TEMPESTS: Storms in the ArchivesErbon Wise by Tara Zachary, 1995; 4700.0636
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President Lyndon Johnson speaks with William Marshall who rode out Betsy on St. Claude Avenue. Times Picayune, September 11, 1965.
Tara Zachary: So not only were you dealing with the Vietnam protest, but the Civil Rights Movement was going on at the same time. And could you describe any of the involvement of the . . . any other involvement of the National Guard as far as . . .
Erbon Wise: Oh yes, yes. We had two terrific hurricanes when I was there. One was Betsy and it flooded all of lower New Orleans. We had the only amphibious vehicles in the guard: fourteen so-called ducks. And we and others took 20,000 people off of rooftops in New Orleans, literally. The homes were flooded, had about eight feet of water, and brought them up to the military port there at New Orleans, which was a very huge place. And we put 20,000 people in there and fed and housed them for almost a month. Of course the other activities, Red Cross and people came in, but it was primarily the military that had to do it all. We sent troops through all the southern parishes that were flooded. And they called up most of the guard troops all the way from Shreveport. And many of them had at least a month's duty. It was a very trying time.
The storm came in one night and the next afternoon President [Lyndon] Johnson decided to fly down and see the, see the storm. So I used a duck to . . . Jackson Barracks was flooded, to get out of Jackson Barracks, and I got on the other side of the Industrial Canal. I commandeered a police car and raced out to the airport and got there just as the president's plane was taxiing up. I put him in the front seat of this police car, and I and three Secret Service people jumped in the back end, crowded in the back, and I brought him down to see the flood. It was getting on toward night so we got on the industrial bridge there, and here's all these people wading out of chest-high water. And here stood the president reaching down and helping them out of the water. So when they'd look up, they were shaking hands with the President of the United States. And so he greeted them there for a while and basically decided that he was going to go back to Washington. So I took him back to his plane and flew back to Washington.
I had to prevail upon the Army to send us in mess teams, which they didn't want to do, because we was trying to feed 20,000 people there and the guard didn't have those kind of facilities. And then of course we needed all kinds of medical teams. Inasmuch as we had the only really amphibious vehicles there, we were just getting hundreds of calls from the police and the hospitals and levee officials and everybody. It's amazing how many people are injured or how many babies are being born or something when everything's flooded. So everybody wanted one of these ducks. And we were making them go as far as they can and trying to keep them running. Our post was flooded. Just the very bit up at the front of the levee there, where our headquarters was the only thing that didn't go under water. So we had our own people to try to take care of down there, as well as all the people in there. It was quite a trying time.