David Borden Tidmore

“No bond will be filed before its time.” Just past 1 AM in the morning of Sunday, June 25, 2023, Louisiana’s leading expert in surety bonding and commercial insurance breathed his last, completing an 81 year life. David Borden Tidmore coined that expression indicating that ‘timing was everything’. It was a guide post for his whole life.

His professional passion was working with small contractors, helping them to become bondable with underwriters— thereby allowing them access to bid upon government and large corporate building projects. This was especially true for aspiring African-American contractors. In 1999, Tidmore co-founded a nonprofit to help minority contractors qualify for surety bonding.

Tidmore also served as board member of the Associated General Contractors, Associated Builders & Contractors of Louisiana and was one of the founding board members of Louisiana Association of Surety Bond Producers. In fact, he cowrote the manual that became the standard “Bible” of the surety industry in the Pelican State.

Tidmore was also involved with a myriad of civic projects. He served as Treasurer for the Louisiana Living History Foundation’s 2015 Bicentennial Re-Enactment of the Battle of New Orleans which brought 1700 reenacts and over 30,000 visitors to one of the largest battle reenactments in American history.

He could be something of a contrarian for the public good as well, especially when it came to his beloved game of Golf. As a member of the Fore!Kids Foundation, Tidmore was an early critic of City Park’s management’s desire to create a championship course out of the remains of the East and West Courses post-Katrina. As the former president of the Suburban Golf Club at the East Course, he knew the importance of an affordable green fee for the average weekend “duffer”. Tidmore predicted that the new championship course would price out the average middle class Louisiana citizen, so expensive were the reconstruction plans.

Tidmore advocated a less expensive approach that could have been paid for by the initial $12 million in FEMA reimbursements, instead of barring another $100 million. He was outvoted and resigned in protest as Fore!Kids endorsed the championship course, but Tidmore proved prophetic. Green fees on the “Bayou Oaks” course not only were too expensive for most middle class golfers, but the high rates actually never produced the profits for City Park that were predicted. In contrast, as he wrote in a newspaper column for The Louisiana Weekly, City Park could have adopted something similar to the reconstruction plan for the Joseph M. Bartholomew Golf Course—which proved financially successful. (It also became Tidmore’s favorite course to play.)

He was also something of a contrarian for a boy who grew up in Bellaire Drive and attended Metairie Park Country Day School. One summer, he was paid for a construction job by his godfather Armand Kreeger with a World War II Harley Davidson motorcycle outfitted with a sidecar. Tidmore reveled in driving it to the private school and parking it in the senior lot in 1959 amidst all of the Cadillacs and Buicks. For years, his classmates remember him as “the lunatic on the motorcycle.”

It was that somewhat iconoclastic attitude that led him to wander into Cosmo Recording Studio in 1961 when his friend Alan Malone confessed that he had to remain at longer his shift at the radio station downstairs. Uninvited, Tidmore sat in the corner as a young Irma Thomas would first tape her hit “It’s Raining”. Two years later, he would invite Irma Thomas and her band to play at the Beta Fraternity House at Tulane University. At the end of her set, Tidmore would go up to Thomas and recount that he had snuck in that faithful night. Suddenly, with an instant of recognition, Thomas said, “You were that fat boy in the corner!”

It became running joke between Tidmore and Thomas for the next 60 years when they would encounter one another, and Irma would always say “fat boy” and hug him, as a witness to the beginning. By that point, Tidmore had become friends with many of the early pioneers of New Orleans rock ‘n’ roll. One Sunday morning, after going to watch Clarence “Frogman” Henry play a brunch set at the Court of Two Sisters, the two were eating breakfast. Tidmore asked, “‘Frog’, why are you playing here when you have a number one record?”

Henry replied, “Cosmo only pays me a penny per record. I would starve if I tried to live on that!” That encounter led Tidmore to embark upon a lifelong campaign to help improve the royalties earned by New Orleans musicians. Ultimately, he would count many famed local performers like Ernie K-Doe as friends because of it. It would be a passion that Tidmore would share with his girlfriend and later wife of 47 years, Elisabeth “LouLou” Villere’. She became one of the noted sketch artists of jazz and early rock ‘n’ roll musicians. (Her Preservation Hall prints remain famous to this day.) She developed her passion for New Orleans music at Tidmore’s side at local R&B concerts in the 1960s.

He majored in history at Vanderbilt and Tulane Universities. While at LSU Law School in 1964, he grew discontented and followed the family tradition into the military. He ended up serving in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in West Germany, as the assistant to the Colonel, who him a glowing letter of recommendation upon discharge—and remained friends with Tidmore for decades. Later, that gentleman noted that one of his great mistakes was failing to convince Tidmore to make a career as an officer in the US Army, instead of two years active duty and four years in a reserve status as part of an MI Division stateside.

Despite serving in the field as a tank commander, Tidmore always downplayed his military service, usually joking that his only real responsibility was really typing the battle orders which said that his unit “would be sacrificed the Soviets if there was ever invasion of West Germany” or remembering that when he got the flu, he was given him the job of a babysitting the nuclear weapons. He later called it the easiest job ever had. He could sleep next to them.

Or he would recount one of his favorite stories. Guard duty was something that every soldier on the Cold War front had to do from time to time, and in winter on the West German border, it was very cold. “One night,” as he explained, “ I was watching comrade in the tower across ‘no mans land’, and he was looking back at me. Occasionally, we would wave at each other, but we were basically just bored out of our minds at 2 o’clock in the morning. Suddenly, a deer pranced into the ‘no man’s land’. Comrade got excited and started pointing. Then, he picked up his AK-47 and fired at the deer. He waved for me to do the same, so I fired a shot out of my M-16. Suddenly all the alarm bells go off. People came running. Everyone thought that World War III had just started. But when my Colonel asked me what happened, I pointed at comrade and down at the deer—which by now had escaped. I looked over, and he was pointing at me as the culprit for the gunshots.”

He laughed about that story for decades, but it must not have affected his military career. He retained his top-secret clearance well into the 1970s. Army stories usually ended with a twinge of sadness. Many of the men with whom he served in Germany would decamp for Vietnam some months later—and never come home.

Upon returning to New Orleans in November 1966, Tidmore decided against continuing his legal studies and joined the business rating firm of Dun & Bradstreet. It gave him a background on analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of corporations that he would use two years later, when hired by Fidelity & Deposit Co. (which later became the Zürich Insurance.) For 12 years he was an underwriter, opening markets in Mississippi, Alabama, and western Louisiana. He transferred over to the agency side by joining Ellsworth, Mayeaux & Associates. Eventually, Tidmore became a vice president and resident surety expert with Marsh Mclennan, representing several Fortune 500 companies and ultimately writing the largest surety bond ever issued by a Louisiana broker. He would later be employed in a similar capacity for Willis and Aon, before joining AWS Insurance locally. In 2013, Tidmore founded T&T Agency LLC with his son, which continues to the present day as one of the leading surety bonding specialist agencies in Louisiana.

Tidmore was active socially with the Opera Guild and multiple civic clubs. As President of the Essex Club, he negotiated the organization’s merger into Bienville Club. He was a member of several carnival organizations, but one particular incident ended up being an example of Mardi Gras mirth. Tidmore was very supportive of the creation of the Kenner Mardi Gras Museum, so he was shocked to discover upon its opening that its introductory video of “a typical carnival ball” displayed he (and a future New Orleans Councilman) dressed in drag and dancing at the front the tableau of the Nereus Ball. The video played for every visitor for the next two decades, until his son managed to obtain the video tape and lock it in a safe— where it remains to this day.

Upon the death of his beloved wife, Tidmore began traveling with his son, and often charmed people on the private training trips to the national parks he repeatedly undertook or on the cruise ships he regularly boarded. His Cajun jokes were so funny that the owner of the UnCruise line overheard him one night and insisted that Tidmore put on a performance for the entire complement of the passengers. Sailing down the Columbia River, the customers and crew guffawed to Boudreaux jokes into the wee hours of the morning.

That was Tidmore’s personality; he loved to entertain and make friends. Even amidst all of his travels and later illnesses, though, he always kept an eye on his business. Two weeks before he died and sitting in a hospital bed, he wrote a $1.1 million bid bond for a pump project in California He was so diligent that many of his clients will only learn of his death with this obituary, not knowing that the emails they received in the last few weeks, including two days before his death, were written in a hospital room. Tidmore never wanted to let down those who counted on him.

He spoke of this regard for others in a series of newspaper columns for The Louisiana Weekly entitled “Confessions of a Duffer”. He always ranked speed of play in Golf as extremely important, warning, “Never spend too much time looking for your ball. Take a drop, and take a stroke. There are players behind you, and you need to be concerned with delaying them.”

Prudence didn’t stop him from being an expert golfer. In a scramble, he was often the team’s closer, dead perfect within 120 yards. One time playing with former PGA Pro Freddy Haas, Tidmore made a hole-in-one on the front nine and came with a half of an inch of doing so on the back nine. Haas, then almost 90 years old, began jumping up and down excitedly. “I was on the PGA tour, and I never got a hole in one. You almost get two in one round!”

Tidmore was the son of David “Ted” Tidmore and Matilda “Tillie” Trelles Tidmore, one of the great ‘grande dames’ of New Orleans history whose parties and political salons were infamous. He was the brother of former Bacon Lumber CEO Trelles Tidmore, all who pre-deceased him. He leaves behind a son Christopher Tidmore and daughter-in-law Barkley. He was also the grandson of the EL TRELLES cigar magnate Macrino Trelles, and at the Trelles tomb at Metairie Cemetery, David Borden Tidmore will be interned at a graveside service at 2 pm on Thursday, June 29, 2023. All are invited to the graveside service with a reception to follow on St. Charles Avenue that evening. (Enter through the cemetery’s main fountain entrance and take a right on avenue H and a left on Avenue R. After passing Avenue N, the Trelles Tomb will be on your right. )

Like his grandfather, Tidmore loved guayabera shirts and will be buried in one along with his ubiquitous baseball cap. Instead of mourning, his family asks for all attendees to wear a guayabera, Hawaiian, or golf shirt to the funeral to celebrate his life.

In his last moments, despite never being a terribly religious man, David Borden Tidmore said, “I see angels,” appropriate since he was an angel to so many—including his friends Ronnie Currier, Clay Tidmore, and Bill Coe. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to saveourcemeteries.org