This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

THE BUY H. KRAUS FAMILY CLERMONT HARBOR, MISSISSIPPI 1937 - 1958
by
Guy Carleton Kraus
Clermont Harbor was a thick forest of tall dark pines under a deep blue sky. Today, I can close my eyes and look .into my mind and when the weather conditions are right and a stiff breeze blows through the tall pines on my mind a soft steady whisper may be heard in the dark green needles of the bent, limbs. No other tree speaks as does the pines in that kind of wind. This is what I heard as the breeze bent the pines over Clermont Harbor in my time that, has passed;
As weekend guests of Lester and Aunt Gertrude Lionnet one weekend in 1937, Guy H. and Claire Carleton Kraus fell in love with Clermont Harbor. There was the hotel in front of the harbor north of the seawall, and the fishing in the Mississippi Sound from Bayou Caddy looked promising. One could rent, a skiff from E-iordages and buy the live bait. I recall, in the late forties, live shrimp costing three for a penny. Later, in the early fifties, a cent apiece and a skiff with a well could be rented for one dollar. It was during the Great. Depression and for less then two hundred dollars one could own a lot on Poinsetta Avenue on the west side of the harbor, which was called the lagoon. For a piece of paradise, all one needed was to make a small down payment, and met the monthly payments. Our lot. had seven virgin pines, and it was rumored that one of New Orleans' mayors had spent, hi-s honeymoon on the site. So every weekend my parents would make the drive from east New Orleans and set up camp. They began to build their summer and weekend home. Later my father-recalled that ten dollars worth of building materials bought in the Bay would take him through the weekend. During the war, he built a second camp further up Poinsetta in the inside bend, and now they owned two camps.
I was born in 1942. My earliest memories of Clermont Harbor were the details of the interior of the first camp; of my mother taking my brother Gary, a toddler and I crabbing in the lagoon when a sudden squall came up; standing in the lobby of the Clermont. Hotel, and boarding the L_ & N passenger train full of troops in the Bay. Suddenly, all of those fading early memories were ellipsed by the forty-seven. It is said the 1947 hurricane was nameless. That .is not true. All conversation of memory of one's existence before the forty-seven was now referred to as "before the forty-seven", and after "after the forty-seven."
Time was now chronological ly divided, split into two distinct, reference points of existence, traumatized by the hurricane. The first house was gone with only one of the virgin pines standing, the foundation and the brick wading pool my father had built, for his two sons remaining. The second was heavily damaged. A1bert Riecker, a New Orleans sculptor, rode out the thirteen feet of hurricane water with his wife, Lilly, his mother-in-law and the snakes in the live oak on our lot. The oak .is still standing.
/