A. J. Liebling

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas – stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

There is a healthy American newspaper tradition of not taking yourself seriously It is the story you must take that way… And if you do take yourself seriously, according to this sound convention, you are supposed to do your best not to let anyone else know about it. (Like bed-wetting.)

Forget that New Orleans is actually a little like the Combat Zone with French cooking, it still happens to be part of the great state of Louisiana where people play the political game the same way it’s played in Lebanon. The place is one layer after another of tribes, factions and at least a million laughs.

The pattern of a newspaperman’s life is like the plot of ‘Black Beauty.’ Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.The Sunday World was a dry-stall interlude in my wanderings.