Katrina's Lives Lost:	Paul Williams Jr., 1945-2005
Submitted By: 		N.O.V.A November 2005
Source:			Times Picayune 11-04-2005

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When Jim Hunter was playing in the club championship at Metairie Country
Club one year, veteran caddie Paul Williams Jr. was on the bag.

On the last hole, one down in the match, Hunter had a 2-foot putt to win
and force extra holes. No one could miss it . . . but stuff happens. He
missed badly.

"Did I pull that?" asked Hunter, the owner of Southern Eagle, the Budweiser
distributorship in the New Orleans area.

"Did you pull it!" said the normally quiet caddie, in disbelief.

"That was about as animated as he got," Hunter said of the 60-year-old
Hollygrove resident. "We got to be close because he caddied for me twice a
week, but he was very quiet, almost shy. He was a pretty good student of
the game, though, and he was always telling me to slow down my swing or
open my stance."

Williams, said Hunter, "was a pretty athletic guy for a guy 60 years old."
He came to Metairie Country Club as a teenager and never really left.

The club's Director of Golf Greg Core said the key to Williams' talents was
that "he was not only a great caddie but a good player. He won the annual
Christmas tournament we had for the caddies more than a few times."
Williams played mostly out of Pontchartrain Park.

"He was used every time he came out here, pretty much every day," Core
said. "He was fabulous. The big difference with Paul is that he was a good
player. It's a big difference if you can play -- that makes it a lot easier
to be a caddie."

Williams, his mother, Alberta Luckett, and his niece, Darrian Williams,
fled their Hollygrove home on Burthe Street the Wednesday after the storm,
said Luckett, now living in Dallas. They walked briefly through some water,
and quickly got to a dry area, walking on Carrollton Avenue toward St.
Charles. They proceeded on St. Charles Avenue until they got near Audubon
Park, at which point Williams told her he needed to go to a restroom.

Williams, her oldest son, headed down Walnut Street toward the park and a
shelter.

"I never saw him again," Luckett said. "I called and called for him and
went looking for him there, but never found him. I don't know where he was
found or when he was found or what happened to him."

His badly decomposed body wound up at the temporary morgue in St. Gabriel
before being shipped to the Wilson-Wooddale Funeral Home in Baton Rouge,
where he was to be cremated. The undertaker told Luckett that her son died
of a heart attack, but she still doesn't have a death certificate
containing the official cause of death.

"I think something happened to him in that park," she said.