[This story originally appeared in the Official Game Program for the 1987 Sugar Bowl.]
His name is Walter Andrew Jospeh Taney. He is a sprite of an Irishman with dancing eyes, a quick chuckle and a mind engrossed with tickets.
“I like tickets – just tickets, period,” he laughs as he tries to shift the attention from a 50-year chunk of his life toward the pasteboards he so adeptly riffles.
A large part of his involvement with tickets has been in relation to the Sugar Bowl. For the past several years, he has worked mainly at the bowl, “although, I will still work with a favorite promoter or two and handle a show for them,” he says.
To Taney age is immaterial and, frankly, none of anyone’s business. “Do I ask you how old you are?” he laughs. And with the way he goes about his work, it is quickly apparent that age hasn’t been, isn’t now, and won’t be a factor.
“I swear, he can riffle a stack of tickets by his ear, tell me how many are there and, if one is missing, what section, row and seat it is,” said Marshall David, chairman of the Sugar Bowl’s ticket committee.
For Taney, the ticket business was a Depression-fostered substitution that became his profession.
Born and raised in New Orleans, he went to elementary school there, but attended high school for only one year. “I went to work at 14 years of age,” he says, beginning to feel at ease talking about himself and reflecting on the past.
He started as a runner at the old Canal Bank and Trust Company in New Orleans and gradually worked his way up to manager of a branch of the Marine Bank.
“Then [early in the Depression], we got into some trouble [with loans] to sugar planters, and the Canal Bank had to take the Marine over,” he explains. “Then the Canal Bank got into trouble, when the big Depression hit. They closed our bank, we waited a while, and finally we reopened briefly before the branch was closed for good. I was fortunate – they kept me all the time, until the end.”
The end was in 1933, when Taney took to another form of counting. “I was lucky. I got into show business at the ticket end,” he says. “It wasn’t easy with anything then, but at least I had something to do, and somehow the people here still wanted to go to the shows.”
It was also about that time – the mid-1930s – that his adeptness as a handball and squash player became quite evident locally and regionally. In fact, he’s got a box full of medals, most coming from doubles competition.
This led to a call from Fred Digby, then-sports editor of the old New Orleans Item, who asked Taney to come in so one of his writers, Scoop Kennedy, could do a column on him. That trek to the newspaper office led to the development of a very close relationship with Digby, who, with Warren Miller, founded the Sugar Bowl.
“We’d go out together, we’d lunch together. You see, Fred never drove a car and I would drive him wherever he wanted to go,” Taney recalls, again trying to turn the attention from himself. “He was such a straightforward sort of guy. I just don’t know anything but nice things about the man,” he smiles. “We were so close. In fact, he is the godfather of our only child.”
It was through Digby that Taney spread his talent with tickets to the Sugar Bowl. In actuality though, it all began with Taney assembling a cadre of people to serve as ushers and ticket takers. Then, when the Sugar Bowl’s ticket operation was moved “in-house” early in the 1940s, Taney added that responsibility to his growing business with the various special-event shows that came to New Orleans.
“It was really kind of cute the way the Sugar Bowl approached it,” Taney chuckles. “We got together and Fred suggested I come over to the Sugar Bowl and that I bring my wife into the picture. That way, they could get two for the price of one.”
Taney and his wife, Mercedese, agreed, and a ticket association that has endured for almost 50 years was born. “We handled a;; the tickets – football, basketball, and back then, tennis, track and boxing, too. We did them all,” he says, recollecting that in those days there were about 10,000 more football seats than there are today.
“We worked an average of eight to nine months out of the year to get the job done,” he continues. “It was still the two of us and, really, I used to take the tickets home on weekends so we would keep up with the work.”
Today, Walter still works tickets for the football game and the basketball tournament. But with the advent of the computer, the advance sellout for football, and only two sports, he spends far less time doing ticket work than he used to. However, he spends enough to keep himself young and to keep his fingers and his mind agile.
“You don’t know how much easier it is now,” he says. “It is a beautiful thing now. We used to have a real problem selling them [tickets].” Then he pauses for a moment to reflect on the question of whether it was the tickets or the people that drew him to this type of work. “I guess both,” he answers. “Tickets have just been something special, more so because I have met so many fine people.”
