Blaine Kern Sr., 'Mr. Mardi Gras' impresario of a New Orleans float-building empire, has died

Blaine Kern Sr., the flamboyant New Orleans float builder and visionary who, as "Mr. Mardi Gras," propelled the modernization and expansion of Carnival, died Thursday, according to his wife. He was 93.

Kern ushered in the era of the superkrewes and pioneered such parade razzle-dazzle as giant props, double-decker and multi-unit floats, splashy lighting and on-board animatronics.

Kern Studios, which he founded, crafts more than a dozen prominent parades, including Endymion, Muses, Bacchus, Orpheus, Iris, Zulu, Hermes and Tucks. For nearly 70 years, through 2019, the company also created the Rex Organization’s floats.

"It would not be an exaggeration to declare Blaine Kern as one of the most significant individuals in the entire history of the celebration of Mardi Gras,” said Arthur Hardy, publisher of the definitive “Mardi Gras Guide.”

Likening Kern to legendary showman P.T. Barnum, Hardy said, “Everyone credits him, correctly, with the concept of superkrewes. But just as important was his creation of rental floats that allowed less affluent citizens to participate in Carnival by forming their own krewes. By making parades more affordable, he really opened Mardi Gras up."

What Popeyes kingpin Al Copeland was to chicken, Kern was to Carnival: a brash, shameless character who came from nothing, launched an unconventional Big Easy empire, and lived unapologetically large and loud as a result.

“Mardi Gras time was Blaine Kern time,” said Clarence Becknell Sr., historian emeritus of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club. “You can’t mention ‘New Orleans’ without saying ‘Blaine Kern.’ He put your parade together.”

Kern grew up poor on Algiers Point. His father, Roy Kern, was a sign painter who preferred fishing and drinking. As a young boy, Blaine watched his dad fashion a primitive float atop a garbage wagon in 1932 for the West Bank's inaugural Krewe of Alla parade.

When the family could no longer afford monthly rent of $15, Blaine, his mother and his three sisters moved in with the Skeffington sisters, a trio of elderly retired teachers.

"My dad was literally raised by seven women," said Barry Kern, the president and CEO of Kern Studios and Mardi Gras World. "They treated him like he was the baby Jesus, like he could do no wrong."

The Skeffington home's extensive library exposed Blaine to the fantastical fiction of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. "The Skeffington sisters encouraged my dad to read," Barry said. "His great imagination was fueled by reading all those incredible books."
After graduating from Martin Behrman High School, Blaine spent a year at the New Orleans Academy of Art. Drafted into the Army in 1945, he shipped out to Korea at the end of World War II. Exploring both Korea and China sparked his lifelong love of adventure travel.

Back in Algiers after two years abroad, he painted a mural depicting the history of medicine as payment for medical services for his mother. Dr. Henry LaRocca, the captain of the Krewe of Alla, was so impressed that he invited Kern, then 19, to decorate Alla’s floats.

Recognizing a potentially lucrative business, Kern founded Blaine Kern Artists Inc. in 1947. The Krewe of Choctaw hired him the year after his Alla debut. In 1951, he added the Rex organization to his list of clients.

He became Alla’s captain in 1957, a position he held for five decades. For the 1960 Alla ball, he created a 19-foot movable King Kong, a forerunner of the various Kong floats he’d later build for Bacchus. 

Theme park visionary Walt Disney saw Kern's Kong and offered him a job in California. Kern, who considered Disney a “god,” nearly accepted. But Rex captain Darwin S. Fenner advised against the move.

“He said, 'Son, you go out there, you're going to be a little bitty fish in a big pond. You stay here and grow Mardi Gras, you'll be a big fish in a little pond,’” Kern recalled during a 2018 interview. “And he was right. I stayed."

It was the pivotal decision of his career. Fenner became Kern’s mentor and patron, sending him to Italy, Spain, Germany and France to study art and learn float-building techniques from families that had done it for generations.

In New Orleans, Kern blended what he learned in Europe with innovations such as animation, said Carnival historian Henri Schindler, the art director for Rex, Endymion and Babylon.
"His magnificent parades for Rex in the late 1950s and the early 1960s reintroduced the large papier-mâché figures from Italy, as well as animation," said Schindler. "They were enormous successes."

Carnival was traditionally the province of the city's Uptown elite. Kern, of German and Italian descent, had been born on the wrong side of the Mississippi River. But his artistic and sales skills afforded him access to Carnival's inner circle. Once there, he aimed to make a difference.

"When I started out, if you were Jewish, black, Irish, Italian, you couldn’t get in these clubs,” he said in 2018. “You had to be a WASP. It was crazy. It was a different world.”

To attract attention and tourists, they envisioned a new type of parade with spectacular floats and a celebrity monarch. Brennan invited Kern to dinner to explain the concept and to ask him to create the floats.

Brennan's original name for the new parade was the Merry Men of Sherwood. Kern suggested another moniker: Bacchus.

Bacchus first rolled in 1969, with Brennan as its captain and Danny Kaye as the celebrity monarch. Kern lobbied for the post-parade Bacchus Rendezvous to be more like a giant party than the formal balls of the old-line krewes. Over the years, Bacchus added such Kern-built signature floats as the Bacchasaurus dinosaur, the Bacchawhoppa whale, the Bacchagator alligator and the Kong family.

"He was the architect of the new super parades, with the enormous floats and the dozens of riders and the ceaseless showers of trinkets,” Schindler said. “Those were all his."

Endymion grew from a small Gentilly parade to a mammoth procession thanks in part to Kern, who rented floats to the fledgling krewe at an affordable price. In Endymion founder and captain Ed Muniz, Kern found a like-minded, equally ambitious outsider determined to remake Mardi Gras.

“Ed had a vision to be the biggest and best, and Blaine fed that vision, because he wanted to build it,” said Endymion vice president Darryl d'Aquin, Muniz’s son-in-law. “So they fed off each other.”

Operating out of Mardi Gras World’s original Algiers headquarters, and later from a much larger riverfront facility on the east bank, Kern fueled an arms race among superkrewes. Kern Studios created Muses' famed shoe, sirens and duck floats, as well as Orpheus' Leviathan, Smokey Mary and Trojan Horse.

Fifty years ago, Blaine charged $5,000 per float. In 2013, Endymion's dazzling, 370-foot-long, nine-part tribute to Pontchartrain Beach amusement park cost $1.5 million.

“Besides building a great parade," said Barry Kern, "my father could sell it to the customer."

In 2006, for the first Carnival after Hurricane Katrina, Kern worked diligently to make sure both Zulu and Rex rolled on Fat Tuesday.

“The mayor wanted the world to know that New Orleans was open for Mardi Gras,” recalled Becknell, the Zulu historian. “To portray that message, you had to have parades on Mardi Gras day. Who could do that but Blaine Kern?”
Orchestrating the timing of Zulu and Rex, so the latter falls in right behind the former, requires a precise logistical operation. That Zulu leases most of its floats, which are also used in other parades, complicates the process.

“We're the last to use those floats, so Blaine didn’t have a lot of time to do maintenance,” Becknell said. “That was one of the biggest challenges he had.”

Another, Becknell noted, was accommodating the extra weight of Zulu’s coconuts: “The poor guy had to figure out a way to put coconuts on floats that weren’t built to hold coconuts.

“It’s a monumental task. The Zulu parade is very challenging. Blaine was a good friend of Zulu. We worked well together. He went out of his way to make sure our parade was the best it could be.”

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Building Mardi Gras floats accounts for only part of the Kern company’s tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Opening Mardi Gras World to visitors in the 1980s created a major tourist attraction. Under Barry Kern's stewardship, Kern Studios expanded globally as an entertainment production and specialty fabrication company, building elaborate props and parades for such clients as Disney, Six Flags and Universal Studios, as well as the Chick-fil-A cows that adorn billboards across the country. 

Being the ever-boisterous Blaine Kern was its own full-time job. In 1988, the Rex organization issued a proclamation making his "Mr. Mardi Gras" honorific official; he subsequently trademarked the term.

More showman than businessman, administration was never his forte. Always full of energy and ideas, his schemes didn't always pan out.

He and his sons built much of the cash-strapped 1984 New Orleans World’s Fair, including its "Wonder Wall." But the gondola Blaine strung across the Mississippi River never attracted enough riders to be viable. Even when Kern Studios was no longer being paid to stage the fair's daily parade, Barry Kern said, his father insisted it continue "because he did not want New Orleans to be embarrassed."

The senior Kern also lost money on the ill-fated Jazzland amusement park in New Orleans East. In the 1980s, he partnered with a New York real estate tycoon named Donald Trump to develop property on the West Bank; the project fizzled.

Kern bought the decommissioned World War II aircraft carrier USS Cabot, which was transferred to the Spanish navy in the 1960s and rechristened Dédalo, for $1. He planned to turn it into a museum and casino docked at Mardi Gras World. Investors included his pal Harry Lee, the longtime Jefferson Parish sheriff.

The Cabot lingered on the Mississippi riverfront for years. But Kern and former Gov. Edwin Edwards couldn’t cut a deal on a casino license. In 1999, the carrier was sold at auction for scrap.

Kern was married four times. By his own estimation, his earlier marriages suffered because he was “young, filthy rich, and an (expletive) of the first magnitude where women were concerned.”

Barry Kern was still in grade school when he accompanied his father to Turkey and was introduced to the spectacle of belly-dancing. On that same trip, they were stranded by an earthquake.

Blaine once ventured deep into the Peruvian jungle with Arthur Jones, the multimillionaire inventor of the Nautilus exercise machine, to collect tropical creatures. There was a nighttime encounter with escaped snakes and spider monkeys, and a plunge into a river to capture a large anaconda.

Besides his many business activities and adventures, Kern was active in charity work. His two pet beneficiaries were Junior Achievement, which inducted him into its Business Hall of Fame, and The University of Holy Cross, which named its library for him.

In 2002, he met Holly Brown after being seated across from her during a Bacchus event at Brennan’s. Forty-nine years younger than Kern, she owned a Metairie dance studio.

They became a couple, and got married in 2010 in Hawaii. She joined him on trips to more than 50 countries and all seven continents. For her 40th birthday, he took her to Antarctica.

The cost of all that traveling came up in a legal dispute between Blaine and Barry that first flared in 2010. Just as Tom Benson's family battled over control of the Saints, the Kerns clashed over Carnival.

The leaders of Bacchus, Rex and Endymion, not wanting the production of their parades to be disrupted, brokered a temporary truce between father and son. In 2015, the conflict was finally resolved. Blaine sold his 50.1% stake in Blaine Kern Artists to Barry, putting the son he'd groomed as his successor firmly in charge.

At age 88, Blaine realized his dream of attending Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The trip reignited his creativity, and he started drawing again. He subsequently illustrated “A Tree in the Sea,” a children’s book written by Holly and published by the local River Road Press in 2017.

Kern never wanted to think of himself as “retired.”

“His age never had anything to do with the way he thinks and feels and lives,” Barry Kern said. “He’s not a person that was acting his age, ever. He’s been referred to as Peter Pan many times. Anything he ever wanted to do, he did it."

In 2017, Kern reigned over the Krewe of Boo Halloween parade, which he founded. That same year, he and Holly traveled to Cuba, where, in 1960, he had staged a mini-parade for Fidel Castro.

In recent years, the couple spent more time at home on the West Bank with their dogs and cats. Up until the coronavirus pandemic struck this spring, he still exercised at a gym several times a week.

By his twilight years, he had mellowed considerably. His ego was no longer as imposing, especially after several brushes with mortality. Before he got a pacemaker in 2008, Holly resuscitated him with CPR at least three times.

Asked two years ago if his Mardi Gras legacy made him proud, Kern responded in a way that would have made his younger, brasher self scoff: “It does and it doesn’t. People walk up to me and hug me and congratulate me. Somehow, I don’t feel like I deserve it. I’m very Catholic. God’s given me this talent, but it’s embarrassing a little bit.”

Being isolated by the pandemic hastened a decline in Kern's health and led to his being admitted to West Jefferson Medical Center. "Blaine thrived on interacting with people, and he had to stay active," Barry said. "Between not interacting with people and not exercising, it took a toll."

His legacy will endure in both Carnival and the global company that bears his family name. "My whole life, we've been executing his incredibly creative ideas," Barry Kern said. "That's why we've been able to take it all over the world."

Survivors include his wife, Holly Kern; three sons, Blaine Kern Jr., Barry and Brian Kern; two daughters, Thais Barr and Blainey Kern; 10 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

Writer John Pope contributed to this story. 

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly credited Kern's company with creating the nude mermaids at the entrance to the 1984 World's Fair. They were built by Barth Brothers. Also, Henri Schindler is no longer the art director for Orpheus, as the story originally stated. 

CREDITS: NOLA.COM

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