-old son.

His mother was unaware that their conversation was being broadcast, and it
led to an invitation for Dr. Minyard to come back and play.

The recital was not a critical success.

"Pete Fountain called in and said, 'If that's music, I'm going to shoot
myself because I don't want to be associated with it,' " Dr. Minyard said.

However inexpert his playing, Dr. Minyard became devoted to jazz, and soon
he was sitting in with the venerated Olympia Brass Band and hiring musicians
as morgue assistants to help them make ends meet. In his first year as
coroner, he was arrested while playing in the French Quarter to protest a
crackdown on street musicians.

As he likes to tell it, the judge told him to do something constructive with
his trumpet, so he started Jazz Roots, an annual concert featuring the
city's musical royalty that has raised $800,000 for city charities over the
past 30 years. It is advertised on the coroner's Web site, along with a
sample of Dr. Minyard's trumpet playing.

"In 31 years I've had nothing but happiness in a job that deals with
unhappiness," Dr. Minyard said over a truck-stop lunch near the morgue. He
has dined with Fats Domino and played the trumpet for Mike Wallace. Once, on
the airport tarmac, Pope John Paul II blessed his trumpet.

But lately, things have been grim. When the flooding began, Dr. Minyard
tried to swim to his office, and ended up marooned there four days. The
process of identifying Hurricane Katrina's victims may take more than a year
to complete. And though his own property and family were largely spared by
the storm, the vast majority of Louisiana's 1,035 dead are what he calls "my
people."

A few weeks ago, when he had a moment alone, the coroner took out his
trumpet and played a tune he had played hundreds of times before. "Do you
know what it means," his horn sang, "to miss New Orleans?"

This time, he said, the song made him cry.