Derek Bridges

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Derek Bridges

Joseph Crachiola is from a small town outside Detroit that got swallowed up by the suburbs (same story for me, except replace Detroit with Chicago). He worked 15 years for suburban Detroit newspapers and 22 years as a corporate photographer before he got bought out and decided to move to New Orleans about 2 years ago. He recently served as road manager for the Pinettes Brass Band in Turkey, and photographed the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy.

Derek Bridges

The producers of HBO’s Treme have gone into crisis mode to tamp down another controversy.  Fresh off the heels of the brouhaha that ensued when houses depicted in the advertising campaign promoting the first season of Treme were demolished following a high profile spat between Treme creator David Simon and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu over a feeble attempt by preservationists and Treme producers to save the doomed structures, preservationists have now turned their attention to the chair featured in the advertising campaign for the second season of Treme.

Preservationists contend the chair was once sat in by Hokie Mokie, considered by many the “King of Jazz” for a brief period in the 1940s. Mokie apparently sat in the chair during a rent party in the Back ‘O Town neighborhood later essentially mowed over by urban renewal projects in the 1960s.

Derek Bridges

Brady, Frank. End Game: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall–from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness. 2011. New York: Crown. (pp. 44-47)

As Bobby was becoming more involved in the world of chess, he attracted the attention of a wealthy and unusual man named E. Forry Laucks. A chess player himself, Laucks liked to surround himself with other players, many of them offbeat and highly talented. He was always generous to Regina [Fischer’s mother] with small amounts of money–$25 to $100–for tournament entry fees and other expenses. During the spring of 1956, Laucks gathered a group of chess players for a thirty-five-hundred mile motor trip through the southern United States and ultimately to Cuba, stopping off at towns and cities for a series of matches with local clubs.

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