Jerelyn 'Pixie' Hall Naquin of Blaine Kern Artists dies at age 63
Times Picayune 06-17-2010
Submitted By NOVA

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Jerelyn “Pixie” Hall Naquin, who rose from secretary to executive vice president of Blaine Kern
Artists during a 47-year career in which she became a Carnival mainstay, died Tuesday of cancer
at her Terrytown home. She was 63.

“When things needed to get done, she was the person to make it happen,” float designer Henri
Schindler said. “She never dropped the ball.”

A precise, detail-oriented woman occupying the No. 2 spot in what has become a worldwide
enterprise, Mrs. Naquin was the counterweight to her boss if his proposals for parades and
floats became too outlandish, said Barry Kern, Blaine Kern’s son and the president of Blaine
Kern Artists.

“She had all the facts, all the information,” the younger Kern said. “She was my dad’s memory.”

Blaine Kern, chairman of the board of Blaine Kern Artists, admitted his dependence on her.

“When my company started to grow, … she was an adviser as much as anything. She was that smart,”
he said. “I was the puppet, and Pixie was the puppeteer.”

Mrs. Naquin, whose mother gave her her nickname when she was a child, was born in Dallas and
lived in the New Orleans area for about 50 years.

She came to work for Kern part time in 1963, when she was a student at Martin Behrman High
School and the company was responsible for just a handful of parades, including Okeanos, Alla
and Rex.

The operation was so small, Blaine Kern said, that she worked on a second-hand typewriter and a
hanging piece of fabric separated his and Mrs. Naquin’s work area from the den.

“In the winter, we froze with an electric heater,” he said. “In the summer, we sweated with an
electric fan, but she was always so bright and so cheery. I didn’t know anybody who didn’t like
Pixie.”

During that period, when she ran out of things to do in the office, Mrs. Naquin said she
sometimes headed into the den to work with the papier-mâché figures and apply gold leaf to the
floats.

Mrs. Naquin was “probably the only person I knew who loved her job 99 percent of the time,” said
her husband, Thomas Naquin.

Her responsibilities grew with the company, she said in a 1990 interview. They included meetings
with krewe leaders about parade themes, being a troubleshooter during parades, and letting
Crescent City Connection police know when floats were about to leave Kern’s Algiers den and
cross the Mississippi River.

And for krewes that rented floats that had been in other parades because they didn’t have their
own, Mrs. Naquin was good at regrouping them for subsequent processions and even coming up with
new themes, Barry Kern said.

“It worked perfectly well,” he said, “and everybody felt like they had their own identity.”

In addition to her husband, survivors include a son, Brian Naquin; her mother, Evelyn Shepherd
of Mandeville; two sisters, Sandi Daigle of Church Point and Zebbi Fried of Westwego; and a
grandchild.

A funeral will be held Friday at 11 a.m. at Mothe Funeral Home, 1300 Vallette St., Algiers.
Visitation will start at 8 a.m.

Burial will be in St. Patrick Cemetery No. 3.