Liz and Robert McDade own New Orleans’ Great American Alligator Museum, a free museum where visitors can see alligator fossils, paintings – and a couple of live residents. Here’s how they run a unique tourist attraction, and keep their energy up in a party town.
What is your morning routine?
Robert McDade: I’m an early morning person, if you call 7:30 early. I make the coffee and catch up on the news. I have my round of papers. The Guardian actually, and I’m from New York, so I was brought up with the New York Times. The Washington Post, and the local New Orleans papers and NPR. Business Insider has a lot of travel oriented articles – we like to travel, and we’re a tourist attraction. I like to start and end the day with a book – usually fiction. Right now I’m reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
Liz McDade: I’m up around 8:30, 9, and I drink the coffee he makes. I check emails, then the news – we’re both news hounds. And Facebook to keep up with friends. I do Wordle every day with my college roommate and her sister. Then the museum starts at 10 o’clock in the morning.
What are you doing today?
Liz McDade: We are preparing for an event called the Champagne Stroll. Businesses on Magazine Street stay open late and offer sparkling wine to guests. I have to go buy some bubbly for that.
Robert McDade: The museum grew out of a boyhood hobby: natural history and mineral collecting. I love fossils. My wife is a geologist, so it was a natural fit when we met. Most of our travels center around geology, and we come back with a lot of specimens. We had opened a small rock shop selling minerals and fossils, and noticed the alligator is one of a kind – it has a strong geological backing, and a lot of fossils.
Tourists come to town wanting to see an alligator. So one day we thought maybe having an alligator museum would be worthwhile. We acquired a very interesting alligator fossil about 25 years ago from a quarry out in Wyoming. A few years after that we acquired a very large taxidermy alligator, and with those two items we had the beginnings of a museum. People love buying alligator things. We had a joke: “If it’s green, it sells.”
Did you have any challenges today?
Liz McDade: The weather. We rely on tourism, and last year New Orleans had close to 20 million tourists. Right now we’re getting around 200 visitors a day. Summer time is very hot and humid – then the challenge is bringing people into the museum.
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What do you do to unwind?
Robert McDade: We are big into our daily exercise. For strength training, we belong to a local health club. We will go up to Audubon Park and walk around – it’s just so beautiful, especially in the spring. And we have been participating in a style of karate called Shotokan. There was a very well-known Japanese martial artist who lived in Metairie, LA, and we’ve been doing it probably three times a week for the last 35 years.
Do you have a sleep routine?
Robert McDade: We usually watch a movie. We go through cycles – sometimes it’s westerns or a film noir. Lately it’s been international black and white movies. Last night we watched a wonderful French film, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. We smiled throughout the entire movie!
This interview has been edited and condensed
