Katrina Redux

PBS shines a prime-time spotlight on a Lower 9th Ward resident's long road home

Posted by Dave Walker, TV columnist, The Times-Picayune
January 06, 2009 5:00AM

Herbert Gettridge was Hollywood waiting to happen.

Anderson Cooper saw it, felt it, knew it. Billy Crystal did, too.

How could they not? Octogenarian living alone in the Lower 9th Ward, rebuilding all by himself the house he built, the one that the feeble levees ruined.

No gas. No electricity. But still: Lights, camera, action.

Cooper came, and kept coming back, for CNN. Crystal found Gettridge for HBO's 2006 "Comic Relief" benefit broadcast.

Filmmaker June Cross found Gettridge during Carnival 2006.

"I'd been down there before, and there were always people sort of poking around," she said in a recent phone interview. "And I saw this guy with his wheelbarrow who looked like Sisyphus -- he was all by himself down there with a wheelbarrow.

"Initially, he didn't want to talk to me. I finally walked away. And he struck up a conversation with my cameraman, and I sort of came back later.

"I didn't go off looking for somebody to be a subject. I was really interested in, how was the city going to come back? And what was going to determine who would be able to come back? And how would all that happen?"

Cross' film, "The Old Man and the Storm," is more than a profile in perseverance. Through Gettridge's eyes, she tells the whole stumbling Road Home story - too familiar to locals, yet still mostly untold to most viewers out in the everywhere-else.

A professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Cross served as a staff producer at "Frontline" for nearly a decade. Before that, she worked as a producer for the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather" and PBS' "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour."

She came to New Orleans intending to do a story or a documentary or something about the first post-K Mardi Gras -- snippets of that are in the "Frontline" she eventually made -- but then found Gettridge.

"The film was going to be about the first Mardi Gras after Katrina," she said. "I had anticipated it being a big healing moment for the city, and actually I think it was."

She returned repeatedly for 18 months.

"Mr. Gettridge would always be there," she said. "He never had any power, but he was so determined, and in some ways represented the spirit of the city so well, I couldn't stop paying attention to him.

"He was just so gripping. There was something about him, such dignity. You look at him and you think you're looking at this sort of uneducated person who may not be very savvy, when in fact he's extremely savvy.

Cross learned about Gettridge's background as a master plaster man, his nine kids, a wife, Lydia, waiting in Wisconsin for the family home to become inhabitable again.

Gettridge -- who had work to do, after all -- was taciturn at first, stoic, a difficult interview.

"Initially," Cross said. "But he got used to me after a while. I was interested in his past, and I don't think anybody had treated him that way. They'd treated him as this sort of crazy old man living in the Lower 9th. And I wanted to know, 'What did you do before Hurricane Katrina?' The day I asked him that, you could almost hear the locks unlocking. He began to tell me."

The result, she said, "was a real tutorial, everything about New Orleans" -- or at least one segment of its culture.

"It was really hard to get him to shut up after a while," she said. "He was really lonely. I think he just wanted somebody to talk to."

Through Gettridge, Cross has attempted to tell the story of "a Kafkaesque place," she said, that has lived with the aftermath of devastation "while the rest of the United States moved on to other issues.

"You have to understand that on Monday the rule says this, on Tuesday the rule says that, on Wednesday they decided there aren't going to be any rules. On Thursday, Washington came in and said, 'Oh, we have to start all over again.'

"Mr. Gettridge was safe because he had the knowledge of what to do with his hands and how to rebuild something. And there are, I suspect, a lot of middle-class people who don't have that knowledge, who just fell through the cracks. They weren't poor enough to get a lot of federal aid, they weren't rich enough to handle it on their own. They've probably just gone bankrupt and disappeared into the statistics."

Not Gettridge, though. Lydia finally rejoined him in New Orleans, a bittersweet June 2008 homecoming that Cross caught on film. His work continues.

"I spoke to him the other day on the phone," Cross said. "He was on the way out the door, headed out, going to have a beer somewhere."