Just about everyone who's anyone in the restaurant business in New Orleans knows Raymond "Pops" ... Even amid disaster, Katrina

Just about everyone who's anyone in the restaurant business in New Orleans knows Raymond "Pops" Thomas. He started as an apprentice cook at the famed Roosevelt Hotel, back when blacks needed permission from the boss to walk into the French Quarter after dark. As a chef, he spent a decade at Brennan's Restaurant, 12 years at Commander's Palace. He's still a food consultant at Acme Oyster House, where most afternoons he could be found chatting up the cooks, relishing life in the city he has called home since he was a boy. That is, until Katrina.

Since the storm, he has been living with his son outside of Los Angeles. He's grateful his shotgun house back in New Orleans suffered only minor damage. And, of course, he's thankful for the roof over his head, for the care of his son and daughter-in-law. But he keeps thinking about going home.

"I'm thankful that I did live there a long time before all this happened. I'm thankful just for being in the city of New Orleans. I'm just thankful for God just giving me life as it is.

"The storm, it's just sort of one of those things that God give me. And I was just thankful that I wasn't in the catastrophe that the people in the 9th Ward was in. I was just above the water level. . . . The only thing that we got was just the wind and the rain.

"New Orleans is all I know, it's all I know. I don't have any intention of going back home until after the first of the year, one way or another. But if I live, I'm going back home. I've been treated like a king, please believe me. I'm here, and I enjoy what I have to be with them, but I just want to be home."

A self-described "Air Force brat," Allen Calliham never really had a hometown. Then, in early 2004, he moved to Waveland, Miss., to care for his elderly parents. When his father passed away and then his mother, in May, he inherited their place - the house that had become home. A few months later, Katrina washed away nearly everything inside.

Calliham saved some family photos, his grandmother's handmade quilts, his mother's paintings - but he figured the house was unsalvageable. Then one day a church group from New Hampshire showed up to carry ruined furniture and wallboard away. Their kindness gave him strength. He has $10,000 in insurance and government aid, and needs at least $50,000 to rebuild, but he's going to try.

Last Thanksgiving was a somber affair, coming two months after his father's death. But he, his brother Gary and their mom watched the Dallas Cowboys as they always had. This year, Calliham and his brother won't have their folks, but they'll watch their Cowboys, like always.

"The biggest thing I'm thankful for is that my brother and our friends and our fellow Wavelanders survived Katrina, and that we didn't lose as many of our neighbors as we feared we had.

He has spent a lifetime serving others, as a waiter at some of the world's finest dining establishments. George V in Paris. Louis XVI in New Orleans. And now Irene's Cuisine, a French Quarter favorite. Customers in the know don't reserve a table, they reserve an attendant: the always warm and gracious John Parry. He never imagined that his customers and boss, friends old and new, would one day attend to his needs.

On dialysis and recovering from a hernia operation, Parry was trapped by floodwaters in his apartment after Katrina struck. Rescued by boat, he was sent to a shelter in Baton Rouge, where doctors and nurses administered care, arranged delivery of dialysis equipment to a friend's house in Florida, even reserved plane tickets for the trip.

When Parry returned to New Orleans in October and found his home in ruins, his boss, Irene DiPietro, offered the key to her French Quarter apartment; customers came by with cash or clothes. Now Parry's back at work.

"The first thing I notice, the warmth in the people. . . . Clotheswise, you name it. Moneywise. Food. You have no idea the generosity of people, and how it has come out in this horrible time.

"I never believed, in a million years, the generosity of my customers. The help from everybody, from everybody, wherever you went. Things like that I'll never forget."

Christa Ervin remembers a time when the kids at Long Beach High joked how great it would be if a storm destroyed their school, so they wouldn't have to go to class. Now, post-Katrina, the high school is one of the few local structures still intact; students elsewhere are attending classes in trailers.

On Nov. 5, the Long Beach senior attended her last homecoming dance - a Hollywood-themed extravaganza organized by a group of Pennsylvania students who raised more than $30,000 to put on the dance, and then traveled to Mississippi with donated gowns, a deejay and door prizes. Senior year is supposed to be about graduating, getting out of school. But Christa's just happy to be back.

"I really didn't think another school, or other students, would come down here and help us. I didn't even think to think of anything like that. For somebody to come down and get all that food and all the decorations we had . . . I don't know if we would've had one (a homecoming dance) if they wouldn't have come down here and done it for us."

Darlene Poole walked away from her old life with nothing but a plastic container stuffed with clothes, identification cards and family photos. The former Orleans Parish sheriff's deputy didn't know she'd be heading to Illinois until she and other evacuees boarded a plane. While some family members went to Houston, she ended up sheltered in a vacant building at the Elgin Mental Health Center, northwest of Chicago.

Volunteers offered a comforting shoulder, practical tips and extraordinary generosity. Poole is now friends with a couple who've provided six months' free rent in an apartment above their home.

This is cache, read story here