WDSU 75 Years: The heart of the story from the hearts of our journalists
"For first time in my life I felt like a real public servant": How stories of change changed the lives of WDSU journalists over the decades.
"For first time in my life I felt like a real public servant": How stories of change changed the lives of WDSU journalists over the decades.
"For first time in my life I felt like a real public servant": How stories of change changed the lives of WDSU journalists over the decades.
For 75 years, people have been the passion of journalists at WDSU, telling your stories and making sure the voices of everyday people are heard. Many even put themselves in harms way to do it.
Photojournalist Arnie Bourgeois remembers the Howard Johnson Shooting vividly. A sniper, Mark Essex, was perched atop the downtown New Orleans hotel, shooting and killing nine people before he was killed by police. Bourgeois, who had just joined the ranks of WDSU after leaving the combat zone in Vietnam, was tasked with making sure those images from our camera made it into your home.
"They needed a photographer. Particularly, they didn’t have any Black photographers. I was a rarity. I was an anomaly," said Bourgeois.
He started in the engineering department and quickly got behind the camera. The war veteran had served in Air Force and leaned on his real-life combat experience to navigate the neighborhoods in New Orleans.
"One of the things that got my attention and I was involved in, and it almost got me killed, was the drug wars," said Bourgeois. "Just trying to stop that insanity with the crank cocaine came into existence."
Growing up in the Carrollton neighborhood, Bourgeois saw both personally and professionally how drugs were impacting his community.
"We were covering drug dealers, and we were a little coo-coo going into areas where reporters wouldn’t go," said Bourgeois. "I worked with Iris Kelso. Iris was just good with connecting with people in the Black community and they would bring her the story. She related to their experiences and she would run them."
Heath Allen, who started his run in WDSU in the early 1990s, relied on the photographer's knowledge to pinpoint the big local story.
"The Arnie Bougeouis', the Dominic Martins, the Hubie Vigreuxs, they knew more about the people in the city than a lot of the reporters did," said Allen.
It was also a challenging time with a crime wave gripping New Orleans.
"Those were the years when we were the murder capital of America. Those are those were the years where there were 400 murders in the city," said Allen. "I remember coming back with a bullet hole in the car, and we didn’t even know that we have been shot at."
"They brought in Richard Pennington, the chief, who came in and kind of turn things around at that point. But everybody was concerned about the future of the city at that point because it was not safe to walk the streets," said Allen.
However, one of the most pivotal moments for our reporters and photographers was Hurricane Katrina.
"It’s like a brand. It’s like a mark. You can’t get rid of it. It’s going to be with you forever," said Allen.
He and photojournalist Tom Fitzgerald rode out the storm as the floodwaters inundated St. Bernard Parish. The pair was missing for days.
"Tom Fitzgerald and I did Katrina together. And through the whole thing, he's a man who never complained. He was the point. He was the tip end of the spear. He was incredible, and he just did this incredible photography under the worst circumstances," said Allen. "Our car was underwater, and Tom realize that he left all of his tapes in the car. Tom said, in the middle of the storm, winds are blowing, water is rising three feet deep everywhere and he said, 'I gotta go move the car. I gotta go move the car.' I said, 'What are you doing? Don’t move the! Where are you going move it to? Stay away from the car.' I looked the other way and he’s gone. He literally got in the car while it was floating away. It was floating away. He got in the back of the car and grabbed a box of tapes or they would not be a picture of Katrina."
WDSU stayed on the air continuously, even using our Hearst sister stations as hubs to get information out to people who evacuated and their families.
"It tested us. It tested us as human beings, as journalists. It tested our courage," said former anchor Norman Robinson. "It tested our determination to stay with us because we had a sense this was the end of the world for us."
Notable faces like Robinson were not only telling the story but living it in the months and years to follow.
"As journalists, we started demanding answers, remember? We were the people's champions for the first time in my life. I felt like a real public servant," said Robinson.
From the floodwaters, the WDSU Hot Seat was born.
The station would go on to cover other natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti and manmade conflicts as we followed our local troops overseas.
"We went there and talked to soldiers who were on the ground in the mountains of Afghanistan, and then we came back and talk to their families," said Allen. "The impact of when a man or woman in a serving over here at the whole family deploys."
The heart of the story is from the hearts of our journalists, getting to the hearts of Louisiana.
"To me, that is a duty to the business you were in, that I am in," said Bourgeois. "To communicate that to the community, to the people how we are alike and not how different we are."
"This place has a footprint you can’t measure," said Allen. "But the national impact starts one person at a time. One percent of the time, that’s how the impact begins, and that’s why does station has always been successful."