(Theme music playing) - [Walt] Coming up on Mississippi Roads, it's more museums in Mississippi, one that was inspired by a difficult time, another that honors the resilience of the town, and one about aviation in Mississippi.

All that coming up now on Mississippi Roads.

♪♪ Hi, welcome to Mississippi Roads.

I'm Walt Grayson.

In this week's show, we're going to be exploring some more of the museums that we have here in Mississippi.

And we're in the little town of Lake.

Lake is in the east part of the state.

It's just off Interstate 20 between Forest and Meridian.

And we're at the Lake Depot.

The reason that we're here is because this old depot has been turned into a museum.

It's not unusual to find no-longer-used depots in Mississippi converted to museums, but we also have museums in interesting and unusual places like the one you'll see in our first story.

♪♪ - Well, it has been around a long time.

It opened on Thanksgiving Day, 1929.

It's one of the chain, or was a chain of Sanger Brothers' theaters that stretched from New Orleans, to parts of Arkansas, all the way to Cuba.

It was originally opened as a movie palace.

So the end result of it is many years later, we have a stage, it's our community theatre.

We do shows, concerts, film presentations of all types.

(somber music) (radio static) - [Radio host] As cases of COVID 19 grow nationally, we look at what local health officials are saying.. - Because of the pandemic, things ground to a halt.

And so that drove us to look around us and say, well, what could we do?

How can we not only be productive, but how can we use this time not just for maintenance, but to create new things?

And we had already begun talking to Mayor Barker here in the city of Hattiesburg about the use of an alley that is on the west side of the Saenger Theater.

But what we discovered at the back of the Saenger in the alley were two boarded up windows.

And it turned out that one of those was in a store room.

And we looked at it and we just thought, what can we do with this?

One of our culinary staff members is an amateur carpenter.

And he said, I'll build some shelves.

And we said, let's make a museum.

A museum that's in the out of doors, is open 24/7, 365 days a year.

And so at the end of the first week in August, we opened in a window in the alley adjacent to the Sanger Theater in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

The Harrisburg Pocket Museum.

As my board asked, what is the deal with pockets?

I said, we're not showcasing pockets.

It is a pocket.

It's a little bitty museum.

In fact, we've given it the moniker of Mississippi Tiniest Museum.

And so this museum changes out its exhibit once a month.

It started out with an exhibition of Swiss Army knives.

It moved from there to an exhibition of rubber ducks.

Who knew how many rubber ducks you can actually find?

What we wanted to do was not just appeal to kids.

We veered off of that a little bit.

We wanted to, one, have a changing exhibit so there's a reason to cause people to come back downtown, come back again and again and again.

- It really has become a place of joy in a time when there wasn't a lot of joy to be found.

And as Hattiesburgers were pushed outside to try and stay active, this became a place where they could come and mill about and meet, and have lunch, and really just be inspired.

And it's going to be something that, I think, takes us far into the future as far as our downtown redevelopment.

- Everybody has other things.

(laughing) No one else has The Pocket Museum.

But I think it's the kind of thing that, all of a sudden, someone comes up with an idea that is truly not just unique, but interesting.

And it brings you back and keeps you coming back.

♪♪ - It's such a small museum that we determined it needed a mascot, so in November, Milo was introduced.

Milo is our mascot.

He's a mouse.

An appropriately-sized museum for a mouse.

That has resulted in artists painting mice in various places in the alley.

So it's kind of got a little bit of a theme going.

Along with it, there are different elements that have been added.

There are lots of little people, little vignettes in the alley that you have to find.

We've had artists that have begun to paint on the actual alleyway itself.

♪♪ Well today we're here for what most of America celebrates as Cinco de Mayo, which is basically an excuse to drink margaritas.

But we decided to take a little spin on it.

Cinco de Milo, because Milo's our little mascot.

Part of this is to show that just an alley, done well, can cause people to want to come into your downtown area and be a part of your community.

- I think it has almost improved that community of downtown.

It almost makes it seem like a lot safer place being here, downtown, together.

It wasn't really much going on down here, especially during COVID, but it was something that the kids could come out, parents could get out the house with and see the kids just enjoying themselves in the alleyway.

♪♪ - It is amazing to us-- we do have security cameras in the alley-- how many people come between the hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. And I can't say enough about not only how entertained they are, but how respectful they are of the whole alley.

We've not had problems in the alley.

Maybe because there's so much traffic, I don't know.

It has brought people down and has helped in a very difficult time.

Our business is to survive and hopefully to thrive.

Our restaurants down here have had a tough time.

You can't, or couldn't dine inside.

But by having a large group of pedestrian traffic means you can get a drink and walk down the alley and try to find all the little hidden vignettes.

Look and see if you like this month's exhibition.

What we are so pleased with is people that have come, heard about it, and seen the exhibits, and said, "I think I have something."

Show us what you collect.

We're all crazy here.

So send us what you've got and let's have a good laugh.

Let's enjoy it and find a place for yourself in this alley.

- Well, obviously, old depots like this one aren't the only historic buildings you can use as museums.

In our next story, we're going to an historic school building.

And the museum there honors the strength and the sense of community of the town where it's located.

We're going to the Waveland Ground Zero Hurricane Museum.

♪♪ - We're in Waveland, Mississippi.

We're on Coleman Avenue.

This particular street goes all the way from the beach to the railroad tracks.

And if you were thinking about Katrina, this is where Katrina devastated everything in this town except for the building we're sitting in.

- This building that we're in that houses the Waveland Ground Zero Museum is actually the oldest building and a historical landmark in Waveland, Mississippi.

It's one of the only historical landmarks that are still standing in Hancock County.

It was built in 1927 as a school for Waveland.

Besides this building after Katrina, the only other thing that was standing was that plaque honoring the volunteers for Camille.

That was standing in front of what used to be our City Hall.

So it was so eerie to walk down this street with all this devastation and see a plaque that honored volunteers.

And we knew that we'd be putting up a second plaque.

So, you know, the Ground Zero Museum is really the heart and soul of what's going on in this building.

You walk into the building, you get a sense of how high the water got here.

The waterline goes all the way around the halls of the museum, and it shows that the water went all the way up 11 and a half feet in this building.

But it also starts on August 23rd, the first time we heard the word "Katrina", and then it's a timeline.

So it tells the tale of how everything progressed.

And it also goes past August 29th on how we started recovery.

Obviously we want to tell the stories of what happened here as far as Hurricane Katrina, because that was such a significant event.

But the stories that we tell are not just about the devastation and the power of Mother Nature, but it's about the resiliency of the people.

It's about a sense of community.

It's about all the volunteers that came from all over the U.S. and even the world to help us rebuild.

Where we are right now is called the Waveland Room.

And this is kind of our kind of collection room.

We have a whole case on just Hurricane Camille.

You can't forget Camille because, you know, all we heard when we asked people to leave was "I'm not leaving.

I survived Camille."

Well, Katrina wasn't Camille, unfortunately.

And then we have memorabilia.

Waveland was the city that started the Krewe of Nereids which was all women's Krewe that still rules the day for Mardi Gras.

So we also have a collection of some of the gowns.

So this room, several hodgepodge, but it's a fun room.

You know, it goes from Katrina to, you know, old school days to Mardi Gras costumes.

And, you know, it's it's lighter than just thinking about how devastating Hurricane Katrina could be.

We have one room that is a dedication to Katrina through the eyes of Chris Porter.

Chris is a wonderful photographer.

She lives in Vicksburg, and when she came down here after Katrina to take pictures, she took the most amazing photographs.

To me, the most wonderful thing about that room is the floor mats.

She took pictures of slabs that we all came home to.

We didn't come home to homes.

We didn't come home to garages or cars.

We came home to slabs.

And she took the pictures of the slabs and she made floor mats that line our entire Porter Room.

So when you walk in that room and you're standing on the floor mat, you're just standing on what you and I could have come home to.

I was here one day when the lady came in and she walked over to one floor mat.

She goes, "Bernie... "This is my bathroom.

I know this bathroom."

Above the waterline, you have all these beautiful quilt pieces.

There was a woman who lived with her husband in Bay Saint Louis before Katrina Solveig Wells is the woman's name.

They lived here, they evacuated, they came back to nothing.

But she was a quilter.

So she was obsessed with finding some of her fabric.

So she started hunting.

She found fabric buried in the sand at the beach.

She found fabric down Main Street and stores that were destroyed8.

She looked everywhere.

So when she gathered up the fabric she could find, you know, she restored it.

And then she said, "I want to tell the story with quilts."

So she made 55 quilt squares and she made a story for each square that she did.

She has a series of three that are footprints.

And it's, you know, it's footprints in the sand.

It's footprints looking for your personal items.

It's footprints of other volunteers who came to help.

She also did Helping Hands.

And it's the same premise.

The initial idea for the Waveland Ground Zero Museum was actually through our two founders, Basil Kennedy and Lily Stahler Murphy.

Lilly was a woman who lived here in Waveland.

She's originally from New Orleans, or as she would say "New Or-lee-ans."

And you could always tell her little uptown accent.

She and her cousin said, "You know, "we want to make a-- we want to do a museum.

"We want to tell the tale of Hurricane Katrina.

We want to tell the tale of our community."

So Lillian Basil actually started the museum in 2013.

- Lilly was a force, not only for this museum, but for the entire city of Waveland.

Lilly passed away a year ago this July, and we miss her terribly.

And this museum was named after her last year.

- But a lot of our board members and volunteers do is a legacy to Lilly Stahler Murphy.

- We know that this is not an easy subject, but we don't leave it on a negative note.

Everything that we have in here, we have dedicated to the resilience of our Coastal people.

- I think it's cathartic for some of our residents to have been able to tell their tale.

Some were happy to do it.

Some were very hesitant.

- You know, we do have people that are affected by post-traumatic stress.

And actually, we had a first responder that came in last summer and said, "It's time for me to face my fears."

And one of our docents just took and said, "Do you need a hug?"

And he said, "You know, I'm okay right now, but before this is over, I might."

If we can make this this experience a little bit more joyful, a little bit more personal, and a little bit more heartfelt, that's what we want to do at the Waveland Ground Zero Hurricane Museum.

- In our next story, we're traveling to Vicksburg to what once was one of the finest folk art creations in the state.

But it's deteriorated a lot since then.

But there's an effort to preserve what's left.

♪♪ - Margaret Rogers Dennis owned Margaret's Grocery on Highway 61 back in 1950.

She was one of the first African-American store owners on Highway 61.

Her first husband was a World War II veteran and survived the War, only to be murdered outside of the shop in the late seventies.

Reverend Dennis was also a World War II veteran, and he was an ordained minister in Georgia.

And he came to Mississippi and he met Margaret, and he fell in love instantly.

And he said, "If you marry me, I promise to build you a castle to our love."

And he turned what was once just a plain grocery store into this fabulously beautiful roadside attraction.

And he built his site, Margaret's Grocery.

There's a tower on one end, and he said that he built the tower as The Sinner's Tower.

So folks from Jackson who were coming over to gamble might want to sit in the tower and read the Bible a little bit before they went over and hit the casino.

He had his own church.

He actually turned a city school bus that was donated to him in the seventies.

First, he drove it around for a while and would drive people to Parchman and preached to them the entire time.

And then one day he decided that he was just going to park the bus on the site, pulled out the steering wheel and the steering column and put in a pulpit and covered the seats and made that into his own church.

I reached out to the city and to the church to see if we could start a Friends of Margaret's Grocery group to figure out how to preserve this.

And so we formed the Mississippi Folk Art Foundation where, almost ten years later, the Mississippi Folk Art Foundation has finally acquired the land.

And we have 80% of all the ephemera and artwork in storage.

And we have a crew ready to start next year to refurbish and repaint the site, and we'd like to dedicate it to the city as a park.

Over the years, people said it couldn't be done.

Why are you doing this?

You're like Don Quixote here.

I made them a promise, and I think it's important for me to keep my promise.

I think that their simple message of "God ain't got no black church.

"He ain't got no white church, there is one church where we're all welcome" is vitally important.

And I will keep my promise and do just what I said for those reasons.

- In our next story, we travel back down to the Gulf Coast to Gulfport, the Mississippi Aviation Heritage Museum.

It was built to honor the life of aviator John C. Robinson.

He was also known as The Brown Condor.

And then it became so much more.

(airplane engine roaring) ♪♪ - This place is the Mississippi Aviation Heritage Museum, where we aim to honor Mississippi aviation history.

The Mississippi Aviation Heritage Museum is the brainchild of a group of men and women who wanted to honor John C. Robinson.

John C. Robinson was from Gulfport, Mississippi, and he was the first African-American licensed pilot to fight in combat in a foreign land.

He became the commander of the Ethiopian Air Force and fought in Ethiopia in 1935 and 1936.

Today, Ethiopian Airlines honor him.

If you go to Ethiopia, he's a hero.

In this museum, you're going to find the John C. Robinson Gallery, The Hall of Fame Gallery, The Engines Gallery, The Mississippi Airbases Gallery.

We have The Gulf Coast Gallery which showcases the Gulf Coast's rich aviation history.

Very few people know that in 1930, Gulfport, Mississippi, was the first airport that had night flying.

You could land at the airfield because he had light, it was a lighted runway.

First one in Mississippi.

♪♪ ♪♪ - We got the Hall of Fame in here in Mississippi.

And a lot of people come in and they're absolutely amazed as to what aviation has come out of the state of Mississippi.

- There were many, many Mississippians that became famous aviators, Roscoe Turner, famous aviator who broke records all over the place, who was a stunt pilot in the movie Midway.

He was from Corinth, Mississippi.

In fact, in Corinth, you will find an airport named after him.

"Earsly" Taylor Barnett.

She became Jamaica's number one commercial pilot.

Samuel Keesler, World War I pilot and the namesake of Keesler Air Force Base, is located here.

Fred Haise, Apollo 13 astronaut.

Apollo 14 astronaut, Stuart Roosa who lived majority of his life in Mississippi.

And of course, the Key brothers.

The Key brothers from Meridian hold the record for staying aloft for 27 days without landing.

They would mid-air refuel.

They invented mid-air refueling.

Nowadays, the same fundamentals are used to allow our Air Force and Navy for refueling purposes.

♪♪ I have found that there are seven Tuskegee Airmen pilots from Mississippi, two of which are from Pascagoula.

And they fought valiantly.

They were incredibly capable pilots.

Most people don't know this, but the hurricane hunters started on a dare.

Two pilots in Texas decided to bet a dollar who would penetrate a hurricane, and one of them did it.

Ever since that day, the hurricane hunters have become exclusively prepared to tell us what is going on inside a hurricane.

We're very proud of that exhibit.

One of my favorite exhibits here is The Bases Gallery.

It takes you back, pictorially, to the early days of aviation in Mississippi.

1917, 1942, or to all of the preparations and all the bases that were used to train the men and women to fight in World War II, in World War I.

Such great, great stories.

♪♪ (airplane engine roaring) We also pay tribute to the agricultural history of Mississippi.

And as you know, crop dusting started in the Delta and that company later became Delta Airlines.

- [Boy] I am going up!

- The great thing about this museum is we're making it so that it's very hands off.

Families can come in here with their kids and they can have this museum come alive.

- We want our visitors to feel like they belong, so we open the doors to the airplanes to get inside the airplanes, they pull and push.

They see the elevators go up and down.

They see the elevators moving and the rotors moving.

We have a turbine that you can get inside of it.

You can turn the engines off and see how a turbine works.

This is an interactive museum.

We were able to acquire flight simulators, motion flight simulators that you sit in and you move and you can feel the airplane, like if you were flying inside of an airplane.

- These motion simulators have been a great teaching tool.

We bring people in.

We show them the basics of flight.

We talk about the principles.

Again, all of the different controls that are on an airplane, instruments on an airplane.

So it's not just a game.

It's actually an educational tool.

- It's very important, not only to learn about the history, but also aviation requires that we learn aerodynamics.

What makes a wing fly?

How is an airplane made?

Why is a propeller made the way it is?

You're going to learn all that here.

- But we can give you information.

We can give you guided tours if you want.

We can give you so much content that people can walk away from here saying, "Wow!"

- I'm flying!

- Well, that's all the time we have for this week's show.

If you'd like information about anything you've seen, contact us at: and make sure you like our Mississippi Public Broadcasting Facebook page and check out our Mississippi Roads Facebook page, too.

Until next time, I'm Walt Grayson.

I'll be seeing you on Mississippi Roads.