With a spiritual reawakening following a successful liver transplant, Gulf region port industry icon Gary LaGrange has, at 74, as much love for life as ever.
In a candid, intimate chat with AJOT, the self-described “blue-collar port director” reflects on lessons learned throughout more than four decades of U.S. Gulf port leadership – and far more.
From his home in Baton Rouge, LaGrange continues active with consulting and relishes hanging out with Fozzie, a 12-year-old Louisiana Catahoula that worked with inmates at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for eight years before becoming LaGrange’s sidekick. (Fozzie is short for the Wizard of Foz, a fitting name for the dog of a lifelong Cardinals fan who once threw out a ceremonial first pitch before a game in St. Louis.)
Having been chief executive of four U.S. Gulf ports, can you explain what makes the Gulf region and its ports so special?
It’s the people, first and foremost. The people down South have a work ethic about them that goes back many years. There’s just a great wealth of pride built into the people on the Gulf Coast. The people provide diversification and a well-trained workforce, plus the cost of living is less than many other places.
The southern states are very aggressive when it comes to work incentives, and good, God-given natural resources are abundant – the oil and gas, availability of natural gas, which contributes to our booming LNG industry. And thank God for the Mississippi River and the ability to export over 60 percent of the grain from the United States. And there are raw petrochemical products and, on the inbound side, importation of steel for manufacturing of autos and appliances.
Leading to all of that is intermodal connectivity, with railroads, highways, air, inland waterways with the MR&T – Mississippi River and Tributaries – and the pipelines.
I think climate has a lot to do with it, having four seasons, and, finally, geography and the expansion of the Panama Canal combined with the over-congestion of some of your more traditional ports of entry.
Overall, it’s people, diversification, geography, intermodality, natural resources, climate, workforce, incentives and cost of living, all of those combined.
What do you see as the future for ports along the U.S. Gulf?
Naturally, growth. I see a lot of growth, with ability to establish and grow natural corridors. The Gulf ports are connected with a market area of 33 states.
The future rests in a growth mode. I don’t see any of the 26 ports being deficient or dying on the vine. I’ve always noticed along the Gulf a very diversified group of ports, with hardly any overlap on the competitive side.
I noticed it at New Orleans with Houston. Everybody thought Houston was our natural competitor. There was no competition whatsoever between Houston and New Orleans. They were two totally different market areas. Eighty percent of everything going into Houston was consumed in the great state of Texas and surrounding areas. Eighty percent of everything going into New Orleans left Louisiana and went upriver, to those other 33 states.
Mobile, a new and fast-comer, Tampa, all different ports and different markets, different focuses. It’s a group of ports that get along like in no other area I can see, almost a family-type situation.
It’s been a pleasure working in the Gulf with all of these folks and just really, really good people.
What I see developing is a new and larger supply chain, with great opportunities.
What are you doing with yourself these days, both professionally and personally?
I’ve been taking care of myself healthwise, number one. I created Gary P. LaGrange & Associates LLC and was in the process of picking up some interesting work with several groups. including an Italian river transport group named Fagioli, but that was short-lived because of health conditions that commanded my full time.
I literally spent the next 18 to 24 months concentrating on health issues and keeping my foot in the door with projects at the Port of Plaquemines, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, which I represented in helping develop container-on-barge and other new concepts, and with Port Manchac on Lake Pontchartrain, as an intermodal logistics transfer point for points on the Mississippi River. I’ve done all that while I was being treated.
I had a liver transplant – cancer of the liver. I had two options, pure and simply, and that was get a transplant or face the consequences, and you know what those would have been. That second consequence is not in my vocabulary.
I love life too much. I enjoy living and I enjoy mainly contributing and giving back. That’s basically my foundation of everything I do in life is giving back.
I tell people – half joking and half serious – that I’m not one to sit at home. People ask me what I do for a hobby. I don’t play golf or hunt or fish. I love working with people. I love people, and, if there’s any way I can help, here’s my card, and I’ll tell people – half jokingly, half serious – I’ll work pretty cheap; in fact, I’ll work for nothing just to contribute somewhere.
What am I doing with myself? I guess you could call it the Three F’s – spending my time with family, friends and Fozzie – and trying to develop Gary LaGrange & Associates LLC. It’s a matter of getting out there and letting people know you’re not dead.
How has overcoming major health issues changed your personal outlook?
More than anything else, it has led to a spiritual reawakening.
Early on, I went to parochial elementary school and parochial high school – Catholic – and my upbringing was very oriented to Christianity and belief in God. As we tend to meander through life, trying to climb the corporate ladder, I never lost sight of it, but I just wasn’t as active for quite some time. And I think I’m back there now.
I think the spiritual reawakening has provided me with a path and an opportunity to become reacquainted with God and our Lord and Savior and accept the graces and to continue to meander through the paths of life understanding it’s not perfect. You’re going to have pitfalls, but you still make the best of it.
I think I really began to do that prior to retirement, with Hurricane Katrina, accepting what was and knowing it was much bigger than any man or mankind itself, that whatever we came out of Katrina with was going to be God’s wish and we were going to have to make the best of it and live through it.
I remember a good friend of mine, a coworker, [now-retired Port of New Orleans operations director] Paul Zimmerman, one night late, after working 18-19 hours, during the early days of recovering from Katrina, onboard the [U.S. Military Sealift Command] Cape Kennedy, which is where we lived for months after the hurricane, asked me, ‘What are we going to do?’ We were looking out a little porthole at a pitch-dark city at explosions going off from erupting natural gas lines.
I said, ‘Paul,’ and I chuckled, ‘we’ve got two choices. We can laugh or we can cry. I choose to laugh. Let’s develop a sense of humor.’ Quite honestly, I think that’s the only way we got through it, knowing we were in the hands of the Lord and He was going to make sure the right thing was done, and He led us and guided us on a day-by-day basis.
That’s the story of Katrina, but it’s also the story of life.
The biggest personal change in me when I found out I had the health issue was, well, it’s another hurdle and the race is certainly not over. Thank God, the race is not over; we’re still in it and, I think, living every day to its fullest.
There was the odyssey of eight hospitals in four states over 18 months, but I never lost sight of the fact that the secret to success was belief in the Lord, family, friends, a great medical team and, finally, a positive and upbeat attitude… Life is great, live it.
Of the many recognitions you have received, which one do you hold most dear and why?
So many people have been so great, and I’m totally beholden to all of them. I feel sometimes like Garfield, the cat, ‘I’m not worthy.’
But I’ll name three. Certainly one was receiving the [2006 International Maritime] Hall of Fame Award at the United Nations and another was in Dubuque, Iowa, at the National Rivers Hall of Fame.
But the one that really stands out most was the Eugene Schreiber Award [from the World Trade Center of New Orleans]. Gene [the center’s longtime managing director] was a personal friend of mine, and we traveled and worked in the international trade and economic development world together. Before we became friends, I was an admirer of Gene. I thought, if I could emulate anybody, it would be somebody like Gene Schreiber. I’m still friends with his son and widow and daughter. Gene was a graduate of the very first Peace Corps class back in 1961, and he wore that on his sleeve. He was the epitome of a diplomat, and he was the man I patterned and molded myself off of. He was the ultimate marketer in international trade and putting New Orleans on the map.
Gene found out he had leukemia shortly after his retirement [in 2010] and died way, way too young [in 2011 at 73]. He sent me an email from a hospital room and he was elated. He said, ‘I’ve got a great room looking out the window at the Mississippi River. What could be better?’
How important have you found it to live by the credo you learned as a Boy Scout of Be Prepared?
You go through life and lessons learned, and Katrina’s the epitome of learning to be prepared. In the case of Katrina, it was what to do as well as what not to do.
We had the absolute best hurricane preparedness plan money could buy, and we rehearsed it and drilled it year in and year out. When Katrina hit, were we prepared? Yeah. We had the best preparation plan in the world. Where we weren’t prepared was we didn’t have a recovery plan. That was a lesson learned I later wrote about in my 180-page PPM – [American Association of Port Authorities] Professional Port Manager – paper. That was the lesson learned: We weren’t prepared for if one really hit.
Another one was the [2003] embargo on steel imports into the United States. At first, it meant nothing to me, until we started looking at our P&L [profit-and-loss] sheets that showed steel representing 37 percent of the revenue of the Port of New Orleans. We were not prepared, but that told me we needed to diversify, that we had too many eggs in one basket. That’s when we decided to develop the cruise industry and to build a new container terminal, which has grown six-fold.
Is there anything you wish you had done more of – or less of – in your life?
I can honestly answer, no, I did it my way, and that was the only way I knew how. And that was by understanding we’re not going to be perfect. We’re going to make mistakes, but as long as the overall goal is achieving something that’s beneficial to mankind and other people who inhabit this earth, that’s the overwhelming priority. That’s always been the case with me.
Any of the major issues that could have caved somebody’s career, I just chose not to let it. I did it my way, knowing that, at the end of the day, the goal was to do more things right than wrong. If you can do that, chances are you’ll come out at the upper end of the score.
I did it the way I knew how, and that was doing my level honest and earnest best I could on a day-to-day basis.
I was challenged in 1975 and 1976 to build a port [West St. Mary] where there was none. That was a challenge to find a location and to build a port, and I did, with the help of a lot of other people, and that’s paramount. This is not a Gary deal; it’s a Gary-involved deal.
Another was taking a port [South Louisiana] that was unheard of and letting the world know it is, in fact, as occurred to me one day, the largest tonnage port in the Western Hemisphere. Let’s let the world know that.
Then going over to another port [Gulfport] and diversifying it into more than bananas.
Then, finally, diversifying another port [New Orleans] to something beyond an importer of steel, growing the container business and creating a cruise ship business. The Port of New Orleans is now the sixth-largest cruise port in the United States.
Not being perfect. Not being the best. Not necessarily being No. 1. But being accountable.
What do you see as your legacy?
I don’t know about a legacy. I’m not going to beat my chest or say there’s a legacy, but if people remember me in any way, I’d like them to probably remember me as the blue-collar port director – somebody that cared for all people and not just people in certain ivory towers or high places, but the littlest guy on the dock, the truck drivers, the railroad workers, the stevedores, the longshoremen.
I’m a believer in the lot of the underdog and the little guy. That’s Americana. That’s what I stand for.
The challenge of building a port where there was none or giving a port that’s not recognized recognition or helping another port to diversify – the thing that comes back to me is the open-door policy for everybody, the littlest of guys, that makes minimum wages. The littlest guy, that doesn’t have a job, that’s looking for a job and is willing to do anything he can for himself and his family.
Finally, the thing I preach to people all the time, no matter where, even in a hospital the other day to a young man about to finish nursing school who wants to work in the pediatric ICU. He said, ‘I don’t know why, Mr. Gary, but it just seems to me to be the thing I want to do.’ And I told him the same thing:
If you’re not having fun, go do something else.
So the bottom line is: All of the good things you may be doing, all of the things you may be achieving, you’ve got to be having fun and you’ve got to have self-satisfaction along with it. Otherwise, go do something else.
That’s pretty much it. The blue-collar port director.
