Tuck's dean, Paul Danos, was born in New Orleans and lived there for almost half his life. His ancestors emigrated to the city from France around 1750 but then spread out into the bayou country, farming, fishing, and in time becoming more Cajun than Creole.
During the boom years of WW II, his family returned to New Orleans, where his feisty and entrepreneurial father soon parlayed his skill and knowledge of the waterways into a general oil-field transport business, with a small fleet of tugs that plied the Mississippi, the Gulf, and the bayous.
The Danos clan, along with many bayou people, settled on the West Bank in a polyglot neighborhood where French, Italian, and even Filipino were spoken as much as English. Life there was family centered and relaxed, and, as is true in that part of the world, food played a major role in the culture. Danos's mother was a "genius cook" whose recipes of gumbos, jambalayas, étouffées, and her son's favorite fresh fig preserves still live on at the family table. "In our neighborhood, freshness was the key," Danos recalls, "be it the oysters or shrimp from the corner shops or the incredible pastries at the Sicilian bakery up the street. The cooks of my childhood demanded absolute freshness."
While in high school, Danos spent his summers on his father's boats as deckhand and cook. "It was a Tom Sawyer–like existence," he recalls, "with an array of very interesting characters that you don't get to know on Main Street, America, that's for sure." He recalls how strange it was to stand on deck on the Mississippi looking down into the French Quarter, which lay below the river level, sheltered by the levees that were seen as just another part of the scenery. "We knew that any of the levees could overflow in a very bad storm, but we never really worried about their actually breaking."
Through his college years, Danos took over the accounting tasks for the businesses and remained at home, earning a bachelor's and master's degree from the University of New Orleans, but he soon realized that he would have to leave his native city to pursue his larger ambitions. "It was hard to leave such a rich and interesting culture, but it was far from a perfect place, with underinvestment in education and public works. Of course, the scars of social injustice and racism hurt the city, and as we saw in the aftermath of Katrina, that legacy is still a huge burden."
When Danos was 29, he and his wife, Mary Ellen, and their daughter, Amanda, moved to Austin, where he earned his doctorate at the University of Texas and embarked on the series of professional and academic achievements that eventually brought him to Tuck in 1995.
But the ties to his birthplace remained. Over the years, he and his wife and children have visited regularly to see family (two of his five siblings live there), strolling along the river, browsing through antique shops in the French Quarter, stopping in at the Café du Monde for coffee and beignets, and stocking up on chicory-laced Community Coffee, Camellia red beans, Steen's molasses, and other staples unavailable elsewhere.
They will visit again soon, to what he knows will be a very different place. Their West Bank neighborhood, which for the most part was spared severe flooding, is now home to a dwindling number of the old families of his childhood, with new faces and with languages such as Vietnamese and Spanish now much more common than French and Italian. And much of the East Bank has been abandoned. Danos says, "All my relatives had some storm damage, ranging from roofs blown off to whole houses being completely flooded, but every one of them is giving it another try. There is an incredible attachment to the lifestyle and culture." If the levees can be made safe, people will return and stay, he says.
"The depopulation of such a old and valued city, and the struggles and challenges of its future, are emotionally draining for the citizens—and even for me, though I haven't lived there for 30 years. The residents need a respite from serious storms and, most importantly, they need some real progress on flood control if they are to be once again The City That Care Forgot."
