KATRINA EVACUEES FIND KIND REFUGE IN EUGENE.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

The black-and-white photograph of Bob Roesler and Dean Martin from the 1951 film "Sailor Beware" is intact, but the water damage is evident. Still, it survived, just as Bob and his wife, Cloe, did.

But little else from the Roeslers' New Orleans home made it through Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29: some sculptures created long ago by Cloe's father, Enrique Alferez, a famous New Orleans artisan; a few other photographs; and a framed tribute to a book that Bob wrote on New Orleans horse racing.

The Roeslers are among several former New Orleans residents living in and around Eugene now. And like others, they just might stay.

"We really love it here," says Bob Roesler, 78, who retired as the executive sports editor of the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans in 1994. "We could stay here. We love it that much."

The Roeslers flew to Eugene from Houston on Sept. 3 to stay with their daughter, Kim Spencer, a graduate student at the University of Oregon, and their grandson, Ian Spencer, a junior at the UO. Now, they have their own apartment in a complex on Bailey Hill Road in west Eugene.

Lifelong residents of the New Orleans' area, they evacuated their home on Aug. 28 to stay in a downtown New Orleans Hilton hours before the devastating hurricane hit. Their son, Toby Roesler, who lived in the same neighborhood as his parents a half-mile from Lake Pontchartrain, drove with his family to Houston, but Bob and Cloe didn't want to do that because Bob hates to drive. A neck injury from a 1991 accident makes it painful to sit in a car, he says.

"We didn't want to go," says Bob Roesler, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a journalist. `(Toby) called us in the middle of the night and said, `Dad, you just gotta get out of there.' '

By then, however, there was nowhere to go. The electricity in the Hilton went out, and the Roeslers joined the others in the dark hallway on the hotel's 24th floor as the building swayed in the 160 mph winds. A few days later they drove to Houston to join their son and his family at a hotel before flying to Eugene.

A couple of weeks ago, the couple's sons, Toby and Bobby Roesler of Los Angeles, were able to go back into their parents' neighborhood and recover the few items they could.

Bobby Roesler took photographs of the one-story brick house his parents had lived in for more than three decades. It was a total loss. It had sat in 10 feet of water. The windows were busted out. Mud caked the home. Fallen trees had punched their way through the roof. The backyard was a scramble of debris.

They lost most everything, including all their furniture and Bob's extensive library. Their mortgage was paid and flood insurance covered most of the loss and they are hoping homeowner's insurance covers the rest, but that is uncertain, they say.

A bright spot that emerged from the disaster for Bob Roesler was the Oregon National Guard, which had 1,921 members in New Orleans soon after the hurricane, helping with security and evacuations.

"Without the military, the city would have been in bad shape," says Roesler, who was once put on active duty by the Navy in the late 1950s to help after a hurricane hit New Orleans, albeit a far weaker one than Katrina. "So I realize what the help means," he says. "I'd like to let the Guard know what their help means."

The Roeslers plan to present the Oregon National Guard with a modest plaque to recognize their contribution. Kay Fristad, a Guard spokeswoman in Salem, said she would be grateful for that and would try to arrange something at the Guard's Eugene armory.

Until then, the Roeslers will take comfort in their modest apartment furnished with a few things they found at a yard sale, and the handful of items from their New Orleans' home, including that photo from "Sailor Beware," the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy filmed in San Diego, where Bob Roesler was stationed in 1950.

A life spent covering the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League and the Louisiana State University Tigers hasn't kept him from quickly becoming an Oregon Duck fan, says Bob Roesler, who was wearing a yellow Saints shirt sent to him by the team's general manager, Mickey Loomis, a Willamette High School graduate.

Roesler was offered a ticket to the Oregon-University of Southern California game by Jeff Hawkins, the UO's director of football operations whose mother- and father-in-law, Bert and Marcia Scalise, also evacuated from New Orleans and are living in Eugene, where they plan to stay for good.

"It's amazing how many people from New Orleans ended up here," says the Scalises' daughter, Amy Hawkins, who grew up there.

As much as the Roeslers miss New Orleans, it might be just as easy to stay here. "Nowhere," have they met better people, Bob Roesler says. "And I've been to Africa and Hong Kong," he says. "I've never been around nicer people in my life. It is unbelievable."

CAPTION(S):

Bob and Cloe Roesler joined their daughter and grandson in Eugene after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their New Orleans home. "I've never been around nicer people in my life," Bob Roesler says. Thomas Boyd / The Register-Guard