Gaetana Leonardo Adde

Gaetana Leonardo Adde, a retired public relations and advertising professional whose career spanned across five decades, died Thursday, October 2, 2014 in Kenner, La. She was 89. The second daughter of a produce merchant, Gay Adde was born at home on the residential end of Bourbon Street. While geographically only a few blocks away from the infamous stretch of nightclubs and souvenir shops, the neighborhood where Gay spent her early life instead was the lively and thriving home to the city's Sicilian-American community. Because of the nature of her father's business - he was a sales representative for what then was known as the Standard Fruit Company - Gay and her sisters Chetta and Josemary spent stretches of their childhood living in Milwaukee and Springfield, Mo. In time, the family moved back to New Orleans. She graduated from Francis T. Nicholls High School in the city's Ninth Ward in 1942. A good student, she once recalled receiving overtures to attend Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Her father would have none of the idea that his daughter would be subjected to the potentially nefarious allure of college life. Instead, Joe Leonardo willingly allowed her to take a job as a copy girl at the defunct New Orleans Item newspaper. Gay would laugh at the incongruity of her father's best intentions and the subsequent exposure to newsroom saltiness that would make the toughest kid at LSU blush, much less a 17-year-old young woman as she was entering professional life. But the Item turned out to provide at least as thorough an education as college could have offered, with a staff that included such lions of New Orleans journalism as Phil Johnson and Hap Glaudi. It was at the Item where Gay met the love of her life - a fresh-out-of-college, Jesuit-educated young reporter named Leo Adde. Glaudi introduced the pair; another copy editor more or less "ordered" Leo to take her out on their first date - against their respective wishes at first, she remembered. Much to their surprise, they hit it off. They married in 1949 and had their first child, Tim, in 1950. Three years later, while Leo Adde was serving in the Navy during the Korean War, Nick was born at an Army hospital in Yokohama, Japan. Two daughters, Tana and Elise were born in New Orleans. Their youngest, Anthony, was born in Miami in 1960, where Leo worked as a reporter and editor at the Miami Herald. Her husband's career called for the family to move several times. After Miami, the family lived in New Orleans again, then the Washington, D.C., area, and again in Miami. While fastidiously tending to the needs of her family, Gay parlayed her natural intelligence and the on-the-job training she picked up in her newspaper days to forge a productive career. She spent several years as an advertising copywriter for Maison Blanche department store in New Orleans, and dabbled in modeling for early television commercials. In 1975, Leo Adde died after a bout with cancer. Gay was left to forge forward with holding the household together as the primary breadwinner. For several years, she managed public relations for a Miami hospital. In time, she felt compelled to return to Metairie, La., a New Orleans suburb, to be closer to her surviving immediate family, landing public relations jobs with United Way and the National Conference of Christians and Jews there before retiring in the late 1980s. Throughout her life, Gay loved to sit at her Singer sewing machine and make many of her own clothes, and also was recognized by her many friends as an excellent gardener and arranger of floral settings. Gay remained active and productive until she sustained a fall in 2003, which left her right arm nearly useless. Still, she worked tirelessly to help care for her grandchildren, living alternately with them in Northern Virginia and at her Metairie home. She is survived by her children - Timothy Adde, of North Miami Beach, Fla., Nicholas Adde, of Arlington, Va., Tana Adde Chase, of Springfield Va., Elise Adde Dubois, of Alexandria, Va., and Anthony Adde, of Metairie, a sister, Chetta, of Metairie, and seven grandchildren. Relatives and of the family are invited to attend the Memorial Mass from LEITZ-EAGAN Metairie, 4747 Veterans Memorial Boulevard, on Wednesday, October 8, 2014 at 12:00 noon. Visitation will begin at 11:00 in the morning. Inurnment will follow in St. Louis No. 3, New Orleans. An online guestbook is available at www.leitzeaganfuneralhome.com.