One of the first things he did, Donald Seals said, was find hogshead cheese and crackers, something he could never find in Denver.
“It is a delicacy to me,” he said. “I was raised on it, and I must tell you, it never tasted better.”
The 60-year-old Seals, a disabled Army veteran, arrived back in his native Louisiana just over a week ago, more than five years after Hurricane Katrina washed away his home.
I wrote about him last month and the effort by Volunteers of America, which had cared for him since he arrived in town, to raise money to send the last of our Katrina victims home.
Money poured in after that column ran. A group of former New Orleans residents in Denver, who gather at a bar to watch Saints games, held the largest fundraiser, netting more than $800.
“It shocked me,” Seals said in an interview from his new home in Westwego, which sits across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. “It was people I had never met and did not know, who treated me almost royally. It meant the world to me.”
He simply missed home. He had left that first late-August day of Ka trina and made it to the Astrodome in Houston. Andrew Hudson, who runs Andrew , was working for Frontier Airlines then and had arranged for the airline to fly Katrina victims to Denver. He met Seals at the Astrodome.
It was the beginning of a five-year friendship.
So on Jan. 6, Hudson and five men from Regis University arrived at Seals’ home with a rental truck. They packed him up and headed east.
“It gave me a sense of full circle,” Hudson said. “I saw a picture of Donald the other day when we were in Houston that first day. All he had was a bag of supplies he had gotten from the Red Cross. I’ll never forget it.”
He and Joe Hodas, a former Frontier colleague, and their two sons rode in the rental. Seals followed in his car.
“At the end of it, standing in Don ald’s front yard, I had this incredible feeling,” Hudson said. “I knew the extent of what people in Denver did, opening their hearts, their homes and their wallets to the people of New Orleans we brought here.
“To see him back there, for him to be home, was incredible.”
Seals’ five brothers were planning to meet him for a reunion. His daughter, who settled in Nevada after the storm, is moving home with his five grandchildren next month.
“It’s a miracle, isn’t it?” he said, seated on the front porch of his new home with Sadie Mae, the 2-month- old American bulldog a Denver neighbor gave him just before he left, at his side.
“I loved Denver,” he said, “but I have to say it is really great to be back in the atmosphere where I grew up.”
What became, I asked him, of the 50 or so plants he dug up from his Denver garden when he knew it was time to go home?
“They went into the ground, first thing,” Seals said. “Right after the cheese and crackers.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
