Sam Moran leads a hectic life. .
On the job (when is he ever ff the job?) it may be the most hectic life of any New Or-eanian.
Sam Moran's the special instigator for the Orleans Par-_>h coroner's office. He's coroner Dr. Nicholas J. Chetta's rightTiand man.
Sam works around the clock. That is, he's on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. No eight-hour tour of duty, 40-hour week tor him. He even has to work Sundays if there are cases to be handled.
Sam's had this job going on 14 years. Based on a two-to-;hree case-a-day estimate, he igures he's already "gone out on" 10,000 to 15,000 of them.
It's been 10,000 to 15,000 times ooking in on death by violence. 3y homicide, suicide, drowning, ire, asphyxiation. To say noth-^ ing of the never-ending succes-* sion of fatalities in accidents on and, on water and in the air.
Many of the cases are routine —what happened is obvious. Others have been complex, mys-;ifying, often bizarre. In those, Sam functions after the fashion of Sherlock Holmes.
NOT CALLOUS
You don't become completely callous in a job like this, Sam hints. He recalls seeing "some awfuj sights" and heartbreaking situations. Some of the deaths he's probed gave him emotional twinges he couldn't shake off immediately.
Sam is a product of the Irish Channel. He was born in the heart of the section 57 years ago and lived in it for more than half a century.
He's a long-time public em-! ploye. Through the 1920s he worked in the city treasurer's office. Later he was with the state health board. In 1942 he joined the New Orleans Police Department. In 1950, while still a policeman, Dr. Chetta drafted him for the investigator's post. In 1962, Sam retired from the police force but stayed on in the coroner's office job.
EVEN IN CHURCH
It's been nearly 14 years of getting pulled 6Ut of bed in the middle of the night and rushing to death scenes from one end of the sprawling metropolis to the other. Sometimes in below-freezing cold or pouring down rain. Frequently having to jump up from a meal with his family. There have been instances when the police went into church on Sunday morning and yanked him out.
Sam says: "The police and the firemen and all, they have to work in all kinds of weather and all hours of the day and night, and Sundays, too. But nobody ever makes them go on the job when they're off duty. Me, I'm never off duty."
Sam is a dapper, energetic man with a slightly husky voice and an authoritative manner. Policemen and firemen and almost everybody around the Criminal Courts Building, where the coroner's office is housed, know him.
They don't refer to him, un-
officially, as the coroner's special investigator—it's simply, Sam Moran. When somebody says, "Sam Moran was on this case," nobody ever asks, "Sam Moran? Who's he?"
PHOTO: SAM MORAN
holds electric lamp and wiring which electrocuted a New Orleans woman in May, 1957. She was electrocuted when she was cleaning the lamp.
