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Mittie — Gaine ille
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to work at the Weston Lumber Company and when he started his family they lived in a company house in Westonia.
Mittie was born there. Willie drove the train for the company and he would signal Alice of his homecoming by blowing the train whistle. When the whistle blewT it meant that it was time to put on the biscuits, Miss Mittie said.
Willie suspected that the Weston Lumber company might go out of business in the not too distant future and so he decided to invest in the service station. When he bought the two room building the family moved into it. Mittie was just a baby. The first location was a ways up Hwy. 43, but when Hwy. 90 came through a few years later, traffic for the business slowed way down. At that time Willie and Alice put the station up on logs and" rolled it to its new location, a little ways each day.
“Every day the school bus would pick us up wherever the station was and every afternoon it would drop us off wherever it had moved to,” said Miss Mittie. “We would walk behind it till dark and then go inside and go to sleep and the school bus would find us the next morning. It wasn’t really much different because we didn't ever have electricity or running water anyway,”
While Willie was working at Weston, Alice ran the station by herself. At night they kept the station open by burning lanterns for light. Alice would bake pies and cakes and serve coffee to everyone that came by, which was just about everyone. At Christmas she would make her famous fruit cake.
“Every day mama would pour a cup of whiskey into the cake and by the time it was ready you could smell it everywhere when you took the lid off, “ Miss Mittie said. “She made chicken and dumplings and if she you
The Maskew family in front of the service station where they lived, left to right are Monuel, Louise, Mittie, Willie Jr., Alice and Willie Sr.
knew you, you were going to get something to eat. I don’t know if she made much money selling food or coffee.
“We wyere allowed to play for an hour each day. We got up early and made the coffee on the wood stove and took it to to mama and daddy. We also had to pump up the gas with a handle into the big glass enclosures each day and let it back down into the storage tank at night.
“And someone had the job of bringing in a taking out the slop jar. After we cleaned the kitchen we could go outside and play with our little white spitz dog.”
The family was Baptist (Miss Mittie became a Catholic after marrying Bully) and attended church in Logtown.
After church the kids would skate at the Masonic Hall across the street, Miss Mittie said, she remembers Bully’s mother Velma making wonderful home baked bread in an oven in the yard and serving it buttered, with a glass of milk.
When the Space Center arrived Alice and Willie
moved to Waveland and opened a boarding house on Nicholson Avenue.
Mittie and Bully and their children moved to Bay St. Louis to a house on Citizen St.
There were still many good memories like Roy Baxter flying in Santa Claus in to the Sound by Washington Ave. in his sea plane, and Santa walking to shore in his fishing boots.
The family kept their land at Bayou La Croix and, like many who were resi-j dents of the lost communities displaced by the Space Center, they chose to just, lease it to the federal gov-\ ernment. Mittie and Bully’ took in the church bell from Holy Cross Church there and cared for it through the years.Many people thought that the government would allow them to return to their land after a while, but that hasn’t happened.
When Miss Mittie moved to her new home ten years ago, she decided that the bell had been waiting to go home too long and had a new home built for it, a bell tower in her back yard, where it lives today.