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15 BILOXI BOY the attack on pearl harbor in December 1941 enraged my thirty-five-year-old father. Several months later, despite being the father of three minor children, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. He was assigned to Keesler Field, later named Keesler Air Force Base, for basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi. We moved with him and rented a small house in Biloxi in the old Seashore Methodist Campgrounds, about a block from the beach. When we arrived, Biloxi had a population of about fifteen thousand, not including the thousands of soldiers at Keesler Field. It was postcard pretty—a sleepy, sun-drenched resort with a thriving seafood industry. The town was also an inviting target of hurricanes since it sits on a narrow six-mile-long peninsula, jutting eastward along the Gulf of Mexico. In those days, huge, ancient live oak trees draped with moss lined the principal highway—two-lane U.S. 90—as it skirted the waterfront. There was very little sand beach when we arrived, just a few little patches in front of the Biloxi Lighthouse and several now-defunct hotels. The gulf was held back by a concrete sea wall. Then, during the 1950s, the federal government paid for enough sand to be pumped in to create a twenty-mile beach from Biloxi west to Pass Christian. The lighthouse, built in 1848 of cast iron, remains a famous landmark that has survived every succeeding hurricane, including the disastrous 1969 Camille and the even more catastrophic Katrina in 2005. In 1865 it was the only public structure in the area to be draped in mourning after President Lincoln was assassinated. Normally white, it was painted black and remained that way for several years. As that long-ago act of homage to Lincoln indicates, Biloxi did not fit the profile of most Mississippi towns. While racial segregation was strictly enforced, the town was in other ways a tolerant, easygoing place. Chapter 3 16 biloxi boy It was populated mainly by Slavs, Italians, and French Creoles who were drawn there by the fishing and shrimping industry. Most were Catholic, and they brought with them a more relaxed attitude towards drinking, sex, gambling, and other human frailties. Their surnames were definitely not those you’d find in the Delta—Galotte, Perez (prounced Pee-rez), Pitalo, Tibadeaux, Mladnich, Kovacavich, Baricev. We had a lot of Pisariches and Peresiches in town, and people used to say that when a branch of the Pisariches got money, they changed their name to Peresich. People had colorful nicknames, like Meatball Randazzo and Noo Noo Cruthirds. As kids, we would stand around on the corner ribbing each other. I thought my friends were the funniest people on earth. Some of them actually might have been. Biloxians touted their town as the “shrimp and oyster capital of the world.” Huge oyster reefs and a large shrimp fleet provided a bountiful supply that was shipped all over the country. The town also attracted tourists during the summer months and hosted numerous conventions of out-of-town trade and professional groups year round. It was an idyllic place to grow up. In the summers Kenny and I would get up before daybreak and go down to the old campgrounds pier near our house and paddle a skiff out about two hundred yards into the Mississippi Sound. We would anchor over an oyster bed in the shallow water and fish for several hours, returning with scores of white and speckled trout and, when we were lucky, flounder. Or we would take a couple of nets out on the pier, bait them with pieces of chicken or red meat, and catch a bushel basket of crabs by noon. You could cast into the shallow waters right off shore and in no time at all bring in a load of mullet—what we called Biloxi bacon. While Daddy was undergoing basic training at Keesler, Kenny and I sold the New Orleans States and New Orleans Times-Picayune to soldiers at Keesler. We would search for stories that might lure them into buying the paper and then yell out a headline. I remember I once shouted, “Read all about it, soldiers’ pay raise,” but the soldier who bought the paper couldn’t find anything about it. “Hey, kid,” he yelled after me, “where’s it say anything about a pay raise?” “Page 5,” I replied. “State representative calls for soldiers’ pay raise.” “Little bastard,” he shouted, as...

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