[Judy Patsch]

Jazzou, if you think about the NOLA wharves' locations, your mother probably wouldn't have strayed from them much either. I suppose she traveled back when she would have had to take ragtime aboard on vinyls, which wouldn't have been very handy - but just think: she could have spread ragtime around the world like the steamboats took jazz upriver. How would you translate "Jazzou" into other languages? We had a retired couple in our church who traveled by freighter in the 1970/80s, and often they would be gone 3 months when the original plans were for only a month or so. They had to agree to be flexible and have plenty of time allotted to complete a trip, or else pay great airfares back. Do you have any idea how much your mother paid for those trips?
A bit of trivia about a couple of passenger ships of the 1950s: the BERMUDA STAR ran out of NOLA in the late 1980s as the first regularly scheduled weekly ship in decades. She was a steamship and was built in 1957 as the ARGENTINA, run by Moore McCormick Line to South America. In order to distinguish her and her twin sister BRAZIL from competitors, the funnel area served as a nude sunbathing area - the functional smokestacks are well aft. I do believe her successful presence in NOLA is what revitalized the cruise ship industry in NOLA, as far as using NOLA as an embarkation city. My only ocean travel was on this ship in 1987, and I immediately rode the MQ the following weekend to get back to the friendly confines of the river.
The BERMUDA STAR is pictured here in Cozumel Mexico, which at that time had only 2 docking spaces for cruise ships and was in its infancy as a port of call.