The following is from Robert Stevens. He and I have been corresponding about the history of the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the late 1940's and early 1950's.
This is a work in progress.
The Friendship House was located at the corner of Debuys Road and Hwy 90. The Grove Club was across the street on the Gulfport or Mississippi City side. Adjoining the Grove Club was Colonial Cottages and the Colonial Sea Wall Café. The cafe' later moved across the highway when it was eaten by the hurricane of 1947. West of us was the Worth Motel (John and ______ Worth) who had purchased the homestead from a retired MD.
More trivia - John Worth was a chemist who put the stink in natural gas which was marketed under the name of Captane – don’t hold me to the spelling – but that’s where their funds came from. He designed the machinery to mix the stink and the gas. And to the west of the Worth Motel was the Alamo Plaza motel. Before it was the Alamo Plaza it was a large large home belonging to the family of Jackie Glass family (a missing classmate of ours) and the story has it that Ernest Hemmingway lived there for quite awhile during the 1930’s. The Alamo was built in several stages and the Glass home survived for awhile.
The Friendship house owned by Jim and Mary Myers was the 2nd friendship house. If one went to Paradise Point in Mississippi City circa 1950 the Paradise Point Restaurant and Fairchild's Restaurant near Teagarten Road only employed Jim and Mary. They apparently purchased what was then Dinty Moore's Restaurant sometime after the construction of Confederate Inn and renamed it the Friendship House. Which implies that they had already purchased the original Friendship House in “downtown Mississippi City” i.e. name continuity.
Jim and Mary later built themselves a home about 200 yards from the restaurant. They later constructed the Deer Ranch to the north of their home. Their daughter Peggy Parrish was in a class behind ours. She also graduated from Mississippi City Grammar School now the Lynn Meadows Discovery Center I am told.
My family, Jim (1909) and Ethel Stevens (1908) with Robert 1938) and Jimmy (1934), moved from Gabel Lodges i.e. Maple Wood Louisiana near Sulfur Louisiana a year or two after the 1947 hurricane. We were the Dam Yankees from New Jersey that moved to the south during World War II when Beneficial Finance purchased the Trailways Bus Company and staffed the management at Shreveport Louisiana. Everybody owned Trailways at one time or another it seems but my dad didn’t want to return North after the War and talked the Harrisons (Furrier business with $ from suing the Oil Companies for transgressing on the Muskrat stock in the swamps – my opinion but I was just a little brat) and the Hennicans (old time law family) of New Orleans to purchase the Colonial Cottage complex with the Stevens family (I suspect they also financed Gable Lodges of Lake Charles Louisiana/Maplewood area).
The Grove Club was built on an old homestead of the famous author Sinclair Lewis but it burned down. The oak trees on Grove Club land and Confederate Inn property still bore scars of that fire for many years. Well that is according to my memories of stories heard . . . my brother doesn’t remember this one.
More trivia, my brother tells me that when the cottage we called home was moved back from the Confederate Inn restaurant he fell into an old septic tank made from bricks stamped 1861. Fortunately the contents had long ago turned to powder. No one knows where from i.e. what that structure might have been. That was actually on the land straddling Colonial Cottages and the Worth Motel.
More trivia; the best manager at the Confederate Inn was a practicing alcoholic with the last name of Henderson. They came from Alabama and their family had lost everything in the Civil War. I was always amused hearing husband and wife argue over whose family had the highest rank in the Confederacy.
Trying to check a few facts my brother tells me that before we left New Jersey we lived in Montclair (a year or two before I was born) next to the real life family from which the novel and movie “cheaper by the dozen” comes from. Who knows? It’s a small world. And redaction of memory is a real human endeavor. But just claim it was Jesus who paid you the visit and everyone tends to honor you - - - that was my Wife’s claim to fame: a really effective marketing technique. Reality is a social game not an objective situation.
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