Peggy Scott Laborde

Christmas in New Orleans & Canal Street:
New Orleans’ Great Wide Way

Since 1987, Ms. Laborde has been the senior producer for the New Orleans PBS station, WYES-TV, where she has developed, produced, and hosted documentaries and in-studio productions about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. In addition to “Canal Street: The Great Wide Way,” she has produced, narrated, or consulted for over forty-five documentaries, including “Where New Orleans Shopped,” “The Lost Restaurants of New Orleans,” “The French Quarter That Was,” “Mardi Gras: The Passing Parade,” “Holy New Orleans!”, and “Streetcar Stories,” among others. She also hosts Steppin’ Out, New Orleans’ only weekly arts and entertainment review program, now in its nineteenth season, and winner of the New Orleans Press Club Award in the Public Affairs category.

Prior to her work with WYES, Ms. Laborde worked as a general manager and writer/producer at WLAE-TV in New Orleans (PBS) and at WDSU-TV (NBC affiliate) in New Orleans. At both stations she produced documentaries about local history as well as magazine programs about local events and personalities.

Ms. Laborde has been honored for both her community and professional work, earning awards from the Press Club of New Orleans, the Mayor’s Conference on Women, the Public Relations Society of America, the American Council of Career Women, and American Women in Radio and Television. Since the ’80s she has been active in the New Orleans community, from theater and the arts to revitalization and conservation efforts. She has served as president of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival since 1992 and has held leadership positions with the Arts Council of New Orleans, the Metropolitan Area Leadership Forum, the New Orleans Coalition, the Mid-City Improvement Association, and the Canal Street Area Service Association.

Ms. Laborde received her bachelor of arts degree in political science at the University of New Orleans in 1975. She is married to Errol P. Laborde, the editor of New Orleans Magazine and producer of the weekly television news roundtable Informed Sources on WYES-TV, New Orleans. In addition to her interest in New Orleans, especially jazz and Mardi Gras, her hobbies include singing, theater, photography, and architectural preservation.

John T. Magill

Christmas in New Orleans & Canal Street:
New Orleans’ Great Wide Way

Born in 1946 in New Orleans but raised in Hawaii and California, John T. Magill has worked at The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC) since 1982, when he was first hired as a picture cataloguer. He currently serves as THNOC curator and head of both research services and the reading room at Williams Research Center.

Over the past decade, he has been responsible for numerous THNOC exhibitions, including Pelican’s Eye: Views of New Orleans (a history of the city through bird’s eye views); From Bank to Shore (neighborhood growth in New Orleans); This Vast Land (the early French period in New Orleans); The Long Weekend (the arts and the French Quarter in the 1920s); and A Mystical Bal Masque (a history of the artistic design of the Mystic Club Carnival ball).

Mr. Magill has also written extensively for The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly, New Orleans Magazine, Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine, and Gambit Weekly. He has contributed to several books published by or associated with THNOC, most recently Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps (2003), which received several awards, including Book of the Year from the Louisiana Library Association, Louisiana Endowment for the Arts, and the Gulf Coast Historical Association.

A graduate of the University of New Orleans, where he earned both his bachelor and master of arts degrees in history, Mr. Magill lectures regularly about various aspects of New Orleans life and history, including urban growth, neighborhood histories, Mardi Gras, and more. He lives in New Orleans.