Reporter bought a house for co-workers covering Hurricane Katrina

As Hurricane Katrina’s howling winds died down on Aug. 29, 2005, relief fell over The Times-Picayne newsroom. Reporter John Pope, who had spent the night there with colleagues and their family members, believed the worst was over. 

But Pope, the paper’s health and medicine reporter at the time, got a call from an employee of Mercy Hospital asking why Bayou St. John, an adjacent waterway, was overflowing. Two of Pope’s colleagues, who had left on bikes to see what was happening, also returned with shattering news: the levees were breaking.

New Orleans was drowning. 

“At that point it stopped being another hurricane,” Pope said.

Hurricane Katrina would go down in history as one of the country’s worst natural disasters, and The Times-Picayune would earn two Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage. But in the uncertain days after the storm, Pope would do far more than write stories and blog posts. He would go to the extreme to provide shelter for colleagues whose lives were unraveling as they worked.

“John Pope was one of the heroes in Baton Rouge,” Kenny Harrison, a Times-Picayune feature design editor and longtime friend, said.

Baton Rouge is where Pope and many of the journalists who had stayed in the city to help cover the storm ended up after they were evacuated in the back of newspaper delivery trucks the day after the storm. 

“Don’t let anyone tell you riding in a delivery truck in South Louisiana in late August is fun,” Pope said. “It isn’t.”

The traveling journalists found emergency refuge in an Louisiana State University apartment for married students, which Pope said “could break up more marriages than infidelity.” It had air conditioning in just one room, so the crew slept on mattresses spread on the floor and kept all doors open to stay cool, at the cost of enduring heavy-snoring colleagues. 

The team initially worked out of LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication and kept long, grueling hours, covering everything they thought could help. Their blog posts got over a million hits. 

They then relocated to a mostly abandoned shopping center they nicknamed “The Bunker,” where they worked at long tables with laptops and cellphones. When time permitted, they called family, insurance companies and contractors. Many suffered breakdowns during those calls.

“Every night I talked to my wife,” Pope said. “That’s what got me through.”

His wife, Diana Pinckley, had evacuated with friends to Mississippi.

When Pope and his co-workers began looking for another place to stay, a writer friend gave him the name of a Baton Rouge realtor, who told him about a four-bedroom house that was in succession and had not yet been listed for sale. The electricity, cable and water were all still connected. It sounded perfect.

“So four days after I evacuated with a gym bag full of underwear and an umbrella, and not much else, I was negotiating for a house for myself and my colleagues,” Pope said.

He bought the house, which he dubbed “The Pope Home for Vagabond Journalists.” It gave a temporary place to stay for his colleagues and their families who had lost their homes in the storm. Eight adults, one teen and “one anxious cat” moved in.

Harrison was among them — his home had flooded, and after moving from Lake Charles to Houston, he ended up in a closet in the Pope Home in the “second wave” of inhabitants. Harrison eventually upgraded to a room, and his family, including his teenage son, joined him.

Harrison and Pope, who’d been jogging partners since 1980, took to the track at nearby Broadmoor High School to take a break from work and blow off steam. The chaos of their lives gave birth to the team’s slogan, which made it onto a T-shirt: “We publish come hell and highwater.” 

His wife, Pinckley, visited Pope at the house twice. He told her he didn’t know how much longer he could keep working. “You’re not allowed to say that,” she told him. “The hardest part is just beginning.” 

Pinckley, a communications strategist, would discover that much of the property in the 9th Ward had been passed down among relatives without a paper trail or documents for insurance. That would make rebuilding more difficult for many poor and working class residents, many of whom were among the hardest hit by the hurricane. Pinckley also would join Women of the Storm, a group of diverse New Orleans women who traveled to Washington to lobby Congress to support the city.  

Six months after buying the house, Pope sold it and gave its donated kitchenware to his co-worker and friend, Karen Bazile. Unlike Pope’s house in Carrollton, which had just one broken window pane, Bazile’s house in St. Bernard Parish took in nine feet of water. One red pot Bazile received, dubbed the “John Pope Pot of Love,” is still in use.

Stress battered the displaced, overworked reporters. One man woke up believing he was suffering a heart attack after a call with his wife about where to enroll their child in school; it was a panic attack. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma came to offer support.

After about six weeks, Pope was invited to speak at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation about the stress of covering the storm. He broke down three times but finished to a standing ovation. 

“That’s when it just really hit me,” Pope recalled. “I remember saying, ‘I don’t know when I’ll again be able to hear Irma Thomas and the Neville Brothers or get a good, sloppy roast beef poboy, or use an ATM or pump gas.’” 

Pope was invited back twice. 

The following April, when the two Pulitzers were announced, everyone in the newsroom hugged, jumped up and down and cried. The awards came with crystal mementos from Tiffany & Co., but Pope couldn’t look at his for four months without crying.

Eventually, the chaos subsided. Pope returned home to New Orleans and began giving Hurricane Katrina tours. 

“My car was practically on autopilot,” he said. 

Some places along the route proved to be too much, even years later. Sites like one in the 9th Ward, where a young girl was swept away and drowned in rushing floodwaters, continued to cause breakdowns in Pope. 

His wife, Pinckley, died in 2012, three years before the publication of his book, “Getting Off at Elysian Fields,” a collection of 123 obituaries and four funerals. Over his long career, Pope has written many big-name obituaries, including those of musician Fats Domino, Popeye’s founder Al Copeland and the “Queen of Creole Cuisine” Leah Chase. He is a member of The Society of Professional Obituary Writers, who push each other to write the best obituaries.

Pope has co-authored two more books and continues writing, travelling, speaking and listening. On Hurricane Katrina’s fifth anniversary, he even caught President Barack Obama’s order at Parkway Bakery (shrimp po’ boys for himself and the First Lady, burgers for their daughters and an order of alligator gumbo).

Twenty years have passed, but some remnants of the storm remain with him, like his uneasiness at the sight of rain clouds. He pauses and reminds himself, ”Pope, it’s only rain.”