Fred Booker goes by a lot of titles.
Some call him Dad. Some call him Coach. Some call him Lt. Booker.
But to visitors at St. Tammany Health System, he’s “the Piano Man,” a sobriquet the security officer earned for his habit of spontaneously stopping to tickle the ivories of the mini-grand piano in the lobby of the health system’s Covington hospital.
“It always gets a positive response. It seems to make people happy,” Lt. Booker said with a smile recently. “If they don’t need me on a post or on a unit, I’ll go play for 10 minutes or so. Sometimes, I’ll walk past the front desk and they’ll say, ‘Go play us something,’ and so I play them something. It’s relaxing. It’s a stress reliever.”
It’s also just one of the myriad ways in which Lt. Booker has dedicated himself over the years to serving others.
“Let me tell you, Lt. Booker is St. Tammany Health System personified,” Security Chief Kenny Norris said. “He’s professional, he’s capable, he’s dependable, but he’s also deeply compassionate, a genuinely nice guy.”
Visitors to St. Tammany Health System clearly felt that as they arrived at the hospital on a recent Thursday afternoon.
As he noodled on the keyboard, Lt. Booker got at least two thumbs-ups from passersby, along with innumerable smiles and a playful exchange with a hospital colleague pretending to look for a tip jar.
Another passerby asked if he takes requests, which, it turns out, Lt. Booker doesn’t do – but not because he doesn’t want to.
“I never played a piano until I started working here,” he said. “I just play what I hear in my head. If you ask me to play a song, I don’t think I could. I just play what’s in my head.”
Growing up in Hammond, he was a sports kid, not a music kid, he said. His big brother played in a garage band, however, and Lt. Booker remembers playing around with their musical instruments when they took breaks.
His brother quickly realized the younger Booker had a gift and urged him to pursue it. By the time he was a freshman in high school, Booker had taken up the tuba and the trombone. He soon added drums to play in a gospel group, then bass for an R&B-focused garage band.
Despite his innate musical talent – which he suspects may have come from his grandfather, who played upright bass as part of a church choir – playing professionally was never in the cards. After graduating from high school and two years at Southeastern Louisiana University, he joined the Army, then segued into a 33-year career with the Hammond Fire Department.
When he wasn’t working, he coached youth sports for more than 28 years – including coaching his own football-playing sons: former New Orleans Saints defensive back Fred Booker Jr., Arizona Cardinals cornerback Robert Alford and former SLU defensive backs coach Duriel Adams.
In 2011, he retired from the Fire Department but quickly realized retirement wasn’t for him. “I was going nuts,” he said – which brought him and his musical talents to St. Tammany Health System.
That longtime dedication to serving others, in addition to being one of the central tenets upon which STHS was founded in 1954, recently saw Lt. Booker earn the city of Hammond’s Wilbert H. Dangerfield Award for his years of service to the community.
“That was huge,” he said, pausing from the piano. “When you’re doing these things, you’re not doing it for recognition. You do it out of love.”