Arthur J. Robinson, Known as ‘Mr. Okra’ to New Orleans, Dies at 74

Arthur J. Robinson, or “Mr. Okra,” as pretty much everyone called him, who rolled each day through the streets of New Orleans in a loudly painted pickup truck-cum-fruit stand singing his sales pitch like the roving food vendors once common in the city, died Thursday at his home there. He was 74.

The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Sergio Robinson, who had in recent years taken to driving the route when her father’s health waned.

In neighborhoods rich and poor alike, you could hear the rising melody some minutes before Mr. Okra’s truck appeared: “I have ooooranges and bananas! I have eeeeeating pears and apples!”

Over tinny loudspeakers you would hear that he had cantaloupe, greens, squash and “the mango,” and soon the truck would come into view, a polychrome, mobile oasis in even the driest of food deserts.

Children, regular customers and selfie-snapping tourists would flock to him — the customers to buy watermelon, or maybe a few ears of corn. Robinson, built like Santa Claus, and with an impish sense of humor, would hand over the produce in a plastic bag, snap the cash proceeds into a binder clip and be on his way.

He was a direct heir to a street-peddling tradition in New Orleans. Well before delivery apps purportedly disrupted the grocery business, people sat at their front stoops and bought from the Waffle Man, the Peanut Man, the Banana Man, the Hot Stuffed Crab Lady or the Ha Ha Man, an ice cream vendor so called for his singsong jingle.

“Used to be a lot more peddlers like Okra,” said Brian Reaney, the warehouse supervisor at A.J.'s. Produce, a wholesaler where Robinson would stop every morning at 6 to shoot the breeze and gather the day’s goods. “I think he was the last of the neighborhood truck drivers.”

He was certainly the most celebrated. In the mid-2000s, a well-known local artist named Dr. Bob offered to paint Robinson’s pickup — this kind of advertising being another local tradition — and turned it into arguably the most recognizable vehicle in the city. Names of fruits and vegetables covered the hood and the sides, along with a slogan — “Juiciest fruits in the hood!"— and Robinson’s own observations, like, “Ain’t no joy like a Ninth Ward boy.”

Sergio Robinson recalled that when her father returned to the city several months after Hurricane Katrina, he saw, spray-painted on a refrigerator left out along the road, “Please find Mr. Okra, we need him.”

He resumed his deliveries, giving away the produce on his first trip around the recovering city free of charge.

Arthur James Robinson was born in New Orleans on June 8, 1943, the youngest of 14 children. His father, Nathan Robinson, known as Okra Man, delivered fruits and vegetables by wheelbarrow and horse and buggy.

Arthur was, naturally, “Lil’ Okra” for a time. But after dropping out of school, he moved into other lines of work, running a gas station, traveling as part of the merchant marine and repairing the tires of 18-wheelers. Still, on Sunday afternoons, he would bring groceries to some of the elderly people he knew, Sergio Robinson said.

“Then it turned out to be everybody in the neighborhood got used to coming to him,” she said.

So, some three decades ago, he affixed a metal roof over the bed of his truck and started making the rounds, on his way to becoming a local celebrity.

When the truck he was using in 2009 broke down, the owner of a local Ford dealership offered a replacement at a steep discount, and Robinson’s fans and customers raised the money to pay for it. Dr. Bob painted it again.

In recent years, Robinson was the subject of an award-winning documentary titled “Mr. Okra” and the main character in a children’s book. His singsong delivery was sampled in a song by the Dave Matthews Band. A recording of his fruit seller’s calls can also be heard on a key chain sold at checkout counters all over the city. And the Louisiana Children’s Museum plans to put a re-creation of his truck on permanent display. (Sergio Robinson is holding onto the actual truck to continue her father’s rounds.)

Besides her, his survivors include six sons and another daughter as well as “a bunch of grandchildren,” she said.

The contours of the daily route changed little, and while Robinson always talked of how much he loved New Orleans, he was, like many of its most celebrated figures, wary of how much the city had changed.

“When I was a boy, New Orleans, it was different than what it is now,” he said in the 2009 documentary, talking of longtime food markets that had been replaced by tourist booths. “Things done changed a whole lot.”