Forgotten, but not gone

Five years later, the Gulf Coast is still trying to rebuild. What’s stopping them?

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InsideAll stories and photographs by Stry

4. The Thing That Saved Bobby Mahoney’s AssHow duct tape, legalized gambling and shrimp gumbo kept one Biloxi institution in business.

6. In Ray’s HandsTwo hours in a town hall meeting with Ray Mabus, the man with the job no one wants.

10. The Eye of the Storm Still SeesOne Biloxi man doesn’t want to remember what he saw during the storm. So why can’t he forget?

18. No VacancyBusiness is slumping. But a hotelier with an unusual past thinks his town might have a strong future.

21. Jr.’s Last-Cast EffortMike Adams’ restaurant and charter businesses were going fine -- until the spill hit.

24. God Bless You, WalmartThe time the retail giant came to town, and mom and pop cheered.

26. Insuring Himself to the DeathCharlie Green is paid to understand the insurance industry. But if he can’t, who can?

29. George Sekul’s Last Rah-RahA football coach’s final dream: putting together a college all-star game in Biloxi.

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It was a stupid thing to do. He knows that now, Bobby Mahoney does. Bobby’s up in the second floor of the home Mary built. The wa-ter level’s inching up the walls. Hell of a sturdy home, Bobby says. Ca-mille’s knee-high water and triple-digit winds made a mess of the old home, but Camille was the worst. That’s what they all said: the worst. The mother of all hurricanes. A five-hundred year storm. So Bobby’s Momma built back, Mary Mahoney did. Rebar, pour concrete, more re-bar, cinder blocks. Built a small for-tress, really, just steps from the Gulf

of Mexico. Mary Mahoney knew it in business and she knew it in homes: you build to last.

But now here’s Bobby Mahoney, looking out his second floor window, and the water level’s right there. This bitch of a storm, Katrina they’re call-ing her, and this water’s higher than anything Camille ever brought in. These two panes on the window are starting to bulge a little, puffing in and out like they’ve got their own breath, and Bobby’s brother-in-law’s telling him to calm that window down. Go put your hands on it or

something. Don’t let it break.

So Bobby goes and kneels down next to the window, and he gets one hand up against the window, and then the second, and he’s got just a little pressure on the panes, slowing that rhythm down, the wa-ter still rising up against the house, and Bobby can see it coming clos-er. The ’47 hurricane showed up at night, and so did Camille, and so has just about every other storm that’s ever hit Biloxi, who knows why, but Katrina’s come knocking in the middle of the day, so Bob-

How duct tape, legalized gambling and shrimp gumbo kept one Biloxi institution in business even after Hurricane Katrina hit.

The Thing That Saved Bobby Mahoney’s Ass

Bobby Mahoney poses next to the doorway where they mark the water level from Camille and Katrina at Mary Mahoney’s restaurant in Biloxi.

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1. Murella Herbert Powell, Biloxi’s historian emeritus, says Mahoney is lying. The city had few slaves, and bricks on the building indicate that the Old French House was built in the 1800s.

The Thing That Saved Bobby Mahoney’s Ass

by’s down against the frame, keep-ing that window from pulsing and looking straight down at this water that’s rising up, which means that he’s not even noticing that right in front of him there’s this wave — no, but waves are what you’d go surfing on during your week-long Hawaiian vacation, with ukuleles and leis and little drinks with little umbrellas in them, and this thing is more like a sucker punch, breaking through the glass and throwing Bobby Mahoney 20 feet back across the room, so no, maybe wave isn’t exactly the right word here, but whatever it is, it’s here — and now the Gulf of Mexico has shifted inside Mary Mahoney’s rebar-and-concrete built-to-last for-tress and is making itself at home on the carpet.

Bobby is bleeding, now. There’s three-and-a-half inches of glass sticking straight out of his ass. The hospital’s close enough that two po-liceman are going to show up in five or six hours, grab two limbs each and carry Bobby to the emergency room, but the hospital’s under water too at this moment. Someone else takes a roll of duct tape and patch-es up the bleeding. Bobby lies on the carpet. A heart attack took his Daddy on Wednesday, and they put Robert Mahoney, Sr., in the ground on Saturday. Today is Monday, and Bobby Jr. is on the carpet, praying. There are three-and-a-half inches of glass in his ass, and duct tape keep-ing the rest of it together, and each little jab from Katrina is bringing more of the Gulf of Mexico into the room and shifting the carpet and tossing Bobby Jr. around. He is pray-ing, that the waves don’t get much

higher, that the rebar holds, that the bleeding doesn’t get worse, that the water will start to drain away, that the city will be spared, and so will their lives, and all of those things will come to be.

Duct tape saved Bobby Mahoney’s ass that day, and maybe his life.

¶ ¶ ¶

It took two weeks to re-open Mary Mahoney’s Old French House after Hurricane Camille hit. It took 55 days to do it after Katrina.

But both times, the restaurant came back. After Katrina, they marked Xs through parts of the green spray paint on the side of the building. “We‘ll Be Are Back!” the words now read.

Bobby runs the place, and he re-members the first post-Katrina cus-tomers well. Some walked out of what was left of their homes, others out of their news vans, and they sat right down at white tablecloths and ordered seafood gumbo.

“People wanted to come out,” Bobby says. “They were living in trailers. This was a little bit of sanity for them.”

But don’t mistake Mary Mahoney’s for a neighborhood coffee shop. The restaurant is just about the only non-casino restaurant in Biloxi — pre- or post-Katrina — that has tablecloths, which makes it feel either quaint or classy, which in today’s Biloxi makes it the place tourists go to get a taste of the city that, frankly, didn’t even exist in restaurant form until Mary

Mahoney invented it back in 1964.

Her restaurant used to be on Mag-nolia Street before the city changed the name to Rue Magnolia. Paul Newman and Tennessee Williams ate here, and so did President Carter. Grisham put the restaurant in two of his books. The restaurant’s presiden-tial platter — crab claws and soft shell crabs — was served for the President on the White House lawn in the summer of 1984.

Mary’s not around anymore. She died in ’85 of a brain tumor, a year after serving that meal for the Rea-gans. But the stories about Mary have been around long enough that the family can just trot them out like so many servings of bread pudding. Here’s Bobby talking about his daddy heading to the newsstand every week to pick up a copy of the Sunday New York Times Magazine for Mary. There’s one about the time Gloria Vanderbilt stopped in for din-ner, her son Anderson Cooper eat-ing in just a towel. And here’s Bob-by’s personal favorite little one-liner about his momma, born without a college education but with an ad-vanced degree in what Bobby calls “social endeavors.”

Then they’ll want to talk about her restaurant. The dates get a little fuzzy, but the restaurant is inside a building that was built in 1737, slave quarters and all, which Bobby says makes the place even older than the Biloxi home that locals actually call The Old House.(1) Bobby’s maternal grandfather, Tony Cvitanovich, came to Biloxi from Croatia in 1898. He was a fisherman there and a fisherman here, which makes Bobby a part of

story continued on p. 31

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All they’re asking for is an end to government corruption, and you can do that for them, Ray, can’t you? All they’re asking for is accountabil-ity, Mr. Secretary, accountability and an end to government corruption.

But since they’re asking already, they’d also like money, and jobs, and a brand new, just-like-it-was-before

Gulf, and more research, and enough data to make an Excel spreadsheet whimper, and an end to the use of dispersants, and a promise to stop erosion in the tidal estuaries, and — and, hang on now, Mister Mabus, they’re not done yet — and a trans-lation of every document produced by the government into English,

Spanish, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian, at the very minimum, and a promise to end offshore drill-ing, and a promise to continue off-shore drilling, and a promise to not forget us, Mr. Secretary, the ones who got you elected into office three decades ago, remember us?, and investigations into the effects of oil on poor, helpless bacteria, and

meetings with the Governor, and answers, and accountability, and an end to government corruption, and most especially their lives back. Give them their lives back, Ray. You can do that, can’t you?

Up front, a wireless mic pinned to his tie, stands Ray Mabus, former

auditor of the state of Mississippi, 1984-1988, former Governor of the state of Mississippi, 1988-1992, Sec-retary of the Navy, 2009-present. The President has asked Mabus to au-thor the Gulf Coast Restoration Plan, a plan that the federal government will use as a guideline to rehabilitate the Gulf of Mexico and the commu-nities that depend on the water. The

President has asked Mabus to take input from the people of the Gulf, so Mabus has come to Ocean Springs, Miss., to discuss what’s next now that BP has plugged the leak below the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil drilling rig.

Inside the Ocean Springs Civic Cen-

In Ray’s Hands

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In Ray’s Handster, a crowd of at least 250 has gath-ered on a Saturday afternoon to speak with Mabus. This is the ninth town hall session that he’s hosted in recent days.

“Some of the themes are becom-ing clear,” Mabus told Stry after the session had ended. He said his final report to the President will likely

propose considerable local involve-ment in all future recovery efforts, as well as a suggestion to utilize much of the available research that’s al-ready being done in the Gulf.

Mabus is also worried about the spill’s effect on the mental health of Gulf residents, and he said his report

will take that into consideration.

As for a timetable for his final report to the President, Mabus said, “I think it’ll be done in the next few weeks.”

¶ ¶ ¶

These are, officially, not town halls. Someone in Washington has given

these meetings a political label, and while government jargon usually conceals the truth, their phrasing here unintentionally reveals it. Offi-cially, these are Ray Mabus Listening Sessions, and that’s a perfect descrip-tion for what ensues. After a short introductory statement, Mabus asks those with questions to step up to a

microphone and be heard.

The first man at the mic tells Mabus, “I’m glad you’re here, but I want to get paid.”

The second man tells Mabus, “A lot of people here have lost faith.”

The third, a woman in pink, says, “I

don’t trust the federal government at all.”

The fifth, a fisherman: “We can’t get paid,” with that drawn-out Southern vowel that makes “can’t” rhyme with “paint.”

The seventh or eighth, though the

Two hours in a town hall meeting with Ray Mabus, the man with the job no one wants: figuring out what do with the Gulf of Mexico.

Mississippians present their concerns and questions as the Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus (center), listens at a town hall meeting in Ocean Springs, Miss.

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notes start getting fuzzy here: “Obama is lying to us” and, “Oh, I know you want to speak, Mr. Mabus,” and, “You can’t lie to me no more,” and, four or five minutes of semi-controlled rage later, “I love you, sir. God bless you.”

The Ray Mabus Listening Session goes on like this for two hours. It is two hours of open-mike psychiatry. Ma-bus stands in the front of the room, fingers interlaced, and allows those at the microphone to speak for as long

as they are willing. At the end of each comment, he re-sponds briefly and then points to the next microphone. In two hours, Mabus speaks for only about 20 minutes. For the rest of the time, he’s a bureaucratic piñata. Stand up and take a whack. Good for what ails you.

“I understand people being frustrated,” Mabus told Stry. “I understand people being worried. I understand people being scared because their livelihoods are threatened.”

The meeting shifts from topic to topic with no real direc-tion, aside from oscillating levels of anger. No one starts a “drill, baby, drill” chant, though several speakers sup-

port BP’s right to drill offshore, and several others ask for a government commitment to renewable energy. One man reads Mabus a letter he’s written about his favorite species of fish. Several dozen Vietnamese fishermen in the back row are wearing the big, black, over-the-ear headphones that airlines used to give out on cross-country flights; there is a man behind them feeding live English-to-Vietnamese translation into those headsets. One Vietnamese woman stands up toward the end of the session and asks Mabus a question about receiving

payment for a loss of servic-es, and Mabus directs her to the BP table, where the oil rep will later be accosted in at least three different lan-guages.

The crowd is diverse in ways that, in the South, only exist in the coastal counties. They are white, black, Hispan-ic and Asian. There are men in camo vi-sors and men

in camo cowboy hats, politicians in flower-patterned shirts and fisherman in blazers. There are Vietnamese-Americans in some rows, and American vets who once fought against the Vietnamese in others.

They are all asking for something: help, answers, a place to vent. But what seems more important is that they are all asking to be heard, and that one of the most power-ful men in the United States has come to listen.

He can do that for them, at least.-----story published on Sept. 2, 2010

Above, a fisherman listens to one of Mabus’ answers. At right, the man who President Obama appointed to create a post-Deepwater Horizon plan for the Gulf Coast states.

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One east Biloxi man doesn’t want to remember the things he witnessed during Hurricane Katrina. So why can’t he forget?

The Eye of the Storm Still SeesAbout a year after the storm that Anthony Tryba won’t name, he got a phone call from a man in Jackson, Miss., a man whose name he doesn’t remember. And whoever it was — John C. or Bill A. or Tom F., or something like that — asked Anthony if he was the Anthony Tryba, and Anthony said yes, and the man started telling him that Anthony should write a book. Anthony told the man that maybe he had called the wrong Anthony Tryba. This Anthony Tryba was formerly an employee at the Grand Casino in Biloxi, Miss., and this Anthony Tryba hadn’t written anything since graduating from Biloxi High with the class of 1972.

The man from Jackson asked Antho-ny if he was the one he’d been read-ing about in the papers. The one who’d gone around in Biloxi shut-ting off gas lines after the storm. The one whose clocks had stopped right at 9:16, the moment time stood still on Crawford Street

Anthony said, Yes, I’m him, and the man from Jackson said, Well, then, you’re the one I’ve been looking for. And he said it again: I think you should write a book about what you saw.

Anthony Tryba does not remem-ber the man from Jackson’s name. He does not have the man’s phone number. He does not know if the man is a book publisher or a literary agent. He didn’t think to ask, really, because Anthony Tryba is just a guy who used to work at the Grand Casi-no, and he’s not a reporter or a writer

or anything like that, and Anthony Tryba doesn’t ask a lot of questions. He doesn’t own a computer or a typewriter or even a cell phone — didn’t then, and still doesn’t, so you know.

But that day, Anthony Tryba decided maybe he needed to share what he’d seen. So he started writing a book.

¶ ¶ ¶

Before this story goes any further — into the magnolia tree that saved Anthony Tryba’s life, or the bodies he saw floating below the water tower, or the storm that destroyed Craw-ford Street and left it a skeleton of its former self — you need to know that Anthony Tryba suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. The case is, officially, undiagnosed. Tryba has never been to a mental health professional, and he may never go.

PTSD is an anxiety disorder that’s frequently mis- or overdiagnosed, according to Jeff Bennett, execu-tive director of the Gulfport-based Gulf Coast Mental Health Center. There are thousands of people on the coast who evacuated before the storm, or who stayed but were nev-er in serious danger during Katrina. These are people, Bennett says, who might be depressed from what they saw after the storm. They’re suffer-ing from anxiety, or possibly what Bennett calls “malignant malaise.”

But PTSD is a condition that’s brought on by much more severe conditions. It’s commonly seen among soldiers who’ve fought in war zones, and also among those who’ve lived through a severe accident or disaster.

In most cases, people who suffer from PTSD survived a near-fatal situ-ation and then continue to re-live

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The Eye of the Storm Still Sees

Anthony Tryba sits on the front steps of his home at 211 Crawford Street. After Katrina hit, he slept on a mattress on his porch for months.

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that experience long after the dan-ger has passed.

I offer Bennett a few details of An-thony Tryba’s Katrina story, and Ben-nett cuts me off five seconds in.

“Oh yeah,” he says. Bennett says five years later, just based off a detail or two and a street address, he can tell whether or not a person is a legiti-mate PTSD candidate. Tryba’s infor-mation fits the profile perfectly.

But even if Tryba does eventually de-cide to visit a psychologist, or sits in on a group ther-apy session with other Katrina survivors, he will not forget. He cannot un-re-member what he saw. He may be able to move on — but he will never forget.

In this, Tryba is far from alone. Bennett points me to a just-published report from the journal “Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness,” which studied the ef-fects of Katrina on the coast’s youth. They found that only half of the chil-dren on the coast who needed help from a mental health professional actually received it. Some 20,000 children displaced by the storm are still suffering from mental health problems, they say.

Katrina is just part of the mental health crisis on the coast. Bennett’s team calls the current situation “KEOS”: Katrina, the economy and

the oil spill. All three are sources of stress for locals, and when all three work in concert, the results can be devastating.

Since the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, Bennett’s staff has distributed 800 surveys to current patients and others in the community. The sur-veys ask if locals are having trouble sleeping lately, or if they’re feeling angry, or depressed, or nervous, or if they’ve been using drugs or alcohol with frequency.

“Almost without exception, they’ll

check something,” Bennett says.

Local leaders are particularly worried about the physical effects of these stressors. Roberta Avila, a mental health professional who also serves as executive director of Biloxi’s Steps Coalition, says domestic violence increased immediately after the storm.

“We saw a lot of that after Katrina,” she says.

Now it’s back. Daniel Le of Boat

People SOS, an organization that offers social services to the coast’s Vietnamese community, says when the government shut down the Gulf to fishing this spring, the fishermen were forced inside, confined to their homes. The result: an increase in do-mestic violence. It’s a situation that Bennett’s also hearing about at his offices.

“If you can’t go out and boat, then you’re at home,” Bennett says. “These are guys, they’re used to being out for several weeks at a time. So they’re stuck. They’re not making any mon-

ey, and domestic issues arise. Maybe they get to drink-ing. The wife said something. The next thing you know, there’s a fight, there’s physi-cal violence. That happened before, but I think it’s more likely to happen now, just because of marital proxim-ity.”

The problem is, as Le notes, as many

as half of the Vietnamese on the coast are either illiterate or non-English speakers. Many would never even consider spending a few hours a month with a psychologist to dis-cuss their issues — that is, if they could even find one who speaks their language.

The Vietnamese fit in with a coastal culture that takes great pride in its own resiliency. In my three months on the coast, I’ve heard stories of men and women who rode out the storm while sitting on their front

Buddy the dog, who neededfifteen minutes to safely paddle to the magnolia tree.

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porches, and even of some who sat on their roofs in folding chairs and watched the storm pass overhead. This is a working-class city, and its citizens are not easily convinced that they should ask for help.

“They’re not people who traditional-ly seek mental health services,” Ben-nett says. “They’re macho fisherman, and they’re going to solve their own problems.”

Mental health also traditionally runs up against another aspect of the Biloxi lifestyle: God. Alice Graham — a reverend, mental health profes-sional and executive director of the Interfaith Disaster Task Force — says there’s a disconnect that existed be-fore Katrina, one that local religious leaders had inadvertently created.

“Too often, the way that they minis-tered to people was around a denial of mental health needs,” she says. “That if you were faithful enough, religious enough, you didn’t have mental heath needs.”

So the Interfaith Disaster Task Force worked to bridge that disconnect. They started a series of programs to teach clergy how to recognize mental health issues — anxiety, de-pression, addiction — and what to do when they spotted it. This year, the Task Force held its fourth annual Community Health Summit, and Graham says local religious leaders have started to embrace the goals of the mental health community.

But they need more — more money, more mental health professionals, more understanding, more educa-tion, more time. They’re still waiting. And there’s this catch: the people who are working to cure the coast

of anxiety are themselves anxious about what happens if they can’t fix the problem.

¶ ¶ ¶

There is a wrench in Anthony Tryba’s hand and a thought on Anthony Tryba’s mind: do the right thing.

Down by the water, he saw where he used to work: the Grand Casino. This was back when the state legis-lature had decided that gaming was not allowed on land, so every casino bought a giant barge and docked it underneath their hotel. In the winds of Katrina, the Grand’s barge had de-fied state law and plowed right onto land, across Highway 90 and into some buildings.

Anthony wouldn’t be going back to work for a while, but he kept walk-ing. He smelled the dead bodies un-derneath the water tower before he saw them. He walked past his own street — the one he’d grown up on, the only street he’d ever lived on in his 50 years — and didn’t even rec-ognize it. He walked right past Craw-ford Street, there on the east side of Biloxi; it just didn’t look the same anymore.

He lived now at 211 Crawford, but he’d grown up two doors down, in the home his momma had lived her whole life in. Daddy wasn’t from here. Daddy was the man who’d grown up in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and had been sent to work in the coal mines at the age of 12. Daddy, the man who Anthony remembers walking in on when he was a child and hearing the words, “Aren’t you going to say hello to the President?”, and Anthony looking around and not seeing any-one else in the room. But that’s the

childhood of the son of a paranoid schizophrenic, of a man who lived in a world of his own creation. At 22, the man wanted out, and found his exit from the open end of a gun.

It went on. The mud was everywhere. The taste of gasoline was replaced by the smell of natural gas. Anthony heard a man yelling for help, and he helped. He guided a mom and chil-dren out of one home. He knocked down a fence and used it to give some elderly women a dry path to escape their home, which had been dislodged from its slab and crash-landed in the middle of the road.

He found a bike with a flat tire and started pedaling, down to Oak Street. Stevie was alive there, some-how, and Anthony found a ladder to help him out of his house. The stairs up to the front door had been de-stroyed by the water.

Stevie smelled it too: the gas, escap-ing out of pipes. Anthony pulled out the wrench and started shutting off gas lines, home by home, the first among the first responders. They went at it for hours. Anthony walked Stevie home, and then went back to Crawford Street. He found a banana in the mud, peeled it and ate it. It was the first thing he’d eaten since the storm. He still hadn’t gotten any water.

Anthony got up the next day and kept shutting off gas lines. He found a Salvation Army truck that was handing out food and water, and a man there asked him about the wrenches. Anthony told him what he was doing, and the man took him to the back of the truck and gave him a bottle of water and some fruit. Two reporters from USA Today stopped

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to ask him some questions, and An-thony gave them his story.

That night, sitting on his porch on Crawford Street, Anthony saw something he hadn’t seen since the storm: a car coming down his street. It stopped in front of his house. The driver rolled down his window. “Would you like a ham po-boy?” he asked.

In his hand, he had half of a sand-wich, a bag of chips and a bottle of water, in a box from McAlister’s Deli. Even five years later, Anthony wants to thank the man for that first meal after the storm, but he doesn’t know where to turn.

It went on. After the first article in USA To-day, reporters started coming to Anthony to hear his story. They came from as far away as Chicago. Their questions were the same, Anthony remembers. His answers were the same.

Anthony kept walking, his feet blis-tering up until he started walking with a limp. He stopped going past the water tower, where the stench from the bodies was overpowering. The eye of the storm had passed 40 minutes to the west of Biloxi, but it was here, in Anthony’s neighbor-hood, where they had suffered the most severe flooding. The streets were empty. His neighbors were the ones who’d called 911 that night, in tears. Months later, the city of Bi-loxi had to bring in counselors to

work with their 911 operators. They couldn’t forget the voices: I’m in my attic. The water’s up to my neck. This is my social security number. Tell my family I love them.

Anthony’s family found him on the second day after the storm, but it wasn’t until a week had passed that they finally convinced him that he should get out of Biloxi for more than a few hours. At his brother’s home in the Back Bay, Anthony fell asleep for the first time in a week.

He woke up, and asked to be driven back to Crawford Street. His fam-ily insisted that he stay, sleep a few hours more, but Anthony refused. He’d gotten this unrelenting feeling into his head, this desire to do the right thing, and he couldn’t let it go.

That’s what he told his family. The day before the storm, his brother, Joey, called, and Anthony told him, I’m staying on Crawford Street. I’ll do the right thing. His friend, Da-vid, called and said, Hey, T-Man, why don’t you get out of there, and An-thony told him, Don’t worry, I’ll do the right thing. His niece, Wendy,

called, and Anthony told her, Don’t worry, I’ll do the right thing. His baby brother, Johnny, called, and Anthony told him, Don’t worry, I’ll do the right thing. Johnny’s daughter, Melaney, called, and Anthony told her, It’ll be alright. I’ll do the right thing.

Now Anthony was walking around streets he no longer recognized, and Anthony, man of God, was asking himself, Why did my God do this? Four hours he’d spent balled up on the roof above his home while 135 mile-per-hour winds whipped over

him. Why had it happened? Why had he survived?

And Anthony start-ed to think: Maybe it was so I could do the right thing. Maybe it was so I could do some-thing to help.

So he stayed to shut off gas lines, to act as a guide for the relief workers who didn’t know their

way around the neighborhood the way Anthony did. He slept on a mat-tress on his front porch for months, and every time a gust of wind rattled his front door, Anthony would wake up, convinced Katrina was back to hit the neighborhood again. The feeling never really went away. Liv-ing on Crawford Street, surrounded by the destruction, the homes shat-tered and bent and bruised, the neighbors dead or gone or forgot-ten, he couldn’t stop the storm from reliving itself over and over in his mind.

It felt like time had stopped on that

The magnolia tree that An-thony climbed to his roof.

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day, and in some ways, it did. An-thony had two battery-operated clocks sitting in his living room. Both stopped five seconds apart at 9:16 a.m., the moment the flood waters reached the little hand.

He did more interviews, sharing his story with reporters, until one day, he just didn’t feel like sharing anymore. He couldn’t. He stopped referring to the storm by name. Giving it a name gave it an identity, and Anthony just couldn’t grant it that.

About a year after the storm, the man from Jackson called, and Anthony decided that it was time to share his story for the final time. So he started writing, longhand, on big legal pads, a story linear and haunting. He was living in a FEMA trailer by then. His sister took the pages and typed it into Anthony’s book. He called it, “My Side of the Eye,” after the center of the storm that had passed over his coast. Anthony’s not an author; he says he doesn’t know what to do with the words he’s written. So his book has sat on a thumb drive in his house, dormant, the story he meant to share but hasn’t yet.

This year, he moved across the Back Bay to D’Iberville. He still has trouble sleeping, away from the only other street he’s ever known, and the home he put his life into, and the humidity of those first nights on the front porch. The memories aren’t as close now, he says. But they’re still there.

I tell him about what Bennett told me, about PTSD, about it all, and An-thony doesn’t seem too worried. He tells me he doesn’t have it so bad. He asks me where a guy like him could even go to see a mental health

professional, and I offer him a few options. But that doesn’t seem to take. He tells me he feels alright. He doesn’t talk about it much anymore, the storm, except to trade stories on weekends. His neighbors had it worse, he tells me. They’re the ones who stood up to their necks in water when the storm came in. They’re the ones who needed saving.

He changes the subject. When the weather cools down, and when his back feels better, he wants to do some more work on his Crawford Street home. The place is still a mess. After Katrina, he mopped the floors and moved some stuff around, but there’s plenty left to fix. He has a job with a shipbuilder in Pascagoula,

but he’s been on leave for months because of his back, which contin-ues to bother him.

Some pain is easier to spot than oth-ers.

¶ ¶ ¶

There’s this other part of the coast’s mental health problem that goes beyond any crisis of natural or eco-nomic proportions. What’s going on is easy to dismiss because, on its face, it sounds ridiculous. Think of it this way: in other cities, identity is partially linked to monuments or buildings, or songs or sports teams.

But the coast has none of those. Their ancestry is the only thing that gives them a sense of uniqueness. These are communities whose iden-tity is wholly tied to their people.

And right now, the people are fac-ing a crisis of confidence.

What it stems from is this coast’s unusual history with New Orleans. French settlers first landed on the Mississippi coast in 1699 and placed the capital of their new territory here. Two decades later, they found-ed New Orleans, and moved the capital there.

The coast was where New Orleans families traveled to — first by steam-boat, and later by rail or car — to get away from the yellow fever that plagued the city in summertime. In 1892, after the Biloxi fishing fleet was destroyed by a hurricane, the city appealed to New Orleans for help, and help they received.

In terms of culture — especially food, art and music — the coast shares more in common with New Orleans than it does with the rest of the state of Mississippi. But the coast can never break free of their ties to Mississippi, and of all the things that come with it: a long history of pov-erty and racism; school systems that consistently rate among the lowest-ranked in America; and illiteracy.

New Orleans is considered an Amer-ican treasure. The coast, it seems, is not.

The only things that break the mal-aise here are these spurts of irratio-nal exuberance. The coast knows how to throw a party, especially on Mardi Gras, where the celebration

“We’re as good as they are. But

nobody’s paying any attention.”

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rivals only — naturally — the one thrown by their neighbors in New Orleans. Graham, the executive di-rector of the Interfaith Disaster Task Force, says the parties are a coping mechanism for the coast.

“It’s the way they manage the dis-missal by the rest of the country….,” she says. “It’s the way that they survive, the way that they make sense of it.”

But since Katrina, the dismissal has only gotten worse. The eye of the storm passed over Mis-sissippi, and the worst of the waves and winds hit the coast. Locals know the story well, though: in New Orleans, engi-neering failures caused massive flooding, and that’s what drew news reporters to the city.

On the Mississippi coast, lo-cals wanted to show off their strength. Their governor flout-ed government aid — we don’t need the feds, he’d tell anyone who’d listen — but at the same time, his people wondered when their help would arrive. It’s a strange contradiction: the locals who pride themselves on re-siliency also feel envious — not re-sentment, but envy — of their Loui-siana neighbors, who received the majority of the attention and aid.

Every time the President heads to New Orleans for a stump speech, or the government pledges more money for schools there, or some-one asks, But did the storm even hit Biloxi?, locals here cringe.

“It’s kind of like family, when you’ve got a favorite child, and then Freck-les always takes the heat,” says the

Gulf Coast Mental Health Center’s Bennett. “It has some impact on you. It kind of diminishes your self-esteem, maybe your general public self-esteem is diminished in some way. You feel less worthy, and then you get defensive: ‘We’re as good as they are. But nobody’s paying any attention to us.’”

Locals don’t like, as Bennett puts it, playing “second fiddle to the metro area.” They don’t understand why they’ve been forgotten, and they do feel forgotten.

For as bad as things were in New Or-leans, things were worse here.

¶ ¶ ¶

Anthony Tryba’s parents always told him: when the flood waters come, open the doors. Better to let the house flood than to let the whole

thing float away.

He needs to throw himself out of the home and into the magnolia tree, because if he does not, he is going to die in this home. The back door is open, and the house is flooding. And that’s about the point where Anthony starts to realize what he’s

actually up against. He could die; he may die; he cannot say.

Anthony is a man of God, and out in his front yard is a tree of life, that big hundred-year-old magnolia just about as thick as it is tall. This is Anthony’s last-best plan.

Inside the house, it’s just him, his dog Buddy and Kym. Kym is Anthony’s ex-girl. They lived to-gether on Crawford Street from ’87 until ’98, then broke up. In ’03, when her landlord jacked up the price on her apartment, Anthony let her move back in.

Stevie’s over in his house on Oak Street, 20 feet up on stilts, but he told Anthony the night before that he didn’t want to come over. They talked a few

minutes earlier; Stevie says he’s watching refrigerators float down his street.

Then the water hit Crawford Street. The speed limit’s 25 miles per hour, but the water’s moving faster than that, Anthony thinks. It hits his front yard and starts rising, and Anthony starts talking back to it, like it’s a golf ball rolling past the hole: Slow-downslowdownsloooooooowdown. He wants a camera, to take a photo of what he’s seeing, but he doesn’t have one. He wants a boat, or a lad-der, or a helicopter, or a second floor

Anthony and his magnolia tree.

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on his home to get him the hell away from this thing, but he doesn’t have any of those, either.

It’s not like Anthony’s not wise to the power of storms. He’s a veteran: Camille, Elena, Georges. In Febru-ary 1988, he received a U.S. pat-ent — number 4726149 — for an installable window protector that could stop debris from flying into your living room during a hurricane, because he’s seen what happens when bits of home and car get sent airborne. When a storm’s coming, Anthony turns on South Mississip-pi’s only local TV station, ABC-affili-ate WLOX, and listens for one thing: the wind forecast. That’s what you’re afraid of in a big storm when you’re a half-mile to the tenth place from the Gulf of Mexico. The meteorolo-gist on WLOX is Mike Reader, and Anthony heard what Mike had said: when it made landfall, Katrina would be moving at 135 miles per hour, and Anthony thought, Hell, that’s nothing. Camille hit us at 200 miles per hour, and we can take anything less than that.

But the water keeps rising through the open back door, just like Antho-ny’s momma said to do, and Antho-ny’s chest is beating quadruple time. He can’t breathe; is this a heart at-tack? The thoughts start crashing in. Where do I go? What do I do? Could the water, maybe, just stop right there, and drain right back out? The water. Anthony doesn’t have flood insurance. He grabs photos and throws them in a box. He finds his still-unopened, original-packaging-and-all Mr. Potato Head, the one he’d gotten from momma before going under for hernia surgery in 1964. He puts it all on top of the mattress in his bedroom, which by now is float-

ing on top of the water and debris. He grabs the antique Coke machine, the one he’d promised Wendy, and stuffs it into a high corner of the kitchen. He has this thought that Wendy will kill him if he loses that Coke machine, but doesn’t want to consider the fact that the water might kill him first. Not the time, re-ally, to let something like that in.

His refrigerator has tipped over. Fur-niture that used to belong to his grandmother is floating. The water is up above Anthony’s chest. Anthony wrestles all 50 lbs. of Buddy off the guest room mattress — wrestles be-ing the literal term here: Buddy can’t swim, and Anthony barely weighs a buck-twenty, and this is a pretty fair fight — and lifts him over his head, and starts wading across the furni-ture in his living room, hopping from island to island. Kym follows. There is a pack of D-cell batteries in his shirt pocket and a Maglite tucked into the back pocket of his jeans, and a 50-lb. dog whimpering above his head.

They get to the front door, but it’s swelling to cartoonish sizes. It won’t open. Kym holds Buddy as An-thony pulls and tugs and yanks on the door, but it doesn’t budge. The water is splashing up onto his face. His mouth tastes of gasoline. And then — Anthony doesn’t know why — the door does the right thing and nudges open, and Anthony grabs his dog and pushes outside. They get to the edge of the porch. The magnolia’s ten, maybe twelve feet away.

Kym jumps first, swims and grabs some limbs. She’s safe.

Anthony takes Buddy and tries to almost shot-put him into the tree.

Doesn’t work. Buddy comes up eight feet short, and now the dog that can’t swim starts trying to pad-dle against the current, and the nails and debris that are coming with it.

Then Anthony jumps in, and he’s getting carried upstream, too. He’d once been a junior lifeguard, but that doesn’t really train you for something like this. He’s 25 feet north of the tree before he even gets in a stroke, he and Buddy simultaneously strug-gling against the water, swimming toward the only thing left that can save them.

Anthony keeps getting close. He works his way up to the tree and grabs, but can’t. He does it again, and misses. Buddy’s still a few feet back, trying to get to the magnolia. Kym’s calling out Buddy’s name. An-thony starts to think: maybe if I get a few strokes past the tree, I might be able to grab onto something. It’s the trunk of the tree that finally takes hold, and Anthony climbs up. Buddy reaches the tree. It’s been fif-teen minutes in the water for both of them, and Anthony reaches down and gets his dog into the magnolia.

Then they start climbing, Buddy in Anthony’s arms, Kym behind. They climb back toward the house, out on the limbs of the tree, to where the branches hang over Anthony’s roof. To shelter.

Anthony balls up there on his roof just like a baby, getting as flat to the roof as possible, his face in the air, trying to wash the gasoline taste out of his mouth with rainwater. He’s thinking that even now, he does not know if he will live.-----story published on Sept. 17, 2010

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I have known Bob Bennett for about 10 minutes, and I cannot decide if he’s making everything up. He’s just spent the previous 10 minutes confessing to the kind of stuff that usually doesn’t get confessed in the presence of a working tape record-er, but hell, he’s the guy with the Tulane Law degree and I’m the guy with the tape recorder, and I’d hope he knows more about what’s admis-sible in court than I do.

I’ve come to his Biloxi-based seaside hotel, the Edgewater Inn, to ask how, exactly, business is these days, with the oil spill hurting tourism and all, and when, exactly, he started work-ing in this business, and Bennett has instead launched into a story that involves racketeering, money laundering, a judge in Des Moines, Iowa, and Jimmy Freaking Hoffa, and I’m not even sure if I feel com-fortable printing the whole thing. Short version is, Bennett’s daddy’s name was Harry, a Jew(1) with a head for numbers. Momma was a Cajun-Catholic named Ora, and you are

what you momma is, so Bennett is a Cajun-Catholic too. Harry worked as a bookie at a few casinos up and down the coast in the ’40s and ’50s, and when I mention to Bennett that gambling wasn’t legalized in Missis-sippi until the Clinton presidency, he just sort of stares at me as if I’m struggling to finish the maze that they print on the side of a Lucky Charms box.

“You gonna call it illegal gambling,” he says, “but it was just paying off the sheriff, paying the D.A., paying the governor….”

In the ’60s, Harry and Ora launched a new nightclub, the Red Carpet Club, right up on Beach Boulevard next to the Gulf. The RICO Act(2) changed things a little for daddy and mom-ma, but the nightclub kept on okay.(3) The place survived Camille, but in ’85, a nothing storm called Elena shorted out some circuits, and the club burned to the ground. So Bennett decided to take the place and turn it into something honest.

In June of ’87, he opened the Edge-water Inn, with 32 units by the sea. He dedicated the place to momma.

Anyway, that’s how Bob Bennett ended up the owner and operator of the Edgewater Inn.`

¶ ¶ ¶

“Theoretically, this a dream,” Bennett tells me. “40 percent of my competi-tion disappeared. So you’d think that I would be in the catbird seat, right? But now the tourists aren’t coming.”

I backtrack Bennett two sentences. Your competition, I say. They…. dis-appeared?

“Katrina,” he says, and that explains enough.

But the Edgewater, Bennett says, was built to withstand winds up to 300 miles per hour, even though nothing above 200 mph had ever been measured on the coast.

“I had lived through Camille,” he says. “I understood the dangers of a major hurricane, because of Ca-mille. And my brother was a builder, so I asked good questions, and I had the architect design it purposefully to take that much wind. In other words, if you’re in an area that you know is subject to hurricanes, it

The tourism business is slumping in Biloxi these days. But a hotelier with an unusual past is optimistic about his town’s future.

No Vacancy

1. who, naturally, was not in the mafia, Bennett assures me, which is kind of de-assuring in a way, since I’ve been Jewish all my life and have never once been mistaken for Pacino, DeNiro or Liotta, but anyway2. Of which Section 1, Sub-section A reads, “(1) “racketeering activity” means (A) any act or threat involving murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, dealing in obscene matter, or dealing in a controlled substance or listed chemical, which is chargeable under State law and punishable by imprisonment for more than one year,” which should give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here.3. Daddy did not. In 1969, Harry was killed in what was later called a “gangland-style murder.” Harry was allegedly about to testify to the feds about a crooked dice game at the Red Carpet.

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No Vacancy

would be stupid to not design a ho-tel to withstand the winds. And the reason we’re at 28 feet elevation, same thing. I wanted to be above the water.”

In his entire hotel, only 10 rooms — those that he had added in the ’90s and had built only 26 feet above sea level — were damaged and shut down by local officials. The rest of the hotel never closed, Bennett says.

But competitors saw their build-ings cut down to mere slabs. A few chain hotels eventually returned, but the mom-and-pop lodging did not come back after the storm, ac-cording to Bennett, who’s also the president of the Mississippi Hotel

and Lodging Association.

A boutique hotel like the Edgewater — which features jacuzzis in many rooms and multi-bedroom cottages for rent — saw loyal clientele return quickly, Bennett says. He took a hit during the recession in 2009, and he feels lucky to have only suffered some.

“It wasn’t a recession as far as the lodging industry” was concerned, says Linda Hornsby, executive di-rector of the Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association, of 2009. “It was a depression.”

But in late spring of this year, Ben-nett’s hotel was sold out four weeks

in a row. “There were signs that this was going to be a breakout year,” he says.

Then the oil spill hit.

When President Obama came on a visit to the coast in June, Bennett’s wife, Mary Alice, was among the in-vited business leaders who spoke with the President.(4) And Mary Alice, who everyone calls Missy, even got the thumbs up from the President, and this part I absolutely believe to be true, since it’s in an official White House transcript:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: As you can see, this is a spectacular beach. You’ve got Missy, who’s got a won-derful inn, the Edgewater Inn –

MISSY BENNETT (co-owner, Edge-water Inn): Thank you.

Bob Bennett inside one of the suites at his boutique hotel, the Edgewater Inn. Revenues are down 40 percent this year due to the oil spill, he says.

4. An aside from Bennett about his wife. They met in New Orleans 46 years ago. Someone set them up on a blind date. 20 minutes into the date, he proposed. She said yes. A few weeks later, he got on one knee and closed the deal. 18 months later, they were married, and nine months and 17 days after that, they had their first child. Their son is now the manager of the Edgewater Inn.

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PRESIDENT OBAMA: — and George (sic), who’s got a terrific restaurant. What’s the name of the restau-rant?

MR. WEINBERG: Blow Fly Inn.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: And Missy was men-tioning she’s already seen a 40 percent drop in her occu-pancy since this crisis occurred, partly be-cause of cancellations of large groups that were planning to stay there. It just gives you a sense — and those folks who were going to stay at Missy’s would have been eating at George’s (sic).

Now, Bennett says the President’s numbers were a bit off. Occupancy has held steady since the spill. It’s the revenue per available room that’s dropped 40 percent.

The reason why is that the Edgewa-ter is among the properties that’s been renting out rooms to BP clean-up workers. But the bad news for Biloxi is that the high rate of occu-pancy has not carried over to other local businesses.

The BP employees are “not your typical tourist, so the impact is felt throughout tourism,” Hornsby says. “BP contractors don’t rent jet skis.”

Bennett isn’t thrilled about renting out rooms at heavily discounted long-term rates, but he says he has no alternatives.

“The reason I took it is because if I didn’t take it, I’d have no business,” he says. “The tourists are not com-ing. So I took that business, as much of it as I could take while still keep-ing room for my repeat guests.”

Those BP workers will soon be clear-ing out of his hotel, he says, and his rate of occupancy will drop with it.

“When they go, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he says. “That’s when it’s going to be bad.”

¶ ¶ ¶

Bennett was among those who pushed the state Hotel and Lodg-ing Association to endorse legalized

gambling in the 1990s.(5) His hotel is next door to the Treasure Bay Ca-sino, and he says he’s a true believer when it comes to the casinos’ ability to generate economic growth along the coast. The fact that it’s not hap-pening right now hasn’t dissuaded him of that belief. When he looks at Biloxi, he sees a potential gem of the South.

“Where we are now is analogous to where we were after Camille,” he says. “When you have a clean slate, like we do now, of course you have problems: insurance problems, pro-motional problems, the oil problem. But ultimately, we’re on the road to becoming a premier destination….

“It’ll come back, bigger and better than it ever was,” he says. “No doubt in my mind.”----story published on Aug. 9, 2010

The Edgewater Inn’s loyal cli-entele has returned this sum-mer, Bennett says. It’s the more casual travelers who are wary of coming to the Gulf Coast.

5. Again, this despite the fact that gambling in Biloxi eventually led to his father’s death.

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Jr.’s Last- Cast EffortMichael Adams, Jr., was a successful restaurant manager, boat captain and bass fisherman. Then the oil spill hit.The dream, all along, was to fish. ¶¶ Mike Jr.’s dad was the oyster-shucking champion of the coast 14 years running. Mike Jr.’s neighborhood backed up to the piers on Biloxi’s back bay, where the shrimp boats were hauling in seafood faster than they could sell it. Mike Jr. was 11 years old, and all he want-

ed to do was fish. ¶¶ Then it all started to happen. He’d hit 33, and after 15 years working maintenance for the county,

he’d quit. His parents had just opened Mikey’s on the Bayou, a restaurant in St. Martin’s, to great acclaim,

and they decided to open a second location over in D’Iberville. They called it Mikey’s

Cafe and Oyster Bar, and they made Mike

Mike Adams, Jr., tosses out a cast in the bayou just east of Biloxi. Mullet — the flying fish locals call “Biloxi bacon” — are prevalent in these waters.

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Jr. manager. Place opened in Sep-tember 2007.

Then it really started to happen. Mike Jr. had been fishing semi-pro over in the FLW’s Bass Fishing League, may-be 10 events a year all around the country. He wasn’t part of some big-time fishing conglomerate. On his competition uniform, it read, “Team Mom & Dad.” But then in October 2007, he went up to Gilbertsville, Ky., about halfway between St. Louis and Nashville, and Mike Jr. nabbed himself a prize-winning bass. They gave him a boat and $40,000 as the grand prize winner of the Kentucky Lake BFL Regional.

Then Michael Adams Jr.’s luck ran out.

¶ ¶ ¶

Mikey’s Cafe and Oyster Bar will close tomorrow, a few days shy of its third anniversary. The promise was huge for a place like Mikey’s, down off of Central Ave. in D’Iberville. The tables turned on pork chop night, and the catfish plates sold, and a 120 lb. sack of oysters couldn’t stay full. The economy was moving, and every-one had a FEMA check to spend.

But then the economy swung, and Mikey’s customers, almost all local, stopped eating out as often. Adams started selling 60 percent fewer pork chops on pork chop night. Then the BP well blew sky high, and the price of seafood went with it. Sales dropped 30 percent.

“It’d done well, and then it kind of gradually slumped with the econ-omy,” he says. “But we were doing good. But when the oil hit, it just done us in.”

The first time I met Adams, he was quietly boiling over. He’d been to the BP claims office again, and he’d seen it happen — again. He’d seen the characters from a CCR song walk in there and walk out with a guaran-tee that BP would pay them to cater a lunch for cleanup workers. Adams just wanted to do the same.

But Mike Jr. wasn’t a senator’s son, and when it came time to decide who’d get the bid on the a cater-ing job, it wasn’t much of a choice between the son of the politician and the son of the oyster-shucking champ.

In three months, Adams had been given one catering job by BP — “just

about had to beg them” to get it, he says — but it kept the lights on at Mikey’s. A month ago, Adams was worried about the arrival of fall, when D’Iberville’s set to begin con-struction on Central Avenue, off of which Mikey’s sits. When construc-tion’s done in a year, city officials predict that it’ll do great things for business, but Adams was worried that construction crews could scare customers away.

“I’m hoping its not the nail in the coffin,” he told me.

To keep the business going, Adams opted to stop serving dinner on all but Thursdays and Fridays. Then,

when we spoke two weeks ago, Adams admitted that unless some-thing changed, he was going to have to shut down.

This week, the final decision was made: close Mikey’s.

“It’s kind of been coming,” he says. “We were hoping BP would bail us out, but we didn’t see a dime.”

¶ ¶ ¶

The bad luck kept coming. In March, Adams launched Fort Bayou Char-ters, his charter fishing company. For anywhere between $300 and $500, Adams will take a small group out for a full day of fishing. He says he started to book charters quickly.

“For just starting out, it was looking good,” he says.

His bass fishing boat could only car-ry two other passengers, so Adams decided to buy to a bigger boat. He had a dozen charters booked for the month of May when the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon caused oil to begin hemorrhaging into the Gulf.

State officials closed local waters, but Adams was hearing that the well would be fixed quickly. He assured customers that the fishing would resume soon, and he went ahead and purchased his new boat. Within days, all but one of the charters had canceled.

Since the spill, Adams says he’s char-tered just three fishing trips. And more bad news: two weeks ago, his new boat just stopped running out in the middle of the Gulf. Two weeks later, his mechanic’s still not entirely sure what’s wrong with it.

“We were hoping BP would bail us

out, but we didn’t see a dime.”

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“I never should have bought that damn boat,” he says.

¶ ¶ ¶

Adams takes me out on his boat — the working, bass one — to see the backwaters near his other res-taurant, Mikey’s on the Bayou. That’s where, as of Monday, he’ll be work-ing as manager. He says the view of the water helps bring in customers to the restaurant, and business there is still strong.

For someone who’s been so thor-oughly hosed by BP — his restau-rant is closing because they dou-bled or tripled the price of seafood, and then they wouldn’t toss him but a single catering job, and then their oil shut down his fishing business — Adams doesn’t seem to be that out-raged, at least outwardly. I ask him about this, and he reminds me that five years ago, he was driving a truck

for the county government. Now, he’s working two jobs he loves.

“Once you’ve done tasted this,” he says, “and you enjoy something as much as this, you’re willing to work on it and sacrifice things.”

Still, Adams knows what’s at risk. He’s got a wife and two children. Since Katrina, he’s been the sole source of income for his family. The money from his 2007 bass fishing win has run out, and he’d like to find a new revenue stream.

So he’s got this other idea in the works: a bayou tour. Biloxi already has a shrimp tour, where for $15, tourists can go out on a boat and see what it’s like to be a shrimper. Adams wants to do the same for the bayou. He wants to dock a boat next to Mikey’s on the Bayou and offer daily tours for a dozen or so people. He’d charge $25 a head.

He’d offer the history of the homes along the bayou, and point out wildlife on the way, and toss a giant net out into the water to catch mul-let, the foot-long fish that locals call “Biloxi bacon.” He thinks that once it launches — and once he buys the boat big enough to make it work — it’ll sell.

But the plan hinges on one thing: tourists returning to the coast. If they don’t come, Adams doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

Or maybe something will break his way. Adams will take his bass boat north to Florence, Ala., at the end of the month for a FLW American Fishing Series event. Winner gets a boat, a truck and a big cash prize.

One great cast could make it all happen again.-----story published on Sept. 2, 2010

Out on the Gulf, Adams says he feels con-fident that business will return. At least on the surface, there isn’t any oil visible along the Mississippi shoreline.

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God Bless You, Walmart

In Pass Christian, they give thanks for what they have. And these days, they’re saying...

Chipper McDermott has not forgot-ten the date: February 8, 2008, the day a town called Pass Christian found a savior.

The cry went out from the roof-tops, or whatever was left of them: Walmart was coming home.

“It was a damn big day,” says McDer-mott, the city’s mayor.

So this is not the story of big, bad Walmart, coming in and taking busi-ness away from local stores. In Pass Christian — the west Mississippi town that Camille knocked flat to the ground and that Katrina top-pled again — Walmart’s return to its beachfront, pre-Katrina location was cause for celebration.

“It was almost a rebirth,” says Huey Bang, a city alderman. “It was just pure excitement. It was that vitamin shot you needed…. It sure makes life a lot easier.”

Understand where Pass Christian is coming from. It’s a six-mile-wide strip of land that stretches, at its farthest, a mile from the water. Mc-Dermott says the city has always made its money off of ad valorem taxes, which are based on the value of land. And along the beach, Pass Christian’s land is very valuable. Mc-Dermott says in the ’50s, the city’s Scenic Avenue was the third richest street in the country. Wall Street was number one.

But Hurricane Camille devastated

the city. The eye of the storm passed directly over Pass Christian, bringing with it waves that were measured at 22 feet, 6 inches. It was the highest recorded storm surge in American history.

“Destruction in this area was virtu-ally complete, resembling more the effect of a tornado than a hurricane,” said the U.S. Army Corps of Engi-neers of Mobile, Ala., in a May 1970 report. At least half, or maybe two-thirds of taxable property in the city was wiped out.

Of the 4,000 people living in Pass Christian at the time of Camille, doz-ens died. A week after the storm, the Daily Herald newspaper published an article titled, “Pass Not to Be Put

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God Bless You, Walmart

to Torch,” in which “Navy officials at-tempted to disqualify rumors which have prevailed over the past two or three days that Pass Christian was so devastated by Hurricane Camille that it was going to be burned.” Mayor J.J. Wittman told reporters that week, “I am mayor of a city in name only.”

¶ ¶ ¶

The city did rebuild, eventually. A new City Hall went up on the highest land that Pass Christian has — about 24 feet above sea level. By the 2000 Census, over 6,000 people lived in Pass Christian.

But Pass Christian re-mained a residential area. They live here, Bang says, but lo-cals work elsewhere — in Gulfport, say, 15 minutes to the west, or out at busi-nesses near Inter-state 10.

In 2002, Census workers charting economic data found that Pass Christian had only 20 retail stores, employing a total of 168 people.

Then Walmart showed up in 2003 and changed all that. The store hired over 300 people, according to com-pany reports. Most remarkable of all, McDermott notes, is that the store even decided to come to Pass Chris-tian. The city lobbied Walmart for months, but company executives were concerned about the location. The Beach Boulevard property is just feet from the water, and Walmart analysts were looking at what was inside a five-mile radius of the prop-

erty. Half of that territory is in the Gulf of Mexico; Walmart would’ve preferred a large neighborhood of discount shoppers.

Still, city leaders managed to land the store. Pass Christian had never made much money off sales tax before, but that number started to grow now that Walmart was in town. The housing market was also boom-ing across the coast.

And then Katrina hit.

Remember those 22.6-foot surges from 1969’s Camille? Katrina’s surge rose to 27.8 feet in Pass Christian, which is a mark that’s still yet to be topped. Homes that had been re-built after Camille had to be rebuilt again. Even the Walmart was de-stroyed.

McDermott became mayor in 2006, with two questions on his mind: Can we rebuild? And how?

City Hall was destroyed, so they held meetings at the fire house un-til FEMA trailers arrived. Help came from unexpected sources: the na-tion of Qatar gave $5 million. Naper-

ville, Ill., gave $1.2 million. Menno-nites showed up to build two dozen homes.

Then came the best news of all. Just as recovery funds were starting to slow, Walmart decided to return, but only after moving to a location about 1,500 feet back from the wa-ter. The store reopened on October 14, 2009. McDermott says it’s gener-ating 70 percent of the sales tax rev-enue in the city, which might mean an additional $600,000 this year to

help balance the city’s bud-get. It will not single-handedly keep the city afloat, he says, but it will help.

¶ ¶ ¶

Co n s t r u c t i o n work is under-way across all parts of the city. There’s still much to be done on the

new $25 million harbor, and on the $11 million downtown. But McDer-mott’s thrilled about the view from his new office. After four years, he’s finally moved out of his trailer and into the $6 million, U.S. taxpayer-funded City Hall, which reopened last month.

The city, though, is returning more slowly. In the upcoming Census re-port, McDermott expects the city to measure at just over 4,000 residents.

Bang says he’s been frustrated, sometimes, at the rate of re-growth

story continued on p. 30

Above, the harbor in Pass Christian is about to undergo $25 million in renovations. At left, a bust of W. Dayton Robinson, whose $2 million donation helped City Hall expand after Katrina.

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Insuring Himself to the Death Gulf Coast home insurance policies aren’t easy to understand. Not even for the businessmen who deal with them on a daily basis.Twenty dollars could have saved Charlie Green thousands.

Green doesn’t have much of an excuse. He was an insurance agent in Pascagoula, Miss., for nearly a decade. Then he started his own, self-titled real estate agency in the 1970s, and in the early 1990s, he founded his own construction com-pany, Green Way Builders. He has

about 40 properties along the coast that he rents. He’s spent his life working with homes along the Gulf Coast, and he’s lived through both hurricanes Camille and Katrina. He’s the seventh of nine generations of Greens who’ve lived in Jackson County, and his family knows the history of storms that have hit the Gulf. If anyone was going to get his home insurance policy right, it was

going to be Green.

But even Charlie Green didn’t.

“I wish I’d known,” he says. “I should have known.”

Green had several forms of insur-ance on his home, he says. He had a homeowner’s policy, which covers fire and theft. He had insur-

This is what the post-Katrina building codes call for: homes standing up to 25 feet in the air. This one, in east Biloxi, is just a FEMA trailer on stilts.

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Insuring Himself to the Death

ance covering both wind and hail. He also had complete flood insur-ance — at least he thought he did — covering both building and contents.

There isn’t a single policy that cov-ers both types of flood insurance anymore. In case of flood, building coverage pays for the structure itself, as well as the foundation and items like a water heater or refrigerator. But other items are not included in building coverage. It covers homeowners for built-in dishwashers but not portable ones. Stoves are included, but washing machines are not.

To get full coverage on everything inside a property, homeowners also need contents coverage, and Green didn’t have it. His insurance agent had called over the previous years to try to sell him on things he didn’t need, like nursing home insurance, but he says his agent had never once mentioned the flood-related hole in his insurance coverage.

When Katrina hit, Green found out how big the hole was.

“I lost everything on the bottom floor,” he says. “We had to throw everything away. All the kids’ stuff, all the appliances, all the electri-cal stuff. Everything. And I had to replace every bit of it out of pocket, because none of it was covered for lack of a $22 addition to my policy.”

¶ ¶ ¶

The first time I heard the phrase was from Bill Stallworth, a Biloxi city councilman. He serves in Ward 2, the strip of the city that is to Biloxi what the Lower Ninth Ward is to

New Orleans. It was the hardest hit during Katrina, and it’s also the area that, financially, is still struggling to build back.

So when it comes to the insurance companies — or any real estate suitor looking to buy land for cheap in Biloxi — Stallworth says his con-stituents have a phrase:

Make me whole.

These locals aren’t looking for a payday, Stallworth assures me. But if they lost something, and they had insurance on it, they’d like to be reimbursed in full.

Still, five years after Katrina, the refrain across the Gulf Coast is that the insurance companies have not been fair to locals. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has hit the tourism and seafood industries especially hard, and the economy has hurt builders and buyers, but no single class, race or industry has been unaffected by the decisions of the insurance companies.

I put the subject to two current mayors on the Gulf Coast, as well as three retired mayors of Biloxi, and all five men suggested that the single greatest obstacle holding back the coast is insurance costs.

The insurance industry’s post-Ka-trina influence came up so often during interviews — and without my prompting — that I stopped asking about it, and instead just waited for the interviewee to steer the conversation in that direction. They always do. The head of the Biloxi school system told me that his enrollment is down because parents have moved to areas where

insurance costs are affordable. The president of the local branch of the NAACP wanted to speak on the subject, and so did an Irish-born Catholic priest and a Biloxi-born bishop. In interviews, architects, city councilmen, restaurant owners, auto mechanics, fishermen, art-ists, librarians and retirees have all pointed to insurance costs as the no. 1 reason why the coast has not built back in full.

“It’s just outrageous,” says Biloxi mayor A.J. Holloway. Pass Christian mayor Chipper McDermott put it another way: “Insurance is killing everybody. That’s why you haven’t seen the coast jump back like it did in the old days.”

Across the coast, residents say their insurance costs have risen any-where from several dozen to several hundred percent since the storm.

The only coast-based business, it seems, that’s been done right by the insurance companies is Waffle House. There are dozens of Waffle Houses that dot both sides of High-way 90, the road that runs right up against Mississippi’s coastline. Bob Bennett, owner of the Edgewater Inn and the Waffle House that sits on his property, told me that the restaurant chain purchased excel-lent insurance before Katrina, and payouts from those policies meant that it cost Waffle House just pen-nies to rebuild their stores in full.

On the stretch of Highway 90 from Biloxi to Gulfport, there used to be dozens of restaurants. Now, plots of land sit vacant, the Scrabble tiles of the Waffle Houses illuminating nearby land that’s since become too expensive to build on.

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¶ ¶ ¶

There was a point, Charlie Green remembers, when homeowner’s policies were simpler, and when they actually covered the home and everything inside. The prob-lem is that many of these hom-eowners are unaware that their policies no longer offer total cov-erage. A survey released Tuesday by MetLife Auto & Home found that 71 percent of homeowners do not actually know how much an insurance company would pay out in case of a natural disaster.

Today’s insurance policies are bro-ken up into several segments:

* The basic homeowner’s policy is still covered by any number of insurance agents on the coast or around the country.

* Flood insurance — for both building and contents — is cov-ered through the National Flood Insurance Program, which is ad-ministered by FEMA. Unlike other insurance policies, the costs are set by the federal government, not by insurance companies or agents. But a policy must still be purchased through a licensed agent.

* Wind insurance in the south-ernmost counties is often provided through the Mississippi Windstorm Underwriting Association. Rates vary depending on which of the four designated zones a home is lo-cated in. Zone A covers beachfront property, Zone B covers most of the land south of Interstate 10, and so on moving north. The windpool, as it’s called, has lowered their rates recently to reduce some of the insurance burden on homeowners.

New insurance regulations have also been added after Katrina to ensure that holes in coverage are closed. If a homeowner does not have complete coverage, the state will now send the homeowner a certified letter explaining the gap.

¶ ¶ ¶

Many insurance companies offer “safe driver” discounts for those who are less likely to get into ac-cidents. Less risky drivers pay less. But building codes on the coast are up to their highest standards ever, which makes these homes less likely to be destroyed by a hurri-cane. So if there’s less risk of prop-erty destruction, why aren’t home insurance costs actually lower than they were before Katrina?

The answer: the insurance compa-nies say that those building codes are still not strong enough.

The Institute for Business and Home Safety — an insurance indus-try-funded group that features executives from Allstate, Farmers Insurance, MetLife, Nationwide and State Farm on its board of directors — released a report last week stat-

ing the building codes in Louisiana were up to par, but standards in Alabama and Mississippi were deemed inadequate.

The same report, however, said that the three coastal counties in Mis-sissippi — Jackson, Hancock and Harrison — had building codes that were up to their standards. It’s the inland counties of Mississippi that insurance companies are worried about. Many homes in those coun-ties suffered damages in Katrina due to wind, but none were hit with the flooding that caused the majority of the destruction along the coast.

Green says he just cannot under-stand why he’s paying so much for insurance, especially if the homes he owns — and the homes he’s building — are up to code. Person-ally, he says, he thinks the insurance companies have been “treating people like they’re dog dookie.”

“Quite frankly,” he says, “I wish they’d have a catastrophe to put every one of these sons of bitches out of business. That’s how I feel about it.”-----story published on Aug. 25, 2010

Charlie Green at the Pascagoula office for his real estate and con-struction companies. He says that insurance issues are taking up more of his time -- and causing more headaches -- than ever before.

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George Sekul’s Last Rah-RahThe local coaching legend’s final dream: an all-star game in Biloxi.It’s 1 p.m. in Biloxi, Miss., and let’s talk about dreams for a second. Buy a home, build a home, raise a family, send ‘em off to college, start a busi-ness, sell a business, make a million, or two, or five, or make something, at least. All dreams, all out there.

George Sekul just wants a football game.

Right up there on that brand-new all-weather Biloxi H.S. football field that sales tax built: the Beau Rivage Junior College East-West All-Ameri-can Game. Or, if the NJCAA regents don’t like that, maybe just the George Sekul Junior College All-American Game. Either’ll do.

And nobody’s disputing that Sekul’s got the C.V. to do it. He won when he was the quarterback at Biloxi High. Won a Division II national championship as QB at Southern Miss in ’58. Went to the Senior Bowl in Mobile in ’59. Took over the job at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College in ’61, and won two titles there, the first two years after Hur-ricane Camille hit. Lifetime record of 204-77. Winningest coach in junior college football history when he re-tired. Bought a yacht and named it “Rah-Rah,” with everything but the exclamation point on the end to let you know that this is a man who

measures himself by down and dis-tance.

His father had dreams. Built a small seafood empire starting from just a third-grade education. Bought a home down on Myrtle Street, so close to the shore, when Camille came in, the place filled up with four feet of water before the second hand had swung back around to the 12. Got a couple of shrimping boats out on the Gulf, and named the first one “Captain Blood,” because that’s what the workers called him. Named the fourth one “Quarterback.” Guess who that one’s for.

The Quarterback’s done impossible

before. He got a college scholar-ship standing 5’10” and weighing not much more than the critters his daddy was dragging in from the Gulf. In ’69, after the first storm-of-a-lifetime, his MGCCC team got asked to play just days after the hurricane hit. Some of the team decided not to come back, or others just didn’t return until weeks later. The team had a week’s worth of practice to-gether before taking the field. The Quarterback gave ‘em the rah-rah and whirled ‘em out there.

“We got our butts beat,” he says.

But no excuses! Sekul learned it in football and he learned it in busi-

George Sekul, the head coach with the dream of one last great football game.

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in Pass Christian. But he also admits that his expecta-tions continue to change.

“My thought after the storm was, in a couple years, we’ll have all new structures all over the place,” he says. “I was naive in thinking that it was only going to be a couple of years.”

But growth can still come, even for a tiny town like Pass Christian. McDer-mott’s team is ready to make a push to annex some of the land north of Pass Christian. Much of it is a bayou that’s unfit for building, but McDer-mott’s confident that he’ll be able to expand the city limits — and maybe take the city a few steps beyond the pre-Katrina days.

But no matter how far inland the city goes, McDermott knows that it’s

the view of the Gulf that’s going to keep Pass Christian alive.

“Natural beauty’s what built this town,” he says, “and that’s what’s going to save it.”-----story published on Aug. 11, 2010

God Bless You, Walmart

ness, and he learned it again in 2005, because after Katrina, nobody was thinking about coming back to Bi-loxi. And of course not! There are 40-year-old men living along the Gulf Coast who’ve already lived through two once-in-a-lifetime storms. There are men in FEMA jumpsuits saying that new homes in the newly-ex-panded flood zone have to start 20 feet in the air, and there are insur-ance agents with clipboards saying that you’ve never seen anything quite as high as the insurance bill you’re about to open. If you’re gon-na stay, you’ve got to wanna.

So make something. Sekul can’t build a casino, and there’s nothing but a slab from where his father’s seafood business once sat. A foot-ball coach retired 19 years just has to dig way back and find that one last

pylon to aim for.

“Every day, I think about another goal I had, which I haven’t given up yet,” he says. “I want to bring a junior college All-American game to Bi-loxi.”

There hasn’t been a game like this played since ’56 — when Sekul played in it. That’s the game that got Sekul noticed by Southern Miss, and into school, and into coaching, and into the only life he’ll ever know. His father wanted him to be bigger than shrimping, and that all-star game made it so. Maybe it could do the same for some other local kid.

“Got a dream?” Sekul keeps remind-ing himself, the old ballcoach the only man left to hear that last rah-rah. “Go get it.”

He says he wants to pick up the phone. Shouldn’t be too hard con-vincing the NJCAA; he’s already in their Hall of Fame.

Thing just needs a name. Funny thing about a place like Biloxi is how things get passed down: homes, trin-kets, names. How many generations you had family here? Just count the digits on the end of the first born’s birth certificate. There isn’t a square inch of the Biloxi phone book that doesn’t have a Jr. or a III or even a few IVs in it. Pick a name and hang onto it for a few hundred years.

The George Sekul Junior College All-American Game?

That could do.-----story published on Aug. 5, 2010

story continued from p. 25

The Pass Christian Walmart, just a few steps from the beach and the Gulf of Mexico.

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a remarkable lineage of Biloxians in his own right.

Back in the ’80s, Bobby recalls, the fu-ture for Biloxi was unclear. The coast had rebuilt after Camille, and the city had paid off its debts. But Biloxi faced new economic challenges.

“We were a tourist town without tourists,” he says. Gerald Blessey, the mayor at the time, says five of the city’s hotels were in bankruptcy. Mary Mahoney’s $14 seafood gum-bo wasn’t much in vogue.

“We needed an attraction,” Blessey says.

But then the other thing arrived that saved Bobby Mahoney’s ass: legal-ized gambling.

Make a list of things that kept Biloxi in business, Bobby says, and “casinos would be 90 percent of the list.” He says after casinos arrived in the early 1990s, his business tripled.

“Yeah, we were smoking,” he said.

Then Katrina came and knocked the casinos offline for a year, some for 18 months. But they did come back, and impressively so. In 2007, Biloxi pulled in more than $1 billion in gross gaming revenue, higher than at any point before Katrina, accord-ing to city records.

Thanks to tourism, Bobby says busi-

ness is doing fine. Mary Mahoney’s is right there on Casino Row, Highway 90 in downtown, a crosswalk away from both the Hard Rock and the Beau Rivage. Tourism is down a few ticks due to the economy and the oil spill this year, but as Bobby notes, “that entertainment dollar is always the last one to go in a recession.”

“They’ll cut out buying big cars,” he says. “They’ll cut out buying appli-ances and homes and things like that. But that last dollar to go is the one we can eat with and drink with.”

As long as people are still spend-ing money on casino vacations, he says, they’ll find their way across the street for white tablecloths and low lighting and gumbo. He says he’s not seeing growth in revenues right now, but his numbers have stayed flat these last two years. Many in Bi-loxi aren’t as lucky.

His prices haven’t risen due to spill-inflated seafood prices, either. He says his margins are enough as is to

make do for the restaurant and the three generations of Mahoneys that depend on it. Most in Biloxi aren’t as lucky.

Yes, Mary Mahoney’s is the excep-tion in town. It is fine dining in a city where, during the casino boom of the late 1990s, income still mea-sured less than $18,000 per capita. Three blocks away, homes still under construction sit on stilts, but here at the Old French House, there is just the warm bubble of Casino Row, in-sulating all that sit within.

Camille couldn’t finish off Bobby Mahoney, and neither could Katrina, or for that matter a piece of glass, or a recession, or the largest environ-mental disaster in American history. The tourists just keep coming, the tables just keep turning over. Here at the restaurant Mary created, her son can look out from inside the bubble of Casino Row and wonder if this, fi-nally this, was built to last.-----story published on Aug. 1, 2010

The Thing That Saved Bobby Mahoney’s Assstory continued from p. 5

One of the dining rooms at Mary Mahoney’s, which survived despite severe water damage caused by flooding during Hurricane Katrina.

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