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Sunday Mass was held at St. Thomas Church in Long Beach just one week after the hurricane. William Pittman curtailed his sermon to keep the service short.
DENNIS HOLSTON
Sacred
Continued from Page 24
Murphy believes the church’s round design and shattered windows may have helped the building ^tay intact. “It would have exploded in a vacuum,” he said.
The statues, fastened to steel girders, held fast. The interior of the church was gutted.
“Foolhardiness was involved. But I had no experience of a hurricane and, in hindsight, no one knew what Camille would do,” he said. “Many people on the Point stayed based on memories of the 1947 hurricane.”
Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, blocks west, was heavily damaged, losing its main sanctuary. Its historic bell tower stands as memorial and landmark.
The Rev. Jack Biggers, church rector, was working in Malawi, located in southeastern Africa, dur-
ing 1969. A French Catholic priest delivered news of Camille to him.
He packed his bags for Biloxi two months later. “I could not believe the devastation, ” Biggers recalls of his first day back.
Rolling rectory
In Gulfport, the Rev. James “Bo” Roberts believed on the evening of Aug. 17 that St. Mark’s Episcopal Church rectory, now the kindergarten, was at a safe elevation.
Roberts, then 27, was the church’s new pastor. He rode out Camille with his wife, three children and mother in the attic of the wood-frame Church Avenue house.
The old house had survived Betsy and other hurricanes, Roberts said. He also was told that the house’s floor was 22 feet above sea level.
“That turned out to be wrong,” he said. Roberts had his feet up,
Please see SACRED, Page 26
A pleasure craft from the Gulfport harbor landed by the side of Gulport’s First Baptist Church.
Family
Continued from Page 24
Williams, his son Malcom and son-in-law Erin Burton were the only survivors.
Tides of terror
Camille’s 200-plus-mph winds and 24-foot tides showed little mercy to the houses of God, flattening or heavily damaging dozens of churches from Pascagoula to Waveland. No others, though, experienced such human losses. In a separate building on the Trinity complex, the minister’s wife, Helen Hardin, also was killed, bringing the death toll there to 14.
Today the church looks the same, re-
constructed from memory and old photographs. Trees have been replanted, some by Williams, and normal parishioner life has returned to the compound on Church Avenue.
Only memories remain of that night, but Trinity survivors have been reluctant to publicly share their experiences. On Camille’s 20th anniversary, though, Williams opened up.
“I try to be a consolation to other peoples as much as,possible,” he says. “You have tragedy — that’s part of life.”
One man’s battle
Williams quit his Trinity groundskeep-ing long ago and took up other handy-man jobs in Pass Christian or his native De-Lisle. At 69, he’s retired but a nervous
energy keeps him on the go, slowly but steadily. His own yard, several blocks north of the church, is neat and well trimmed."
He is a tiny man, not more than 5-foot-5, with thinning hair and a salt-and-pep-per mustache. He fought fiard to best a fourth-grade education and the disadvantages of a black growing up in a sawmill town during the Depression.
He and Myrtle had 15 children, and the size of his one-room house increased with them. The five who survived Camille were in other shelters or out of town. Tragically, another son — his namesake
—	died in a motorcycle accident after the storm.
“Raising up my family was so hard, ” he says. “Like I say, I never give up.”
Behind his glasses are eyes that reflect experiences enough for several lifetimes. Yet, his voice is calm, almost philosophical in its intonation.
As if in contradiction, Williams is plagued with bouts of nervousness and sleeplessness and nearly half his stomach has been lost to ulcers. Are his problems related to Camille?	>
'I tell ya, I honestly don't know.”
Williams talks of an accident during. World War II Army training, but his memory is fuzzy about crawling through mud and an explosion. He’s never been quite the same since.
Please see FAMILY, Page26
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