 |
|
|
 |
Musicians Hotline® is very honored to bring you an inspirational story of courage, faith and determination. Our friend Vince Geirdroz of New Orleans Guitar was a victim, as well as a survivor of Hurricane Katrina. Vince was kind enough to share a very personal story of the storms impact on his life, his faith and his business, but more importantly a testament to human spirit.
Please join us in honoring this incredible luthier who has over come incredible challenges to rebuild New Orleans Guitar, and how his company Conquered Katrina...
|
|
Vince, welcome back. Your story is a testament to courage and the ability to overcome adversity. Please give us an account of last August 29th and how Hurricane Katrina first unleashed her devastation on New Orleans Guitar. For example, what did you do to prepare for the storm’s arrival?
Thanks, Trent. It’s good to be back. It has been very odd, being out of the loop for eight months or so, but at last we’re back. I’m sure that most people are probably tired of hearing about this—I know we are—but this has been one hell of an experience for a lot of people, and we really feel lucky to have come out of it like we did. A lot of people around New Orleans took a major beating.
When we first saw the storm enter the Gulf, we knew this was something to really keep an eye on. But the following day, when we saw how much of the Gulf was covered by the storm, we knew it was time to get moving.
So, we boarded everything up and headed to Houston to stay with some friends. When you live in a place along the Gulf, you get used to making brief evacuations during hurricane season.
The night before the storm made landfall, we were online checking the buoy readings near the mouth
of the river. We saw that waves measuring 35 ft. to 50 ft. were
being reported just southeast of the
delta, and that’s when we knew that
this could be the one. Growing up here, you hear about how Camille and Betsy really did a number on us. But if a storm were to hit the mouth of the river, New Orleans would really be swamped. Initially, I don’t think anyone was thinking that it would do this kind of damage, but then we heard that the levees were breaking. We pulled up the NOAA website, which has satellite images, and we saw that most of New Orleans was under water. It’s really amazing, the amount of detail you can see with the satellites. So, we were scanning this bird’s-eye view of the city trying to get our bearings from that perspective, and we were noticing that a lot of the structures have water above their eaves. Some things were just unrecognizable because they were just gone. Then it all starts to sink in.
Funny thing is, we actually dodged the bullet. Had the storm made landfall a little further to the west, New Orleans would now be just a spot on the map.
So, you’d evacuated to Houston, but you were also aware the New Orleans—whenever you could man age to get back—certainly wouldn’t look the same or feel the same. How did you make it through the next several days?
We stayed in Houston for a week before trying to get closer to home, knowing that getting back into the city was going to be a problem. The closest place that we had was my brother’s home in Covington, which is on the other side of Lake Ponchartrain, so we settled in at his place with the intention of getting back into the city when we could. At that time the city was shut down except for emergency vehicles and the National Guard. The first time I was able to get to the Orleans parish line, I knew that this was quite unlike anything we had ever seen before. Wildlife and fisheries agents were directing a rescue effort in Lakeview using fishing boats from the other side of the parish line. To see boats being launched in the middle of Veteran’s Highway--while you look out on what was once really prime real estate but is now under eight feet of water, with boats docked against roofs--is surreal, to say the least.
It took nearly another week for the water to recede enough for us to get to the shop. So, we knew we’d have a hell of a mess on our hands. The National Guard started letting business owners in certain zip codes back in, just long enough to assess their damage and leave. Our shop is in an older, higher part of town between the French Quarter and Lake Ponchartrain, pretty much right in the middle of the city. We could tell from the satellite photos that we had definitely flooded, but you really couldn’t see how much water we had taken on from that perspetive.
The first ride through the city was strange, to say the least. To get to the shop, we had to enter the city uptown and skirt the flooded areas, going through National Guard check stations around town and dealing with nineteen-year-old guardsmen slinging AR-15’s or whatever. I’m glad they were there, but it’s strange to see martial law on the streets of an American city. At that time there was still a lot of looting going on.
There was a lot of paranoia and everywhere you looked, ordinary citizens were carrying handguns. As we worked our way through town, it was just amazing seeing everything. There were hundreds of boats that had been used to rescue people just strewn about in the roads, not to mention the trees and debris that made a lot of roads impassible. There were houses that had floated off of their foundations and landed in the middle of the street, and broken cemetery crypts spilling out. Entire buildings around town had collapsed, all over the place there were pets that were lying there dead or just wandering around. Power lines were down everywhere. It looked like a bomb had gone off and the smoke had just cleared. As things started to dry up, the silt covered everything in dust. It was definitely something you’d never forget.
When we finally got to the shop and pried open the doors, we saw that we had taken on about three feet of water and everything was covered in a greasy slime. All of our tools had been submerged and were rusting badly, and there was a bunch of wild-looking mold on everything. What a mess!
As a long-time resident of New Orleans, how had Katrina’s wrath impacted your home?
As far as our house and all of my family’s homes, we made out okay. Our roof got torn up and all of our fences were knocked down, but we’d suffered no major flooding. I don’t think I could have taken a beating both at home and the shop. We really lucked out, in a way. A lot of people lost everything.
What were the first steps you initiated in starting the rebuilding process of the shop?
The first order of business was just convincing ourselves that rebuilding would be worth it. I was well aware that rebuilding was going to be costly and that it would take some time before we would be back in business. But taking stock of what lay ahead, I felt it was worth it. Like a lot of people in New Orleans, we got caught with our pants down and had no flood insurance. It was stupid, I know, but for three years I’d been putting the money back into tool building and product development, and as a new company things were just tight. Our product had really started to take on a refined form and was getting some notice, and I was looking forward to growing the business. Two months prior to the storm, we had taken in a bunch of orders and new dealers, and were gearing up for future production when these storms came through. You have to make a choice at that point: Do I want to do this to myself and my family? Is it really worth it? Or, should we just pack up and start a life somewhere else? But I’m 38, New Orleans is my home, and I couldn’t see burning up the rest of my years crafting somebody else’s mediocre designs in another city. So, I just had to accept the fact that this was how it would be for a while. You have to have faith in yourself to deal with this. Right now, New Orleans just represents a whole lot of work and very little time to play.
As far as rebuilding was concerned, I found that the best way to do it was just to start where I was and keep chipping at it little by little. I knew that eventually I could look back and see how far we’d come.
When I spoke to you via cell phone two months later, I sensed an optimistic, somewhat blessed attitude from you. The spirit you’ve shown in rebuilding is inspirational. Tell us about your state of mind as you started to rebuild your shop, as well as your life.
When you’re trying to rebuild a shop out of your own pocket, you get creative. Eight months after the storms, we are only now seeing a minor presence from the SBA in making us a loan, and we’d applied for the loan two days after the first storm. So, early on we knew that we were going to have to just deal with this the best we could, using what we had. We’d noticed that a lot of businesses around town were leaving for good, and that in the process a lot of things were getting discarded. The tool that fared the best in our shop was a very old, very heavy cast-iron band saw from the turn of the century, so when we started seeing this same kind of tooling being given away or on the cheap, because it was too heavy to ship out of town, we started scooping them up. We’ve had to rebuild just about all of it, but we’ve got a nice little collection of vintage industrial tools going, some of which dates as far back as the early 1900’s.
After getting started on rebuilding the shop, from time to time we would drive to the outlying areas of the city, checking on friend’s properties and trying to get a feel for what had happened outside our immediate area. That’s when we realized that we didn’t have it so bad. Driving through fishing villages and small towns closer to the water’s edge, it was simply astounding to see entire areas wiped clean except for foundations and portions of the road. And that would go on for miles and miles. These were areas that we had grown up in. These were places where we’d go fishing on the weekends -- little backwoods towns that centered around our fisheries. To see it wiped clean was a very humbling experience.
So, yeah, I feel lucky. I could have come out of this a lot worse. It’s been a lot of work, but we’ve gotten the support of countless people in the process and feel that we will come out of it just fine.
Tell us about the current status of the shop and the progress you’ve made in building guitars again.
Almost all of our tooling is operational, and we’re getting closer all the time. We currently have 35 guitars in the works, and 14 of them are nearing completion. I’ve got three great employees who are doing excellent work and will become the core of a great shop, so we’re hoping to get our production up pretty soon. I’m beginning to have the time to focus on the things in the shop that really need my attention, and I’m very pleased with the quality we’re putting out right now. As we get more time to refine the tooling, the quality will only improve, but we are doing very well, considering.
Vince, we cannot even begin to imagine all that you’ve been through.
We’re just very happy to have you back. What do you feel you’ve learned from this whole experience and how “Conquering Katrina” will be reflected in the passion of your work?
I guess the biggest lesson has been that whether you live here or in San Francisco, near Mt. St. Helens or wherever, if Mother Nature deals you this kind of hand, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. You just make the best of it and move on. You can’t expect someone else to dig you out. We’ve been incredibly lucky and have made some really strong friendships along the way. There are a lot of good people in this country who helped us to get back on our feet, and I’m proud to be a part of the music-and-arts community. Priorities become very solidified. You try to spend more time with family and friends, enjoy life, and chase some dreams.
New Orleans still looks very much like a ghost town, and I expect it will for a while. But we’re seeing bits of life spring back here and there, and we’ll remain optimistic. A lot of good is going to come out of this.
Thanks, Vince. Everyone here at MHL wishes you and your family the very best. We are very proud to share your story.
New Orleans Guitar Company
neworleansguitar.com
Rahan Guitars
20 Southbelt Industrial Dr.
Houston, TX 77047
800-535-5823
sales@rahanguitars.com
www.rahanguitars.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
