Tinderbox
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IN NEW ORLEANS, reports surfaced that authorities had not inspected the Up Stairs Lounge for more than two years. Although fire prevention experts recommended an inspection of structures every six months, the New Orleans Fire Department (NOFD) cited a staffing shortage to explain why the burnt-out bar had last been inspected in March 1971. Simultaneously explaining and excusing their shortfall, NOFD representatives complained that the entire French Quarter was allotted just one inspector. “Decorations in the Up Stairs Lounge, I’m sure, were not fireproof,” fire examiner Norman J. Guererra told the Times-Picayune. “If the inspector had been able to get there, I’m sure he would have tested the decorations and made them change them.”20
Most New Orleanians seemed willing to accept this pretext: a holocaust of flame in a tinderbox lit by an arsonist could never have been prevented or minimized. The front fire door that didn’t close when exposed to heat, the rayon wallpaper that went up within seconds, the window bars trapping people inside, the back entrance without a functioning Exit sign—all of this was, officials implied through the media, neither the responsibility nor the liability of city or state agencies doing their best.21
The only semblance of blame leveled by authorities continued to be directed at the Vieux Carré Commission. “They’re only concerned with design authenticity,” railed Assistant State Fire Marshal Timothy Driscoll, “and to hell with safety.” Driscoll’s campaign to clean up the “firetraps” resulting in an unprecedented series of inspections, with nearly one hundred French Quarter buildings visited and more than a thousand violations cited. Exit signs would receive new lightbulbs. Fines would be paid. A letter to Advocate editor Rob Cole described how “Alice Brady’s bar (gay) had to remove some grill work that was in front of a window,” in addition to how “Lafitte (gay) put in a new side door so now it has three exits.” The Central Business District, the neighborhood that actually contained the Up Stairs Lounge, escaped inspectors’ attentions throughout the month of July.22
Speaking in the defense of this misdirection, Mayor Moon Landrieu would explain to the Times-Picayune that, even though the Up Stairs Lounge was not officially in the French Quarter, “the fire there did alert inspectors to the dangers of fire in any area congested with people and buildings.” Indeed, the mayor had returned to his offices at City Hall without ceremony on Monday, July 9. He landed more than two weeks after the deadly fire, having completed his European trip by spending a final night in the Kong Frederik Hotel in Copenhagen. Back at his desk, Landrieu answered official letters and made proclamations. He gave a statement to Living Magazine, but his office rebuffed the Vieux Carré Courier’s attempts to speak to him about the fire, claiming that the mayor was still out of the country.23
Landrieu thus did not offer comments on the Up Stairs Lounge case, even though a decidedly laissez-faire attitude characterized his police department’s investigation following the July 2 discovery of Roger Dale Nunez. On July 6, according to the state fire marshal’s report on the Up Stairs Lounge, John Perino of Charity Hospital security notified the NOPD that Roger had recovered from surgery and was ready to be released. The fracture in the suspect’s jaw had been closed with sutures on July 2. Four days later, he displayed no trouble speaking, even though police claimed to be making “periodic checks on Mr. Nunez,” during which they were told the patient was “unable to converse due to the operation on his jaw.” Nonetheless, “the New Orleans Police Department didn’t send anyone to take a statement from this subject,” reported the security guard to deputy state fire marshals. Nor did the NOPD send an officer to detain or supervise the suspect until detectives could arrive. Meanwhile, Roger phoned his mother, Rose Choate, in Abbeville, Louisiana, and requested that she make the long drive to pick him up.24
Thus, when no officer from the NOPD turned up to delay Roger, and with no instructions to do otherwise, Charity Hospital discharged the patient to his mother’s care. Theirs was a medical facility, after all, not a prison. Roger wandered into sunlight with a partially wired jaw. He set free foot in front of free foot. He hopped into his mother’s car and directed her through the miasma of New Orleans in the full daze of summer. They drove to pick up his things at Cee Cee Savant’s on Iberville Street. Roger was now informally “at large” from several authorities, who wanted him for active investigations.25
According to the NOPD report, Detectives Schlosser and Gebbia arrived at Charity Hospital on July 7 and were flummoxed to learn that Roger had already been released “on July 6”—or so the detectives insisted in their account. The NOPD report includes a parenthetical note: “Detectives Schlosser and Gebbia were not notified of his release as requested.” But hospital records reviewed by the state fire marshal said otherwise, with Roger Dale Nunez released on July 7 and police notification the day prior. Police were informed, according to Charity Hospital security, and Roger Nunez left on July 7 before Schlosser and Gebbia arrived and claimed to discover the suspect’s supposed “early” release.26
Schlosser and Gebbia’s police report makes a special point of blaming hospital security, much in the same manner that they critiqued Deputy State Fire Marshal Edward Hyde on July 2. However, after discovering Roger’s discharge, the detectives failed to immediately notify other law enforcement agencies of the missing man. Investigators for the state fire marshal, in fact, wouldn’t learn that Roger Dale Nunez had eluded police custody until July 11—four full days of noncommunication, during which Schlosser and Gebbia claimed to be “making attempts to locate Nunez,” who by then had fled New Orleans.27
On July 9, the detectives interviewed Gene Davis, Roger’s former employer. In an official statement, Davis claimed to have sat on the hood of a car with a view of the Up Stairs Lounge on Sunday, June 24, and was certain that “nobody was in front of the building for ten to fifteen minutes, maybe even twenty minutes before [the fire].” This account seemed to squash the possibility of arson. But Davis had, in fact, contradicted this testimony more than two weeks before, on the night of June 24, when he told a UPI reporter how he came upon the fire. “I heard all the commotion and ran out into the street,” said Davis. “There was Luther Boggs—I cash checks for him—dancing at the window with his clothes on fire.” How could Davis hear the commotion and run into the street if he was already in the street and facing the bar?28 Nonetheless, detectives did not explore why Davis might have changed his story.
In the midst of these snafus, Sergeant Frank Hayward, the information officer assigned as the NOPD mouthpiece for the Up Stairs Lounge case, was suspended from the force pending an investigation into his acceptance of illicit moneys from the film crew during the late June production of My Name Is Nobody. Evidently, a producer working for Sergio Leone had written Hayward a $300 check to avoid “a great deal of trouble.” Hayward admitted to accepting the check on June 21 and cashing it thereafter. Mayor Landrieu felt compelled to speak in Hayward’s defense. “I have great respect for Officer Hayward and they are going to have to prove to me he tried to shake somebody down,” said the mayor, while demurring that perhaps some mistakes “may have been made.” A grand jury subsequently exonerated Hayward, even though his unreported “financial reward” for off-duty work was against NOPD rules.29
YET ANOTHER FIRE survivor became a fatality on July 10, when Luther Boggs succumbed to his wounds at Charity Hospital. A World War II and Korean war veteran, Luther died holding the hand of MCC minister Paul Breton.
Having opened the door to the bar’s front staircase that Sunday night in June, Luther’s skin had melted away, and third-degree burns covered nearly half of his body surface, including his lips and face. Clinging to life for sixteen days, he developed bronchopneumonia and cerebral edema—a swelling of the brain tissue—inside his sterile tent as ministers watched on and prayed. He expired through brain failure, while choking on his own blood, having never again seen his best friend, Jeanne Gosnell, who was still healing at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital.30
The day after Luther Boggs’s dea
th, Mayor Landrieu held his first press conference of the month. Speaking from his office on Wednesday, July 11, Landrieu addressed the pressing matters of government. He criticized a property tax plan proposed by the Louisiana Assessors’ Association. He opposed efforts to ease so-called corruption by placing the city’s police and fire departments under state jurisdiction. And he issued his first words about the Up Stairs Lounge, advocating for sprinkler laws to be instituted statewide “on a reasonable basis.” Landrieu seemed ready to change the subject when Bill Rushton pressed the mayor with a pointed question about the “homosexual angle,” which drew eye rolls from the establishment press.31
“I’m just as concerned about that life as any other life,” Landrieu responded. “I was not aware of any lack of concern in the community.” These comments must have lacked fundamental newsworthiness to Times-Picayune and States-Item reporters, who either did not deem them important or attempted to include them in the day’s coverage but were overruled by Landrieu-friendly editors like Charles Ferguson at the States-Item.32
At 6:45 a.m. the following morning, Up Stairs Lounge patron Larry Stratton also died in Charity Hospital. Burns covered 80 percent of his body.33 Stratton had spent two years in the marine corps, from August 23, 1967, to November 26, 1969. His time in the marines, America’s “first to fight” military force, included a tour of duty in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. The deaths of these two veterans, Luther Boggs and Larry Stratton, thus coincided with Mayor Landrieu’s statement of absolution.
Larry Stratton was the Up Stairs Lounge fire’s final and thirty-second victim—and one of its youngest. At the time of his death, Stratton was twenty-five and weighed just 113 pounds. His had been a fledging life in New Orleans, but he had clung to it for weeks after falling from the windows of a burning bar. No one really knew how to eulogize him, other than perhaps noting his time in the military. Some whispered about a lover, a devastated young man named Lynn Cobb, but whatever stories or secrets held the keys to Stratton’s past, whoever he’d loved in his home on 2719 Burgundy Street, vanished unrecorded with his last breaths.34
Between July 10 and July 17, NOPD detectives continued to search for Roger Dale Nunez or anyone with information pertaining to the fire. “However,” they noted, “all attempts were to no avail.” During this period, deputy state fire marshals received a tip from Morgan City, Louisiana. On July 13, the police there pulled over a person named Roger Dale Nunez during a routine traffic stop related to a local burglary. That officer from Morgan City, a bayou town located about seventy miles west of New Orleans, could not have been aware that Roger was wanted for questioning by anyone and simply let him go. At the time, Roger was driving a 1966 Plymouth Fury registered to his name and the address 305 South Valery Street in Abbeville—the home of Roger’s mother.35 It was apparent that Roger Dale Nunez had not fled the state of Louisiana.
AS ROGER CONTINUED to evade law enforcement, the cremains of Up Stairs Lounge victim Bud Matyi were interred in Glendora, California, at a service attended by friends, ex-lovers, and children. Rod Wagener, still at odds with Matyi’s spouse, Pamela Cutler, was openly discouraged from attending, and therefore did not make the trip. “I think it’s because of my mother,” insisted Tina Marie Matyi. “My grandmother said his ‘manager’ would not be coming because of the confrontation with my mom.” For Rod Wagener, Bud’s loss was calamitous. He would relinquish their lakefront condo and move to the Irish Bayou in eastern New Orleans, where he isolated himself outside of work hours and mourned privately for several years.36
On a verdant summer day, a small crowd gathered before an urn. Matyi’s wife, Pamela Cutler, and his ex-wife, Mary Griego, sat in positions of honor. Tina Marie Matyi, only four, was old enough to understand some of what was happening at the burial. “You do feel that you get robbed of your childhood,” recounted Tina. The little girl could not stop dreaming about her dad dying at the piano, as people had told her. She did not know—and would not know for years—how he perished while likely attempting to sacrifice his body for another in the midst of an inferno, how they found him 95 percent burned on the piano stage protecting Willie Inez Warren, who was only 35 percent burned but nonetheless became the fire’s lone female victim.37
Although Tina had few recollections of her father, she could vaguely remember the song her dad liked to sing most at the piano, because it was also her favorite: “The Impossible Dream” from the musical Man of La Mancha. In the weeks that followed, she asked her mother to play that song repeatedly on the record player. She did not know why the part of the song about “unreachable stars” could make her cry.38
ENCOURAGED BY THE memorial service, gay leaders increased their focus on the Up Stairs Lounge. Morris Kight dispatched New Orleans Emergency Task Force member Morty Manford on a “national tour to mobilize gay organizations in major cities to form support groups.” On July 16, Manford met with the Gay Coalition of Denver. According to the press release, “many in attendance that night learned of the tragedy in detail for the first time and realized that this was an event every gay person must respond to.” The very next day, Manford rallied a massive assemblage in Chicago, representing the city’s United Front of Gay Organizations. Chicago groups volunteered to use their mailing lists—their primary means of connecting with closeted ranks—to conduct fund-raising. “These lists range in size from a few hundred to several thousand names,” said the press release. A front-page headline then appeared in the Chicago Gay Crusader: “Chicago Gays Mobilize to Aid Fire Victims.”39
On July 18, Manford spoke in Washington, D.C. On July 19, he was in Philadelphia. Following Manford’s tour, MCC Pastor Paul Breton made a similar trip around New England. “The most enthusiastic group so far has been the Homophile Union of Boston,” Breton wrote Dick Michaels, editor of The Advocate. Attracted to the cause but unable to donate money, gay prisoners at the Federal Correction Institution in Lompoc, California, and the California Medical Facility in Vacaville went on a two-hour hunger strike for the Up Stairs Lounge victims. Around the country, concerned citizens gave enough blood to the American Red Cross’s “New Orleans Catastrophe” account to raise the possibility of a “blood credit” for future gay emergencies.40
Checks poured forth into the National New Orleans Memorial Fund as The Advocate ran a series of Up Stairs Lounge stories and appealed directly to readers for donations: “We ask all who can to help with whatever money they can spare.” Money started arriving as early as June 30. By July 19, more than eighty checks—ranging from $5 to $334—had reached the magazine. Organizations in Oklahoma City, Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, Detroit, and Boston pitched in. These sums, small and large, represented nothing less than a countrywide outpouring.41
ON TUESDAY, JULY 31, the Orleans Parish coroner released the last fire victims to the city for public burial. In the end, Coroner Carl Rabin was able to positively identify twenty-nine of the fire’s thirty-two dead. The New Orleans Emergency Task Force viewed this percentage of identified bodies as remarkable, given the initial states of the bodies. The coroner also succeeded in moving twenty-eight of the victims out of the morgue and into funeral homes, where families (or, in Bill Larson’s case, the MCC of New Orleans) could make arrangements.42
The final four victims became property of the city, despite attempts by the MCC to claim them. NOPD Sergeant Joseph Vitari, speaking for the Coroner’s Office, told the Vieux Carré Courier that he was unable to release bodies to the MCC without a letter of exemption from Blake Arrata, the city attorney. When the MCC sought out Arrata, his office told them that such an exemption “might open up possibilities for later lawsuits by relatives against MCC, the city, and the Coroner’s Office.” Arrata then denied the church’s request and condemned four people to public graves. Three of the bodies—numbers 18, 22, and 28—were burned so badly that they could never be given names.43
Additionally, the body of Ferris LeBlanc was identified at the eleventh hour using an antique ring made from a silver spoon. The Coroner�
�s Office made this connection after an anonymous caller tipped them off about this piece of jewelry. “Authorities are requesting that the unknown caller contact police to provide further information on LeBlanc,” said a report in the States-Item. Sadly, the caller never reached out again. In an unfortunate coincidence, LeBlanc was a common French surname in Louisiana, and authorities grew frustrated with attempts to contact local households, ultimately abandoning their search. No one in the LeBlanc clan in California ever spoke to an official or received news of the death.44
Ferris LeBlanc’s sister, Marilyn, went on believing for decades that her brother was alive but not in touch due to the grudge he bore about moneys owed to their grandfather. Through a mix-up of surnames and fear of an acquaintance who would call authorities but not risk outing himself, Ferris LeBlanc received burial alongside those without kin. A fifty-year-old World War II veteran who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, he was interred in a plywood box. Though federal agencies assisting the city could have accessed military records to prevent this oversight, LeBlanc was buried without military honors in Panel Q, Lot 32 of Resthaven Memorial Park, a city-affiliated cemetery for indigents. As LeBlanc and the three unidentified bodies were lowered into the ground, MCC pastor Lucien Baril stood over them reading scripture. Ceremoniously, he blessed the caskets while wearing his red and white cassock.45
The bodies were then carefully covered with earth and left without markers. The trio of unknown victims would forever remain question marks to loved ones and friends, who would miss them without any certainty of being able to grieve. Body 18, an over-eighteen-year-old white male, for example, had no identifying tattoos and burns over 70 percent of him. Body 28, over 60 percent of his body charred, met his final resting place with pants and an undershirt still grafted to his skin. Body 23, 90 percent burned, was the most unrecognizable figure who had been pulled from the ruins. All that is known is that he met his end wearing brown shoes and black socks.46