By Kyle Roberts
This is a story I love telling, but I don’t know that I’ve ever actually written it down before.
And it’s a dramatic story that for us has a happy ending, although it cannot be told without acknowledging the many lives that were upended and lost in the tragedy.
But before we get there, a little backstory.
I proposed to my best friend in October of 2004, knowing that we would spend our lives together, no matter where we chose to make our home. Judith and I were set to graduate from Louisiana Tech the next year, and we were both bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the world looked to us like Oysters Rockefeller with our wedding set for the following fall.
Our plan? Attend seminary in New Orleans and become historians and writers for our faith (no joke). So, we loaded a moving truck in August of 2005 and headed for The Big Easy. Our wedding was going to be in September, so we thought we were adulting by going ahead and getting our new home ready for us to move into as soon as we tied the knot. Thus, we decided to go ahead and get down to the NOLA region, finally settling on a second-story apartment in Metairie, La., just a few blocks from where the New Orleans Saints hold their training camp.
It was heaven.
I lived in our apartment, Judith lived with a relative, and we started what we believed would be a longterm stay down south. I coached junior high football at Isidore Newman High School (stop laughing) and Judith was a barista at a coffee shop in a hospital.
As fate would have it on a sunny afternoon early in that hot month of August, I got a phone call from my now-business partner Malcolm Butler as we were driving up the Huey P. Long bridge near Interstate-10.
“Kyle, this is Malcolm Butler, the sports information director for Louisiana Tech University,” he said on the phone. “I understand that you and your fiancé have recently moved to New Orleans, but I wanted to reach out to let you know about an open position in my department. I think you’d be a great fit, and I’d love to interview you. And we’ve already worked with the local paper here, and we can bring both you and Judith back to Ruston.”
I was beyond honored to get the call. I had a tremendous respect for Malcolm, and we had both learned from the best in the business: Wiley Hilburn Jr., who was also instrumental in putting the package together for Judith and me to return home before our wedding and plant our roots firmly in Ruston.
But the timing was off, and I said words that have been seared into my brain like a tuna steak:
“Malcolm, I appreciate the offer, but I just signed a six-month lease on an apartment here. It would take an act of God to get me out of it.”
Well, then.
It turns out an act of God was headed our way. Just two weeks later, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and we all, very sadly in retrospect, know how that turned out for the city and the surrounding area.
Judith and I watched the hurricane make landfall at her parents house in Oak Grove, La., just five days to go before our wedding. Everything — EVERYTHING — we owned was in that 500-square foot apartment being ravaged by the storm. And the news about the people who were losing their lives … it was so much.
But I made another call that night. To Malcolm.
“Hey Malcolm,” I said, knowing my voice was shaking beyond control. “Is there any chance that job is still available for us? I don’t think we’ll have a place to go after this anymore.”
And Malcolm’s response turned out to be a turning point for our lives: “Yes. If you’d still like to interview, it’s still open.”
Judith and I married that weekend, went on our honeymoon in borrowed clothes, and eventually were able to get all of our things back. The top floor of the apartment building was decimated from fallen trees, and the bottom floor was flooded over six feet high.
But the second floor? Nearly pristine, other than a refrigerator with rotten meat.
New Orleans, thankfully, was rebuilt over time, and subsequent hurricanes have caused significantly less damage, praise God.
But our lives are firmly rooted here in Ruston, where we belong. And I can say firmly that from the time I worked with Malcolm in the mid-2000’s to the point where we now co-run a thriving local business — none of that would have been possible without his reaching out as we drove over the Huey P. Long bridge that summer day.
It’s something I’m forever grateful for, and I believe that he’s grateful, too, that I got out of that lease.
