“As I was swimming naked through the living room …”
It might have been the best newspaper lead ever. It was the opening phrase of the first post-Hurricane Katrina column penned by Ronnie Virgets, a New Orleans original who died Monday night at age 77. As the Crescent City’s media world loudly laments the loss of one of its most beloved characters, we all should lament the nationwide decline of his species, namely, the ink-stained newspaper guy whose lifeblood is one with the audience he serves.
Chicago had the gritty, tough-minded Mike Royko. New York sports fans had Dave Anderson and Red Smith. World War II soldiers and readers had Ernie Pyle. And New Orleans, with its abundance of personality, has had its share. Virgets, though, was second to none, even though he wasn’t really a traditional news guy.
Virgets was a sports and culture writer, but with a newsman’s eye for detail and for human foibles, combined with a native New Orleanian’s appreciation for absurdity and serendipity. He could write “in praise of the neighborhood bar,” advising readers to “wrap your fist around the glass, spin slowly around on your barstool and, full of all the common sense of a newborn baby, get ready for a little education.”
Or he could write about “living vicariously,” with all the quirky lyricism that was his trademark: “Here’s the setup. Yogi, Jimmy Chimichanga and I to this Uptown chateau have come, and it is replete with swimming pool and a garden tended by professional pruners. It is owned by Duffossat’s sister, who is married to an investor who has invited her on a cruise around the Aegean Islands. Duffossat has a business card that reads ‘Personal Service,’ which means he runs errands for old people, and he’s housesitting for his sister. He also owes Chimichanga a bunch of money, which is how we all got here.”
Virgets, who branched into TV and radio, had a raspy voice and a character-actor’s mustache, along with an ear for whimsy and a nose for, well, BS. Yet if the BS were mere embellishment rather than malicious, he could spray it with some Drakkar Noir and go on his merry way.
The decline of newspapers has made Ronnie’s kind rare. Newsrooms once were full of people who loved and honed their craft, imbued their news “beats” with outsized personality or outsized tradesmanship or both, and knew how, in distinctive ways, to find the meat and marrow of their subjects.
New Orleans, for example, was graced for 70 years by the work of sports columnist Pete Finney, who wrote with such clarity and insight, without adornment, that his fellow sports scribes marveled. I remember the morning after one of many nights when Finney turned in remarkably astute analysis with accessibly eloquent prose, facing an absolutely hard deadline a mere eight minutes after a game’s end.
“Did you see Finney’s perfect column last night?” one veteran sports reporter asked another.
The other writer just nodded. “Finney’s a god,” he said.
In Mobile, Ala., my friend Gary McElroy had a similar touch. From all the way in Arkansas, Pulitizer Prize winning editorialist Paul Greenberg noticed, describing a McElroy article about a fight at a funeral as a “classic Southern news story” that “went down straight. Neat. Like a shot of Early Times.”
But back to Virgets. For two years, three decades ago, I had the pleasure of editing his “Razoo” columns for the New Orleans weekly, Gambit. Sometimes it was hard to decipher his hand-scribbled self-edits on his typewriter-produced copy, but Ronnie was worth the effort. Three paragraphs in, I’d usually find myself nodding in recognition of his street wisdom, or chuckling at his wryness, or both.
This morning I drove to my storage locker where 29-year-old issues of Gambit reside. I pulled out an issue at random, from the middle of the stack. I flipped to Razoo. There was Virgets, writing about a move to a larger abode chosen by his “mistress of the manor.” It was repainting day for the couple, and he was tasked with covering a long, long hallway with a color called “Robespierre grey.” Naturally, Virgets soon had covered himself and the floor with Robespierre splatters. One of their friends peeked in and told Virgets the sight of him trying to paint was “funny.”
Wrote Virgets: “Funny? Some things — if you don’t have to deal with them — are funny in ways that are beyond their control: over-ripe fruit, women in beauty parlors, desk-sergeants. This was not one of them.”
But of course Robespierre-splattered Virgets was indeed funny. He couldn’t help it. New Orleans is funny, and Virgets was quintessentially New Orleanian. To read him was like wrapping a fist around a glass — maybe of Early Times — and spinning around on one’s barstool, readying oneself for good-natured education.
