He showed up on his first day on the job at the Louisiana Office of Risk Management in March 1997, moving over from another state agency. I had been working at ORM for a little over six years. He was assigned to a different section than the one in which I worked, but we formed a friendship almost immediately.
John Michael Burch was a 24-year-old ultra-right-wing Reagan conservative and it didn’t take much prodding to elicit an opinion from him. He’d already earned his political stripes as a White House intern (during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, before joining ORM) when he somehow managed to find himself seated next to England’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at dinner. He adored England’s Iron Lady and her politics. He also was a big fan of Barbara Bush, Larry Hagman (TV’s J.R. Ewing).
But John, who died suddenly Sunday night of a heart attack at age 49, was anything but one-dimensional. He’d worked for the state 24 years and was looking forward to retirement. He wanted to retire to Kauai, geologically the oldest of the main Hawaiian Islands. He never made it.
As we get older (I’m 75), we’re constantly mindful of our own mortality. The reminders are there every day: the aches and pains we didn’t have 20 years ago; the pill organizers we have to use to keep track of our medications; the energy kids have today that we once had, and the most painful of all, the young ladies who insist on calling you “sir.”
But John was young, a man in his prime eagerly contemplating a retirement in a virtual Eden. He was too young to be ripped from our midst.
Asked how he was, he would invariably respond, more than a little cynically, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” He left ORM after a few years and moved up to the Division of Administration where he worked on agency budgets, first for the Department of Corrections, which was frustrating enough, and then the Department of Education, which he found to be maddening.
John would never leak a story to me—or anyone else. He took his job seriously and refused to be drawn into undermining his bosses. But that didn’t mean he would not reveal his personal feelings about his first boss, Commissioner of Administration Kristy Nichols (“never showed up in the office until about 11 a.m., terrible boss.”) and then current Commissioner Jay Dardenne (“Extremely hard-working. No matter how early I got to the office, he was already there working. A completely different work ethic from Nichols.”).
He also had complete disdain for former Angola Warden Burl Cain and Superintendent of Education John White and did reveal to me that Angola was corrupt “from top to bottom” long before the Baton Rouge Advocate did a stellar job of showing just how corrupt. If I didn’t know John Burch better, I’d swear he was a source for their stories—except I know he wasn’t.
About Senate President John Alario (R-Westwego), John said he was probably the most capable lawmaker in the entire legislature and State Sen. Francis Thompson (D-Delhi) was “sneaky smart. Don’t ever make the mistake of underestimating him.” For most of the rest of the legislature, he had almost universal contempt, which of course, he had to keep concealed because of the necessity of working with legislators on budgetary matters.
His love affair with the Republican Party ended with Bobby Jindal. Disgusted with the direction the party had taken, he became in independent, confiding in me that the Republicans no longer stood for anything but themselves.
John, however, had a wonderful sense of humor, which I believe drew the two of us together as friends. I was puttering around with stand-up comedy at a local comedy club and he would drop in from time to time. But it was at coffee breaks and lunches, first in the old Education Building and later in our new headquarters, the Claiborne Building, that his humor shone through.
Once during lunch in the Claiborne Building, there were several of us at a table when I looked up and saw a woman walk in with painted-on eyebrows that arched far too high onto her forehead. “She’s either very surprised or paying really close attention to somebody,” I observed. If he’d had milk in his mouth at the time, I believe he’d have squirted it out his nose, he was laughing so hard.
But the line that kept him laughing for years occurred a few years earlier in the old Education Building. There were more than a dozen men who took our morning break together and sat together in the break area. One of those was a real blowhard who loved boasting of his own (imagined) importance. I’ll call him Sam, but anyone who was there that day will know exactly who I’m writing about. He claimed to be a member of the Hammond Country Club and any time anyone would mention any prominent person from Hammond, his automatic response would be, “Yeah, he always sits at my table when we have a function at the country club.”
One day, I brought up the name of a Hammond attorney who attended a comedy show I promoted in Hammond. “Yeah,” said Sam, right on cue, “he always sits at my table when we have a function at the country club.”
I looked at Sam and before I could even think better of it, said, “Sam, just how many tables do you wait on, anyway?”
Sam, by way of further description, once dyed his graying hair jet black with liquid shoe polish for his upcoming high school reunion. Problem was, the dye started running all down his neck at work, prompting even more running jokes (no pun intended) about Sam from everyone, including John. No one, after all, was exempt from his biting humor.
He also got a good laugh at my expense when I told him about a luncheon I attended at Texas A&M at which George Bush the First was guest speaker. Spotting a white-haired lady sitting down front when the event ended, I rushed down and asked if she would pose in a photo with me, which she graciously did. Back home, I called my wife into my office to show her the picture of me and Barbara Bush. She took one look and said, “That’s not Barbara Bush.” It wasn’t. I’d approached her from behind and never really looked at her face. I’m sure she wonder who the hell I was. John loved that story.
He idolized comedian Don Rickles. From time to time, I’d send him a link to a Rickles clip and he always responded the same way: by reminding me once again that there was no one funnier.
But John had a softer side, too. When I was placed on administrative leave, effectively convincing me it was time to retire, because I’d started publishing LouisianaVoice, it was John who was first to call me at home to offer condolences. When I had a book signing for my book Louisiana Rocks, John was first in line to get his copy.
When he emailed me that I’d “really stepped in it this time” after I’d written on a Friday that State Police Superintendent Mike Edmonson would be retiring because of the controversy over the infamous San Diego trip, he was just as prompt to write, “Don’t gloat too much” the next week when Edmonson did, in fact, announce his retirement.
Visitation will be from 9 a.m. to 12 Friday at Seale Funeral Home in Denham Springs with services at n 12. Burial will be at St. Margaret Catholic Cemetery in Albany.
We will miss John’s acerbic sense of humor. We will miss his keen political observations. We will miss his work ethic. We will miss his loyalty and his friendship.
But most of all, we will miss John Michael Burch.
