Transport Workers Solidarity Committee

http://www.poboyfest.com/history

The History of the Po-Boy

Be sure to check out the panel discussions on po-boy and New Orleans history!

Poor boy sandwiches represent bedrock New Orleans. The shotgun house of New Orleans cuisine, Po-boys are familiar but satisfying. The sandwich is as diverse as the city it symbolizes. The crisp loaves have served as a culinary crossroads, encasing the most pedestrian and exotic of foods: shrimp, oyster, catfish, soft-shell crabs as well as French fries and ham and cheese. Comfort food in other cities seldom reaches such heights.

As with many culinary innovations, the poor boy has attracted many legends regarding its origins. However, documentary evidence confirms that your grandparents' stories about one particular restaurant were right.

Excerpt from Streetcar Stories documentary with info and interviews about the history of the Po-Boy [1min 45sec].
View longer excerpt covering the entire transit strike [13min 30sec]
Bennie and Clovis Martin left their Raceland, Louisiana, home in the Acadiana region in the mid-1910s for New Orleans. Both worked as streetcar conductors until they opened Martin Brothers' Coffee Stand and Restaurant in the French Market in 1922. The years they had spent working as streetcar operators and members of the street railway employees' union would eventually lead to their hole-in-the-wall coffee stand becoming the birthplace of the poor boy sandwich.

Originally posted here

After working without a contract since before Katrina, almost every city bus driver called in sick Friday morning, stranding commuters who were left waiting in the rain.

By Leslie Williams - The Times-Picayune, May 4, 2007.

Of the 65 Regional Transit Authority bus drivers and streetcar operators that were supposed to show up for work at 9 a.m. Friday, 61 called in sick, stranding thousands of passengers who use the public transit system in New Orleans to get to work and others who take to it to the Fair Ground to play a Jazzfest.

"The sick out came as a surprise," Rosalind Blanco Cook, an RTA spokeswoman said shortly after the blue Friday began. "The president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, Joseph Prieur, and management are meeting now to see what can be done to get full service back on the street as soon as possible."

The union has complained about wages, she said.

City buses and streetcars transported about 14,000 people over the three-day weekend to and from Jazzfest, but it's not clear what impact the sick out will have today, she said, because it's not clear how long this will last.