Richard West Freeman, Jr., a civic leader and business executive who ran Louisiana Coca-Cola Bottling Co. and in retirement became a successful horse breeder, died Wednesday at Lambeth House in New Orleans. He was 88.
He died of complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter Dr. Adair Freeman Parr.
A longtime resident of the New Orleans area who reigned as Rex, king of Carnival, in 2003, Freeman had been president of the bottling company that his grandfather A.B. Freeman led. Richard Freeman, who had joined the firm after serving in the Navy in the early 1960s, was president when the business was sold to Coca-Cola’s Atlanta-based parent company in 1984 for an undisclosed sum…