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CAMILLE: 20 Years Later
Class of ’69 met the challenge _
By MARIANNE DAY DUBOSE_______________________________________
THE SUN HERALD
Four years of high school were finally over.
Hip Hurray.
On with the graduation parties.
The Coast’s newest batch of bright and promising graduates, pictured in their 1969 yearbooks with crew cuts, flips, and long wavy bangs, had all the markings of a clean-cut group. But, they didn’t miss much.
They remember that it was an unbearably blazing hot summer that kicked off with- bonfires and The Prom. Weekends were devoted to drive-iri movies and dancing at the Vapors and Fiesta. Lots of barbecues, water skiing, pool hopping, and beach playing in those temperature-high months of 1969.
In between, the graduates even managed to hold down summer jobs. College was approaching and their days of carefree cruising were about to end. It was almost a little frightening, this thought of growing up.
At summer’s end, though, something speeded up the
process. Hurricane Camille would throw the graduates into premature adulthood before they even checked into their freshman dorms.
When she blasted her way through the Coast late that Sunday night of Aug. 17, 1969, everyone’s life was uprooted, and turned inside out.
Many people would live with the howl of the wind and the buzz of chain saws stuck forever in their memory.
“That hurricane could jerk ypu around quick, ” said Janie Powell Schrantz, 37. “And that’s about how much my life changed.”
Jane Stanovich Dietz in 1969, left, and today.
Grad had on-the-job insurance training
Ever since she was 14 years old, Jane Stanovich .Dietz had helped her father at his State Farm Insurance office.
It sure came in handy when Hurricane Camille hit. Dad and daughter set up business early the next day.
“There was no electricity at his office and it was hot,” said Dietz. “So, we took our card table and sat outside in an alley by the office. There was no phone. No typewriter. But, we took claim reports . . . We’d take a flashlight and go look people up in the files.
“There was no such thing as flood insurance. That’s where people really got hurt financially.
It was a sad situation.”
After graduation from Biloxi High School, Dietz, planned to go to the University of Southern Mississippi and major in nursing. To help pay for her schooling, she'held down three jobs that summer.
She couldn’t wait to get away from home.
“It was like you were on the brink of a new life ahead just waiting,” Dietz said about the anticipation of college. “I thought that three months would never end. I was ready to get going.”
Bam. The hurricane hit.
Please see JANE, Page 28
Storm altered course of life
John Dubuisson’s goal was to earn a football scholarship at Perkinston Junior College after he graduated from Pass Christian High School. For three years, he played the glory sport as a running back and a wide receiver. College tryouts were scheduled for late August.
If Dubuisson got a scholarship, it would help pay for a degree in law enforcement.
Then came Camille. She ruined another set of plans when she destroyed Dubuisson’s
Please see JOHN, Page 28
John Dubuisson in 1969, left, and today.
Linda Flenniken Robertson in 1969, left, and today.
Great wedding, wet honeymoon
Linda Flenniken Robertson, the “Friendliest” senior girl at Long Beach High School, does have one small regret thinking back on that summer of 1969: Why did her first full day of marriage begin with Hurricane Camille? Why did her new husband, Larry, have to be in the National Guard?
“He was gone round the clock, 24 hours, for the first two weeks after the storm,” said Robertson. “It really wasn’t like
Please see LINDA, Page 28
Chance to teach blown away when Camille swallowed Coast
Janie Powell Schrantz in 1969, left, and today.
Janie Powell Schrantz was 17, the president of Future Teachers of America at Gulfport High School. That summer of ’69 she worked for friends of the family at Owen Realty Company, spending most of her earnings — $500 to be exact — on plaid skirts and matching sweaters for freshman year at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her mind was set on elementary education.
“I really enjoy kids,” she said. “I wanted to teach first grade.”
Camille killed that dream career, though. Not only were her college clothes “blown into high heaven somewhere,” Schrantz
never even saw the inside of the Hattiesburg school.
“After Camille, nothing seemed to be falling into place, ” she said. “I decided not to go to school. You know sometimes you think: It is just not the right time. I felt like it would be just my mother alone. She would have been all by herself.”
Schrantz’s dad had died earlier that year. She was the youngest of eight and the last one to leave the nest. When she and her Mom drove from Hattiesburg to a water-drenched home, she decided that college was out of the question.
To make it worse, both of her
bosses had been killed.
“There were lots of tears,” Schrantz said.
Though she still planned to go to Southern the following year, she got married instead.
“If not for the hurricane, I would have been up there at school,” she said. “Maybe I would be teaching school some-*^ where now.”
Schrantz has since remarried. She’s a housewife and the mother of two children. In her future, she still sees a college education.
“One of these days, I’ll get a'J degree,” Schrantz said. “I may be 50, but it’s a goal in my life.”