A one-family rescue crew
Published: September 14, 2005
Paul West isn’t that different from thousands of other Houstonians, who as volunteers and donors, welcomed Katrina survivors.
He just did away with the middlemen.
Accompanied by his 15-year-old daughter, Paula, and her girlfriend, Noel Gilman, he drove down to the George R. Brown Convention Center on Saturday afternoon, Sept. 3, as it was filling with flood-shocked folks from Louisiana.
After a brief look around, they approached two women and two boys.
“You’re coming with us,” West told the exhausted visitors.
So began a four-day adventure for a one-family rescue squad.
West, an accountant who served for years as chief financial officer for Landry’s Restaurants Inc., said the news on television was so “horrific” that he felt a powerful need to do something.
His wife, Vicki, was out of town at a family funeral, and he was at home with four of his five children. The oldest is at Notre Dame University, the youngest is 11.
“I told them I was going down to get a family out of the shelter,” he said. “They all wanted to go with me, but I told them I needed room in the Suburban for the family.”
30 minutes off the bus
When he and the two girls arrived at the convention center, “it was a tough scene for everybody. We saw a sea of shoes and of humanity, of desperate people. God bless the volunteers. They were so patient.”
It was Paula who spotted 9-year-old Perry and 8-year-old Jimmy. Together with their mother, Caroline Jimerson, and aunt, Gloria Goodman, they had arrived on a bus from New Orleans 30 minutes earlier.
A preacher was comforting them. After talking briefly with West, he urged them to go with him.
“They had a bag of shoes and stuff,” West said. “I told them to leave them.”
On the way home, West stopped at a Target store and urged the women to gather what they needed, as well as some toys for the boys.
At his Tanglewood home, he led them to a vacant garage apartment. There they were able to wash off the remains of the flood.
That afternoon the story would unfold of their home 10 blocks from the French Quarter, of receiving a warning too late, of learning of the flood when Perry asked for cereal and someone went into the kitchen to find it filling with water.
Beauty parlor charity
First they took refuge on the second floor, then in the attic, then on the roof. After a night under the stars, rescuers came by in a raft, picking up only women and children and taking them to the Superdome. They told of seeing dead bodies in the water on the way.
West said he didn’t press them for details.
Soon the West children were playing with Jimmy and Perry. Somebody mentioned that their 15-year-old cousin, Gloria’s daughter, Precious, had become separated from them in New Orleans.
“My kids are computer-savvy, so they got online and started posting messages,” West said. “Within two hours, we got phone calls from relatives who wanted to connect with them. We learned that Precious was in the Astrodome.”
It took about three hours of roaming around the Astrodome on Sunday to find Precious among the more than 15,000 survivors there.
The next day, Labor Day, West took the two women to a beauty parlor.
“These people needed to be lifted up, to feel better about themselves,” he said.
By Tuesday morning, the visitors had located relatives in Dallas and decided their future lay in that direction. So West drove them to Dallas.
“They said they were not going back to New Orleans,” said West. “They had never been out of New Orleans, and they were seeing opportunities.”
I tried to reach West’s guests. I wanted to hear the story from their perspective.
They left a phone number with West, but it turned out to be a relative in Alabama who has not yet hooked up with them. I hope to talk to them when she does.
Meanwhile, West says the four days were great for his family.
He said he wouldn’t criticize any of the major charities, but he had the experience of knowing his money and efforts were having an impact on one family.
“And I didn’t even have to fill out any forms,” he said.
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