Poor in Mississippi

I grew up in New York and attended high school in the middle class suburbs of Long Island. However, I've lived in Austin, Texas for over forty years. I recall being astounded the first time I saw the tiny white wood-frame houses skirting downtown Houston when I visited there in the Seventies. The houses were referred to as "shotgun shacks"-- nicknamed that way because a single blast from a shotgun would kill all the occupants. The warm Southern climate made shoddy houses workable, though hardly acceptable for human habitation. The rows of houses had a Civil War feel, reminiscent of slave housing or perhaps homes at the level predicted for tenant farmers. My neighborhood in Austin, believe it or not, still shows signs of the shoddy housing. A few shacks dot the area even as the property values push $500,000 for some of the town homes, condos and solidly built McMansions.

A few nights ago I had a conversation with a friend who grew up in Mississippi. I'll give him the fictional name of Del. He speaks in deliberate, somewhat syrupy cadences at a pace slow enough to drive a New Yorker to finishing his sentences. But I always love hearing his recollections of a childhood growing up poor in Biloxi, Mississippi. He has told me his mother worked at a Shrimp Factory. I immediately thought of Forrest Gump. This story is real though. Sometimes his mother left  for work at the factory with absolutely no food in the pantry. Del, as only a little tike, sought her out at the job one day because he was hungry. But Del went into a bit more detail with this telling and I found myself amazed at his story.

Del's mother was initially housed in a "shotgun house, provided by the company." The company was the Shrimp Factory. Eventually their family bought their own house, still a shotgun house but their own this time an apparently a step up from living on property owned by the company. They had no sheet rock and the walls and would hunt around for cardboard to provide some insulation for the colder times of year. He doesn't recall his mother ever having a wedding ring. She did have 8 children with her husband, four boys and four girls. Del had a job working in a store as a 13 year old and got a job at the store for his 11 year old brother. They used some of their earnings to buy furniture for the house. The four girls occupied a single room. They even took in a runaway girl which, I guess, added another occupant to the room. Each corner of the room had a piece of rope hanging from its sides and served as a clothes closet for each of the girls.

I asked about his father. The father worked for a timber company and one time a pile of logs fell down and put him out of commission for an entire year. The family owned 95 acres of land and moved into the city. The sold the land for less than $1.00 an acre! Del said moving into town was likely a mistake. They may have subsisted better on the land. Biloxi and the Shrimp Factory offered wages and an alternative to subsistence farming.

Del joined the Air Force in 1963 and got some training. He did find himself back in Biloxi working is stores and driving delivery trucks before moving on to Texas. Del could tell I enjoyed hearing about a world so foreign and exotic and drifted slightly in tone. He told me that there were good times and "we didn't know we were poor because everybody was poor." He said "there were good times and bad times and the house was filled with laughter with my mother." There was a gossip about the sister's boyfriends. But the laughter died down as the years passed and his mother grew older. I liked the simplicity of Del's observation and its connection to all homes, rich and poor. People make the laughter happen and relationships make us rich in those moments, but with the passage of time all these things fade to oblivion. Del said he had no bed for his entire childhood. "I slept on on the floor, probably until the age of twenty-two."

Incredulous, I asked "On the floor?"

"Well, on a palette on the floor."

So different than my existence on Long Island.

There it is-- a conversation between a relocated Yankee and a Southern man.

Frank Gifford: Last of the Great White Running Backs

Frank Gifford was a hero of mythological proportions in the late 1950s. Frank played running back for the New York Giants. New York has a way of creating legends, mythologizing sports stars and gilding them with Greek-godlike attributes. Frank fit the bill. He had the looks. Frank ran gracefully as a running back as the New York Giants football team, the tam that found its identity in hallowed Yankee Stadium. As a ten year old kid I liked the guy, number 16 on his uniform, and he embodied the traits we liked in our Fifties heroes-- modesty, hard work and a nose for victory. Frank outlines his exploits and the hard scrabble early days of the New York football team in The Glory Game, his 2008 book about the NFL championship game of 1958.

He never deviates from his modest temperament across the pages of The Glory Game. Gifford, ever the ambassador of goodwill demonstrates equal affection for his teammates guys like Sam Huff and Charlie Conerly and for the Baltimore Colts, the opponents, a team that included Johnny Unitas, Gino Marchetti and Raymond Berry.

Gifford cannot claim to be the last of the great white running backs-- that was my term. Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung achieved great running statistics for the Green Bay Packers in the 1961 season, after Gifford's glory years had passed. And Jim Brown symbolized the future of football. Jim Brown anticipated the arrival of the great African-American running back. Jim Brown, Lenny Moore and Bobby Mitchell, the early black stars, jump out from the cold, hard statistics on rushing yards as the future of pro football. The sport had to accommodate the unquestioned superiority of the African-American running back, for sports by definition are a level playing field.

But Gifford had a certain aura. He as a King of New York in the 1950s-1960s and beyond. He straddled the electronic era, the era of television and football's emergence as the TV sport par excellence. He announced the games on Monday Night Football, poised between Don Meredith and Howard Cosell, the Texas hick and the New York prick. Both guys were funny and they needed the gentler spirit of Frank Gifford to class up the joint.

Gifford got in trouble with sex scandal, a tabloid affair with buxom Suzen Johnson in 1997. His Monday Night Football days were numbered. Frank partook of the electronic landscape for gossip long before TMZ made it an art form. And even that hotel room setup adds to the luster. Suzen did a Playboy spread and you had to sympathize with Frank's fall to temptation.  Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank's wife and a powerful figure in daytime TV, struggled to keep the marriage to Frank going despite the massive media circus and the marriage continues to the present day. Frank is now 83 years old.

But Frank should not be forgotten. The son of an oilfield worker, Gifford did not have the grades to get accepted to USC. He eventually made it there. His strong delivery as a TV announcer proves he had no lack of intelligence. Frank was a King of New York, pals with Toots Shor make that a natural fact. Gifford had all the right stuff, really proved himself a natural for the Big Apple spotlight. His book, The Glory Game, continues in the vein of grace and modesty. He acknowledges David Halberstram would have been the man to capture the 1958 NFL championship game and all of the sociological implications-- the integration of American life through television and the rise of Frank's favorite sport. Halberstram died in a car accident while pursuing the subject of football's rise from the 1958 championship game. But Frank's version makes a damn fine book, smooth and effortless as a crafty running back cutting through the line.