The Origins of “Po’ Boy”

Back in the nineties, I lived briefly in New Orleans. Unfortunately, I don’t have too many fond memories of that time. In fact, it was a downright mess, for a variety of boring reasons. One thing I liked, of course, was the music scene, although I didn’t get to enjoy enough of it. Another was fried shrimp po’ boy sandwiches. Today the New York Times reports on the origins of the expression “po’ boy.” Turns out, by way of six degrees, that the historian cited is the brother of the sister-in-law of a colleague at work.

That’s where Michael Mizell-Nelson, a University of New Orleans historian, came in.

Researching a violent 1929 streetcar strike, during which 1,100 members of the Amalgamated Association of Electric Street Railway Employees walked off their jobs, Dr. Mizell-Nelson confirmed how the sandwiches acquired their name and their form.

Similar sandwiches existed before the strike, Dr. Mizell-Nelson learned. And the term “poor boy” was already in use, applied to, among other groups, orphaned children.

But in 1929 a sandwich called the poor boy was something new. Fashioned to be wider, to accommodate generous and equitable slices from a loaf, the bread was first baked by John Gendusa at the request of the New Orleans restaurateurs Bennie and Clovis Martin…

The Martins were onetime streetcar workers who, at the height of the strike, pledged to feed their former colleagues at their sandwich and coffee stand. “Whenever we saw one of the striking men coming,” Bennie Martin later recalled, “one of us would say, ‘Here comes another poor boy.’ ”