I was about 11 or 12 years old when I first saw New Orleans, and it was the beginning of a fascination with the city that continues to this very day. I was captivated by the sights and sounds of the river and the smells of the French Quarter. I was a country boy who had never been farther away from the familiar sights of the MidSouth than St. Louis. By the time I was 10 years old (thanks to my mentors of blessed memory), I was completely familiar with Memphis, especially Front Street, the National Garage, Court Square, John Gerber and Goldsmith's and Phil A. Halle department stores, and Oak Hall and Alfred's stores for (wannabe English) "gentlemen." But New Orleans was a world apart, exotic and foreign.

My oldest sister served in a military medical unit in WW II, and was stationed in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her future husband, a deep-rooted native of New Orleans, was in the army, and was working at the nearby, and highly secret, Los Alamos "installation." They met, fell in love, and were married in Santa Fe. After the war, they returned to his home in Algiers, directly across the river from New Orleans' French Quarter. When the newlyweds first made it to Missouri, I could not believe that she, a quiet, intellectually gifted, dignified, very orderly, and "settled" person had married a "Frenchman!" He was loud, even more talkative than my mother's family (and yours truly), and he undiplomatically and dangerously attempted to teach my mother, a master cook in the Southeast Missouri style, how to "season" her food (meaning Creole spicing to eye watering extremes). We weren't immediately fond of him, which seems a distant and alien impression now, since our entire family learned to love and respect him, as we do today. But back then he did not fit the mold, or the plans, my parents had for their much admired daughter. She was to come back home after the war, and return to her interrupted career at St. Bernard's Hospital in Jonesboro.

I was to change my mind about him on the first day of the first of many visits that our family made to New Orleans. It seemed he couldn't wait to show me his city. Without knowing it, he could not have chosen a better way to win the heart of a somewhat catered- to baby of the family than to give him a private introductory tour of the great curiosities of the intriguing city of New Orleans. At the end of that special first day, Thomas Benoit (pronounced BEN-wah) was to be my friend for life. He said, "call me 'Chip,' all my friends do." And, "Chip" it's been for a lifetime.

People living in Algiers took the convenient Canal Street ferry to New Orleans to work and shop and to party. The ferry was just a couple of blocks from the Benoit home. On my first day in New Orleans, he and I took the Canal Street ferry as soon as he could break away from his in-laws. Chip was a much better host than he was a visitor, all his guests had to do was be willing to walk eight hours a day. Never mind that he would wear you out, Chip became the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable tour guide one could imagine, and no detail was left at peace. For example, we just didn't board the ferry for Jackson Square that first day, we explored the big boat, as if he owned it, from top to bottom, including the engine room. He explained to me, in greater detail than one normally wants, how the diesel engines converted their energy to electrical power, thereby making the boat more responsive to its pilot's commands.

I was soon to learn during that sensational day, starting with the exchange of friendly insults and familiar greetings of his friends, that my brother-in-law seemed to know everybody on both sides of the river, from black deck hands, to top black and white politicians, and, it seemed, dozens of policemen and detectives.

The ferry had a window enriched top deck filled with hard wooden pedestrian benches. It had a horseshoe shaped hard-rubber matted parking deck below, literally packed with cars. Rising out of the center of the boat was a three story tower, with the "guts" of the ferry below, and the captains deck at the very top. Later that week, I spent many hours alone on the Canal Street ferry. I would pay my quarter at the Algiers port, and ride the morning away with back and forth trips across the river, without once disembarking on Canal Street. It is still the best way to get a feel of that great port city.

There were giant ocean going freighters docked, in those golden days, along the New Orleans side of the Mississippi River. And just about at the foot of the Canal Street ferry dock, there was an enormous old timey paddle wheeler. It was a majestic "king of the river" excursion boat by day. At night, it was a party boat palace. The steamer's extreme party boat potential was to reveal itself a few years later, in the company of selected brother "frat rats," all of whom were given to more than occasional bacchanalian extremes. (That means binges, broads, and booze, boys). But as a wide-eyed youngster, I was more interested in the steam powered Calliope playing vaguely familiar musical "oom-pah" ditties. I instantly compared them with the "merry- go- round" songs one heard played at our small town traveling carnivals. The kind of music one heard only during cotton picking time, "When them house trailer gypsies come to get our cotton pickin' money."

It was also a thrill to hear the paddle wheeler's huge whistle exchanging bottomless bass signals with the ocean going freighters that were powerfully easing their way downstream, and barely missing, I thought with delicious fear, the horn "tooting" and bell-ringing ferry that I was on. Tell you the truth, I often stood on the bow of the ferry's passenger deck, and pretended, to a magical reality, that I was a young Mark Twain. I had escaped the cotton fields of home to become a severe, but evenhanded, river boat captain, master of the Mississippi!

We went to the huge French Market on that tropically humid first day. The reeking, fetid, foul smelling outdoor "fresh" fish market was even more offensive to my virgin nose than had been the outdoor toilets at my grade school back in Hornersville, and I mean at the toilets' maggot delivered, swarming green flies, worst. I suspect my brother-in-law knew how I would react to the stinking fish part of the market, so we went there first for his amusement? We worked our way from the seafood stalls, through the vast fresh vegetable and fruit markets, until we took a break at the French Quarter's Cafe du Monde, my first visit to a sidewalk cafe. It was there, 60 years before Starbuck's, that I was introduced to a delicious variety of dark roasted coffee and chicory. I also had my first square donuts. Well, they tasted like donuts, but Chip (remember he's a native Cajun, and self-proclaimed "coonass") explained to me that I needed to know that those square "donuts," snowed in as the were with powdered sugar, were called, "beignets." (Pronounced "beg-nyeh," if you're a Cajun, and "ben-YAY" if you're a French teacher).

New Orleans is so much more than its TV touted reputation as a Disneyland for drunks, and "skin" afficionados. That's why I want to write more about the genuine New Orleans next week.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.