Ghosts of the King Edward Hotel

 Most "professional" writers produce between one and two thousand words a day.  On a good day, I can easily do between five and ten thousand.  Even if half of that is garbage (which it often is), I'm still ahead of the game.  

What kills me is the process of going back and not only correcting grammar and sentence structure but deciding what stays and what goes.  I'd rather have dental work than spend a day doing that.  Most of the time, for blog and Facebook stuff, I don't do it.  For that writing, I'm just making words for the sheer exhilarating pleasure of it.  

My other Achilles heel is that I'll often get eighty percent finished with a project and have not one clue on how to close it out.  Most people like writing with a dramatic conclusion to the conflict, but you almost never get that in life, so I'm not very good at imagining it.  As a result, I have about two dozen pieces in a folder named "unfinished" because I couldn't figure out how to end them.

One of these pieces I started a long time ago.  Before they renovated the King Edward Hotel, young people who weren't very good at balancing risks and rewards would sometimes break into the abandoned hotel and explore.  I always found that block of West Capitol Street fascinating.  There were all these really cool buildings with nothing inside them.  I knew they had histories, and I would often imagine what they were.  

One of these long abandoned buildings had an elaborate green and white mosaic in front of it that read "Bon Ton Cafe."  There were several places around West Capitol Street that had inlaid tile decorations like that.  The Mayflower has probably the most elaborate mosaic, but even Lott Furniture had one.  The Standard Life Building has one, but it uses big cut sheets of stone rather than square tiles.  I imagined, back in the 20s or 30s, there was a guy who went from business to business, selling his skills at laying mosaic tiles.  

Back before the explosion of the internet, if I wanted to find out something about Jackson's past, I had to go to the library.  I could ask the librarian, but if they didn't know off the top of their head, they pointed me to their extensive collection of Jackson papers on microfilm and microfiche.  I got pretty good at using those machines.  While they were fascinating to use, there wasn't such a thing as a text search feature.   The papers were organized by date, so the best you could do was to go to the date you were interested in and scan whole editions to see if they had the information you wanted.

Without a specific date in mind, I tried just pulling random dates in the 20s and 30s in hopes of finding maybe an ad or a review of the Bon Ton Cafe.  No such luck.  Since I had to make up a lot of the details anyway, I decided to make up all the details and create a false history for the Bon Ton Cafe, based on what I knew about The Mayflower, Primos, The Rotisserie, and The Elite.

Now that I have access to newspapers.com, I've gone back and checked for real information about the Bon Ton Cafe, and it turns out a lot of my guesses were right, but some were terribly wrong.   Since every restauranteur I ever met who got their start before 1960 was an immigrant from a Mediterranean country, I assumed the guy who started the Bon Ton was too, and said he was Lebonese.  That was wrong; he was from Germany.  The imaginary menu I came up with turned out to be exactly right.

Between the end of the war and 1960, businesses on that block of West Capitol did pretty well.  With the train depot on the other side of the street, they could always count on business.  They couldn't always count on the depot, though, by 1960, passenger travel dropped off considerably.  Dumas Milner bought the King Edward in 1955.  He modernized it by replacing the grand staircase with an escalator, then considered fantastically modern and impressive.  By June 1967, he locked the doors on the King Edward, never to open it again in his lifetime.  

Milner was a friend of my grandfather, and in all my studies of Jackson's history, he's the most interesting to me.  There were always rumors that Milner was connected to the mob.  Those were kind of true, but mostly not true.  My father explained it to me once.  In the old days (before 1980), all the banks had a policy that automobiles were not considered fixed assets (because they moved), so dealerships who borrowed money based on the value of their inventory had to pay off the entire note once a year, and then once the old note was paid off, they would write a new note so they could buy new inventory.  If the time came to pay off the annual note, and a dealership didn't have the cash on hand, it wasn't unusual for Jackson dealerships to borrow the money from New Orleans bootleggers or Memphis merchants and then pay them off once the bank wrote a new note.  If this sounds convoluted and unnecessary, the banks eventually decided it was too.

Even though Milnew owned hotels and restaurants and Pinesol, he made most of his money from selling cars, so when he had to, he would borrow money from these guys.  Besides all that, being in the hotel and restaurant business in Mississippi before 1966 meant you had to deal with New Orleans bootleggers because every hotel in Jackson had a bar, and selling alcohol was illegal (although, if you did, you had to pay tax on it) and at one point, Milner owned The King Edward, The Robert E Lee, and the Sun n' Sand.  To get around the laws against serving booze, these bars were all legally set up as clubs.  To gain membership to the club, you paid the hotel clerk a buck or two, and you got a card saying you were a club member and you could drink.  Milner owned the Patio Club, among others.

The King Edward Hotel Died because Mississippians quit using passenger trains, but they switched to America's new obsession, getting every human being in the United States to own a car, which Milner also made money on, so no matter what, he was in the good.  By the time I met Dumas Milner, he had retired after a stroke.  Most of his businesses were either sold off or closed down.  The Sun 'n Sand was still going strong.  My grandfather loved him and loved the fact that a guy who could be successful at so many different things lived here in Jackson.

I'm going to try and finish my piece on the Bon Ton Cafe this week.  It's an utterly meaningless story, but I enjoyed it.  It reminds me of being a little boy and eating at the Mayflower or Primos downtown.  When they reopened the King Edward Hotel, a whole bunch of ghosts flew out.  Maybe one of them wanted me to write this story.

Where to From Here

For many years now, I've been digging into Jackson's past, trying to figure out in my own mind what really happened between 1950 and 1970 with regard to Jackson's schools.  My initial motivation was to find out what part and what responsibility my dad and my Uncle Boyd played in all this.

For a while, I've been thinking, maybe this could be a book.  Maybe I could start with my High School Science Teacher giving me his opinion on what made my private high school different from the other private high schools, and then in subsequent chapters, writing out all the stuff I've collected over the years.

This project, at times, borders on an obsession.  Lately, I've been thinking that anybody I could hold accountable is dead.  Anybody whom I could absolve is also dead.  I was just a kid.  Nearly everybody in this story who is still alive was also either a kid or a very young teacher, and while very young teachers can be very brave, and some were, they were also not accountable.  

Part of what I wanted to accomplish was to resolve in my own mind whether or not my Father and Uncle ruined Jackson.  I think I've done that.  I also wanted to resolve in my own mind that my private school was different from the other private schools, both in its origins and purposes.  I think I've done that.  

Among other things, I can tell you that St. Andrews, through the years, paid a price for not playing along with the Mississippi Private School Association.  Even though St. Andrews tops every measurable aspect of a school in Mississippi, they still face challenges for not joining the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools.

What happened to the schools in Jackson created a panic that ended in one of the worst cases of white flight in the 20th century, a panic that left Jackson bereft of needed resources and a population that continues to decline.

I think my motivations for studying this were probably selfish, even though I was seven when it happened, and so were nearly all of my friends.  

I don't know what the future of this project is.  There is an awful lot of fiction I want to do, and I worry sometimes that I can't do both.  I'm also worried that I might be trying to vindicate myself when nobody is accusing me.  There's no real mystery about what happened in Jackson and what its impact was.  What happened in Jackson basically turned Madison, Brandon, and Pearl into Jackson, or whatever Jackson was, and Jackson proper is left as a sort of unresolved mess that a lot of people wish would just go away.  

A lot of times when I write, I confess.  This is me confessing.  I don't know where to go from here.  

Count Ohno and the Imaginary Dog

Tom Cotton was at work.  At sixty-four, he had enough life savings to last him about eleven months, so he figured he’d be working till the day he died.  He didn’t mind work.  He rather liked it.  If he died working, he wouldn’t mind.  He just wished that being a DJ was as good a job today as it was thirty years ago.  He thought a lot about the fact that, in a couple of years, he’d be heading into a new century, having dedicated his life to a job nobody really cared much about anymore.  

Everybody thought Tom used a made-up name for the radio, but Cotton was the name of his ancestors.  The only thing Tom made up for the radio was Wonder Boy, the imaginary dog that was the butt of most of his jokes.   Tom was the top morning man in central Mississippi for twenty years until a young fella named Mateer took over that spot in the eighties.  Mateer played Top Forty at a time when MTV on cable television had reignited young people’s interest in top-forty music.  

Tom preferred to pick his own music.  Some country, some top forty, with a focus on singers familiar to Mississippi, Bobby Gentry especially.  He’d been in radio long enough to know how playlist services worked; he just preferred to use his own.  In his current job, he gave out the station ID and the time before playing the news over the wire.  When he got to work, he played the day’s recording of the Rush Limbaugh show.  His station played Limbaugh twice a day, once live during the day and once recorded during his shift.  Nearly every day, he received a call from somebody who thought they were talking to Rush.  Sometimes, Tom would talk to them.  He’d done talk radio before, and it was nice having somebody to talk to.  After Rush, he played Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell until four in the morning, when he’d play the recorded playlist until his replacement came at 6:00 a.m.  Sometimes, he’d record commercials and voice-overs, which gave him a little extra money.  

As the night wore on, Tom’s job got quieter and quieter.  When he first started working in radio, the studio was on the first floor of the Lamar Life Building.  A glass window let passers-by look into the studio and see Tom at work and try to catch a glimpse of Boy Wonder, who Tom always said was outside doing his business and would be back soon.  There was some discussion in Jackson about whether Boy Wonder was a real dog or imaginary.  Tom never let on what he knew.  His current studio is in rented office space on the west side of Interstate 55, across from Devilla Plaza on the east.  He sat between the car dealerships and the Chinese restaurants.  When he broadcast from the Lamar Life Building, everybody knew where he was.  Now, nobody cares.

Sometimes, when it got very slow at work, Tom would answer fan mail sent to Count Ohno Notagain.  When Tom worked for one of the top media companies in Mississippi, they had offices and radio studios in the Lamar Life Building and an independent television station a few blocks away on Commerce Street.  

There were two television stations in that part of town.  One was the fabled WLBT, one of Mississippi’s oldest television stations and the only one in the country ever to lose its license for associating with too many racists.  WLBT was an NBC affiliate, but WLFB was independent.  Like most independent television stations, they survived by broadcasting syndicated programs, Gilligan's Island, Star Trek, The Brady Bunch, etc, and packages of old movies.  

Starting in 1964, WLFB signed a contract to offer “Shock Theater.” on Saturday nights.  ScreenGems, the television arm of Columbia Pictures, assembled a package of fifty-two horror films made before 1942.  Most were by Universal, but it also included King Kong, Son of Kong, The Body Snatchers, and I Walked With A Zombie from RKO.  

Most of the stations that carried the Shock Theater package put together a program where a host, sometimes given a creepy costume like a character in one of the movies, would introduce The Mummy’s Hand, Monster on Campus, or House of Frankenstein, and then again lead either into or out of commercial breaks.  

The station manager asked Tom if he wanted to do a voice-over to introduce the movies, but Tom decided he loved the idea and wanted to do more.  He asked if he could use the studio space where they shot commercials and do a program like they had in the bigger cities with Zacherly, Sir Graves Ghoulie, and others.  Tom still owned his father’s 130-acre farm near Learned, Mississippi, and there he had some woodworking tools he was pretty good with.  He made a coffin out of pine boards and stood it upright on a base with locking casters.  He could stand inside and open the coffin lid like a door to start the show.  He built a “mad scientist table,” also on casters, which he decorated with test tubes and beakers from Mississippi School Supply and blinking light bulbs he got from Irby Electric.  He built a throne with locking casters on the feet and decorated it with plastic Halloween skulls.  These three props would be stored in a corner until Saturday nights when Tom would roll them into place with a clip-on mic that dragged the chord behind, and he mostly adlibbed his lines, although he spent most of the week trying to figure out what he would say.  Boy Wonder, the imaginary dog, was replaced by Bubbles The Blob, played by his wife, crouching down and covering herself with several layers of plastic sheeting.

Mississippi Monster Matinee was the surprise hit of the sixties and seventies.  WLFB even managed to license it to stations in the Delta and the Golden Triangle.  School children wrote letters to Count Ohno Notagain and drew pictures of him and bubbles.  For a costume, Tom found an old Tuxcedo at the Goodwill Store.  It had some dry rot at some of the seams, but he was going to dirty it up anyway.  By thirty-five, he still had a full head of hair, but it was already dead white.  On a trip to New Orleans, he visited a magic shop and costume shop, where he bought a white handlebar mustache, a white goatee beard, and white mutton chop sideburns.  A little greasepaint gave him circles under the eyes and thin black lips, and that became Count Ohno.  Tom joked that he looked like Colonel Sanders in a Dracula costume, but the look was memorable, and his young fans loved it.

During the sixties and seventies, Count Ohno made appearances at the Arts Festival in Jackson and the State Fair.  For people of a certain age, Count Ohno was a bigger star than Doc Severson, George Jones, or any of the other acts the grownups brought in.  Eventually, Tom cleared it with his station manager to start a Count Ohno Notagain Fan Club.  The station always figured the show was six months from failing, so they let him do it as long as he paid the expenses.  He rented out a PO box at the downtown post office in the Federal Court House and started telling kids an address where they could write to him.  For five dollars, they could join the Count Ohno Fan Club and receive an official Membership Card, a signed 8 x 10 photograph of the Count, and a personal letter written by the count and slobbered on by bubbles, the blob.

As the seventies wore on, Screen Gems quit offering the Shock Theater, but there were other packages, including one that had early Ray Harryhausen films, The Giant Claw, some Hammer Horror, and Tom’s favorite, giant monster movies from Japan.  One night, Tom put on a lab coat, some thick glasses, and a heavy accent to become Professor Tojo Ohno, who talked about how horrible Godzilla and Ghidora were for Japan.  He thought it was incredibly funny, and so did his wife, but an irate German woman called the station to complain about the horribly racist portrayal of our Japanese Allies Tojo Ohno was, so Tom decided not to ever play him again.  It was just the one person who complained, but Tom was like that.  He never wanted to offend anybody.

When he started playing Count Ohno, Tom had to draw on the bags under his eyes and the wrinkles on his forehead.  He has all these naturally now, but he still draws them in as part of the ritual of getting into character.  Of all the things Tom had been, of all the parts he played in live, being Count Ohno was the most fun.

The station canceled the Mississippi Monster Movie Matinee by 1985, but Count Ohno Notagain still made convention appearances and command performances at Halloween parties at local nightclubs, like Hal and Mals.  He was always surprised at how many kids listened to his morning show and then watched him on television but never realized he was both people.  Tom never admitted to fans that Count Ohno was actually Tom Cotton, the radio DJ.  It was well into the twenty-first century before the secret made its way to his many fans.

For the Monster Movie project and other programs Tom came up with, he was often left to sell advertising himself if he wanted the show to go on.  Tom had a few places he could always count on for an ad.  BeBop Record Shop, The Little Big Store, and JL Jones Furniture were all regulars.  He sold ads to Mac Bailey Fine Cars in Pearl, where your job was your credit.  Bailey had a pretty active racket selling late-model used cars in crappy condition to desperate people on a weekly payment plan they couldn’t afford; then, after several weeks of struggling to keep up with the weekly payments, he would repossess the car and sell it again.  Some of his better cars were sold six or seven times this way before they quit working.

Tom could always count on Clarance Wong of Wong’s Authentic Chinese Kitchen and Lounge.  Wong was authentically Korean, but nobody cared.  His name wasn't Clarance or Wong either, but that’s what they put on his immigration papers, and he always got a kick out of the fact that he tricked the government.  Wong had a menu with almost thirty choices on it, nearly all made with the same ten ingredients, but your choice of protein.  Wong built up quite a reputation and quite a business over the years.  He wanted very much to leave it to the daughter he loved so much, but she decided to get her MD at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and now she’s an anesthesiologist and not a very good cook.  

Tom’s wife died about six years ago.  He fell in love with her in Junior High School and never thought about another woman.  His father left him a little farm up around Learned with a house on it.  He and his wife lived there.  She had a garden and taught third grade in Raymond.  Tom always fancied himself a farmer.  His father was, and he grew up on that little farm helping his father with the beans and corn.  Farming didn’t pay what it used to, and small farms never paid much.  Once Tom got into the radio business, he eventually gave up on agriculture.  He still lives in the house now, but he rents most of the land out to a guy who grows Christmas trees.  

For a while, Tom served in the Mississippi House of Representatives.  His wife taught school, and he still worked in radio to pay the bills, but when the house was in session, he’d go from his desk in the radio studio to his desk on the House floor and do the people’s business.   As white people moved out of rural Hinds County, districts were redrawn to preserve white majorities for a while, but ultimately, Tom’s district began looking for black candidates, so he retired from the house.  He still paid close attention to every bill that passed through the Mississippi House Of Representatives, even though he couldn’t do much about it.  

As Mississippi raced toward the twenty-first century, Tom felt like his best days were behind him.  Most people remembered him for things he didn’t really do anymore, at least not professionally.  At least two generations of Mississippians grew up listening to him on the radio and watching him on television, but they were becoming parents themselves now, and fond memories of Boy Wonder, the imaginary dog, and Count Ohno doesn’t pay the bills.  What people do because they love it and what people do so they can feed their progeny are usually two different things.

When six o’clock comes along, Tom will drive back to Learned.  He’ll make a cup of coffee and sit on his porch and watch the sun rise over the horizon where Jackson, the State Capitol, the Lamar Life Building, and his wife’s grave lay.  If you can measure a man by his memories, Tom Cotton is one of the richest men in Hinds County.  For tens of thousands of Mississippians, Boy Wonder sits curled up at Tom’s feet.  They can see him, even if Tom can’t.    Count Ohno’s throne sits in the barn, under a tarp, ready for the next show.  Until next time, my ghoulies.  Sleep tight!  If you dare! Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha!

Brittania on Amazon

 I've started watching Brittania on Amazon. I'm not sure why since they canceled it before finishing it.

There's a character in it that's a combination of Oedipus and Lear, so that's interesting, although, at some point, I start wondering if they're going to do anything new.

I struggle with the historicity of the show. Everybody is wearing pants, including the Romans. It has a scene where a druid harvests mistletoe using a scythe, which checks with the historical record (at least according to the Romans), but the scythe wasn't silver; it was rusted and gross. The Druids, it seems, all have eating disorders. Every one of their men weighs less than 100 pounds.

They make the point several times that the druids and the Celts never write anything down because of some religious objection that they never really specify. That comes directly from Roman historians, but a lot of people question it, including JRR Tolkien.

The druids and the Celts wrote constantly. Everything we have from them is covered in the symbols of their complex alphabet. They grew flax and raised sheep, so it just doesn't ring true that these people didn't write. Tolkien and other historians believed that when the Romans converted to Christianity, they destroyed all of the Druid and Celtic writing they found. We know they did that with other cultures, including older Christian texts, so that seems possible.

Tolkien believed that among these destroyed Celtic and Druid texts were the original myths of the British Isles. He believed, as I believe, that myths define a people. Having them be "true" or "historical" isn't the point. The stories define the culture, and without our own myths, we developed our culture based on first-century Judaic and Roman/christian myths.

What's left of my people's mythology (the Scottish) is fairytales and ghost stories. Waterhorses, werewolves, kelpies and selkies. Tolkien pointed out that the texts we do have, like Beowulf, were Norse stories transferred to Britain by Norse invaders.

Some people believe that the Autherian stories are remnants of Celtic myths, but while those stories have a lot of Celtic trappings, they are decidedly Christian, which suggests, to me at least, that if they are Celtic myths, they are remnants that were Christianized.

Without any genuine British myths to work with, Tolkien decided to make his own, and that's where we get the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Even that is heavily influenced by Germanic and Norse myths, but his Elves, with their elvish writings, are clearly meant to be celts, and Gandalf, with his pointed hat and long beard, is the very image of a druid (as described by the Romans.)

They do get a couple of things right in the series. For one thing, they have the Druids practicing human sacrifice. We have a fair amount of archeological evidence this actually did happen. They go a bit far, though, and have the Druid village decorated with thousands of human skulls and moments of cannibalism. None of that has any historical or archeological evidence.

A great deal of the show focuses on Kelly Reilly, wearing a wolf stole, a leather bustier, shooting a long bow with Robin Hood-like accuracy, all the while her auburn locks flow in the wind, with a mind of its own. All of that is pretty hot. She's basically a Celtic Xenia Warrior Princess. I like the idea of female heroes; it fits well with my people's mythic view of ourselves. I do wish these writers would keep in mind that flawed heroes are more interesting than perfect ones, and tragic heroes are the most interesting of all. Kerra's only flaw is her constant self-doubt, which becomes annoying.

Early episodes have Ian McDiarmid playing King Pellenor. It's like the writers sat down one day and said, "hmmm, what's a good name for a British mythic character? Oh, I know!" McDiarmid must be one of those guys who looked seventy his whole life because Return of the Jedi was forty years ago, and he looks exactly the same. He wears a beard in this, but once he speaks, all you can hear is, "yesssss, my young apprentisssss."

I'm gonna ride it out to the end because this is a period I am pretty interested in. That might be my undoing, though, because it'll frustrate me if they do it wrong.

Claymores are weapons that came out of converting the Scottish to Christianity, so I don't expect to see any of those (but I probably will). I would like to see some kilts, though. I can't think of a reason why all these weirdos wear pants.