New Orleans Some things just can’t be purely coincidences, so when Waveland, Mississippi crosses my path twice in one week, something must be happening there, and that’s very good news in the post-Katrina.
Waveland has a special place in my heart. It’s the closest Gulf Coast beach to New Orleans, but was never a tourist beach. It was a place for locals along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and for folks from New Orleans who were in a hurry to get into the warm water on the Sound, even if there were acres of white sand and beach volleyball nets around.
When our kids were young we would go over on a Sunday at the beginning of swimming time and again at the end of the season almost as a ritual. When my dad retired more than 20 years ago, he surprised (and delighted) all of us by buying a small beach house in Waveland about a half-mile from the water, which he kept for a dozen years and equally surprised (and shocked) us when he sold it without so much as a "never you mind" a decade ago, but it was his place and he was tired of taking care of it, as the kids got older, we all got busier, and weren’t there as much. He sold the place long before Katrina and we drove my folks over to look at the slab where the beach house had stood in the devastation of Waveland which had been at the very center of Katrina’s path. No area was harder hit by the storm, even if the residual flooding and levee breaks crippled New Orleans as well.
So, first I stumbled onto an article about Citizen Wealth reprinting one of my blogs on a website at www.wavelandwatchers.workpress.com maintained by Beau and Cheryl Kring in Waveland. The banner was a beautiful beach scene. The casino tax money ended up allowing the county to pay for dredging sand in from the Sound and extending the beach for miles along the Waveland part of the coast, and I won’t lie – we loved it! – and for years as I ran along the beach I would monitor its progress. The Kring’s seem to be involved with a poor peoples’ rights efforts around Waveland, and that’s good news as well.
Today, I saw a notice on Facebook of all places about a piece written by Leonard Clark from Phoenix noting that progressive radio was finding a place in conservative soil, and darned if he wasn’t talking about the sandy beaches of Waveland as well. Seems the Jeff Farias Show (www.jefffariasshow.com) and the show Sunday Morning Coffee with Sarge (www.coffeewithsarge.com) which are live, progressive shows in the Phoenix market are beamed over via internet and rebroadcast live on radio station WQRZ in the Waveland area. Part of the interest comes from the fact that both of these radio fellas had a Katrina connection as well with Farias taking donations during the storm and Sarge Herb Phelps being a Katrina survivor himself.
Bryce Phillips, the station manager of WQRZ seems to have been one of the heroes of this mess and attracted quite a lot of attention by keeping the station on the air in impossible conditions after the storm. He was so effective that the National Guard, according to Clark’s piece in the Examiner, gave out portable radios so that refugees from Waveland and the area could keep up with the devastation and the plans to return.
It never occurred to me that Waveland was the bastion of conservatism that Clark is claiming but I’m sure he’s just making the point that it’s Mississippi, and they’ve earned it over time. The truth is that the hardscrabble working man’s beach of Waveland deserves to come back and folks there are gritty enough to bring it back as something more than a New Orleans play spot.
Websites and progressive radio stations will keep Waveland waking up and on the road to something even stronger in the future as Katrina fades farther back from the shore.