Utah duo lost all, but spirits are intact

The things she lost included knickknacks and an entire city. You can picture the inventory as concentric circles, starting in the kitchen of her house and spreading out to include nearly every familiar thing about her life in New Orleans.

Mary Bischoff fled the city the day before Hurricane Katrina, on one of the last flights out. She took three changes of clothes and $1 in cash, figuring she would spend a few days at her daughter's home in Salt Lake City, then fly home again.

Of course, we have heard or read how plans like that worked out. When the levees broke, Bischoff's house filled with water up to the middle of the doorways. When the water receded, the house and nearly everything in it began to grow mold. There was nothing to go back to except piles of things to be thrown away.

So, at 83, Mary Bischoff had to start a new life, with hardly anything left to link her to the life she left behind. The cedar wedding chest, nearly every photo of her children, the house she had raised her family in: all gone.

It would be easy, would make sense even, to be sad. To sit in your little apartment at the retirement residence in Salt Lake City, surrounded by just a few pieces of furniture, none of them really your own, amid a tiny collection of brand-new knickknacks, and to focus on a lifetime lost.

"There's your mother who lost everything ,but she sits here with that smile and lights up the room," Stratford Brossard told Bischoff's daughter not long ago. Brossard is one of a threesome that eats together at the Chateau Brickyard Retirement Residence.

The threesome also includes Raymond Siebrandt, who just turned 92. By sheer coincidence, Siebrandt is also an evacuee from New Orleans. In fact, back home he and Bischoff lived about 10 blocks from each other, although the two didn't meet until bad luck threw them together.

"When we left New Orleans we didn't take nothing. Except a change of clothes," remembers Siebrandt, a retired operating engineer who worked on the Superdome when it first opened in 1974, long before it became a hot and stinky refuge for thousands of displaced people. Two days before Katrina, Siebrandt and his wife got a ride to Baton Rouge. Later, a grandson from Park City flew down to Louisiana to bring them to Utah. Later still, everything in their house in New Orleans was thrown away, and Siebrandt's wife, Georgie, fell and broke her hip and died six months after they moved to Utah. For most of that time she pined for her old city.