Today started with an unusual Zoom conversation. There were four cousins, all on my maternal grandfather’s side of my family. One of us was in St. Louis (8 a.m.), I was in Washington (9 a.m.), one in Denmark (3 p.m.), and one in Sydney (11 p.m.). It’s the first time we tried this, and it worked out pretty well.

Did I learn anything on this call? Well, mainly it was talking about things I already knew, but….I learned that my St. Louis cousin (second cousin, once removed) and one of my first cousins in St. Louis (not on the call) both studied psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. That seems random, doesn’t it? These two people do not know each other, even though they live only about 10 miles from each other. One is about 20 years younger than the other. But still…….random.

Studying in Mississippi just seems random, doesn’t it? Especially if you aren’t studying at Ole Miss in Oxford. And Mississippi is sort of an unknown state to most Americans, I guess.

My connections with Mississippi? First (not chronologically), my son in law Josh comes from Columbia, Mississippi, although he left there during high school, and moved to New York. His father Vernon recently passed away and Josh, Michelle, Josh’s two sons, and his mother Gail, took a trip to Columbia to bury his ashes last month.

Second, the first real vacation I ever took with my family (mother, father, sister and grandmother) was a road trip in 1958 to Edgewater Gulf, Mississippi to stay at the Edgewater Gulf Hotel, a 400 room hotel (owned by the owners of Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel) built in 1926, and demolished and replaced by a shopping center in the early 1970s. I remember a number of things about that spring vacation trip. Here goes:

First, I remember staying with cousins in Memphis on the way south (I went to an alcohol infused party with my young cousin, something that at age 16 I had not experienced in St. Louis), second my parents stayed with my mother’s aunt and uncle in their one bedroom apartment and got into an argument that lasted until 3 a.m. about who would sleep in the bedroom and who would sleep on the foldaway couch, and I was surprised, even at a young age, that every shop in downtown Memphis seemed to bear the name of a Jewish shopkeeper.

In 1957, there was no Interstate highway in that part of the country, so we were basically on two lane highways, and it took much longer to get places than it does today. I remember stopping for the night in Granada MS and being surprised how down at the heels the town looked, and how difficult it was for my mother to agree to stay at any of the motels in town. (My mother had a rule then: don’t stay at a motel if it does not have a swimming pool. Why she had this rule none of us knew, because she didn’t swim.)

Then I remember that about 20 miles north of Jackson the road became a divided four lane highway, with a broad green median strip, something that didn’t exist in St. Louis (to my knowledge) and I thought that everything was really up to date in Jackson.

The beachfront in the Gulfport/Biloxi area (Edgewater Gulf only existed as the hotel, as far as I know) was filled with “modern” motels and restaurants, and that impressed me. I didn’t know what to expect. I don’t remember any of the restaurants, but I do know that we went to one, taking my good high school friend Ellen Scheff (also on vacation with her family) to a restaurant located on some water inland from the coast, and the waiter dropped a lobster on her head.

My grandmother wanted to stop and see her former sister-in-law, Sylvia Wrobel, who had been married to her brother Sam Wrobel (he, the former second for Jack Dempsey, and then sought after hand model), but I don’t think we ever found her. At least that’s my memory.

We did find the brother of my Uncle Joe Frey (he was married to my father’s sister Irene; they lived in Dallas). I think his name was Abe, and he had a pharmacy in Biloxi; I remember that my parents went into the drug store unannounced and said hello to him, but their meeting certainly did not generate any excitement.

I think my next venture through Mississippi was during law school, when I drove from St. Louis to New Orleans with a friend (he tells me there were three of us; I am sure he is correct) in my 1964 VW bug. I remember the roadside lemonade stand with White and Colored windows separated by a two by four, with the woman selling the lemonade sitting where she could serve either. I ordered my lemonade at the Colored window and had no trouble being served. I asked her what would have happened if I were Black and went to the White window. She told me that she would have politely asked me to step (one or two steps) over to the other window. Separate but equal.

Then, in the spring of 1998, Edie and I spent a week in Mississippi (we had to go somewhere). I remember a fair amount about that trip. Edie, who keeps kosher out as well as at home, had a hard time finding anything to eat, and had a lot of salad. The only fish was non-kosher catfish in most places, and vegetarianism must have been looked upon as a disease. We went to Jackson (stayed in a nice hotel outside of downtown) and went to a museum which had a special exhibit about (I think) classical Spanish art. We went to Natchez and visited the synagogue where we were shown around and saw a photographic exhibit of old Natchez (we still have the catalog). We went to Canton (speaking of my uncle Joe Frey, who was born in Canton) and found Joe’s father grave in the Jewish corner of the municipal cemetery, and the location on the town square where he had his dry goods store. We went to Port Gibson, where we were able to visit the closed synagogue and the cemetery, where we saw the prominent graves of the grandparents of a St. Louis friend. We saw part of the Natchez Trace. We went to the Vicksburg Battlefield.

And we went to Springfield Plantation, near Natchez. Springfield plantation is known to be the oldest house in this part of the country, built in 1791. It is noted for several things, including being the site of the marriage of Andrew and Rachel Jackson. When we visited, it was lived in and maintained by a man named Arthur Edward Cavalier de LaSalle, and he gave quite a good historic tour. He had taken the house over in the 1970s when it was in ruins, restored it, and operated it as an historic tourist site until his death in 2008 (according to Wikipedia). He was quite a character. He said he loved living at the plantation away from everyone else because everyone but him in the state had what he termed “Mississippi pea brains” and he couldn’t tolerate them. He also had nothing good to say about the United States of America at the time. Was he a Confederate sympathizer? Not at all; he even had less good to say about them. He was, pure and simple, a monarchist and looked forward to the time when the entire of the current United States would again be under the control of the British royal family.

There you have it. The highlights of me and Mississippi.