NEW ORLEANS — Restaurateur, musician and civic leader Edgar “Dooky” Chase Jr. died at Tuesday age 88, his granddaughter Tracie Griffin said.

She said Chase and his wife, chef Leah Chase, had been married for 70 years. For decades, Leah Chase has been a fixture and mainstay of the family restaurant named for Dooky Chase’s father.

The restaurant was open Wednesday, Griffin said, adding, “Of course, she’s in the kitchen.”

Mayor Mitch Landrieu called Dooky Chase a local legend.

“As the patriarch of a great New Orleans family, he was a man dedicated to faith who had an infectious smile, a word of wisdom or joke for anyone who came through his doors on Orleans Avenue,” Landrieu said.

The famed Dooky Chase’s Restaurant opened in 1939 as a street corner stand, and moved it in 1941 to its present location.

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The younger Chase delivered sandwiches for the shop but went on to play trumpet in his own jazz band, the Dooky Chase Orchestra, according to a biography on the Edgar “Dooky” Chase Jr. and Leah Chase Family Foundation’s website. As treasurer of the local musicians’ union, he “was able to raise the pay scale,” it said.

He met Leah Lange when his band was playing for a Mardi Gras ball in 1945, and they married the next year.

After the band’s last performance in 1949, Chase became a promoter, and hosted Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn, Nat King Cole at the restaurant.

During the civil rights era, Chase went door-to-door and spoke on the radio to get people to register to vote.

Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Thurgood Marshall and Andrew Young were among civil rights leaders who “gathered to have pivotal discussions over a bowl of gumbo” there.


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