June 1984:Pat Boone's Undiscovered Bay of Discovery

One of the odder places I visited on my summer trips to the Mississippi Gulf Coast was a largely empty resort subdivision north of Pass Christian called Discovery Bay. The place had been developed by a corporation called the Wendell-West Corporation of Mississippi, started by a lawyer in Seattle named Moksha Smith, with a board of directors that included the singer Pat Boone. No sooner had the yacht club, marina, sales office and model home been completed in early 1969 when Hurricane Camille came through and left the entire development under water. While it was popularly believed that nobody would buy the lots after the storm, the truth was that almost all the lots were sold. But the lack of adequate water and sewer facilities made building on those lots difficult, and the flooding made landowners reluctant to build. While it is unclear whether Wendell-West ever intended to build the infrastructure, it soon was unable to do so, as it quickly ran into serious financial problems, and the development was foreclosed on by the North American Acceptance Corporation. NAAC would also end in bankruptcy in 1980, leaving a development full of roads and little else other than the sales office, where one employee of the homeowners' association presided over an old wooden model of the development and old sales literature. As it turned out, the Wendell-West Corporation left unpaid bills and heartbreak everywhere they went, from Mississippi to Arizona, to Australia to Hawaii to Oregon and Washington State. Perhaps the most bizarre outcome of the whole fiasco were rumors linking the company and Moksha Smith to the Central Intelligence Agency and money-laundering.

A place with plenty of streets and no traffic or buildings makes a fairly good place to learn to drive, and in 1985 or so, my mother gave me my first driving lessons in Discovery Bay, in her huge old Ford Granada. I recall it vividly to this day, because at the end of my lesson, she and I were both bitten by mosquitoes, which my grandfather denied vehemently, as he sat on the Harrison County Mosquito Control Commission. As he was so fond of repeating, "There are no mosquitoes in Harrison County!" He finally conceded that since Discovery Bay was fairly close to the Hancock County line the insects might have strayed over from the adjoining county!

In the late 1980's or early 1990's, the Discovery Bay Yacht Club reopened under new owners, with a restaurant that occasionally got good reviews. Unfortunately, before I could ever eat there, it closed, and Hurricane Katrina dealt the community a final blow. From the looks of videos on YouTube, the community has deteriorated even further from what it was when I first saw it in 1984. Coastal people continue to ridicule Pat Boone for the venture, saying that he sank a considerable amount of his personal money into it, and lost all of it. To me, probably the real losers were the people who purchased the lots expecting to be able to build their dream homes and instead stuck with worthless land due to the lack of water and sewer extensions.