Marconi Drive is a street in New Orleans that figures into my fiction with some frequency. (It’s early, and my alliterative bent is apparently in absolute overdrive.) It’s also a street I travel pretty often — write what you know, right?

Returning home from breakfast Sunday morning, Husband Tim asked if the street was named after the Marconi who invented the radio. Without hesitating, I answered, “yes.” But then I struggled to remember the circumstance that led to one of our streets being named after Guglielmo Marconi. I wanted to believe the Marconi Company had a radio relay station somewhere around these parts, because that’s just the type of stuff that gets my imagination going.

Alas, a ruined early-twentieth-century radio tower lives only in my imagination. Here’s what I discovered: Guglielmo Marconi visited New Orleans in 1917, six years after he won the Nobel Prize for physics, and was welcomed by big, adoring, crowds. Roughly twenty years later, part of Orleans Avenue was renamed in his honor. This information comes from Hope and New Orleans: A History of Crescent City Street Names, by the talented Sally Asher. (Thanks, Sally!)

Marconi died in 1937, and it seems he was pretty well thought-of. In 1938, the same year the City of New Orleans dubbed a thoroughfare after him, Franklin Roosevelt approved a memorial to Marconi in Washington, D.C. Even though Marconi had been aligned with Mussolini’s fascists since the 1920s. (This information courtesy of Mental Floss and Wikipedia.)

Pre-WWII America must have been a different place. Because my imagination kicks into overdrive again when I think of the inevitable backlash Marconi would have faced if he’d lived and invented and been a political animal in our current century.

Maybe the negative attention would have caused him to withdraw from society, and live a recluse life. In an abandoned radio tower somewhere in the vicinity of Marconi Drive in New Orleans. 🙂