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What a .joy! ... to have m man like Felix Seeger in our community!
Our Bay St. Louis Superintendent of Public Grounds is a professional horticulturist with an impressive background in nursery management and landscape design.
He has been of great help to us in the planning of our Highway Beautification Project and is also responsible for the actual planting and continuing maintenance. Besides all this, he also helped to coordinate efforts with the State Highway Department and the City of Bay St. Louis.
It is because of him that our Bicentennial Beautification Program of U. S. Highway 90 has been such a tremendous success!... The "Little old ladies" in our club could not have done it without him!
Bicentennial News
Felix Seeger - Beauty is his business
By Joe Pilet Bicentennial Publicity Committee
It must give a person a warm, good, comfortable and confident feeling to live in a town where everyone loves, admires, respects and appreciates him. That is the status of Felix Seeger.
Felix is known to everyone. You can't miss him. He is everywhere. Almost as much a part of him as his good right arm are his truck., his tools .. his crew. Spades are thinning and steel gleams with much use.
Earth is lovingly turned and nourished and told by Seeger to "produce". Bay St. Louis has bloomed* and flourished and become a more beautiful place in which to live because of the work and the spirit and the vision of this man.
A man of great faith, when Felix plants a tree, a shrub or a flower he expects it to live, and live it does! Of course he expects it to live because he has a deep reverence for living things— plants with beauty or potential beauty.'
He has something more. He has an empathy for plants. When they are in shock because roots are exposed or there is too much or too little water, Felix feels compassion.
Entering Hancock County from the west on Highway 90, one begins to feel a change in the coastline even in the middle of the Bay bridge.
The shoreline looks green and glistening. Grand old liveoaks just sort of wave a welcome. In case one misses that signal there is the sign WELCOME TO BAY ST. LOUIS GATEWAY and all around that beautiful plantings of shrubs.
The highway median is broad and well groomed. In the Spring the crimson clover vies with bright yellow calendula as a ground cover. Just the right amount of red to make the green look greener and the yellow look sunnier. That’s Felix! An innate sense of balance when it comes to color.
Then there are all those familiar and beloved Southern shrubs. The delightful old-fashioned Oleanders, a familiar hallmark of Bay St. Louis, with narrow dark green leathery leaves and in late spring through summer large clusters of flowers in shades of pink, white, yellow salmon also the popular reds. Certainly this minimum-care shrub is a “Southern Charmer.”
Magnolias, too, planted and m me process of being planted lend stately grace and elegance. Felix and his crew are stringing a long stretch of young trees along the highway shoulders — 45 plantings between Second and DeMontluzin and more in the planning.
Surely “no man is an island.” Felix has had financial help from businesses, clubs, and institutions and encouraging words from well-wishers and he points out “he’s doing his job”.
But the business of creating beauty can be frustrating and back-breaking. Over and over, crews clean away trash and litter - paper plates and beer cans -drinking straws and the like.
The majority of the citizens of Bay St. Louis are aware of Felix Seeger and the beauty he is creating. They are appreciative of a pleasant place in which to live. A few are careless, thoughtless litterers who should and must be taught.
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THE SEA COAST ECHO, BAY ST. LOUIS, MISS., THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 1975
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