225BatonRouge.com

How many times have you asked that question?

Maybe someone sparks a memory at a cocktail party, or a story in the news snags in your mind and kicks up a face or a name, and you wonder, “Where are they now?”

At 225 we get asked that question all the time. So we decided to track down some of those familiar and, in some cases, long-lost Baton Rougeans, to find them and learn what they’re up to now.

Many of them are simply living low-profile lives, while a few have gone on to interesting and surprising jobs and places, with stories to match.

The multi-tasking mayors

Tom Ed McHugh, who served as Baton Rouge’s mayor from 1989 to 2000, has gone from looking after one municipality to 305 of them as executive director of the Louisiana Municipal Association. This month he’s regrouping from an annual midwinter conference, one of two conventions the association hosts for elected officials from all over the state.

His successor, one-termer Bobby Simpson, worked as a consultant with a handful of clients after leaving office. One of them, developer Tommy Spinosa, made him an offer after a couple of years, and Simpson became chief operations officer of JTS Enterprises.

Simpson says he found being mayor “exhilarating” at times. “You like the role because you’re in the fray, making decisions.” Which may be why he’s all the more happy with his new position, where “I don’t have to please but one person.”

The duke of the Ukraine

It’s not hard to keep up with David Duke: the Anti-Defamation League takes care of that, devoting page after carefully detailed page to Louisiana’s most famous ex-Klansman. He’s now known as Dr. David Duke, courtesy of a Ph.D. bestowed upon him by the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management, or, as the ADL refers to it, the “Ukrainian University of Hate.”

Duke’s offices are in Mandeville, but he lectures and teaches frequently in Eastern Europe. A woman answering a call to the number listed on Duke’s website said he was “out of the country.”

But Duke isn’t gone completely. He weighed in on 2007’s Jena Six controversy, and days after last fall’s presidential election, he gathered with fellow white supremacists in Memphis to chart the course for the group’s future.

Father and son

Stephen Edwards, son of former Gov. Edwin Edwards, now works for a local awning fabrication company, and business has been good. Certainly better than 2002, when Edwards was sentenced to prison, convicted along with his father and three others of shaking down casino owners and license applicants. Edwards isn’t allowed to visit his father in prison and was permanently disbarred by the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2004. EWE avoided a similar fate by resigning from the bar a year earlier.

Hair you go, Mr. Brocato

Mane man Sam Brocato divides his time between New York and Lafayette’s River Ranch, with a little Minnesota (where his line of hair care products is manufactured) thrown in for good measure. “My wife (Holly) and I are still in love. Things are actually quite good.” Son Gianni has just come into the business with him, and Cohlie, the younger of his two boys, is in college in New York.

Product development takes a good bit of his time, as does traveling to some of the 16 countries where those shampoos, conditioners and dozens of other products are sold. “I’ve been to Russia—not anxious to go back,” says the former Lockworks owner. “I try not to have to travel all the way to Taiwan.” Up next are trips to Italy and Amsterdam for seminars and shows. But “I’m still a Louisiana resident. I vote in Louisiana. Home is always home.”

Insurance casualties

Of former insurance commissioners, Doug Green and Sherman Bernard are both out of jail, but missing in action. Bernard was released from prison in 1998 after serving 30 months of his 44-month sentence for extortion. Green, convicted on 31 various counts, remained a guest of the government far longer, serving 12-plus years in the pokey in Pensacola. He was paroled in 2003. Robert Wooley, who held the state’s top insurance post from 2000 to 2006, resigned after a controversy that paled in comparison to his predecessors: He treated himself to the use of a luxury pickup truck on the state’s dime. Wooley left the office to practice law and lobby for law firm Adams & Reese. Wooley once bragged that he was the first Louisiana insurance commissioner in 34 years to stay out of jail.

Jim Brown wasn’t quite so fortunate. The former LSU track sprinter landed himself a six-month stretch in federal prison for lying to the FBI in a case involving failed Shreveport-based Cascade Insurance. To this day, Brown rails against what he considers the injustice of being sent to prison for “lying about a crime that was never committed.” Brown began writing a blog about his experience while in prison, and since his release, he has penned two books.

As extensive as this quest for vindication is, it’s only part of Brown’s day-to-day. He’s taught at LSU and Tulane, writes a column and has a weekly radio show.

“I’m eventually going to go back and teach some more,” Brown says. “I travel a good bit—the kids are spread out across the country, and the grandkids are coming along.”

The next arrival is due next month: the second child of his daughter, CNN anchor Campbell Brown.

The supers

Also heading east was former East Baton Rouge Schools Superintendent Clayton Wilcox, who became the superintendent of schools in Pinellas City, Fla., in 2004. From there, Wilcox jumped ship last summer, generating no small amount of controversy when he accepted a spot as vice president of education and corporate relations for children’s book publishing giant Scholastic.

Another former school superintendent, Gary Mathews, who came to Baton Rouge in 1995 from that position in St. Augustine, Fla., hop-scotched through superintendencies in Missouri and Texas before landing in Williamsburg, Va. He’s headed up the Williamsburg-James County School District since 2005.

Set in stone

Mark Drennen, who was commissioner of administration during Gov. Mike Foster’s administration, made a lasting impact on the face of Baton Rouge.

He spearheaded the state’s initiative to consolidate its mishmash of rented offices, then scattered all over the city, into a cohesive, state-owned campus. Today those buildings, which feature the art deco style of the Capitol, comprise a planned campus on the northern edge of downtown. They have served as the foundation on which hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment continues to pour into downtown.

After Foster left office, Drennen moved to New Orleans and headed the economic development agency Greater New Orleans Inc.

Last year he joined the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Cornerstone. “It’s a perfect fit,” Drennen says of his new gig. He handles the firm’s government relations and lobbying work in Louisiana from offices in the downtown he helped reinvigorate. It’s the first state outpost for Cornerstone, although more are likely.

Stored memories

Watching big-box electronic stores shut down around town brings New Generation to mind. Joe Shaab and his brothers started the business in 1973, turning an old Food Town on Florida Boulevard into the largest electronics store in the state. The store expanded to include clothing and records before it closed in 1987, and Shaab retired for “a 12-year fishing trip.” In 1999, he went into the used car business with friend Caye Ribas at University Motors. Shaab didn’t find that business fast-paced enough, so he’s wound that down and has gone into power equipment manufacturing and sales.

“I’m the do-it-all guy” at the new business, he says. He travels to China to oversee the manufacturing, then with his partner and another employee unloads containers of generators, pressure washers and chainsaws at a warehouse on Choctaw Drive. “We get it all done very efficiently to keep our prices down for our customers.” So they can—wait for the irony—compete against the big box stores.

Ed Easterly, co-founder of McLavy & Easterly Ltd., left the Baton Rouge retail scene in 1988, selling his share of the business to his business partner Frank McLavy, who’s operated the clothing store ever since. Easterly moved to Destin where he opened Taylor Cruise Men’s Fine Clothes, says the eldest of his six children, daughter Christian Easterly of Mandeville. He operated the store until 2001 when he got into the real estate business. “He loves the life of the beach,” Christian says.

Truckloads of Champagne

No longer working in film production but providing equipment for those who do is Andre Champagne, who’s put together a fleet of more than 200 “trucks, trailers, generators, you name it” to cater to Louisiana’s thriving film industry. Having opened locations in Baton Rouge and New Orleans in 2007, Champagne has recently finished making the Shreveport location of Hollywood Trucks “fully operational.”

Conventional wisdom

Leon Maisel, who headed the Baton Rouge Convention and Visitors Bureau from 1996 to 2002, returned to his hometown of Mobile to head up its CVB.

Rockers roll with the punches

Jeff Pollard left the rock ’n’ roll life he led as a member of Louisiana’s LeRoux more than a quarter century ago to form New Covenant Ministries, and he pastored the Providence Baptist Church in Ball for seven years. He’s now an elder of Mt. Zion Bible Church in Pensacola, Fla., an organization whose Chapel Library distributes Christian literature and tapes. In 2007 he authored Christian Modesty and the Public Undressing of America, in which he expounds on the viewpoint that “our culture’s basis for modesty was eroded, almost to the vanishing point.”

Another former LeRoux member, Randy Knaps, owns Media Scope Concept and Production, which specializes in automotive advertising and post-production. He’s still singing—check out YouTube for his work at Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, also home to the voice of former Caterie regular Allison Collins-Rhys. As for LeRoux itself, half of its eight members have been with the band since it was formed in 1978, and they’re still touring after all these years.

After 12 years Travis McNabb recently left Better Than Ezra—his last show was Feb. 15. McNabb’s been touring with Sugarland for the past year and a half but will continue to serve on the board of the Better Than Ezra Foundation. Michael Jerome will step in, and the group will release its seventh studio album, Paper Empire, in May.

Isaac Greggs, who led the Human Jukebox at Southern University for 40 years, hasn’t given up his trumpet entirely. He played it recently when he was grand marshal of the Karnival Krewe de Louisiane ball. Last year he was grand marshal of Zulu in New Orleans, coconuts and all.

Greggs has well over half a century as a band director, including 15 years in Shreveport before coming to Baton Rouge. Greggs travels the state giving inspirational speeches to bands directed by his former students. “I call them ‘my kids,’” he says. “They got pretty good bands, too.”

The television crew

Margaret Lawhon has been taking a walk on the creative side since her days as an anchor at WBRZ . In 2003, Lawhon published The Poydras Project, a thriller set in New Orleans, and now she’s working on another book.

Lawhon took up painting eight years ago and sold a painting featured in a recent show at Dixon Smith’s. The painting’s subject—a pair of riding boots—was a natural, since she’s been riding (hunter-jumpers) for 20 years. A true francophile, she keeps current in the French language through a conversational group, and she sits on the board of LSU’s Friends of French Studies.

Lawhon hasn’t abandoned the camera, either. She moderates webcasts for Our Lady of the Lake, an outgrowth of her years as a medical reporter for WBRZ. And every year she hosts the station’s Life After 50 Expo. A member of the Screen Actors Guild, she says, “I still audition for things when my agent calls me with a part she thinks would be good for me.” Not surprisingly, she’s often cast as a reporter.

Lawhon is one of dozens of familiar names to whirl through the revolving door that is the local media spotlight.

In the fall of 2005, WBRZ’s George Ryan left a career of more than 25 years in broadcast news to become a spokesman for ExxonMobil in Baton Rouge; he has highest regards for both careers. He grew up in Battle Creek, Mich., as George Pietrogallo, a name he’s using again in his second career. “My first boss said, ‘Son, that name ain’t gonna fly in Huntsville, Alabama,’” he recalled.

A few other WBRZ alums remain in Baton Rouge.

Ed Buggs went to work for radio station WIBR until its demise in the fall of 2005. He’s now working for a consulting group “helping to bring solar power to Louisiana.”

“I travel a bit on business, and I’m really enjoying life. I’m enjoying the anonymity,” he says.

“I always call myself the accidental weatherman,” says former environmental reporter and meteorologist Glen Duncan. He majored in geology, but his post-college gig with an oil company turned out to be a boring office job. “I loved science, and I started to look for ways to write about it,” he says. With a master’s in journalism from LSU under his belt, he was reporting about science when the weekend weatherman quit. A star was born the next day. “I won all kinds of awards for reporting, but no one remembers that—only that I was the weatherman.”

Duncan’s broadcast career began in 1988 and ended roughly a decade later. It was followed by the founding of his own PR company, the authorship of Goodbye Green: How Extremists Stole the Environmental Movement from Middle America and Killed It, and a five-year stint at the Louisiana Health Care Review. For the past five and a half years, he’s been the director of communications at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. “When I hand people my resume, what it looks like is that I can’t hold a job,” he says with a laugh. “But there’s a common thread!” All of these endeavors have involved “taking information and recasting it in a way that moves people into action.”

Reporters and anchors leaving WAFB had more of a tendency to move to another station than into public relations or other business endeavors. An exception is Julie Baxter, who transitioned to law school and on to practice with Moore, Walters, Thompson in 2006. She’s also an adjunct professor of media law at LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication. She might run into Andrea Clesi McMakin there—after 30 years of reporting and anchoring for WBRZ, McMakin now attends graduate school.

How many people can list among the high points of their career apprehending a murderer and introducing computer graphics to the local weather forecast? Ex-WAFB weatherman Mike Graham can—he’s now a cop.

His current job as communications officer for the Baton Rouge Police Department has him fielding calls from the public as well as dispatching units to trouble spots. His first police career spanned 25 years (mostly in the reserves), overlapping with his 43-year stint in broadcasting. He retired from full-time work at WAFB in 2003 and called it a wrap altogether the following year.

The decision to ratchet down the work hours came on the heels of wife Gloria’s breast cancer diagnosis in 2002. “We knew then we needed to start doing the things we really wanted to do together.” They bought a motor coach and drove it all over—Newfoundland, the Midwest, Disney World with the grandkids.

Now they’ve sold the RV and are turning to interests closer to home—Graham acts occasionally and sits on the board of governors of the Baton Rouge Little Theater.

So what’s “straight ahead?” No concrete plans for retirement. “We’re having a lot of fun right now. Eventually we’ll reach a point where we’ll be forced to slow down. Maybe in a few years.”

Kopplin goes national

Andy Kopplin served as former Gov. Mike Foster’s chief of staff, then distinguished himself as one of only a few top officials to be retained by Foster’s successor, Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Kopplin, a veteran of public service who grew up in Texas, headed the Louisiana Recovery Administration after his administration-straddling chief of staff gig.

After overseeing Katrina recovery efforts for a few years he sought public office—an unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination for the House of Representatives seat vacated by longtime Republican Congressman Richard Baker. The Democratic nomination eventually went to Don Cazayoux, and the seat ultimately was won by Republican former state Sen. Bill Cassidy.

In July of last year, Kopplin became executive vice president of growth strategy and development for Teach For America, a national nonprofit that places bright college graduates as teachers in struggling schools, especially in inner cities.

Kopplin held that post until his recent promotion to senior advisor to TFA’s founder and CEO, Wendy Kopp. In his new role, Kopplin spends a lot of time traveling around the country, but Baton Rouge remains home—he still lives in Spanish Town with his wife, writer Andrea Neighbours, and their two children.

Weilling away the hours in NYC

Gus Weill left Baton Rouge for New York to be with his son, who was ill. Gus Weill Jr. died in 2004, but his father has remained in New York ever since.

“I think I’ll stay here ’til it’s time for me to come home, and I’ll know when that time is,” he says. “Nature kind of makes that decision for you.”

He sees a sort of circle in his life reflected in the nation’s economic troubles. “I was born at a time very similar to these times, March 12, 1933, the day Roosevelt closed the banks,” he says. In the 76 years since, Weill has worked on political and advertising campaigns, hosted radio and TV shows, and written many plays and books (including poetry, fiction and biography). These days, he rises early in his Upper East Side digs, lights a cigar and hits his old Underwood for a writing session usually lasting four hours. In the works is a play titled Little Brother.

“Over the years I’ve just trained myself to do it. Discipline’s the most important part of the writing process. I absolutely put talent second,” he reflects. He not only avoids the computer when writing but for any other purpose as well. He knows there’s “tons of stuff” about him on the Internet, but “I don’t Google myself. Honestly, I’m not that interested in me. After you get to know yourself long enough, you get awfully bored with yourself.

“I am happy to be out of politics,” he says. “It was a fascinating experience. I made a good living out of that, but it was a brutal experience. I got to know some of my candidates too well and some of the tragedies in their lives—I’d just as soon not have experienced that.”

Some of his favorite Louisiana politicians include the subject of his biography You Are My Sunshine: The Jimmie Davis Story, and John McKeithen, whom he served as executive secretary. Of Davis, he says, “That was a wonderful experience—he was a dazzling character.” McKeithen was “a main force in my life” who “spoiled” him. “I keep looking for other John McKeithens.”

And he’s not finding anything close in the Governor’s Mansion today. On Gov. Bobby Jindal: “I don’t agree with him on almost anything politically.” What really has Weill bugged is the creationism issue. “I just detest it when I see Louisiana take a step backward. It makes us the laughingstock of the nation. Whenever you read about Louisiana up here it’s primarily in some devastating fashion.”

But he misses his home state, and Baton Rouge, “which I dearly love. It was where I was the most prolific in my life.” His nostalgia is heavily gastronomic: “A plate of red beans and rice … a gumbo … a chicken sauce piquant … I haven’t had a good meal since I’ve been in New York.”

Click here to see what became of some 225 newsmakers.

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