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OPTIMISM MOUNTS
Camille Cleanup Moves Westward
By BERT HYDE
(States-Item Staff Writer)
PASS CHRISTIAN - The cleanup of debris—which began the day after Camille struck on Aug. 17—has moved speedily westward from Biloxi Bay to Waveland, through private contracts let by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, and by the efforts of National Guardsmen, the Seabees, U.S. Air Force Personnel, U. S. Coast Guardsmen and crews of the communities and the Mississippi Department o f Highways.
Clean up progress, necessarily, has been slowest in the area of Long Beach and Pass Christian, and in a vast crescent-shaped area extending five or six miles away from Mississippi Sound along the Eastern shores of the Bay of St. Louis.
HERE, Camille hit the hardest, according to the records. The wind was highest, the water was highest, both slamming from two directions.
Here are the shambles of half a dozen or more tourist courts, historic old homes and churches, major shopping centers, thousands of stately pines and spreading old oaks as familiar to many New Orleanians as the Oaks of Audubon and City parks.
The debris of a single shopping center represented more than a thousand truckloads of broken bricks, smashed blocks, twisted steel and broken glass.
Add to this the scores of tubs and toilets, lavratories, and air conditioners of motels, the trunks and limbs of trees and you have a major hauling job.
IN' THE BACK area there are dozens of tiny homes standing limp on the sides of roadways.
Across the beachfront area of Bay St. Louis roads are having to be rebuilt, and leading on toward Waveland, a hundred tons of seaweed piled upon the beaches by a restless sea is being moved
I	out.
Out of the chaos there has developed an optimism, of which there was little on Aug. 18.
The movement of 25 or more trailer homes into the Pass Christian area, now parked along the beachfront awaiting distribution by the American Red Cross, proves “they’re coming back.”
A SIGN in front of The Ole Rebel Inn tells the story even plainer: “With God’s Help, and Yours, The Old Rebel Will Be Back.”
A. W. Cooper, Pass Christian insurance executive, has begun rebuilding Middlegate, one of the old mansions which has survived many previous storms since being built shortly after the turn of the century. It was damaged heavily by Camille.
Cooper, his wife, three , daughters and his mother, a neighbor, Mrs. James Car-swell and her two babies, rode out the storm at Middlegate.
The nine, according to Cooper, were downstairs until the 45x35 foot living room of the mansion blew away and the doors and windows of the home were torn out of their frameworks.
“Then, the water came,” Cooper said. “It was waist deep by the time we reached the staircase and ceiling high by the time we reach ;d the second floor.”
C "’ER pointed to a bru_ covered group of purple roofed buildings at the tear of Middlegate where bulldozers pushed and groaned in tons of tree limbs.
“That’s the Japanese Gardens,” Cooper said. “Tne’-e was little damage there beyond debris.”
Japanese Gardens is a | showplace for New Orleans I Garden Clubs.
John McClcskey, whose home is just east of the gardens, rode out the storm with Mrs. M c C 1 o s k e y in their 1 home.
During the height of the storm McCloskev said he looked out his window and was amazed to see the house next door moving ever closer ' to his own.	\
WHEN daylight came, he said,-he found it wasn’t his neighbor’s home but his own that had left its foundation and moved some 10 feet away.
“There was absolutely no sensation of movement,” McCloskey said. He said workmen have begun pushing j the house back on its founda- I
! Cooper said that next door ' a home built in 1840, where several persons died but several others survived, there was another unusual story.
Those who survived the storm, by crawling onto a back roof, said the house lifted from the front and stood for several minutes on end. Then, the wind subsided and the house fell, the roof and second story collapsing onto the first floor.
Immediately behind this ! destroyed mansion is the home of John M. Parker Jr. Parker’s home received only minor damage from broken limbs.
Cooper tells one other unusual story of the freakishness of Camille in the Long Beach, Pass Christian, Bay St. Louis triangle.
FOUR FRIENDS were “riding out” the storm in a home on the west beach of Bay of St. Louis north of Hwy. 90.
One of the group walked outside and came back to warn the others that the bay was creeping on the shoreline.
“They rushed to get into their car. As they started to drive away,” they said, “the wind changed, the waters of | the bay backed out and the waters of the bay poured to the east.
“They said you could see the bottom of the bay by the headlights of their automobile