June 1984: A Trip With My Grandfather to Leakesville

Toward the end of my summer vacation, my grandfather decided to take a day and drive to Leakesville. I went with him, and probably as much for me as anything else, he agreed to stop in some of the little towns that we came to along the way. We headed up Highway 49 to Brooklyn, Mississippi near Hattiesburg, and then continued along Highway 98 to New Augusta, the county seat of Perry County. I remember that we drove across the Leaf River to Old Augusta, where nothing remained but the former jail. The town had been abandoned in 1906 when the railroad came south of the town, and everyone had moved to New Augusta. In McLain, there were several abandoned schools which I photographed, and in Beaumont I took a picture of the main street of town along the railroad tracks. But in Leakesville, we visited an old home that had belonged to some of our relatives, and the local Presbyterian Church. One of the strangest things I noticed about Leakesville was that the Greene County Courthouse sat in a square that only had buildings and two sides, with the other sides being woods, as if the town was never really quite complete. Leakesville was in fact a really small town, but was bigger than State Line, which was the last place we visited on the line between Mississippi and Alabamz. As I recall, we headed down to Moss Point and Pascagoula from there, and then back to Gulfport.

June 1984: Remembering the Broadwater Beach Hotel and Marina

Another favorite dining destination for my grandparents and me was the place we called The Marina, which was actually a restaurant at the Broadwater beach Marina across from the Broadwater Beach Hotel. The restaurant had great food, particularly seafood, and also had great views of the Gulf of Mexico. As for the hotel, it was by far the most elegant and upscale resort on the Mississippi Coast, featuring two golf courses, and a large elegant swimming pool. My grandmother must have had a connection with someone in the hotel's management, because I recall being able to swim in the hotel pool at least one summer, probably 1984, given the pictures I took. Although the Broadwater Beach and its marina had been coast favorites, visited by many entertainers and celebrities, they began to fall on hard times when legal casinos came to the coast. The Broadwater Beach came under the control of the President Casino, and an ugly riverboat (later a barge) was placed across the street from it on the other side of the marina from the restaurant. Under the control of the casino, the Broadwater Beach began a slow decline, which was furthered by the construction and opening of other casinos and hotels, both in Gulfport and Biloxi. And the restaurants also declined, as people opted for the restaurants and buffets that were in the casinos. By the summer of 2005, the Broadwater Beach Hotel and casino had closed, and demolition was planned, so that a totally new hotel and casino could be built. But instead, in August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed both the marina and the hotel. Neither was rebuilt, and only the roads and dykes of the old marina remain.

June 1984: A Taste of Hawaii in Mississippi at Diamondhead

While Discovery Bay floundered and ended in bankruptcy, another similar development north of Pass Christian fared far better, a community known as Diamondhead. Even though both developments got under way around the same time, and both were affected by Hurricane Camille, the main reason that Diamondhead may have succeeded was also the reason for its name- that it sat on the highest point of the coast between New Orleans and Mobile. Set on land bought from the Gex family, prominent Hancock Countians, Diamondhead was developed by the Diamondhead Corporation with a Hawaiian theme. Buildings had tall, angled roofs that suggested thatched Polynesian lodges, palm trees were everywhere, and the company logo was used in architecture and even in the design of the swimming pools! Streets had nearly unpronounceable names such as Kaumakapili and Kaleapohuku, and the little shopping center was given the grandiose name of Bali Hai Mall, although it was really just a shopping center. Presumably, the higher ground made landowners more confident in building, and the better-financed Diamondhead Corporation went ahead and built the necessary infrastructure so that homes could actually be built. Also, unlike other similar developments, the developers envisioned a commercial area along the I-10 interchange where motels and restaurants could be built.

When I first visited Diamondhead in 1984, only the business area could be accessed without going through a guard gate. Those who wanted to visit the Administration Building and Sales Office or the Country Club, or who wanted to visit any of the residents, had to be allowed in by the security guards at the gate. That only changed at some point in the late 1990's or early 2000's when Diamondhead decided to incorporate as a city. The Diamondhead Corporation by then had been renamed the Purcell Corporation, and had attempted to develop many more such developments: Lake Forest in Alabama, Newport and Mile High in Texas, Falconhead in Oklahoma and Lake Arrowhead in Georgia. They also had acquired the legendary Pinehurst resort and golf course in North Carolina. All of this largesse, and particularly the spectacular failure of the Mile High development near Sierra Blanca, Texas led to the collapse of the Purcell Corporation, and despite Diamondhead's success as a town, an end not much different than that of the Wendell-West Corporation that developed Discovery Bay nearby.

Despite being the highest point on the Gulf Coast between Louisiana and Alabama, Diamondhead was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, with nearly everything south of I-10 being destroyed, including the Yacht Club. There have been several restaurants to open and close where the yacht Club was since the hurricane, but nothing has managed to stay open. That being said, Diamondhead has become a destination of choice for many whose houses were destroyed in Waveland or Bay St. Louis during Katrina. At one point, Diamondhead was the most populous town in Hancock County.

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.

June 1984: Remembering Annie's at Henderson Point

When I spent summers in Mississippi with my grandparents, we often went out to eat at dinner, and the Gulfport-Biloxi area offered a lot of choices for great food. Usually, we chose a place close to home, but my favorite place was a historic restaurant in an unincorporated community called Henderson Point along the beach west of Pass Christian. Henderson Point was a place that never really developed, although the actor Robert Mitchum had once lived there, and there had once been an elegant hotel there called the Inn By The Sea that later became the U.S. Merchant Marine School before it was demolished by Hurricane Camille. The center of the community had been two places- Bennie French's Tavern, which once had its own private beach, and a drive-in restaurant called Annie's which opened in 1928. In one sense, Annie's might seem to have been cursed, as it was constantly being destroyed, by hurricanes, fires and even a truck that drove through the front windows. But each time, the restaurant built back, coming back stronger than before. When the restaurant was inherited by the original owner's daughter, Annie Lutz, it was converted into an upscale establishment, and thoroughly remodeled in 1972 by the owner's husband George. The beautiful building and grounds remained unchanged in 1984, and Annie's was justifiably famous for steaks and seafood. My grandparents didn't seem to particularly like going all the way out there, but on occasions, they would take me there, and I was never disappointed.

I recall being amazed at the massiveness of the complex at Annie's, which apparently included a number of meeting rooms. To my teenaged eye, it appeared that there might have even been a motel, but I cannot find any evidence that this was the case. I have since read that the buildings were full of bells, but I don't recall seeing them, or hearing them ring. A final tragedy proved too much for Annie's, 2005's Hurricane Katrina. Most of Henderson Point was under water, and the restaurant was completely demolished. Only a vacant lot remains where it stood. A later incarnation of Annie's tried opening in a strip mall in Pass Christian for a period of time, but it did not survive for very long. Although there has been much recovery in the nearby towns of Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian, it does not appear that Henderson Point will recover. Much of the area where there were formerly houses and businesses has returned to overgrown woods or jungle. It sadly appears Annie's will remain simply a fond memory of long ago.

June 1984:Summer Vacation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast

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.