NEW ORLEANS -- Stormy, a legendary Bourbon Street stripper of the 1940s and 1950s whose real name was Stacy Lawrence, was found dead Friday at her home. She was 54.
Miss Lawrence, who achieved notoriety when Louisiana State University students pitched her into a campus lake in 1948, eventually ran her own club on Bourbon Street and even worked in a presidential campaign.
In recent years she had suffered from emphysema and lived alone in New Orleans. Police who discovered her body Friday said she apparently died of natural causes.
A native of Philadelphia, Miss Lawrence was brought up in a carnival family. She spent a year at Temple University, studying voice and piano, before launching her show business career.
She came to Bourbon Street as a singer in 1945 but found it hard to recruit and train strippers for the finale of her act.
'Some of the girls resented my interference when I attempted to give them advice and asked me to try the strip myself if I thought I could do it better,' Miss Lawrence said in 1947. 'I said I thought I could.'
As Stormy, she enjoyed a career that included engagements in a string of French Quarter nightspots, photographic layouts in Look and Holiday magazines and an appearance in a newsreel. In the 1950s she opened her own club, Stormy's Casino Royale.
Miss Lawrence did not confine her appearances to Bourbon street. In 1948 she attracted a torrent of publicity by journeying to Louisiana State University to promote the sales of a campus humor magazine and help the editor become student body president.
During her appearance with a band on a truck bed, she began to strip. A handful of students seized her and hurled her into a nearby lake.
'Boys will be boys,' she said.
Her next foray into politics was an offer to join Alabama Gov. James 'Kissin' Jim' Folsom's unsuccessful campaign for the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. Miss Lawrence said she like the politician because he was 'a honey pot.'
