It was usual for me to spend at least a week or two during the summers in Gulfport with my grandparents. My grandaddy Dutch Amsler had been an agricultural agent for Harrison County, and my grandmother, Sallie, had been a schoolteacher. They had lived on East Beach on the site where the Holiday Inn was constructed after Hurricane Camille in 1969 (this site is now the location of the Courtyard by Marriott), but had moved after the storm to a small house on East Second Street a block back from the beach. In the summer of 1984 however, both my parents were working, and money was tight, so they sent me to Gulfport on the bus rather than driving me down, which actually resulted in me having opportunity to take some interesting photos. The bus stopped at Grenada, at a location that happened to have a video arcade, and at a small store in Winona, and again at the central terminal in Jackson.
Once in Gulfport that summer, I discovered that there were occasional pickup basketball games at a small park in East Gulfport at Second and Henderson, where some of the Black young people from the neighborhood of Soria City across the railroad tracks came to hoop. I started hanging out down there, and some of the guys told me about another park across the tracks in Soria City itself where there were runnings, so soon I started venturing over there as well. For whatever reason, I was carrying my camera just about everywhere I went, snapping photos wherever I could. I was certainly not a professional, and had no idea at that early date of ethnography or musicology, but looking back, I was documenting a community that would ultimately vanish in Hurricane Katrina. I don't think my grandparents were aware that I was walking across the tracks into Soria City, and I don't think they would have approved. People in the white community often called it "Sewer City", and I have never found any explanation for the name "Soria", although I have an idea in the back of my mind that a man named Soria might have been an official of the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad. The neighborhood had something of a violent reputation, which I really didn't understand, inasmuch as it was a fairly quiet neighborhood of small houses, with a few churches, a school, a park, a community center and a couple of cafes/beer joints. Some of the kids there were fans of Run DMC and Whodini just like I was, and some of them were drummers or keyboard players, so we had certain things in common, and I enjoyed having some people my own age to hang out with. If there had been a place where we had access to instruments, we likely would have held jam sessions, but as it was, we had to be content with walking around, hooping and grabbing cold drinks from a neighborhood store such as Broadmoor Grocery.
Picturing these old stores in my mind reminds me that almost every bar, store and cafe had the familiar orange and blue Barq's Root Beer signs in front, with the simple logo "Drink Barq's. It's Good.", which indeed it was. It came in brown bottles, and was only available in the Gulf Coast region in those days. If I wasn't hanging out with friends in Palmer or Soria City parks, I was walking down Hill Place to the beach, where I often went swimming. The man-made beach at Gulfport was really on Mississippi Sound, and as such had little to no surf, as there were barrier islands such as Ship or Cat which blocked the waves. One of the oddities about them was that they could be clearly seen on certain days and not on others, which was a phenomenon I never understood.
My granddad worked at WLOX television during the day, but my Grandmother would often take me out to lunch, and occasionally would drive me to Mobile, Alabama or New Orleans, Louisiana to the sheet music store so I could buy classical piano music for my collection of scores. We also occasionally went out to eat at dinner, either in Gulfport or Biloxi, and often at the Yacht Club, where my grandparents were members. The club also had a swimming pool, and if I didn't feel like swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, I could always swim in the pool at the GYC.
I tended to take those summers for granted, but looking back on them, they were indeed special. I also would be remiss if I didn't mention that one of the young men who used to show up for the pickup basketball games at Palmer Park, Soria City or East Ward was a young star from Gulfport named Chris Jackson. People were already talking about his amazing skills then, and he was an outstanding player at Gulfport High School. Jackson later played for LSU in Baton Rouge, then entered the NBA, changing his name to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf in 1991 when he converted to Islam. Long before Colin Kapernick, Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the National Anthem, calling it a "symbol of oppression", and was fined $31,000 for each refusal by the NBA before he reached a compromise with the league. The house he was building for himself in Hancock County was vandalized with racist messages and then burned to the ground in an arson fire. Although the City of Gulfport has since honored him, he chose to move to Atlanta after the arson.
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