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I have traveled through 159 countries, some of them 25 to 30 times, and this is the nicest place I have ever been.

And of course, you refer to it as the Gulf Coast.

And of course, so many people still refer to it as going across the lake.

But that was also those innocent days when summer seemed to last forever.

My recollection is, is that they almost did.

The nice thing about our yard is that it was sort of magical in the sense that if it rained, new things would just pop up.

Hyacinths and crocuses and irises.

And we had a gardenia tree that was just so old and huge in the driveway.

We had honeysuckle in the area that hung down.

I used to eat the honeysuckle.

I was raised in the third Ward, a two lane account on Sacred Heart Parish.

We didn't know about the world, so the Gulf Coast was like the yellow brick road to us.

It was like the land of Oz.

It was like going somewhere.

We going to get to go to Mississippi and see the Gulf of Mexico.

You know, if you cross the Gulf, you can see Cuba over there, South America.

So that was our first opening into the world.

I don't know how to explain it.

People, you know, they say, where are you from?

Saint Louis, Mississippi.

Well, where is that now?

It's on the Gulf Coast.

All of you know this one block from the water, and they have.

Oh, yeah.

Well that's nice.

Oh, no, you don't understand.

It's not nice.

It's heaven.

So live a teeny tiny piece of heaven.

That's all I can say.

And Louis.

To a mapmaker or geographer.

The Gulf Coast may extend from Brownsville to Key West for generations of New Orleanians.

The boundaries are subjectively narrower, generally starting at Waveland and extending no further than Ocean Springs.

Although some might lobby for Pascagoula as marking the outer frontier, Gulf Coast residents, whether natives or New Orleans ex-patriots draw the boundaries even tighter and more personally.

Generations of Biloxi natives have at times only grudgingly acknowledge the existence of Gulfport, and vice versa.

And if you were born and raised and passed Christian, for example, the Gulf Coast starts as your front step and need only extend to that point where the water kisses the beach.

There's not much need to go anywhere else.

The Gulf Coast country is a slow Latin shrug at the harsher, more exacting morality.

A few miles inland, it is a region which suffers neither from abiding anger nor from fierce ambitions.

A soft near tropical abode of chameleon sea and white sand, and the rustling beauty of tall pines and moss drenched water oaks and redolent magnolias.

A beacon like commingling of peoples of many blood.

A volatile land where only the tide, gentle within its island protected sound, offers any certainty of behavior.

Dad wrote this book with Tony Ryerson, Anthony Rogerson, who was a wonderful character who was a native of the Gulf Coast.

In the summer of 1950.

Dad, my mother, my older brother Hodding, my younger brother Tommy all were transported to Ocean Springs, Mississippi for the research and writing of this book.

I remember this very hot summer with my dad working very, very hard.

Lots of day trips out to see the sights and sort of eat food and and frolic in the beach, or go out at night and go fishing for soft shells or flounder, digging for flounder on the from the Gulf front, that kind of thing.

It was a fun summer.

And the Gulf Coast is a playground.

Its western, half a sort of prisoner to the great Latin city of New Orleans, whose mother it was, and whose children have made the coast their summer playhouse, and their behaviorist counterpart a playground.

Unpretentious, inexpensive, democratic and naive, and sometimes garage and loud.

We love New Orleans.

It's our playground.

This may be New Orleans playground, but New Orleans is our playground.

The way I explain it, there's this indelible cord that still stretches between the coast and New Orleans, and it was never snipped.

There's a melding of personalities between the coast and New Orleans.

We're different, yes, but we're more alike than we are probably with any other community.

You know, if I'm in New Orleans and they'll say, where are you from?

And I'll go to the coast, and there's usually this nice big smile, and they don't have to say the coast of what?

Or the coast where they know.

They know we're talking about Biloxi.

Gulfport.

You know, these are the communities down here where.

One advantage the coast resident has always claimed over the New Orleans visitor.

They're already there.

The days before Interstate ten, New Orleanians attached no romance to the notion that it's the journey, not the destination.

Getting to the coast was a necessary evil, a grueling epic means to an end.

I had to finish it.

It's right between us on the street.

It was boring and interminable.

The journey was you go out straight out, chef, mature.

You go through that stretch and then those days it was, you know, it was nothing.

It was a swamp and they didn't develop it.

Now it's still a swamp and they've developed it you know.

Well so dramatic.

If you're a kid in New Orleans because you had to go to the Gulf Coast, you know, down highway 90 and all those fishing camps had all these cool little names, you know, funny names on the buildings.

And it was a very dangerous road.

All those curves.

This is a, you know, it was a two lane, 70 mile an hour speed limit and, you know, curves.

And, you know, it was like, oh, can I make this one?

You know, it was it was kind of frightening, but yet.

Yeah, I'm sure kind of thrilling at the time for, for the young people.

Of course, you know, as New Orleanians or as a lot of people do.

You know, I think there was probably a little bit of, you know, partying or beer drinking along the way.

The first big site was the, that fork in the road post junction, power junction.

And then you go off to the right.

If you're going to, you go to the left to go to the slide, and you go to the right, and then you'd pass for Pike and we'd say, oh please, let's stop here.

Let's stop here at Fort Pike.

Oh no.

You union right pass.

You never stopped there to get to the Gulf Coast.

There's a particular stretch of highway 90 that's very dangerous.

And it was a fog area and it was called Deadman's Curve.

That's where Jayne Mansfield died.

Right along that stretch.

Most people didn't have air conditioned cars in those days either.

And so we'd be driving along and have all the bugs you had to eat in your mouth, you know, from driving on the highway.

And it was an wasn't as much fun as nowadays, for sure.

The good old days weren't that good, you know.

Oh, that was such a fun drive.

And we were in a 1962 Ford station wagon.

No air conditioning in this part of the country.

A family that sits together, sticks together.

There were numerous arguments and fights, but somehow we all made it there.

Okay.

There was a place right at the Mississippi and Louisiana border.

White kitchen.

And they had slot machines in there.

And my grandmother was so refined and so on, but she loved to play the slots.

That's my grandfather.

He had a 20 nickels, and she just started putting them in.

And he would get anxious to go.

And just before she could use the last one, she had hit.

And then the cycle started all over and its white kitchen would come up.

Please, let's stop here.

Let's get a sandwich looking right at them.

Now she got carsick.

You could stop there because you got in.

You went and vomited in the in the white kitchen bathroom.

Daddy.

It was very, very patient until we all decided that we would have to go to the bathroom at different times.

They're thirsty.

They're hungry.

They need the bathroom.

They, they need to get, you know.

Right.

They just need to get out of the car for a little while.

So that, I think, started the tradition of stopping at the Marina for breakfast.

And nobody better have to go to the bathroom or need something to drink till we got to the Marina.

And I remember there was three little bridges you crossed, and then you got to Pearl River, which was another larger bridge.

Then you got to the highway 90 that went into the coast, and you traveled.

You passed, and they still left.

You really got excited if you were a kid and you passed shell shops and then finally you knew you were there when you saw that pile of seashells.

You know, this pile of conch shell was at a stuckey's.

So they said, please, let's stop and look at these young red deer.

And they got these good old days.

The birth of the Iron Horse changed America forever.

Looking east and west in a way.

Now taken for granted.

Back in the day, riding the rails was the preferred mode of both residents and summer visitors commuting back and forth to the Gulf Coast.

And in the very beginning, we had a lot of people from New Orleans that came over.

In fact, the beach was lined with summer homes from New Orleans.

People, and we had an excursion train that ran from New Orleans over to Ocean Springs.

And the families would live over here, and the men would go back and forth, on the excursion train in the morning and come home at night.

It was the best commute in America.

Men could come over early spring, bring their families, move into their summer homes, and then a day to.

They boarded the train at 9:00.

They were at the station on Canal Street.

Spent the day at their offices at five they boarded the commuter train and were back in the bay within an hour, and their wives would pick them up at the train station, and then already bathed the kids and fed them and put them out on the beach to play.

These men sat on their front gallery and sips cup at night and wine until bedtime, and did it again the next day.

My father and my grandfather, would generally go in on Monday morning and would come back on Friday afternoon.

We would meet them at the Bay Saint Louis station, would pick up my father, grandfather first stop.

The ice house was right across from the station.

225 pound blocks of ice, the right on the bumper.

and sometimes we would put a watermelon there.

You would, you would, that, scrape your initials, on the watermelon, leave it in the ice house.

When you picked it up, it was wonderfully cold and sometimes almost like a like a sherbet.

But schools, children here used to walk out and flagged down the train and ride into New Orleans to school.

I knew a lady who said she wrote her horse and freed it every day on a pasture that belonged to friends, and when she returned from school, she had to bring an apple or her horse wouldn't come to her, and she had to walk home.

The stories of legend of a man that would be playing gin rummy or something with his friends have a good ham.

his wife would be at Waveland to meet him, and he'd have this great hand going in and yell out the window, meet me at bay.

Saint Louis.

She and the tutor would happen to go to Bay Saint Louis.

If he wouldn't finish, then you'd see Halsey at the pass.

traveling by train is a wonderful, civilized way to travel.

And and it was very much, in use at that time.

It.

If getting there was something less than half the fun, it made the arrival all the sweeter.

As the first elusive mound of seashells appeared on the horizon, it heralded a sojourn that may not have been the Riviera or even Florida.

But it was close and it was over.

The Gulf Coast always represented the poor man's vacation.

You know, where you you couldn't afford to fly somewhere or something or take long trips.

You know, a lot of people didn't have the time.

And on the weekends, the Gulf Coast acts as a as an excursion, you know, trip where you could actually spend a night and come back Sunday and be ready to go to work Monday morning.

People didn't go on for vacations.

Nobody had a lot of money in those years.

So, the station was to go to the Gulf Coast and you rented a cabin for a week.

People came over for the weekend, did family picnics, big barbecues, excursions and drives down the beach sailing.

Everybody had a boat.

It was simply the closest place to New Orleans.

You could dart across the bay and have your own beach or bayou.

It had everything that you wanted.

It had a beach, has water, has that, sort of that Florida feel to it, even though the water is not as pretty as in Florida, and it's very different from Florida.

This is not a Florida vacation.

This is a Mississippi vacation.

I guess it's what we would consider if we were in the northeast as going to the country.

You just never knew anybody who lived there all year round.

And they were all transplanted New Orleanians who would come over for a visit very often.

If you did drive around there in the winter, everything was kind of locked up.

The interesting thing, I think about going to the Gulf Coast in in those years and probably still now is going into the water ankle deep and walking and walking and walking for what felt like a mile.

And you were knee deep.

But, it was just special to be together in this relaxed time.

And if you take a week off and you stay at home, it's not quite the same as going somewhere, even if it's only 50 miles away, you know, then you feel like you on vacation.

As we got older, a mom and dad would rent a house, maybe in Waveland for a week or so.

They were these kind of camp jobs that had air conditioned and one bedroom.

And of course, that would be the one mom and dad got.

But they had really good fans and really good screens.

So the mosquitoes didn't carry anybody away during the night.

You know, nowadays all these kids graduate from high school and they go in these senior trips to the Bahamas or France or something.

Well, my father arranged for me and I think about 4 or 5 of my friends to go stay in Biloxi in a motel for the weekend.

I think we just stayed up all night and look for girls, and nothing happened.

And pretty anticlimactic.

And I was like, great.

And so that was our senior trip to Biloxi.

To me, the worst thing that was possible was to drink the water over there.

Oh, God.

And I, I refused to drink it.

I would dehydrate and it had to bring a case of Covid had sell for that.

Oh, Jesus.

Oh, it was like, you know, egg we had we call the kids call it digits water.

It was like the worst possible thing you could call anything.

And I'll never forget my grandmother.

She'd take a glass of a glass and she turned the faucet on, and you go, oh, this is just sort.

Delicious.

And we thought she'd lost her mind because she was drinking this nasty tasting stuff, you know.

But I remember I would drink the water like this.

My uncle would say good Lord look at that.

Just take your fingers off you nose.

Drink it straight, man.

You know, because I was telling you, you can if you put shut your nose, you can drink.

And I wouldn't trust anything.

I just got water over there.

Still taste the same.

So the kids, maybe they didn't catch anything, but they could read a line.

And you took the kids swimming?

We loved to play cards.

Penny poker, ten twos and fours, wild with mad interest in there.

Throw in one eye.

Jacks.

But, it was it was still fun.

And we all enjoyed it.

It was nice time.

They were nice.

Folks were happy.

And that was days.

Nice, nice days.

Coming up, a great place to visit or the perfect place to live.

Gulf coast natives and New Orleans visitors debate the finer points of going there or staying there.

I think that it is a little bit of an escape over here.

It's like you're going back in time a little bit.

We were very fortunate because when we got over here we were able to participate in all of the boating activities sailing, water skiing, fishing, all those things that that everybody else in the country is trying to get to today.

And we were here, you know, from the time I was born until the time I was 18 years old, when we lived here, I was fortunate in that my grandparents had a summer home in Bay Saint Louis.

So we would go over and literally spend the whole summer just, just wonderful times.

And of course, the other girls, all of those wonderful of some addresses with just the small strap and the wonderful tans and ponytails and, and of course, that was in the days when if you weren't jitterbug and you danced slow and close.

So the memories of those days, I guess, seem almost quaint now.

But I would not give up those innocent days.

We felt we thought very sophisticated.

We think it was a lot of fun, innocent things to do.

An unheard of phenomenon on the Gulf Coast.

Numerous.

Later, a lady named Camille and a man named Mason altered the coast forever, all part of Gulf Coast memories.

The Gulf Coast country was a land of the ghosts of men who dreamed of empire, and it's been a place of seafarers for over two centuries.

It is a place of strange, scenic beauty, white sand and a mild tropic sea pine forests, low savannah stretching inland and abiding lagoons.

I think Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1946.

The honor was bestowed upon the longtime civil rights advocate for his essays condemning racial, religious, and economic intolerance.

As Carter was writing Gulf Coast Country and Ocean Springs in the summer of 1950, over in Waveland, a community was marking nearly a quarter century of offering spiritual refuge and replenishment and a place to indulge in Gulf Coast pleasures.

Others took for granted.

The place was founded by Bishop Robert Lee Jones, who was the first black bishop of the United Methodist Church.

He had visited a white camp in Ohio and just longed for a place like that where black people could come for recreation, for training, cultural events.

It's a very powerful place.

We call it holy ground.

When my mother met my father here at the site where she was going to school, when she brought us out here, I fell in love with Gus.

I. It was a good place to come so you could play, and, you couldn't.

You said you couldn't go to the movies.

You couldn't go play baseball.

It baseball.

You couldn't go to the parks so you could come here and go all over this place.

I just as long as you stayed in front of you there, you couldn't go back in further than however wide of that was in the front, and you had to stay within that room.

Nobody said, don't go, but you just knew when people used to come here to the beach, they used to come to the woods.

They had to come because they could walk on the beach, but they came by trains, you know, from as far away as Memphis.

The water was.

That was the big impression, how they felt when they saw the water.

And in order for us to, you know, go on the beach, that was our recreation.

We would come through the woods because we lived over by the depot over in Waveland, Mississippi, and we'd get a stick just well to the would get our croaker sack our fishing pole and just come to the beach.

It would come down to the back around the trail, you know, not to go, sat down to the beach.

And then we spend the day, they play in the water and then go home.

So we can always go back and tell my friends, what do you do for the summer?

That's a real proud.

I got to just go to the beach because other blacks couldn't do that.

That was that was something special.

It's always been a place that nurtured people, particularly children.

Leontyne Price, and her brother, came to Dallas.

Bishop Jones's daughter tells a story about Leontyne being at the age of three, playing the piano.

And somebody in there saying, you know how we used to get the young off the piano?

Is he going to take the and visit Jones and leave the baby alone and let it play?

This place should be called the Mecca on the down.

The name before that was an oasis of hope.

So we've just let down to the Mecca.

It embodies the passion.

it embodies the future.

it embodies a journey.

You know, you journey to Mecca and we say, come to the Mecca, plant your footsteps in the sand, and, you know, learn the history, see the and experience, just experience.

The hands.

Of, you know, the focal point for much of the tension here in Biloxi centers around the activities of a doctor, Gilbert Mason, a Negro physician who has been trying to lead his people down to the public beaches today.

They, Robert Black, Doctor Gilbert Mason, and, few other people on the coast were determined that their children were not going to have to have substandard education in those days.

People considered that they owned the beach if it was in front of their house, even though it was, it was a nice long road in front between them and the beach.

This was theirs.

And they, were very particular about who would walk on the beach, who could use the beach.

And of course, that pretty much precluded all the blacks, doctor Mason, when he couldn't get any place in some of this.

And to make a statement, I think we looked around and said, you know, how can we best make this statement and make it peacefully?

And there was the beach.

We planned to be there.

We planned to be very and we planned to act like, you know, the right to the beach.

But in 1959, I concluded that.

We needed to go anywhere anybody else go.

So on a Thursday, I said, after school, we're going to go to the beach.

Mayhem broke out, and by the time we got down there, they had organized and they set up on us.

What's changed?

LED parts, baseball bats and, Q6 what that arouse really aroused the community.

Doctor Mason led several wait ins at Biloxi beaches from 1959 to 1963, ultimately succeeding in getting them desegregated.

Black folks tried to use the beach, and we didn't have any problem.

In the meantime, the ruling came down, from the Supreme Court that we were we were not guilty of trespass and that we had the right to use the, the beach.

To me, the best part of that story, besides, is bravery.

A person that I admired greatly to to be able to stand up to this because it eventually was ruled that because the beach was pumped in the sand on the beach was created by Uncle Sam's money, the Corps of Engineers, that then it was a public beach, but is because of people like doctor Mason that today we can drive down the beach road and we can see beach and we can see sand because it's a public beach, no one can build on it, no one can claim it, and it is ours.

It is everyone's.

And that is a strictly a result of the civil rights.

Rumor has it that even the infants of the Gulf Coast never hold a milk bottle in both hands, for they instinctively say one the cup about an or tiller.

Whether this is true or not, it is inevitable that a people who grow up by the sea in a climate which permits sailing in the year round, should be as familiar with the way of wind upon outstretched canvas as a New Yorker is with a subway turnstile.

There's a feeling, there's a sense of of control and power.

When you're out on a boat with no engine.

And the boats sail and you feel like you know you're doing something that's special, that's different than a lot of other people can do.

But in our case, and in the case of a lot of people in this community, it gets in your blood.

It's a family.

It's almost like a family tradition.

People enjoyed each other and they enjoyed the beach a lot.

In fact, we didn't even have a yacht club for a while.

We just sailed from the pier.

That's what I was first dating my husband and 1937 and eight, and we would just have our boats anchored, you know, tied onto the pier and sail from there.

A lot of what we did when we were kids, a lot of our activities were surrounded on the water.

I remember sailing sunfish out in Bay Saint Louis with with 3 or 4 kids, and we turn the boat over and swim around until we can get it back up.

Right.

you know, you always remember things that scare you as a kid.

And one of the things I remember is getting.

We turned over and I got trapped under the main, you know, I'm under the sail, and I'm thinking I'm going to drown.

And of course, that happens to every kid at one point in life.

And I come back out at round, jump up on the boat and get back up and start sailing again.

And I used to have wonderful parties, usually around holiday weekend, cept they'd have raft ups and you just would know or kind of word would spread around the harbor and stuff that all the, the boats would meet out at Horn Island or Ship Island and you know, you would just approach one of the islands and there would be 150 boats and everybody would meet at one of the islands.

In those days, the beach was a wonderful thing to do.

And my mother took us in the summertime, every day, twice a day to the beach.

We would go to the beach in the morning and swim.

And then when we'd go home with, each one take a turn to get a shower and she'd give us our breakfast, we'd go downstairs to work, and then the next afternoon, about 5:00, to take us back to the beach and to pack a picnic lunch.

And, we'd go swimming.

One sort of fateful visit that my relatives had.

My uncle was sort of a bit of a daredevil, but he took us, down to the water and, it felt like we were walking on water.

Like we shouldn't be able to to balance on it.

But then the tide started coming in, and he kept going further and further.

I mean, my my grandmother's, you know, in the car, just livid with rage, you know, that this the children and I remember like at one point, his eye looking down at his feet and there's water like coming up and he he hoist us under like watermelons under his arm and is walking with us, you know, getting us back just in the nick of time before A kitchen was so great because it had a a tin roof.

So every time it would rain, this is its best sound.

But we had holes in our roof, so we always had, buckets of these metal buckets.

Strategically placed around the house.

So you get the rain pelting on the, on the tin roof and then the plinking and all the various buckets.

And that was always is always exciting because we had those windows in the living room.

And, and when it would light lightning, the whole house would light up.

It would be kind of purple.

When I was born, I was the fourth son in our family, and my father decided that this would be a great place to raise a bunch of boys.

We were very fortunate because when we got over here, we were able to participate in all the boating activities sailing, water skiing, fishing, all those things that that everybody else in the country is trying to get to today.

And we were here, you know, from the time I was born until the time I was 18 years old, when we lived here.

The house was in Saint Louis.

We'd called it a castle by the sea.

It was just a great place.

We moved there from New Orleans in 1979.

I was I was three months old and, and we moved there because my, my father, he he had bad nerves at the time and he the sounds of the city of New Orleans were just agitating him terribly.

So, he said he wanted to be back by the water so he could sail all the time because he loved to sail.

We had a porch swing.

And my mother, when I was little, she used to sing to me on the porch swing.

She played the dulcimer, too, but those were some of my nicest memories.

Worth her really.

It was very peaceful.

There is very, very quiet.

I really miss it.

You know, there'll never be a house like that.

I remember, Jubilees, your parents would wake you up in the middle of the night and say, hurry, hurry, go get some shoes on.

There's a jubilee.

It has to do with the moon.

But, the tide goes out and the crabs will go the wrong way, I guess in the.

In the crabs.

Or sometimes it's, for flounder, but they they're very close to the water's edge, and you go out and you're just picking them up, and you're just picking them up all over the beach because they're actually coming up on the shore.

Well, I would say Christian is the garden spot of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

place of genteel living, place of great beauty.

I think that it is a little bit of an escape over here.

It's like you're going back in time a little bit.

My wife is from uptown New Orleans, and she was amazed when when we were married and had children, that she could go to the post office over here and leave the car running with three kids sitting in the car seats.

Go into the post office, take care of business and come back out.

And she knew that the car was going to be there, the kids were going to be there and everything would be fine.

I'm not saying that's the safest thing in the world because they were strapped in the car seats, but but it is kind of a step back to the old fashioned way of doing things.

I was driving a car alone, unattended at 12 years.

I go to the to the bank for the and I go deliver a package to customer.

I'm still today in our neighborhood.

We'll let the boys go with two or 3 or 4 of their friends and go down this person's house and over to this friend's house.

And we trust that because we know everybody in the neighborhood that if something goes wrong, they'll be taken care of a will we'll hear about it and be able to get there quick enough to, to help out.

My family had a summer home here from the time that I was knee high to a short duck when I was about five.

They bought a summer home here, but they had been coming over here for generations, from New Orleans for the summer and staying at the hotels that were located here.

You know, there was this, this lady in New Orleans that didn't own any luggage.

And she said, why would I need luggage?

I'm already here.

And that's the way I feel about that Saint Louis.

It just amazes me when, you know, we've been having the bakery for 15 years.

This is this year is our 15th anniversary.

People will come in to pick up a cake and go, oh, you have pottery and they'll buy a piece of pottery just because I made it for no other reason.

Any artist that you talk to, almost any resident that you talk to in Saint Louis, is going to tell you that they live here because it feels good to live here.

And I can't explain why.

It's just a feeling.

And this was just been the most wonderful place in the world.

There there isn't any place better coming up, New Orleans on the coast, as do two larger than life ladies whose visits bring tragic results.

Jayne Mansfield and Hurricane Camille, all part of Gulf Coast memories.

Even with a place that on most days, is more akin to a sleepy Mediterranean villa than a North American metropolis, New Orleans still has its big city moments of urban aggravation.

New Yorkers may escape to the Hamptons, Southern Californians to Palm Springs.

We have the Mississippi Gulf Coast after he wrote this book, dad bought a place on Wolf River back behind passed Christian Love going over there from New Orleans.

He was writer in residence at Tulane, then, and practically every weekend, mom and dad would take off for the Gulf Coast and, and he would cook and entertain, back on Wolf River and a wonderful old log house, just, one house away from my aunt Lorraine Moore and her husband, Frank and I have spent many a happy weekend at the Lorraine and Frank's fishing, boating?

chasing pretty girls, having a great time over there.

I mean, just about everybody in New Orleans, you know, would would come over on either the pass or Waveland.

Gulfport.

Just a quick place to get away to, to go.

Gosh.

And what, 45, 50 minutes, depending upon how far you were away, where you had to get to straight shot.

Great place.

On Broughton Bayou, which is, falls into the Jordan way up.

That's where little boys learned how to swim.

There was a great big cleft there on one side.

On that side.

And little boys used to climb up that cliff, and Pappy and I sat on a boat with a bear and, watch the dogs run up and down chasing the minnows on the sand beach and little boys running around.

We didn't know who was having more fun than the other guy.

The dogs or the little boys are sitting there watching him.

But Joe the dog, the lion.

The boys would get across the bayou with their belts and they'd call Joe, and Joe would swim over there, turn around, just before he got to them, and then grab onto his hindquarters, and he'd swim back across the bayou with them and bring them back to the side beach.

It was, really fun.

Everybody was having a good time.

Like, the big events were when animals would get into a house.

Once a bat got in, I was in bed when it got out.

And I remember looking out thinking is biggest bug I'd ever seen.

It might pull the covers up under my head.

And once we had an owl flew in with his giant wingspan flapping and my mom, she got a towel and she caught it is massive.

Bird is flapping its wings and she, she held it and she pulled it out onto the porch and like, wrestling with the towel.

Now at this point.

And she she set it free.

But there was one other thing.

There wasn't a mosquito that there was red bug.

Oh, red lines and red bugs.

You know, there's little.

And they'd really itch.

So you'd come back from the from the, they'll see soon with, you come back with some jellyfish wounds, you know?

See, now, that was a blistering sunburn.

Sand and the red bugs.

He lie in bed all night looking on the rack.

The flying squirrels.

the, person who helped my my grandfather, do the yard work.

Buddy Nichols.

I can remember him so very vividly.

And he was the first one who put my friend, John and I onto the fact that you could trap flying squirrels.

So we would religiously put our trap up in a high oak tree.

And in the morning, the first thing I would run out in a state of high excitement.

More often than not, it was a false alarm or something of that nature.

But.

But I would guess a couple of times during the summer we would actually catch a flying squirrel.

And they're beautiful little animals.

They actually sit in the palm of your hand, and even though they bite with pinch, it wouldn't wouldn't break the skin.

And with handling, they would grow quite tame.

You put a little rope around their neck, you tie that to your, belt loop, and they would go into your pocket.

They would sit in your pocket all day long and you'd give them little things to eat, etc.

and so inevitably, the flying squirrel would escape at night.

One time we'd look all over the house, and finally my grandmother wanted to take a nap and pull the shade down.

And this flying squirrel had gotten in the shade.

so.

So they lived in mortal fear every time that I probably a flying squirrel.

But but it was a high adventure and crabbing, you know, you just crabbing.

And guess who got bit by the crab?

I'll never forget this crab was on the on the dot, not the basket.

Was scuttling along the seawall.

And the thing came right up to me and bit me right on the toe.

And it drew blood ever since.

I mean, I love boiled crabs, don't get me wrong, but, it was one of those, horrific events.

I it was only about four years old, you know, up.

It was fabulous.

Really great time.

Oh, yeah.

It was it was really fun that Waveland, the Brothers of Holy Cross, had a camp, beautiful camp as a reward for those kids that were active in the school.

They had several picnics in the spring, therefore.

And whatever you wanted, the brothers had food, watermelons, everything was there for you.

All you had to do was show up and have a good time.

Oh, I was in the glee club, and that wasn't always a big popular thing in the school with other guys.

You know, being in school, it was, he had a history of athletics, football.

But Mr.

Crosby and brother Alfred got the girls from Holy Angels to come to Holy Cross to do an operetta with us.

Then they started singing with us regularly, and that did wonders for the membership and the glee club, and also for the picnic, because the girls came on the picnic also remember that I do remember that Brother Mary Joseph drove.

Yeah, they drove a school bus.

He drove, Holy Cross school bus and took all of the kids who had participated in The Mikado that year.

So while Larry and I met in church at Saint Cecilia, we got to know each other better while he was a student at Holy Cross.

And I was in the glee club with Holy Angels in Waveland at the Holy Cross.

Care.

So I have a lot of nice memories of that.

That, of course, is gone.

In his 1951 book hunting, Carter observes that contemporaneous media accounts of the unnamed 1947 hurricane greatly overstated the extent of that storm's destruction.

Two decades later, hurricanes were identified by name, and no amount of hyperbole can exaggerate the effects of a ruthless lady called Camille.

The real dramatic thing was to be there the actual evening before the hurricane.

We spent that whole day there playing or playing on the coast with friends, with our kids.

They had pony rides.

It was just a lovely day, and the owner made arrangements that the next day he was going to bring the ponies back and we would come again with the kids and they would take a long ride the next day, and we were going to go back the next day.

It was just so beautiful.

And when we left we saw the hurricane flags up.

We ate at some cafeteria that night and, Waveland.

But on on highway 90, we got a tank of gas on the way home at a gas station.

Oh.

Let us.

So we used a credit card.

We didn't get a bill for three months.

The gas station was leveled, and I know they knew the hurricane was coming, but physically, there was no hint of it.

That evening, and no one dreamed it was going to be as bad as it was.

That was a surprise.

That was going to hit Sunday night, and we were not over a of across the alike at the time.

For that weekend.

We had not planned it.

And I started thinking, golly, that kitchen door is just going to be torn off.

Its hinges if we if, you know, if I don't go over there and latch it securely.

So we talked about it and we went over Sunday, we knew that it was going to hit during the night.

See, that's the bad part.

And I was playing the piano, and, you know, we were trying to.

Occupy ourselves.

So we didn't worry about.

We didn't have any radio, you know, we didn't know what was going on anywhere else because the electricity was out.

That had about 9:00 that night, 200 mile an hour sustained wind.

So we left.

There were there were five of us, two boys and Poppy and me and and, and Joe the dog, the lab.

And I know we all would not have made it because, it was not a really, well constructed house.

It's just a little weekend cottage.

It was in 1969.

I was nine years old, and we lived on the beach here in Bay Saint Louis.

And I can remember the night of the storm sitting in that house, listening the wind blow.

And we go out on the front porch and shine flashlights around.

And we would see pine trees.

You could hear them snapping, and then you could with a flashlight, you could find them and you could see a pine tree that we as kids could chop on foot for months and never do any damage, just snapping like, like toothpicks, you know, it's unbelievable, the force and the power.

And we looked out and we saw cars floating down the street.

Now we're in a house that everybody thought was was safe from any, any flood, any possible flood.

Car started floating down the street.

And then then we saw the water coming up the front steps, and the water just gradually came up the front steps until it reached that we had water lapping at the porch, which meant, you know, we're looking at floods and maybe 19 to 20ft.

My mother was still teaching at Saint Pius in that in that time.

And one of the children she taught, they didn't know for sure what the weather the storm was going to be in New Orleans or at the storm was going to hit the Gulf Coast.

One of the boys, who was about fourth grade, went to be with his grandmother, who stayed in Bay Saint Louis, and he was there with his grandmother when the water started to come up.

And this little boy got the boat, had a rope, let the boat float up so that it was on the roof, and he and his grandmother survived.

Camille on the roof with the boat hanging on.

During that storm.

I remember just this terrible roaring.

It was like a freight train running around around my house.

My parents had left their house and gone to educate school, during the hurricane, and the last I heard from them was at 9:00 that night.

My mother called and she said, we're leaving to go to the school.

And my electricity went off and my phone went out.

And so I was frantic to get information, and I had to travel north of where I lived, north of the bay, to find a telephone.

I finally found a telephone at this little store that worked, and I call my sister in California and said, have you heard from mother?

And of course, she freaked totally, because here I was in Biloxi and had not heard and didn't know what was happening with my mother.

and she lived in California and she was trying to get through.

And the lines were busy, busy.

They couldn't get through.

They gave me a pass to come across the Ocean Springs Bridge, which was pretty heavily damaged.

Back Bay bridge was totally knocked out.

And when I got over the bridge, it was unrecognizable.

What was where they had bulldozed the debris off the road, you know, the beach road, to a certain extent.

And it was just piled high on either side.

I remember passing an area where a house should have been, a historic house that had been built in the antebellum days.

it was a pile of debris.

And on one of the tree branches was hanging a lady slip.

And at that point, I just lost it.

But I just cried all the way to until I was finally able to come up Lamu Street and then get down Howard to Crawfish Street, where my parents house was.

They were safe.

When you think about the sheer destruction and how our landscape was totally changed, how much of our tangible history we lost, how many of the wonderful old oaks went down the houses?

And so I guess when you think about it, we're lucky to have what did survive.

And one of the things that survived was our spirit.

Did it change our personalities?

Yes.

Do some people still have scars from it?

Yes.

But overall, I think it made us very stronger, very determined.

And when we build back, we build back better and stronger than before.

The Gulf Coast people, and especially their visit, do openly what the rest of the state either does only surreptitiously at home, or comes to the coast in New Orleans to do.

The Gulf Coast stands alone in its adamant refusal to practice its vices in secret.

Well, it was a very exciting time.

Never a dull moment.

There was always something to do.

Entertainment someplace, to go 24 hours a day.

A lot of people would come and rent a circuit from, Hollywood and then on to, the Gulf Coast on the way down to Miami.

And, of course, there was no I-10 back then.

So everybody had to come down highway 90.

And that's where all the, action was.

Gus Stevens in those days, was it on the coast?

There weren't the big casinos like we have now, and Gus Stevens was the place to go.

When I was younger, we used to go to Guy Stevens, and then when I got married and, you know, and I used to always go there and see some off the wall entertainments which, which way would you wish we used to go see?

I played that a couple of times, you know, with the Basin Street sex, I always amaze me about, how he was able to get such big name entertainment to come there because at that time, even I mean, I don't think we had relative the prices of these stars that he used to play in.

I used to wonder sometimes, you know, I mean, there's this seafood restaurant doing that.

Well, he had a, like I said, that way with people and the entertainers actually, like my father, they wanted to come and play at the club because they enjoyed it and they enjoyed his company and his entertainment and the way he would treat them and give them lavish meals and then, take him out on the farm or on the boat or different things that, were, common to us in Biloxi at that time.

in that land.

La la la la la la la la la la la Gus's, place was either, you know, you were going up or coming down there and the one in the middle, you know, you were you were trying to get yourself off the ground.

Are you?

You're trying to strike, you know, keep keep your name alive.

Jayne Mansfield was really a star when she, played there.

But the show was was not, the nightclub act was terrible.

It was provocative enough what she said, guys?

Laughs.

And who in Hollywood put that in the air and all that?

It's really corny, passé act, even for the 60s.

In 1967, I was about 16 years old, and it was, end of June.

And we went over there and my parents were going to go see Jane Mansfield perform that night at Gus Stevens Club.

And so my brother and I were swimming in the pool, and there was two of the little boys in the pool who were about six and eight years old, and they both had really long hair, which was unusual because the Beatles had just kind of started to come around.

People didn't have long hair.

And so after a while, the PA system summoned Mr.

Hagerty's children, and the two kids got out and left, and we realized that was Jayne Mansfield's sons.

And so we were thinking, you know, when's Jane going to come out in her little bikini?

We can check that out.

But that never happened.

And then my parents went to see her show that night.

And then, of course, the next morning she was robbed in New Orleans, and her Buick Electra careened into the back of a mosquito control vehicle.

And that was the end of Jane.

Why does Jayne Mansfield live with us all these years later?

It's very much a part of us.

I think in some ways, if you were to ask the locals, you could almost know where you were when you heard that Jayne Mansfield had died.

Almost everybody here can tell you, even though it was so many years ago, that, yes, Jayne Mansfield did die when she was performing.

Ferguson was, taking a trip to New Orleans to be interviewed on TV.

I get a phone call one day and it was from Mrs.

Gus Stevens, and she said, Elaine has found her baby.

I didn't even know what she was talking about.

What baby?

And it turns out that Elaine Stevens, their daughter at their teenage daughter, was very much in love with Jane Mansfield's driver.

The secrets were buried because think back in the 1960s, you didn't talk about being pregnant and not being married.

So Elaine was, sent to, unwed mothers home, as often happened in those days.

She had the baby and gave it up for adoption.

And all these years later, through the wonders of the internet and other searching, the baby, who is no longer a baby, has been found.

And both families, both Ronnie Harrison's family and Elaine Stevens family now have this wonderful new member of a family.

And and it's and it's totally changes the Jayne Mansfield story.

Jayne Mansfield did die, but now there's these other lives that were changed and in some ways have found a little bit of peace.

You know, when you come here, you know that God is in his heaven and things should be right with the world.

You know?

You see the water, you see the the trees, you see the brownies, you see all of nature right here.

And that's what he created and it's all embodied.

And in this one area you can just see it and feel it.

You know.

Gulf coast memories as being possible, by the way, has produced a circle.

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