Editor's Note: In August, 2015, Blaine Kern and his son Barry reached a legal agreement to dismiss all pending litigation. Blaine also sold Barry a 50.1% stake in his company, Blaine Kern Artists, Inc.

Blaine Kern Sr., 88 years old, sporting a sharp black-and-white tracksuit and chunky Ralph Lauren eyeglasses, bounces into a suburban New Orleans restaurant at lunchtime flashing his megawatt smile. "Hi, everybody!" he says, and is immediately besieged by waiters, managers, and customers eager to greet the local legend who calls himself Mr. Mardi Gras. In a city famous for larger-than-life characters, Kern occupies a unique place in the pantheon. Not for his physical stature--he's small and wiry--but for his outsize ambition, which for nearly seven decades made him the biggest parade-float impresario in New Orleans and a P.T. Barnum of the bayou.

"I did a carnival for Fidel Castro after Batista was out!" Kern says after settling in at his table, reeling off tale after tale seemingly straight out of Twain, but all true--founding a company that strung a gondola across the Mississippi River, acquiring a decommissioned aircraft carrier to convert to a tourist attraction, catching Walt Disney's eye with a huge King Kong that crashed a Mardi Gras ball--and often digressing into bawdy asides about his many romantic conquests ("My nicknames were Pretty Boy and Honey Boy!"), which have led to four wives and five children.

Most of all, Kern wants to talk Mardi Gras, the event that still defines New Orleans, where parties are a sacrament and Kern a high priest. "Michelangelo and da Vinci, all of them were float builders, so I'm in pretty good company," he says, with characteristic humility. Listening to the monologue is Barry Kern, Blaine's 52-year-old son, who does not share his dad's propensity for self-revelation. Asked about some outrageous antic of his father's, Barry usually shrugs and says, "That's just Blaine being Blaine."

But Barry wasn't so sanguine in 2010, when he started slapping his father with lawsuits in a spat that nearly destroyed their venerable company and threatened to derail New Orleans's most beloved--and lucrative--tradition. All family businesses face succession issues, of course, though most don't involve floats with naked female mannequins, packed courtrooms, a weeping wannabe-rapper wife, and press conferences aired on local TV newscasts. The Kern family wasn't supposed to have these problems. Barry was always Blaine's choice to take over the family firm, Blaine Kern Artists. Not Blaine's oldest namesake, Blaine Jr., or his youngest, daughter Blainey. Not his daughter Thais or son Brian, who both somehow escaped being branded with variations of their father's name. "Barry really wanted to do it and had the leadership ability," Blaine Sr. says. During Barry's childhood, the two were inseparable--traveling abroad, fishing, dreaming up floats, even showing up at parties wearing coordinated costumes.