Archive for the ‘Mississippi’ Category

Spanning the Big Muddy

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

In March 2003, retired Air Force Col. Joe Pope wrote this on the website www.greenvillebridge.com from his home at Fair Oaks Ranch in Texas: “In February 1943, shortly after the Greenville Bridge opened, we moved to Montrose, where my mother and father lived until their deaths in the 1980s. I graduated from high school at Lake Village in 1951, the U.S. Naval Academy in 1956 and spent 22 years in the armed services. During these years, I crossed the bridge many times visiting my parents and even ‘bombed’ it electronically several times when I was a navigator on B-52s at Columbus, Miss., in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“In 1989, my wife and I moved back to Lake Village and lived there until 2001, when we moved back to Texas for family health reasons. I know firsthand how much the old bridge has meant to generations of people on both sides of the bridge and to millions of travelers who have used the bridge through the years. When we left, we sold our home on Lake Chicot to the project engineer for the new bridge. I am sure he is overseeing the building of a fine and unique new bridge that will serve many more generations of local residents and travelers. May God bless their endeavors.”

On Monday, that “fine and unique new bridge” will be dedicated between Lake Village and Greenville.

On Wednesday, traffic will begin crossing it on U.S. Highway 82.

The old bridge will be demolished. A contract in the amount of $22.4 million was awarded in January to Granite Construction Co. to remove the bridge. Demolition is scheduled to be complete by Sept. 21, 2012. At that point, the 1940 Greenville Bridge will be nothing but a memory. But what a story it was as Delta leaders worked during the Great Depression to find the money needed to build a bridge between Arkansas and Mississippi.

“The bridge was intimidating and fascinating to me,” Dr. Clyde Brown of Memphis wrote in 2002. “I always thought of it as a powerful steel horse perched in the Delta sky. When I got my driver’s license, my parents trusted me enough to drive them across the bridge to Lake Village. I must say that this experience was as unnerving as landing an F-16 on an aircraft carrier at night.”

In the comments section of an earlier post I wrote about Greenville, Jack Rhodes recalled the day in 1951 that a jet from nearby Greenville Air Force Base, which is no longer in operation, struck the bridge and exploded. The pilot was killed, and there was a large fire. The crash caused $175,000 in damage, a huge amount at the time, but the bridge was reopened to traffic after 22 hours.

Greenville, known as the Queen City of the Delta, was a booming place in the 1930s, but Mayor Milton C. Smith knew there needed to be a bridge to Arkansas rather than just a ferry for growth to continue. He joined forces with John A. Fox, the secretary of the Washington County Chamber of Commerce, and spent weeks at a time in Washington during 1937-38, lobbying for congressional funding.

According to the history posted at www.greenvillebridge.com: “The two spent so much time at their efforts, Smith’s Queen City barrel hoop business would eventually go bankrupt from his continued absence. The first order of business was to get Congress to pass a law authorizing the bridge. Fox, whose national network of friends reached all the way to the nation’s capital, wrote to Mississippi Congressman W.M. Whittington about the matter in May 1937 and was told the timing of his request was not good.

“While considering what to do next, Fox was agreeably surprised to pick up the newspaper days later and read that Congressman Wade Kitchens of Arkansas had introduced a bill requesting permission for the bridge. Fox worked Capitol Hill with Kitchens, Whittington and other friends, including Sen. Pat Harrison of Mississippi and Sen. Joe. T. Robinson of Arkansas. The governor of Arkansas, Carl E. Bailey, had been an ally from the early days of the bridge campaign.”

Fox met with chambers of commerce from Birmingham in the east to Lubbock in the west, explaining what the bridge would mean for the South. Everywhere he spoke, he urged people to send telegrams to members of Congress. The bill authorizing bridge construction was approved in August 1937 and signed by President Roosevelt.

“With all permissions granted, Smith and Fox turned their focus to financing,” the website history states. “How much would a new bridge truly cost? Smith and Fox hired Ash Howard Needles & Tammen of Kansas City, an engineering consultant with a large portfolio of major bridges, to conduct a study and make the estimate. The consultant determined that Warfield Landing, the site used by the Greenville fairy, was not a suitable site for a bridge. Their recommendation was to build the bridge downstream, below Lake Chicot on the Arkansas side, in a straight stretch of the river with stable banks. The new location meant long and expensive approaches to the bridge would be needed. The new estimate for construction: $4.25 million.

“Where Fox succeeded as a master of politics, Mayor Smith succeeded as a master of finance, and during the year that followed, the mayor’s skills would be tested to the fullest. A survey of traffic volume, commissioned to satisfy possible investors, concluded there wouldn’t be sufficient income from tolls to warrant construction of a $4.5 million bridge and that the project merited only $2.55 million in financing. The Reconstruction Finance Corp. would lend the $2.55 million, but this left Smith and Fox some $2 million short.”

In September 1938, Smith and his city attorney, S.B. Thomas, went to Washington to seek money from the Works Progress Administration. They had to make the case to the WPA that construction of a bridge would create lots of jobs for men who otherwise would be unemployed in the Delta. They made that case successfully.

On Sept. 21, Smith and Thomas sent a telegram to Greenville stating that the trip had been a success and that “we can now look forward to the actual materialization of our fondest dream, the construction of the mammoth bridge.”

The Delta Democrat Times reported, “And so it was that exactly at 11:30 a.m. on that day, Greenville received the joyful news with the blasting of every steam whistle in the city, a prearranged signal.”

On Oct. 2, 1940, the bridge was officially opened to traffic. It was named for former Congressman Benjamin G. Humphreys of Greenville, a co-author of the Ransdell-Humphreys Flood Control Act of 1917 that established a national flood control program along the Mississippi River. His granddaughter, Mildred “Maury” McGee, had cut the ribbon during the earlier dedication ceremony in September.

Humphreys, who was born in 1865 and died in 1923, was known as Our Ben to his constituents. His father, Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, had been a Confederate general who fought at Gettysburg and served as Mississippi’s governor from 1865-68. His great-grandfather, Ralph Humphreys, was the colonel of a Virginia regiment in the American Revolution. When Ben Humphreys married Louise Yerger, the daughter of Greenville’s mayor, Jefferson Davis was one of the guests at the wedding.

Ben Humphreys was elected to Congress in 1902 and was determined to make the folks in Washington aware of the flood problems along the lower Mississippi River. A paper he wrote in 1914 advanced the notion that the river was, in essence, the drainage canal for the nation and a federal responsibility. That paper swayed public opinion. Members of the new House Flood Control Committee toured the region in 1916 so they could see the problems for themselves. The act passed the following year, giving the federal government the responsibility of flood control along the Mississppi River.

The Delta Democrat Times later would write of the 1940 bridge, “It seems appropriate that the massive structure of steel and concrete which links two sides on the great river he loved should be dedicated to his memory. His life work had been the conquest of that river beside which he now sleeps.”

Beginning next week, there will be no traffic on that bridge for the first time in seven decades.

Posted in Memories, Mississippi, Traveling Arkansas | 3 Comments »

The Great Delta Bookstore Tour

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

I’ve led my own version of the Great Delta Barbecue Tour several times. You can never get enough barbecue, after all.

I’ve also led my version of the Great Delta Tamale Tour (I hope you saw the feature on AETN regarding that memorable trip with Kane Webb and Bill Vickery).

Next, I want to do the Great Delta Bookstore Tour.

There’s something special about independent bookstores. And we’re blessed with some fine ones in the Delta. Along the way, we can also eat barbecue and tamales. A man has to eat while visiting all of these bookstores, right?

Here are our stops:

1. We’ll start in Blytheville at perhaps my favorite bookstore of all, Mary Gay Shipley’s That Bookstore In Blytheville.

Mary Gay opened her store in 1976 in historic downtown Blytheville. There are 2,400 square feet of space and about 25,000 titles in stock.

As her website points out, “Browse while sipping a cup of coffee. You can relax in a rocking chair next to a wood stove, engage in conversation about the book you’ve just read or enjoy a spontaneous reading of the new favorite children’s book of the day.”

Sounds like heaven.

2. We head south from Blytheville and cross the Mississippi River to Memphis. The destination is Burke’s Book Store, which opened in 1875. Its oldest book in stock is from 1866: Two volumes written by Bayard Taylor titled “Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures.”

Cheryl Mesler and her husband, author Corey Mesler, own Burke’s. They are only the fourth family to have owned the store in its 135 years of existence. Bill Burke was the third and final member of the Burke family to own the store. Diana Crump (got to have a Crump in there somewhere when you write about Memphis) owned the store from 1978-84. Harriette Beeson owned it from 1984-2000.

“Independent bookselling is never an easy thing to do, but we love it,” Cheryl recently told the Memphis Flyer.

The Flyer goes on to report, “The Meslers met in the store when both were staff members in the late ’80s and bought it in 2000. Though Burke’s has carried a variety of products over the years — toys, newspapers and literary journals and magazines — the Meslers have expanded what they feel is at the core of the business: buying and selling used books. … Their devotion to old books has served them well, as has the store’s most recent move, from a building on Poplar at Evergreen.”

The move to the funky, artsy Cooper-Young neighborhood gave them foot traffic again. People spend hours browsing there.

“Though they do stock some new books and magazines, it’s the couple’s attention to customer service that is a focal point,” the Flyer reports. “Burke’s carries textbooks for three local private schools, devotes an entire section to Southern writers and buys all their used books from people in the community.”

“I have no fear that the printed word is going to go out,” Cheryl says. “My husband says it’s the perfect little invention. You can’t improve on that.”

3. Our next stop is Square Books in Oxford. OK, OK, I realize that Oxford isn’t in the Delta. It’s in the north Mississippi hill country on the edge of the Delta. But it’s close enough for our purposes. The town square in Oxford is quite simply one of the best places in the South to spend the day.

Square Books was opened in September 1979 by Richard and Lisa Howorth, who had worked for two years at the Savile Bookshop in Washington, D.C., before returning to Richard’s hometown.

Here’s part of the history as published on the Square Books website: “While the Square Books customer base was centered in the Oxford and university community, the selection and display of books was focused upon literature about Mississippi and the South. Customers were pleased to find such books as a hardover edition of ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ or Shelby Foote’s ‘Civil War,’ books that at the time were not commonly available in a retail setting anywhere. Square Books also hosted book signings and readings as soon as the store opened. …

“Around the same time Square Books opened, Bill Ferris came to Oxford as the first director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, immediately creating great enthusiasm for academic and cultural interest in the South and Oxford. Ferris was a great friend of Square Books and was key in bringing such writers as Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alex Haley and Alice Walker to the store for readings and book signings.

“Willie Morris became writer in residence at the university in 1980 and also was a great friend to the bookstore who brought to town William Styron. … In 1981, Barry Hannah moved to town, a writer who was to literary fiction as Morris was to literary journalism. Hannah had an enormous effect on his students — Donna Tartt among them in those early days — and many writers came to town to visit Hannah and thus Square Books.”

The store expanded to its current location, the former Blaylock Drug Store, in 1986.

4. Returning to the real Delta, the next stop is Turnrow Book Co. on wonderful Howard Street in downtown Greenwood. You should spend the night just down the block at the Alluvian Hotel, visit the Viking store across the street and make an appointment at Viking’s spa while you are there. There also are antique stores and furniture stores on Howard Street. Head to Lusco’s for dinner and let them pull the curtain on your booth.

5. Head next over to Greenville and McCormick Book Inn. I discussed this delightful store in a previous post that I hope you’ll read if you have not already done so. While you’re in the store, make sure and ask Mr. McCormick what he thinks of John Barry’s “Rising Tide.”

6. Go south on U.S. Highway 61 to Vicksburg and spend some time at Lorelei Books on Washington Street in the historic downtown district. Stay at one of the bed-and-breakfast inns in Vicksburg to end your tour — Anchuca or Duff Green perhaps.

I’ll close with something that’s posted on the Lorelei Books website. It’s part of what novelist Howard Frank Mosher wrote about independent bookstores:

“A good independent bookstore always puts good books and good customers ahead of the bottom line. Interestingly, by doing so, passionately and knowledgeably, many (though, sadly, not all) independent bookstores have managed to stay in business in this economically depressed era when even chain stores are suffering.

“Of course, one of the reasons that chain bookstores are having their own difficulties is that many of them do not place a top priority on books and customers. In fairness, though, I have to say that, from time to time, in chain stores, I meet very independent booksellers who love books and respect customers and like to match them up.

“Good independent bookstores — like Tolstoy’s families — are all different. But they are very happy places. When I walk into one, the colorful jackets of books that are my old friends or may become new friends excite me the way walking out of the dim concourse of a major league baseball stadium onto the bright, geometrical familiarity of the diamond below excites me.

“Good independent bookstores are always welcoming. Customers are invited to browse. Booksellers make time to talk about — books! Go into any university English department at the end of the day. All you hear is people grousing about poor students, parking restrictions, pay freezes. Booksellers should be so lucky. Still, they’re as enthusiastic about Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Committed” and the new Raymond Carver collection at the end of the day as at 10 a.m. They just plain love books.”

At all of the above stops, you’ll find people who indeed love books.

These are six excellent independent bookstores in six historic, interesting towns.

Happy travels and happy reading.

Posted in Memphis, Mississippi, Traveling Arkansas | 3 Comments »

Greenville on the river

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

I mentioned in an earlier post that Clarksdale, Miss., just might be the most Southern place on earth.

If isn’t Clarksdale, it must be Greenville.

The new U.S. Highway 82 bridge over the Mississippi River between Lake Village and Greenville is scheduled to open to traffic late this month. It will be an exciting day for the Delta.

When the current bridge was dedicated on Sept. 17, 1940, more than 5,000 people gathered for the ceremony. At the time, it was the longest span for a highway bridge anywhere on the Mississippi River (Dubuque, Iowa, would break that record three years later).

Seventy years later, many Arkansans dread crossing the aging, narrow, two-lane bridge. That’s about to change with a four-lane, cable-stayed structure that will have wide shoulders in addition to those four lanes. The bridge itself cost $110 million. The approach on the Arkansas side over the Mississippi River levee and floodplain cost almost $66 million. The approach on the Mississippi side over the levee and floodplain cost about $86 million.

As you can see, we’re talking real money.

In a post on a website that’s maintained by the Mississippi Department of Transportation (www.greenvillebridge.com), Jean Horton Armstrong of Pelahatchie, Miss., wrote: “I was born in Greenville, spent most of my young life there, and the bridge is one of those things in life that was awe inspiring (the largest thing around Greenville in 1955). The class ring design of the 1955 graduating class of Greenville High contains a replica of the bridge. After all the wear and tear, I still enjoy taking out that old ring and sharing stories about the bridge, Greenville Air Force Base, the beautiful trees on Main Street and two-way traffic on Washington Avenue with my grandchildren. When the old bridge comes down, all of the above will have disappeared. There will be only memories surrendered to different elements.”

Greenville Air Force Base was established in 1940 and originally known as Greenville Army Airfield. Thousands of airmen received their instruction there. Cadets from U.S. allies were even shipped to Greenville, as were firefighters and emergency medical personnel. These days, there’s a museum devoted to the base at the Mid Delta Regional Airport.

A couple of other places those interested in the history of the Delta should visit are the Flood of 1927 Museum at 118 S. Hinds St. between Main and Washington streets downtown and the Greenville History Museum at 409 Washington Ave. The flood museum is a project of the city of Greenville, the Mississippi Levee Board, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and numerous volunteers. The museum opened in March 2009 in a carriage house built in the 1850s. There’s an excellent 12-minute video presentation for visitors. The flood museum is open each Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.

The Greenville History Museum is a project of Benjy Nelken, who has spent many years collecting items dealing with the history of Greenville. The museum is open from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. until noon on Saturdays.

I’ve already written extensively in an earlier post about my love for McCormick Book Inn (check out the store’s fact-filled website at www.mccormickbookinn.com) at 825 S. Main St. No visit to Greenville is complete without a stop at the bookstore.

Other points of interest in downtown Greenville include:

– The Hebrew Union Temple at 504 Main St. The temple was erected in 1906 and boasts some of the most beautiful stained-glass windows anywhere. The temple houses the Goldstein Nelken Solomon Century of History Museum for those interested in the history of Delta Jews. The city’s first elected mayor, Leopold Wilzinski, was Jewish.

– The Greenville Writers’ Exhibit in the William Alexander Percy Memorial Library at 341 Main St. More than 100 published writers called Greenville home at one time or another during the 20th century. The exhibit celebrates the work of William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, Hodding Carter, Shelby Foote and others.

– The First National Bank Building, built in 1903 when Greenville was thriving. Its marble and its stained-glass windows were imported from Italy. The building now houses the city’s municipal court.

– The Greenville Inn & Suites at 211 S. Walnut St. If you’re a history lover, you’ll be spending the night here since this building, constructed in the 1880s, long was the levee board’s headquarters.

– The building at the corner of Main and Walnut streets where Hodding Carter penned editorials for the Delta Democrat Times advocating racial tolerance. You can’t go in the old building, but you can read the historic marker out front.

– St. Joseph Catholic Church at 412 Main St, which was erected in 1907. It was designed and financed by Father P.J. Korstenbroek, a Dutch nobleman who served as the parish priest for 33 years. William Alexander Percy wrote about him in “Lanterns on the Levee.” The stained-glass windows in the church were obtained from the Munich studio of Emil Frei.

Of course, your day must end with dinner at the original Doe’s Eat Place at 502 Nelson St.

Michael Stern writes at www.roadfood.com: “There is a special magic about the original Doe’s in Greenville. Located on the wrong side of town in the back rooms of a dilapidated grocery store, it does not look like a restaurant, much less a great restaurant. Many of the dining tables are in fact located in the kitchen, spread helter-skelter among stoves and counters where the staff dresses salads and fries potatoes in big iron skillets. Plates, flatware and tablecloths are all mismatched. It is noisy and inelegant, and service — while perfectly polite — is rough and tumble.

“Doe’s fans, ourselves included, love it just the way it is. The ambience, which is at least a few degrees this side of casual, is part of what makes it such a kick. Mississippians have eaten here since the 1940s; for regular patrons the eccentricity makes the experience as comfortable as an old shoe. Newcomers may be shocked by the ramshackle surroundings, but Doe’s is easy to like once the food starts coming.”

Amen. Don’t ever change a thing. It’s not just the Mississippians who are comfortable. It’s a lot of us from Arkansas who make regular pilgrimages there.

Dominick “Doe” Signa and his wife Mamie started the place in 1941. Doe’s father had moved to Greenville in 1903 and opened a grocery store in the building that now houses the restaurant.

The restaurant’s website at www.doeseatplace.com goes on to explain: “The family lived in a house behind the store. The grocery, which the Signa family called Papa’s store, did well until the 1927 flood. After that, Big Doe Signa went into bootlegging to help the family get back on its feet. After several years, he sold his 40-barrel still for $300 and a Model T Ford. Around 1941, Mamie received a partial recipe for hot tamales. She improved the recipe and began selling them. That was the beginning of Doe’s.

“At first, Signa ran a honky-tonk in the front part of the store. It was strictly for blacks. He had things like buffalo fish and chili. Ironcially, the carriage trade arrived by the back door, like segregation in reverse. One of the local doctors began coming for a meal between calls. Big Doe would cook him up a steak and feed him in the back. Pretty soon the doctor brought another doctor, then a lawyer and before he knew it, Doe had a regular restaurant in the back. After calling in family and in-laws to help with his thriving restaurant, he eventually closed the honky-tonk and focused on the eat place.”

Big Doe retired in 1974. His sons, Charles and Little Doe, took over. Big Doe died in 1987, but the family tradition lives on along Nelson Street.

Plan on crossing that new bridge when it opens and spend a day in Greenville. It struggles economically like the rest of the Delta. Yet for those who love history and tradition, it remains a magical place. You don’t even need to step foot in one of its three casinos.

Get there in the middle of the morning for a cup of coffee and a long visit at McCormick Book Inn. After leaving the bookstore, drive a few yards south on Main Street and take a walk through the Greenville Cemetery. Go a little further south for lunch at Sherman’s at 1400 S. Main St.

After lunch, visit the downtown sites listed above. They’re all within walking distance of each other.

End the day with dinner at Doe’s. I might see you there.

Posted in Mississippi | 6 Comments »

Eating your way through Clarksdale

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

In the previous post, the upcoming Most Southern Weekend On Earth at Clarksdale, Miss., was discussed.

Whether you visit Clarksdale this weekend or at another time, it’s a great town in which to eat.

People from as far away as Memphis, Little Rock and Jackson drive to Clarksdale to have dinner at Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett’s Madidi.

Madidi is in an old building on Delta Avenue, its interior walls covered with the work of Delta artists. Reservations are recommended, and there’s a high-dollar menu that has entrees ranging from fried quail to coq au vin to duck a l’orange.

Just down the street, Freeman and Luckett operate their far more casual Ground Zero Blues Club. The club opened in May 2001 and offers live music on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The kitchen is open from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays, from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m. each Wednesday and Thursday and from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m. each Friday and Saturday.

The plate lunch each Monday through Friday is a bargain. For $7, you get your entree, a choice of two vegetables, a drink and a dessert. At other times, there are burgers, fried catfish and the like.

Delta Avenue in downtown Clarksdale is beginning to achieve critical mass when it comes to serving the blues tourists who visit the Delta. In addition to being the home of Madidi and Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art (mentioned in the previous post), it has seen a couple of additional restaurants open in recent years.

Rust is open for dinner only from Wednesday through Saturday of each week at 218 Delta Ave. It describes its menu as “progressive Southern dishes with a New Orleans influence” and offers everything from gumbo to crawfish to seared tuna.

Last fall, Stone Pony Pizza (a gourmet pizza restaurant — think Za Za in Little Rock) opened in a building that was built in 1912. It’s a fun place to spend part of an evening.

I’ve mentioned before that I was in Clarksdale almost every week during the four years I worked for the Delta Regional Authority. Getting away from Delta Avenue, here are the places I ate supper when spending nights in Clarksdale:

1. Abe’s — I happen to like the tamales even better than the barbecue, but both are good.

Here’s how noted food writer Michael Stern describes it at www.roadfood.com: “Abe’s barbecue is Boston butt that is first cooked over pecan wood, then allowed to cool overnight, then sliced, then heated again on the griddle when it is ordered. While it is getting heated, the pork gets hacked into a rugged hash. The process results in meat with lots of juicy buzz in its pale inside fibers and plenty of crusty parts where it has fried on the hot iron of the grill. You can have it on a platter or in a sandwich, which is available in two sizes — normal and Big Abe. We love the latter, which is twice the amount of pork heaped into a double-decker bun. …

“One of the things that makes these sandwiches so especially delicious is the sauce, which is dark red, tangy, with the resonance of pepper and spice, a sublime companion for the meat. Pat Davis told us that it is made from the original recipe his grandfather developed except for one top-secret ingredient, which he swears he doesn’t use anymore. ‘It is sort of addictive, isn’t it?’ Pat said. ‘We once had guys order a case shipped to Oklahoma. They called to tell me they were drinking it in shot glasses.”’

2. Hicks World Famous Hot Tamales — We told you about Eugene Hicks in a previous post titled “A day of Delta driving and dining.” Here’s how Rod Davis put it in an article for the Express-News in San Antonio: “Eugene Hicks not only sells hot tamales here in this fabled hometown of the blues, he sells a lot of them. Sometimes 500 dozen a week: over the counter, from the drive-through window, express delivery in containers holding five dozen each. … So many that this Henry Ford of tamale production, who got his start making bicycle deliveries as a teenager, counts among his diners former President Bill Clinton and an ongoing galaxy of politicians and celebrities.

“So here’s a liner note to the legions of German, British, Japanese, Canadian and American pilgrims who come to this steamy stripe of alluvial Mississippi to pay homage to the legends. You can stand at the crossroads where Robert Johnson allegedly bartered his soul. You can hear live music by new bands and old hands. You can catch up on history at the Delta Blues Museum and you can wander over to Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero Blues Club. But if you want to get the true taste of the Mississippi Delta, best also to genuflect at Hicks.”

3. Rest Haven — As far as the number of visits during my years in Clarksdale, Rest Haven ranked first. I always enjoyed the greeting from Chafik Chamoun, the owner, and the service provided by his daughter. And the variety — Lebanese food, Italian food and Southern cooking. Rest Haven also has the best breakfast in the Delta. Try the country ham, biscuits and eggs.

Here’s how the desserts are described on the restaurant’s website: “One cannot mention Rest Haven without a word about those pies. Coconut and chocolate cream pies with mile-high meringue have been famous here for years. People have been known to travel from Vicksburg and Memphis just for a piece of that pie. An unsettled dispute continually breaks out over which is better — chocolate or coconut.”

I simply alternate between the two.

And here’s how the website tells the story of the restaurant: “Lebanese people began immigrating to Mississippi in the 1880s. Many of the early Lebanese residents sold dry goods door to door and eventually opened their own stores. Chafik and Louise Chamoun arrived in the United States in 1954. Chafik borrowed a suitcase and received $50 from a wholesaler of women’s apparel. He peddled women’s clothing door to door for years until opening his own grocery store in the 1960s in Clarksdale.

“Customers noticed Chafik eating a strange-looking sandwich that Louise made frequently for his lunch. After samping this oddity called kibbie, a steady increase of customers started asking Louise to make them similar sandwiches, and Chafik had to move tables and chairs into the store to accommodate what became a regular luncheon tradition in Clarksdale. In the words of Chafik: ‘Once everybody tasted, everybody wanted.’

“To a great extent, the Lebanese community has assimilated into the American culture. However, though clothing and language have changed, the Lebanese foods have persisted. Traditional foods made with cracked wheat, parsley and grape leaves are still very popular. Newcomers to the Mississippi Delta are surprised to discover a Middle Eastern cuisine sharing the same table with black-eyed peas and collard greens. … The Rest Haven is perhaps known best for its kibbie specialties. Kibbie is made with lean ground round, cracked wheat, olive oil, onions and special seasonings. You can indulge in kibbie sandwiches, kibbie patties, kibbie baked, kibbie fried, even kibbie raw. You can eat kibbie with pine nuts, cabbage rolls, stuffed grape leaves.”

4. The Ranchero — I had supper there with my family week before last. I ordered the seafood platter.

Nelms Mitchell started the restaurant in May 1959 in a one-room concrete block building. For years, it was known mostly as a hangout for teenagers. But it has long been a full-service restaurant serving everything from barbecue to seafood to steaks to one of the best bowls of gumbo in Mississippi.

Locals often refer to it simply as The Ranch. The walls are a museum of Clarksdale’s rich history. Mitchell played high school football in Clarksdale with the great Charlie Conerly, who quarterbacked the New York Giants from 1948-61. There’s plenty of Conerly memorabilia in the restaurant, including a number of his trophies.

Conerly led Ole Miss to the Southeastern Conference championship in 1947. He led the nation in pass completions with 133 that year, rushed for nine touchdowns and passed for 18 more. He was named the Player of the Year by the Helms Athletic Foundation. I believe that’s one of the trophies in the restaurant. He was fourth in the Heisman Trophy balloting that year. In the NFL, Conerly was the 1948 Rookie of the Year and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1959 by the Newspaper Enterprise Association. He led the Giants to an NFL championship over the Chicago Bears in 1956 in a game played at Yankee Stadium. He also portrayed the Marlboro Man in commercials. After retiring from the NFL, Conerly and his wife, Perian, returned to Clarksdale. Conerly, who died in 1996, owned shoe stores.

5. Ramon’s — This is the home to the best fried shrimp anywhere. I can also recommend the fried chicken livers, the spaghetti and the oysters. Get good directions. It’s in a residential neighborhood.

Michael Stern writes: “It takes a diehard Roadfood devotee to drive along Oakhurst Street in Clarksdale, spy Ramon’s and think: ‘My, what an excellent looking place to eat.’ It is, to understate the point, a less-than-handsome restaurant far off the beaten path in a residential neighborhood. The savvy tipster who took us there, Roger Stolle, described going to Ramon’s as ‘like eating in a small Florida restaurant from the 1970s … but with serious roof problems.’ Roger told us that local lore says Thomas and Barbara Ely, the couple who run it, rent the building for a dollar a month so there’s no real incentive for them (or the owner) to repair or renovate.

“Tables are bare, chairs are mismatched. Still, there is some serious effort to make the dump charming: empty fifths of Jack Daniel’s and three-liter jugs of Taylor chablis have been made into decorative lamps all around the two dining rooms.”

6. Uncle Henry’s — If you want to drive out toward Helena and the banks of Moon Lake, you owe it to yourself to have dinner at Uncle Henry’s. Dinner is served each Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. George Wright likes you to call for reservations at (662) 337-2757. Uncle Henry’s is the site of the old Moon Lake Club, a noted gambling establishment mentioned by Tennessee Williams in some of his dramas.

Hungry yet?

Posted in Mississippi | 6 Comments »

A Mississippi Delta weekend

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

The Oxford American is billing it as The Most Southern Weekend On Earth.

On July 9-10, lovers of Southern culture will gather in Clarksdale, Miss., to listen to music, attend interviews, eat, drink, dance and generally have a good time. You can register for the weekend by going to www.oxfordamerican.org.

If you don’t stop along the way, you can make it from west Little Rock to downtown Clarksdale in two and a half hours. Believe me, I know. I made the trip every week during the almost four years I worked for the Delta Regional Authority.

The name of the weekend is based on James C. Cobb’s excellent book “The Most Southern Place On Earth: The Mississippi Delta And The Roots Of Regional Identity.”

Here’s how Amazon describes Cobb’s book: “‘Cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed,’ Rupert Vance called it in 1935. ‘Nowhere but in the Mississippi Delta,’ he said, ‘are antebellum conditions so nearly preserved.’ This crescent of bottomlands between Memphis and Vicksburg, lined by the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, remains in some ways what it was in 1860: a land of rich soil, wealthy planters and desperate poverty — the blackest and poorest counties in all the South.

“And yet it is a cultural treasure house as well — the home of Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Charley Pride, Walker Percy, Elizabeth Spencer and Shelby Foote. Painting a fascinating portrait of the development and survival of the Mississippi Delta, a society and economy that is often seen as the most extreme in all the South, James C. Cobb offers a comprehensive history of the Delta, from its first white settlement in the 1820s to the present.”

For those who are intrigued with Delta culture, as I am, I can highly recommend Cobb’s book.

And for those who want a true Mississippi Delta experience, I can highly recommend a couple of days in Clarksdale.

The Most Southern Weekend On Earth will begin on a Friday night at Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero with performances by Robert Belfour, Jimbo Mathus and Kevin Gordon. Tickets for Friday night are $20.

Saturday events include:

– An 11 a.m. Mississippi Delta hot tamale talk and tasting moderated by my friend Amy Evans Streeter of the Southern Foodways Alliance at Ole Miss. When you have a chance, go to www.southernfoodways.com and check out some of the oral histories Amy has done. The 11 a.m. event will be at Delta Amusement Cafe at 348 Delta Ave.

Delta Amusement owner Bobby Tarzi is a true Southern character.

In an article last October in the Hattiesburg American, Jamie O’Quinn wrote: “Our group met early for breakfast the next morning at the Delta Amusement Cafe. Here owner Bobby Tarzi not only took our order, cooked and served, he also showed us how to play Tonk, the card game the locals play at his diner on their lunch break. As we made our way out to attend the workshop session at the Cutrer Mansion, I was met outside the diner door by local icon Puttin Hatchett, who showed me a few quick dice tricks while stopping periodically to return greetings from passersby on the street.”

Reading about Tonk and dice tricks, I’m reminded of this February 2008 story in the Press Register at Clarksdale: “On Friday night, the public integrity division of the Mississippi attorney general’s office conducted a raid on the Delta Amusement Cafe. … The raid was conducted in conjunction with the Mississippi Gaming Commission.”

Like I said, it’s a colorful place.

– A 1 p.m. interview conducted by OA editor Marc Smirnoff with writer Peter Guralnick, who’s considered on the top music writers in American history. Guralnick’s books include “Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream of Freedom” and “Last Train To Memphis: The Rise Of Elvis Presley.” The interview will take place at the Delta Blues Museum (www.deltabluesmuseum.org).

– At 4:30 p.m., the first OA Independent Beer Tasting and Contest at Rust, a fine restaurant along Delta Avenue.

The weekend concludes with performances at Ground Zero on Saturday night by Mose Allison and True Soul Revue. Tickets are $30 for Saturday night.

While on Delta Avenue, be sure and visit Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art Inc., which I’ve mentioned in previous posts.

Here’s how owner Roger Stolle describes the place on his website at www.cathead.biz: “Cat Head is a six-day-a-week store that features a full selection of blues CDS, DVDs, books, magazines, T-shirts, artwork and collectibles. It’s kind of like shopping in a juke joint, I like to say. It’s the kind of store I always dreamed of finding but never did. It has become a base of operations for other blues projects and a clearinghouse of information about area musicians, juke joints and festivals.

“The cool thing is that Clarksdale has a lot to offer. Great blues music four or five nights a week, every week — plus killer festivals a few times a year. Wonderful musicians, artists and characters live and work here. Since I moved here, I’m sure at least a dozen others have as well — from the Netherlands and all over the United States. … Because we’re part of the ‘roots music corridor’ that runs for Memphis to Chicago, we get tourists from all over the United States, Europe and Asia every single week. They come in search of the land where blues began, and when they finally reach the blues mecca of Clarksdale for the first time, and they drop by Cat Head, I know they’re hooked.”

Ground Zero is a great music venue, created to look like a juke joint, complete with old couches and chairs on the front porch of the former cotton sorting facility. But if you want a real juke joint experience, you also need to head to Red’s Lounge a block over on Sunflower Avenue.

Stolle writes: “Sure it looks closed and/or scary, but it’s actually just a big ol’ wonderful house party. It’s open some weekday nights and all weekends with live blues some weekends and special events during festival time. If you come to Clarksdale, you simply must visit Big Red at his killer juke. Regulars include T-Model Ford, Robert Belfour, Big T., Lightnin’ Malcolm, Wesley Jefferson and Big Jack Johnson.”

I earlier mentioned the Cutrer Mansion. It was the home of Blanche Cutrer, on whom Tennessee Williams based the character Blanche DuBois in “A Street Named Desire” and Carol Cutrere in “Orpheus Descending.” For years, the home was owned by the Catholic Church and used as a school. It’s now the Cutrer Cultural Arts Center, operated in association with Coahoma Community College, and is available for workshps and conferences

Williams is also thought to have used the house as a model for Belle Reve in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and as a model for Big Daddy’s house in “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.” Drop by and look at the house when in Clarksdale.

You should also find some time to hang out in the Delta Blues Museum either before or after the 1 p.m. Saturday interview. The museum includes the remains of the cabin from Stovall Farms where Muddy Waters lived during his days as a sharecropper and tractor driver. You can also find a guitar made from a plank of wood from Waters’ cabin and used on tour by ZZ Top.

Many of its people are poor, but the culture is incredibly rich. Just don’t expect the South as told by Disney. This time of year, it’s hot, dusty and gritty in Clarksdale. There are rundown buildings and burned-out homes. It’s real, which is why I enjoy it far more than an amusement park. This is not “Blues Land” complete with rides and a water park. It’s a struggling town where people live, die and try to hold onto the good parts of their past while battling to overcome racial divisions that remain deep and wide.

Yes, Clarksdale just might be the most Southern place on earth.

Posted in Mississippi | 2 Comments »

A day of Delta driving and dining

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Last year, I donated an item for a fundraising auction at Little Rock Catholic High School.

It wasn’t exactly an item.

I donated a day in the Delta — eating barbecue, viewing the sites, generally having fun.

I didn’t know if anyone would bid on it or not. But it was my gift to the school where my oldest son is receiving an excellent education.

To my surprise, a number of people bid. The high bidder was Gerald Grummer of Sherwood, a great guy who owns the Western Sizzlin at Jacksonville.

On Saturday, we finally got around to taking our trip. We were accompanied by two of Gerald’s sons, Jordan and Conner. Jordan majors in journalism at the University of Arkansas. Conner, who graduated last month from Catholic High, plans to attend the University of Arkansas and major in broadcast journalism.

Jordan is working this summer as a reporter for the Times Record at Fort Smith. He saw a far different world Saturday from the one he covers in west Arkansas.

Gerald began his career with Western Sizzlin in 1977 as a store manager in North Little Rock. He became the general manager of the Jacksonville location in 1995 and purchased the restaurant in February 2002.

We pulled out of Little Rock at 9 a.m. and made our first stop at my favorite vegetable stand in the state, the one at Biscoe in Prairie County where Arkansas Highway 33 intersects with U.S. Highway 70. I bought locally grown tomatoes and some squash.

On my way back to Little Rock from Arkansas City last week, I had purchased Bradley County pink tomatoes at the produce stand on U.S. 65 in Pine Bluff where Mrs. Jones’ restaurant once stood (I still miss that place). When the Arkansas tomatoes are ripe, we run through them quickly at our house. So those tomatoes were already gone.

I was tempted to buy a couple of big cantaloupes (I enjoy having half a cantaloupe for breakfast when they ripen each summer), but we had a long, hot day ahead of us. Frankly, I didn’t want to subject my guests to the smell of cantaloupes left in a hot car. It wouldn’t have bothered me. That smell always reminds me of childhood vacations, when my mother would buy cantaloupes on the way back from Texas.

After the stop at the vegetable stand, we pulled in just down the road at Martin’s IGA in Biscoe for something to drink. Back when I was going to Clarksdale, Miss., on a weekly basis, Martin’s was my morning stop for coffee and sausage biscuits. We were too late for biscuits Saturday morning. They were all gone. That was fine. There was plenty of eating ahead of us. I did, however, want the Grummers to get a feel for a real east Arkansas country store — one with lots of duck hunting photos on the wall.

We worked our way over to the Louisiana Purchase State Park, which I consider one of the most hauntingly beautiful places in the state. This National Historic Landmark just off U.S. Highway 49 preserves the initial point from which all surveys of the Louisiana Purchase began.

Twelve years after the 1803 purchase by President Thomas Jefferson, President James Madison ordered an official survey of the purchase area. This territory included parts of what are now 13 states stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. In October 1815, a survey party left the confluence of the Mississippi River and the Arkansas River and headed north to establish a north-south line known as the Fifth Principal Meridian.

On the same day, a party headed west from the confluence of the Mississippi River and the St. Francis River to establish an east-west line known as the baseline. The crossing of the two lines would be the point from which all future land surveys in the Louisiana Purchase would originate.

In 1921, two surveyors found marks on water tupelo trees in this headwater swamp. They knew this marked the initial survey point.

A granite marker was placed here in 1926 by the L’Anguille Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Despite the historical significance of this point where Monroe, Lee and Phillips counties intersect, few people visited until the Arkansas Parks and Tourism Department used revenues from Amendment 75 to build a modern boardwalk to the 1926 marker. There are interpretive exhibits along the boardwalk that tell of the Louisiana Purchase and explain what can be found in the swamps of east Arkansas.

The park is open from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. each day. Be ready for solitude. You likely will be the only one there. Twenty-one miles south of Brinkley, you turn onto Arkansas Highway 362 and travel two miles to the east. You can park right at the start of the boardwalk.

Having worked up an appetite after our visit to the park, we drove quickly to our first barbecue stop. When I put this day up for auction, I had planned for the first eating stop to be Shadden’s on U.S. 49 just west of Marvell. We reported last month the death of Wayne Shadden and the fact that his legendary country store likely won’t reopen. We drove by slowly Saturday and stared at the wreath still on the front door of the old building.

Our first eating stop ended up being on the other side of Marvell at Poplar Grove. It used to be called J.R.’s. It’s now called A.C.’s. But it looks just the same inside, the service is friendly and the pork sandwiches with slaw (we went with medium sauce rather than hot) are still good. Just look for the pink-and-purple pig on the wooden sign by the highway. It’s on your left as you head toward Helena.

We took a left at Walnut Corner and drove north on Arkansas Highway 1 to Marianna. The destination was Jones, the barbecue joint that no less of an authority than John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance believes might be the oldest continuously operated, black-owned restaurant in the South. Unfortunately, the place was closed. You just never know when it comes to getting barbecue at Jones. At least the Grummers were able to see the old house that holds the restaurant. Fresh hickory was piled outside.

We drove back south on Highway 1 and picked up our second barbecue sandwich of the day at Cypress Corner Bar-B-Q near Lexa. The barbecue is excellent here. Cypress Corner, in fact, ranks in my Top 10 of Arkansas barbecue restaurants.

With two eating stops behind us, we crossed the Mississippi River bridge at Helena and drove into Clarksdale. Taking a break from barbecue, we dropped by Hicks World Famous Hot Tamales to sample the tamales. The always affable Eugene Hicks took us into the back room to show us where he makes these tamales, which he ships across the country.

Since Gerald is a restaurant owner, he was fascinated by the $8,000 electric press that Mr. Hicks uses. That commercial press was intended for stuffing Italian sausages. But Mr. Hicks uses it for his beef tamale fillings. He has a tray with dozens of three-inch cylindrical plastic molds to shape the meat before it is hand rolled in white cornmeal and paprika. The 66-year-old Delta legend says the most time-consuming part of the job is rolling the tamales in corn shucks, which he orders from a company in Dallas. The tamales are then tied in groups of three.

We left Mr. Hicks and headed out to the Hopson Plantation on the edge of town. In 1935, Hopson’s owners began a serious effort to mechanize their cotton operations. In the fall of 1944, International Harvester introduced its first mechanical cotton picker at Hopson. The plantation has long claimed that it was the first place in the world to grow and harvest cotton completely by mechanical methods — no more rows of humans hoeing cotton in the summer and picking cotton in the fall.

The mechanization of agriculture changed the South, so Hopson is an important place for those who study Southern history. Fortunately, my friend James Butler was there on Saturday and hosted us for a visit in the Hopson commissary, which was built in 1924. The commissary now serves as a special events center.

We said so long to James and went downtown to Delta Avenue to visit Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art Inc., a store that Roger Stolle started in 2002.

“I was living in St. Louis with my now ex-wife (Jennifer), and after seven or eight years of visiting the Mississippi Delta, we started talking about moving there to start a blues business and try to support the far-from-flourishing blues scene as well as the culture and personalities behind it,” Roger writes on the store’s website. “I was running a marketing department at the time for a large retailer in downtown St. Louis, and the job was awesome — the kind people kill over. Still, it just felt like at the end of the day I was really just punching a clock, trying to make the most widgets and amass bigger and bigger slices of the pie. At some point, it just didn’t make sense to me anymore.”

Eight years later, the store is going strong.

Our fourth eating stop of the day was next on the agenda — Abe’s Barbecue in Clarksdale, which has been around since 1924. After World War II, Abe’s moved from the intersection of Fourth and Florida streets to the crossroads of U.S. Highways 61 and 49. Among the musicians who have eaten at Abe’s through the years are Paul Simon, Charlie Pride and Conway Twitty.

Michael Stern writes at www.roadfood.com: “Abe’s has been sung about in blues songs and written about in Faulknerian novels set in the Mississippi Dleta; and to the traveling foodie, it is a must-eat destination. Its legend goes back to 1924 when Abe Davis opened a snack stall on the street in Clarksdale. Today at the famous crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, Abe’s grandson Pat Davis maintains the name and the high-quality cooking, which includes thin-sliced, crisp-edged barbecued pork as well as that incongruous Mississippi Delta specialty, the hot tamale.”

Having had tamales with Mr. Hicks, we had our third pork sandwich of the afternoon at Abe’s.

It was time to head back west toward Arkansas.

Before crossing the bridge into the promised land, I showed my guests Uncle Henry’s Place on Moon Lake, just off U.S. 49. Moon Lake is an oxbow lake, and Uncle Henry’s is in the historic building that housed the Moon Lake Club (a casino famous across the Delta) in the 1930s. Tennessee Williams mentioned the Moon Lake Club (which he called the Moon Lake Casino) in “Summer and Smoke” and referred to Moon Lake itself in several other works.

According to www.roadtripusa.com, “Moon Lake was home to one of the South’s most famous Prohibition landmarks, the Moon Lake Club. Unlike speakeasies associated with thugs and tarts, this club was a family destination where parents could dance and gamble while the kids played in the lake. In a place and time when planes were still so rare the sound of their engines could interrupt work and empty classrooms, the club flew in fresh Maine lobster and Kansas City steak for its clientele of rich white Memphians.”

George Wright now operates the restaurant at Uncle Henry’s with service beginning at 6 p.m. each Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. George likes you to call ahead for reservations at (662) 337-2757. I can highly recommend his cooking. This is fine dining in an unlikely spot. Sarah Wright will also rent you one of the five rooms and serve you breakfast the next morning.

We didn’t eat with George on this night. Our final stop was to be that most famous of Arkansas Delta barbecue restaurants, Craig’s in DeValls Bluff.

We drove briefly around downtown Helena. We also stopped to read the new Civil War marker once we reached DeValls Bluff.  We walked into Craig’s at 7 p.m. This would be our fifth and final eating stop of the day.

Stern once wrote of Craig’s: “‘Mild, medium or hot?’ you will be asked when you place an order at this roadside smokehouse. Even the mild stuff packs a pleasant punch; medium is very spicy; hot is diabolical, enough to set your tongue aglow for hours. It was quite a sight to watch local boys in overalls come to Craig’s for ‘extra hots’ at lunch and quickly ingest two or three big sandwiches before hopping in their trucks and driving back to work. Not a one of the big fellers combusted from the heat.”

Well, these four Arkansas boys went the “medium” route on the barbecue sauce. As always, the food was excellent.

We arrived back in Little Rock less than 12 hours after we had departed — two states, four barbecue restaurants, one tamale restaurant, a swamp and several historic sites covered on a Saturday. It was quite a day.

Posted in Mississippi, Restaurants, Traveling Arkansas | 7 Comments »