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In 1908, Louis Armstrong gravitated to the South Rampart Street home of the Karnofsky family, Lithu- anian Jews who worked as peddlers.Working on their coal cart, sharing family meals, absorbing lessons (say “this” instead of “dis”), he borrowed five dollars to buy his first cornet; he was seven. Armstrong praised the Karnofskys lavishly in a late-life essay, stating, “If it wasn’t for the nice Jewish people we would have starved many a time. I will love the Jewish people, all my life.” Home was still the shack a few blocks away with “Mayann” and his younger sister, Beatrice, known as Mama Lucy. On New Year’s Eve, 1912, Louis was arrested for shooting a pistol, celebrating in the streets. The court sent him to the Colored Waif ’s Home, set in a pasture beyond Bayou Road at the city’s edge, by the cemetery where Bolden would go. Captain Joseph Jones, the African American founder and former soldier, was “a hardheaded idealist who believed that children who got into trouble belonged not in jail, where they would be at the mercy of older criminals,” writes Armstrong biographer Terry Teachout, “but in the hands of reformers determined to give them a chance to change their lives.” Armstrong had at least two substantial stays at the Home before mid-adolescence. The daily order, nurture and discipline helped him, as he recalled years

later. The Home had a schoolroom, mess hall and chapel with a dormitory upstairs. The regimen included cleaning chores, learning carpentry, gardening — and music.Twice a week they marched with wooden guns and wooden drums. Band instructor Peter Davis invested serious time with the boys; he saw Armstrong’s talent. “We used to go fishing behind the home,” Deacon Frank Lastie recalled. Louis blew “taps on a bugle to let us know it was time.” Armstrong marched with the Waif ’s Home band in a 1915 May parade that featured Kid Ory’s group. A year later, after leaving the Home, he sidled up to Kid Ory, who hired him several times. Armstrong coaxed Joe “King” Oliver, who became a father figure, to give him cornet lessons; Joe’s wife Stella fed the boy red beans and rice. In 1917, Armstrong was playing cornet with Oliver in Ory’s band when the U.S. Department of War ordered Storyville closed as a threat to the health of navy sailors stationed in New Orleans. Women scattered, some to the French Quar- ter. In the 1930s, madams bought their bedding, chairs and sofas at a hefty mark-up from Mayor Bob Maestri’s furni- ture store. When Louis Armstrong left New Orleans in 1922, the great talent of early jazz joined his mentor Joe “King”Oliver in Chicago. As his prolific recordings made Armstrong a celebrity, he moved to New York and traveled the world. Many of his songs, interviews and writings memorialized his native city.

45 everyday NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018