Jimmy Fitzmorris, Louisiana politician who lost squeakers for mayor, governor, dies at 99

Jimmy Fitzmorris liked people. And people liked him. Just not quite enough of them.

Fitzmorris won three elections to the New Orleans City Council in the 1950s and 1960s and was twice elected lieutenant governor in the 1970s.

But Fitzmorris, who died Wednesday at age 99 at his daughter's home in Slidell, fell just short of being elected mayor of New Orleans, both in 1965 and 1969, and he was edged out during the 1979 race to be governor of Louisiana by the narrowest of margins.

“I suspect Fitzmorris will go down in the history books as one of the tragic figures of 20th-century Louisiana politics,” columnist Allan Katz once wrote about Fitzmorris, “although he has never thought of himself that way.”

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