In mid-November tour guides were added to the National Occupational Shortage list for the first time, encouraging skilled overseas workers to undertake the task. It can work both ways. Back in 1972 I did a stint as a tourist guide in New Orleans, starting within days of being dropped off in the heart of the city on a Sunday morning while hitchhiking through the southern states.
The streets of the French Quarters were deserted after the revelries of the previous night. An open air jeep pulled up alongside. The driver Tony, his partner Fran, and four-year-old daughter Aries, in their hippie hair does, looked alike. They invited me to stay in their home, a converted bus parked in a vacant lot.
New Orleans was their most recent way-stop on a cross-country journey across the United States. Their anthem was Johnny Denver’s ‘Take me home, country roads’. They played it over and again, and sang along with the tape while out driving in the jeep.
Tony had a job driving a bus modelled after the trolley car featured in playwright Tennessee William’s Streetcar Named Desire. The bus was hired for city tours and party nights. Tony introduced me to the tourist scene. I needed cash to fund my onward travels and hired a trishaw for five dollars a day. The money I earned ferrying people around town was mine.
On the eve of my first day on the job, I read up on the history of New Orleans and devised three alternative routes: the jazz trip, the market trip, and the voodoo trip.
Route one took my passengers to the jazz joints of Frenchmen and Bourbon Streets. I spun tales of New Orleans’ jazz legends ranging from pianist, composer Jelly Roll Morton, and pioneering bandleader King Oliver, to much-loved trumpeter-vocalist Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong who took the artform to popular heights. It helped that I was a long-time fan.
This route was easy money. I parked the trishaw and waited outside the venues as passengers made their way in. The tour concluded at Preservation Hall on Saint Peter Street where old time jazz musicians and integrated bands plied their trade exercising their hard-won civil rights.
'I needed cash to fund my onward travels and hired a trishaw for five dollars a day. The money I earned ferrying people around town was mine.'
Route two offered my passengers a tour of the fish markets and stand-up oyster bars in the French