New Orleans' Greatest Storyteller
Ronnie Virgets spent his entire life telling stories about New Orleans, and he did it better than almost anyone. Through newspaper columns, magazine essays, television features, and a radio show on the local NPR affiliate, Virgets captured the texture of life in the city with a precision and warmth that made you feel like you were sitting on a barstool next to him, listening to a man who knew every corner of every neighborhood and loved them all.
Virgets was born in New Orleans in 1942 and graduated from Loyola University in 1965. He worked for the Times-Picayune, Gambit, and New Orleans Magazine, and he did television features for WWL and WDSU. He hosted "Crescent City," a radio program on WWNO that became essential listening for anyone who cared about the culture and history of the city. He won a regional Emmy in 1992 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Press Club of New Orleans in 2002.
But the awards only hint at what Virgets actually did. He was a storyteller in the oldest sense—a man who understood that the real history of a city isn't in the official records but in the stories people tell each other, in the characters who inhabit the bars and restaurants and street corners, in the small moments that reveal something true about a place.
His essays about New Orleans were small masterpieces. He wrote about food without being a food writer. He wrote about music without being a music critic. He wrote about politics without being a political columnist. He wrote about people—the specific, particular, often eccentric people who make New Orleans unlike anywhere else. His voice was conversational, knowing, and shot through with the dark humor that New Orleanians develop as a survival mechanism.
In 1996, he was named King of the Krewe du Vieux—the satirical, adults-only Mardi Gras krewe that parades through the Marigny and French Quarter. It was the perfect honor for a man who understood the irreverent, subversive side of New Orleans as well as the genteel side. Krewe du Vieux is where the city laughs at itself, and Virgets had been helping the city laugh at itself for decades.
After Katrina, Virgets wrote about the experience for NPR, bringing the city's devastation and resilience to a national audience with the same intimacy he'd always brought to local stories. It was Virgets doing what Virgets always did—finding the human story inside the larger catastrophe, making the national audience understand what it felt like to lose a city and fight to get it back.
Ronnie Virgets died in 2019 at seventy-seven. His personal papers are archived at Loyola, preserving a body of work that amounts to a love letter to New Orleans written over the course of a lifetime. He was the city's unofficial laureate—the man who put into words what most New Orleanians felt but couldn't quite articulate. Every city deserves a storyteller like Ronnie Virgets. New Orleans was lucky enough to have one.
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