Mississippi Oral History Program

Transcription

1 Mississippi Oral History Program Hurricane Katrina Oral History Project An Oral History with Rod Dickson-Rishel Interviewer: James Pat Smith Volume

2 2011 The University of Southern Mississippi This transcription of an oral history by The Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage of The University of Southern Mississippi may not be reproduced or published in any form except that quotation of short excerpts of unrestricted transcripts and the associated tape recordings is permissible providing written consent is obtained from The Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. When literary rights have been retained by the interviewee, written permission to use the material must be obtained from both the interviewee and The Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. This oral history is a transcript of a taped conversation. The transcript was edited and punctuation added for readability and clarity. People who are interviewed may review the transcript before publication and are allowed to delete comments they made and to correct factual errors. Additions to the original text are shown in brackets [ ]. Minor deletions are not noted. Original tapes and transcripts are on deposit in the McCain Library and Archives on the campus of The University of Southern Mississippi. Louis Kyriakoudes, Director The Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage 118 College Drive #5175 The University of Southern Mississippi Hattiesburg, MS An Oral History with Rod Dickson-Rishel, Volume 966 Interviewer: James Pat Smith Transcriber: Stephanie Scull-DeArmey Editors: Micah Hicks, Stephanie Scull-DeArmey

3 Biography Reverend Rod Dickson-Rishel was born October 1, 1956, in Gulfport, Mississippi, to Mr. Horace Smokie Rishel (born July 16, 1914, in Long Beach, Mississippi) and Mrs. Leola Mae Yeizer (born February 22, 1924, in Pennsylvania). His father was a carpenter, and he worked in construction. His mother was a homemaker and mother of seven children. Reverend Dickson-Rishel attended Long Beach Public Schools in Long Beach, Mississippi, Eastern Kentucky University, from which he was graduated, and Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, from which he earned a Master s of Divinity. During his working life, he has been employed in residential construction, industry manufacturing engineering, and the Christian ministry in United Methodist Churches in Texas and Mississippi. At the time of this interview, he was the pastor of the Mississippi City United Methodist Church. On September 3, 1982, he married his wife, Mrs. Dorothy Dickson-Rishel (born July 6, 1959, in Texas). She is a clinical psychologist who, at the time of this interview, was on staff at Memorial Hospital in Gulfport, Mississippi. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology, and she is also an ordained Methodist minister, holding a Master s of Divinity. They have two daughters, Savanah Jane and Emma Grace. Reverend Dickson-Rishel lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast through both Hurricane Camille in 1969, and Hurricane Katrina (2005). He is a member of and the chaplain of the Gulfport Rotary Club, and he was the Coordinator of United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) prior to Hurricane Katrina. He is the founding director of Seashore Homeless Ministry in Biloxi, Mississippi. He enjoys fishing and boating.

4 Table of Contents Family... 1 Education... 2 Work history... 2 Called to ministry... 2 Churches pastored... 3 Gulfport Rotary Club... 3 Coordinator, United Methodist Church, Seashore District, disaster relief... 3 Characteristics of good caregivers in disaster... 4 Children... 4 Father... 5 The Depression... 5 Hurricanes of Preparing for evacuation before Hurricane Katrina... 6 Calling church members before Katrina... 7 Katrina comes ashore... 7 Evacuation to Memorial Hospital, Gulfport... 7 Ceiling falls in... 8 People with medical needs begin to come into hospital... 8 Survivors of storm surge... 8 Helping survivors during Katrina... 8 Hospital as shelter from storm... 9 Pharmacy... 9 Post-traumatic amnesia from Katrina... 9 First inspection of home following Katrina Scope of damage to hospital employees Why some folks do not evacuate Moving back into house First inspection of Mississippi City United Methodist Church after Katrina... 12, 41 Tally Arms, Sixteenth Street No refrigeration, no ice means no insulin Scene of destruction in downtown Gulfport Needs for rebuilding church Debris pile Ruby Tuesday s Restaurant, VFW Dibs Chemical and the Environmental Protection Agency St. Mark s Episcopal Church Services held at church sites... 15, 18 Butterfly, signifying resurrection Reconnecting with church members Options for church s future Handsboro United Methodist Church Donations St. Paul s Catholic Church, Pass Christian The need for a sense of place... 19

5 Katrina mud First services at damaged church Congregation members who lost homes Survivor, hanging in tree for six hours Church school FEMA trailers Insurance issues... 23, 29 Volunteers... 23, 27, 37 Paying full insurance premiums on a trash pile Highland Park United Methodist Church United Methodist Church, Gulf Shores, Alabama Matching volunteers with people in need SBA loan The toll that ministers pay in a disaster... 31, 35 Taking a break... 32, 34 Delayed post-traumatic stress from Katrina, three years later Living inside the curfew zone Personal differences in ministry after Katrina Current membership Lessons learned... 38, 42 Deaths from broken hearts Worst Katrina memory, the smell, the razor wire Best Katrina memory Benchmarks of recovery Claw marks in the ceiling... 43

6 AN ORAL HISTORY with ROD DICKSON-RISHEL This is an interview for the Mississippi Oral History Program of The University of Southern Mississippi Hurricane Katrina Project. The interview is with Rod Dickson-Rishel and is taking place on June 16, The interviewer is James Pat Smith. Smith: This is an interview with Reverend Rod Dickson-Rishel of Mississippi City United Methodist Church. The interview focuses on Katrina, the aftermath of Katrina. His church was severely damaged, practically destroyed by the storm, and Reverend Dickson-Rishel s personal residence was heavily damaged by the storm. The interview takes place on June 16, 2008, in the library of the USM [University of Southern Mississippi] Gulf Park Campus on Highway 90 in Long Beach. Reverend Rishel, could you state your name and today s date, and where you think we are? (laughter) Dickson-Rishel: Rod Dickson-Rishel, June 16, 2008, at The University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Library in Long Beach. Smith: Can you share your date of birth and place of birth? Dickson-Rishel: October 1, 1956, and I was born in Gulfport Memorial Hospital, and I was brought home to 300 West Old Pass Road in Long Beach. So I always say I was born in Long Beach, but I was actually born in the hospital over there. Smith: [What is] your spouse s name? Dickson-Rishel: Dorothy. Smith: And does she mind if you tell her date of birth? Dickson-Rishel: No. I got to remember it. July 6, Smith: Very good. One of the things, you can redact stuff if you re wrong, when you get the typed script, but do you remember your date of marriage, what that might be? Dickson-Rishel: September 3, Smith: OK. You got that one.

7 2 Dickson-Rishel: Just finished a twenty-fifth anniversary last September. Smith: Good. Can you talk about your education, really, from elementary, high school, college, seminary? Dickson-Rishel: Attended Jeff Davis Avenue Elementary School in Long Beach, which was Harper McCaughan Elementary prior to Hurricane Katrina. That property s now cleaned. The school still exists. Went to Long Beach Middle School [and] got to lay out part of that time because Hurricane Camille blew the school away. Graduated from Long Beach High School in 1974, [when] I attended Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, from [19]74 to [19]79, where I graduated with a BS in industrial technology. And then went from there to Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1981; finished there in 1986 with a Master s of Divinity, which I always thought was a strange name for a degree. And quit going to school at that. (laughter) Smith: You re a master of things divine. Dickson-Rishel: Well, I thought theology was reasonable. Divinity was a little stout, (laughter) but that s what they gave me. Smith: OK. What types of work had you done before you went into the ministry, that period of time there? Dickson-Rishel: I was, all my life, expected to be in heavy industry manufacturing. That s all I was ever interested in, and that s what I actually trained in in college, was a heavy kind of manufacturing. And so I always, I knew about welding and machine shops, and I worked construction, residential construction. My dad was a carpenter, and I spent a lot of years, not a lot of years, but a lot of summers and things in residential carpentry and construction kind of stuff. So I was real familiar with the construction trades, and that kind of big business. I worked for a company called National Tank Company out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who had a plant here in Gulfport and in Electra, Texas, for a while and went from there to seminary. So most of my background was in kind of mechanical/technical. I didn t do a mechanical engineering degree, but I was in that area of interest and study. And so out of that into the ivory tower was an interesting (laughter) transition, but all of that served me well in the last three years. Smith: And how did you find yourself drawn into the ministry? Dickson-Rishel: The only thing I can say is I felt called by God to that, and I don t even know how to explain that to people who don t have any sense of what that means. There s no way to explain it, I don t guess. And it s a call that I struggled with, probably, all through my teenage years and through college, and more actively at some times than others, but finally after I was out of college and out in the professional world, I realized I just wasn t doing what I needed to be doing. And

8 3 when I committed myself to pastoral ministry, everything was much better, and been at it ever since. Smith: What churches have you pastored, locally or anywhere? Dickson-Rishel: Well, during seminary I had the privilege of being on the staff of Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, part-time, as a student, which at the time was the largest United Methodist Church in the denomination. So it was a big, high-dollar operation. After I graduated seminary, I worked from [19]86 to [19]90 as minister of evangelism at Plymouth Park United Methodist Church in Irving, Texas, while my wife pursued PhD studies at the University of Texas in Dallas, at the medical school actually, UT Medical School in Dallas. And then from there, in [19]90, I went to the Nugent United Methodist Church, which is now in Gulfport, at that time was in Harrison County, preannex. It s at the corner of John Clark Road and Old Highway 49; served there for ten years, from [19]90 to In 2000 I was appointed to the Mississippi City United Methodist Church and have been reappointed there for at least one more year. Smith: What s your wife s profession? Dickson-Rishel: She s a clinical psychologist on the staff at Memorial Hospital in Gulfport. Smith: Do I remember that she s also an ordained minister? Dickson-Rishel: She is. She is also an ordained United Methodist minister; holds a Master s of Divinity degree as well as a PhD in clinical psychology. Smith: Were you ever in the military? Dickson-Rishel: No. Smith: Do you have any other interests and activities outside of your church roles that, you know, community interests, civic interests, that you re a part of that might help us understand your perspective on things? Dickson-Rishel: Yeah. I m a very active member of the Gulfport Rotary Club and have been a Rotarian probably since about 1986, 1987; somewhere along there, I was invited to be in the Rotary the first church I served in Irving, Texas. And I ve maintained participation in Rotary since then. And I currently, for the last four or five years anyway, have been what they call the chaplain of the Gulfport Rotary Club. And that means I open every meeting with a thought for the day and lead a prayer and the pledge of allegiance, which has been a wonderful experience for me, and the Rotarians say they like it, too. So every president up to now has asked me to go for (laughter) one more year. So it s a year-to-year gig, but that, I guess, is my primary community service. I think Rotary does an awful lot of good in a lot of ways. I was

9 4 very active, over different times, in disaster response for the United Methodist Church of Mississippi. I was the head of the disaster response for the state, or the Mississippi Annual Conference is the geographic bounds of the state. So at one time I was the coordinator for the entire state, and I have been the coordinator for what we call the Seashore District, which is the geographic area along the Coast here, off and on, a number of times, for several years, and was one of the founding directors and was a longtime chairman of the board or president or whatever they called me, of the Seashore Mission of the United Methodist Church in Biloxi, which was a ministry to homeless people. And I take a certain pride in having been part of that original group and led that ministry from a concept into a really vital, working ministry. And I don t know how much I m supposed to toot my own horn, here, but it was an exciting time. So I ve, I guess, always been interested in trying to be in ministry to what we like to call the least, the last, and the lost, the poorest of the poor, and those folks, disaster response. And that s part of my technical skill, I think. I didn t mind getting out and getting my feet dirty. I knew the difference between a shovel and a rake, and then personally, I fish and occasionally build a wooden boat. Smith: Were you an officer or a person of responsibility with UMCOR [United Methodist Committee on Relief] during this storm period? Dickson-Rishel: Yes. Yeah, I was the disaster response coordinator for the Seashore District at the time that Katrina hit, and I resigned as quickly as I possibly could. The church, after Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1993, [19]94, whenever that was, [19]92, somewhere in that time frame, we brutalized a lot of clergy people down there, mismanaged them, put them in frontline roles. And one of the lessons that came out of that was victims are not very effective caregivers, and if you try to make victims into caregivers, the victimhood will win out in the end, and they will eventually crash and burn. And I knew that from my, personally, not from my own experience but from observation and studying. So I bailed. I said, I have way too much to do to try to rescue everybody else. And fortunately there were other people who stepped in and have done wonderful work, and I was really pleased that that ball didn t get dropped. Smith: OK. Can you list your children and their ages? Dickson-Rishel: My oldest is Savanah, Savanah Jane; she is seventeen, will be eighteen on June 28; just graduated from Long Beach High School and is enrolled to be a student, if I can use these words in this place, at Ole Miss, (laughter) beginning August 16. Smith: They ll probably redact it. Dickson-Rishel: If they delete that from the tape, (laughter) if anybody s listening, Ole Miss offered her twice as much money as the Lucky Day Scholar that Southern did. (laughter) Away she went. And my youngest is Emma Grace; she is sixteen, turned sixteen in February; will be a junior at Long Beach High School; is a very

10 5 serious competitive gymnast. And that s two words that encompasses a world of stuff, but her gymnastics will probably define our lives for the next couple of years. The Long Beach High School Band owned us for the last three, so gymnastics gets us for the next two. (laughter) Smith: What was your father s name? Dickson-Rishel: Horace, otherwise known as Smokie, Horace Elliot Rishel, otherwise known as Smokie. Smith: And do you know his date of birth? Dickson-Rishel: Today. Smith: Do you know the year? Dickson-Rishel: Nineteen fourteen. Smith: And what occupations did he pursue during his lifetime? Dickson-Rishel: Well, you know, you re talking about biographical interests. There s now ministorages on the corner of Alexander Road and Pineville Road on the southeast corner, but there s also a big oak tree. He was born in a house underneath that oak tree June 28, 1914, sort of in Long Beach, and turned fifteen in 1929, the Great Depression. He spent several years as a Woody-Guthrie-style hobo, riding the rails and just doing the best he could. World War II came along, and he enlisted, and he was about twenty-five, I think, when he enlisted into the Army. He went ashore in D-Day plus thirteen, I think it was; was wounded in North Africa; eventually got out, went to Pennsylvania, and there he met my mother sometime during his military experience, married her. They lived there for a couple of years and moved back to Mississippi in 1949, where he bought a piece of land over on Old Pass Road and built a house. He was a carpenter; he worked as a carpenter his entire life. Smith: And what about your mother? What was her maiden name? Dickson-Rishel: Yeizer, Pennsylvania Dutch from Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Smith: What s her full name? Dickson-Rishel: [Leola Mae] I could never remember, believe it or not. (laughter) She s still with us, too. [Leola Mae Yeizer] from Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Smith: Did she pursue any occupations outside of homemaking? Dickson-Rishel: No. She was a homemaker; never even got a driver s license.

11 6 Smith: How many children were Dickson-Rishel: Seven. Smith: Seven children, so she had plenty of things to do. Do you know the date that your parents were married? Or your mother s birthday, first of all. Dickson-Rishel: Mother s birthday was February 22, 19 it s George Washington s birthday, the real day, not the holiday day, which I think is February 22, 1924, in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. And I don t know when they were married; I don t know that date. Smith: OK. Let s think about this storm. You live on Beach Park Place, not a block from this school, which was heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Talk to us a little bit about somebody that lives within sight of the beach. How do you go about storm preparation? When did that storm start registering on you? What did you do in the lead-up to the storm? Dickson-Rishel: Well, that had been a very active summer of storms. We had evacuated or prepared to evacuate, I believe, six times that summer. And we live in what they call a mandatory evacuation zone, although that s a misnomer because you cannot force somebody to leave their home in this country. They can choose to stay there and die if they want to. But we respected those mandatory evacuations, and we based our evacuation plan on the marine evacuation. If the officials issued a marine evacuation, shut down the casinos, which is a huge economic decision, we thought if that was scary enough for them, then we probably ought to do something, which meant we put all the [outdoor] stuff, that could blow [away], in the outbuildings, and we had all of our personal effects packed up and ready to go, and the kids. We had various plans. Our daughters, depending on at that age, they were thirteen and fifteen. So I have a sister, or at the time I had a sister in the Jackson area; we have grandparents in the Dallas area. So we would send them off. My wife was always given permission to evacuate to the hospital, so we could go there. Board up the windows. I also had a church member who was chief of police in Gulfport. So there was a couple of times my wife went to the hospital, or my wife and kids left town, and I would go and stay with the chief of police in Gulfport and just kind of follow him around. Smith: What s his name? Dickson-Rishel: Steve Barnes was the chief at that time, Steve Barnes. He Smith: He s not now? Dickson-Rishel: No. Shortly after Katrina, he resigned. But we would, Steve Barnes and I, I d just kind of follow Steve around. And it turned out, none of those hurricanes materialized to be a serious threat to our area. We had some real close calls, but, so

12 7 we were pretty seasoned, and we didn t make any preparations to speak of until probably that Sunday afternoon. The storm came in on Sunday, and throughout that Saturday, we watched it, and as most people know, it really ratcheted up over Saturday night and into Sunday morning. We held worship on Sunday morning. We held worship on Sunday morning; in spite of the storm threat, had about thirty-five people, where we would typically have had about 150. And then one of the things we did as a church was we called we, being myself and three or four staff members every home of every church member to ask them what their evacuation plan was, where they would be, where I could contact them, where I could find them after the storm, if I needed to. So I had a complete list after Katrina. I say complete; it was 95, 98 percent complete list of where everybody was and how I could reach them, whether they stayed in their home, whether they went to Grandma s, what they did, what their cell phone numbers were. And that was one of our regular parts of our preparation, but we didn t do any of that until Sunday afternoon, and then we came home, and we boarded up the house. And we all went over to the hospital, to have a big wait-for-this-onenot-to-happen hurricane party. My wife has a 1968 Mustang convertible that she s owned since she was fifteen years old, that s been restored, and she had the good sense to take it and park it in the parking garage at the hospital. We still have it. (laughter) It was tucked safely away. But anyway, that was our evacuation plan. And I don t know if the hospital lets staff bring families anymore. She s part of their required [staff]; she was required to be there. So they allowed her to bring family, which was wonderful for us, as it turned out. Smith: What kinds of things did you see during the storm? In the hospital, what could you see? Was anything particularly alarming, upsetting as Sunday night turned into Monday morning? Dickson-Rishel: Actually we were in what they call the medical office building, which is a new building attached to the hospital, and had all kind of stuff to eat. The power didn t go off in the hospital because they had generators. So we were airconditioned, and when the power went off, we didn t know any different. And then we bedded down there somewhere in an office on a couch or something; I don t remember exactly where we went. I slept all night. Got up the next morning; it was blowing pretty strong, and I decided to go down to the cafeteria to see if I could find a cup of coffee, took my youngest daughter with me. The connecting walkways between the buildings were primarily glass, and they were pretty much all blown out and destroyed at that point. When we started trying to make our way across there, I realized how bad a shape that the hospital building was in. I began to get some idea then that things were going to be a lot more serious. Then of course I didn t find any coffee because they weren t making any coffee, and security kind of flipped out when they found me out wandering around the hospital with a little girl. But eventually they moved us all out of that building because of the risk to it. And they also wanted to conserve power, so they shut that building down, shut all the power off in that building, moved us into the medical office, or the medical staff office, as they call it. But it so happened that that area was under construction and had a temporary roof on it, so we weren t there an hour before the ceiling started falling in around us. And

13 8 then that s when I learned something really interesting about doctors. There only were doctors and families, were the only people who were allowed to be in there. All doctors are in charge of everything, all the time. And so all we had was a room full of adults, panicked, shouting out orders and instructions to each other, none of whom were following anybody else s instruction. (laughter) And it was one of the funniest things I ve ever seen, because they were all accustomed to telling people what to do, and people would go and do it. And nobody was doing anything that anybody else was telling them to do. And finally the secretary of the medical staff services area came in and started giving instructions, and the people listened. (laughter) It was really phenomenal, but they moved us then over into another part of the hospital, part of the old, original part of the hospital where they made us stay in an inner hallway, and a lot of the doctors were able to go to work. The patients, people had begun to trickle in by then, and there was a medical need. And through the morning, I watched it blow and kind of milled around and kept trying to find something to do that was useful. And by the afternoon, I d gotten kind of fed up enough that I went looking specifically for something to do and discovered that there was a huge crowd of people. I say huge; it was probably numbered in the, maybe in the tens, but you know, 100 [to] 150 people, relative to the space they were in, trying to get into the emergency room for all kinds of different reasons. And because there was no place to put them, they set up a temporary shelter in what is now the food court of the hospital. And it had about four inches of water in it because the windows had blown out, but we were able to mop the water up, get rid of the glass, and begin to bed people down in there kind of as a temporary shelter because the storm was really still blowing. All of those people are ones that floated or swam out of wherever they were. There were a lot of residential properties there south of the hospital, between the railroad tracks and the beach, and most of them were in there. They began to come in with their stories of being on the ground floor, going to the second floor, going to the roof, the building s floating out from under them, building s collapsing, jumping off of buildings onto the roof of motor homes that floated, swimming. And eventually as those stories began to emerge and people were coming into that area, we were trying to provide them with just basic [comforts], give them a drink of water and a place to sit down. For some of them, that was all they needed. They were just physically exhausted. They d been hours swimming in that debris-laden water. So anyway, I kind of got really heavily involved in that, taking care of those people for about four days, I guess. Smith: What exactly were you doing? Dickson-Rishel: Well, started out kind of functioning as a chaplain, going around, talking to them, praying with them. Well, I guess I really started out as a janitor; cleaned up the water, mopped, dried it all up, got the broken glass out of the way, began to set up pallets. The hospital was very generous with the use of their laundry facilities, at that time thinking that they could be resupplied from their laundry in New Orleans. Ha, ha, ha. But anyway we provided people with a sheet, trying to I mean, I remember one man in particular who came in who had taken refuge in pink fiberglass insulation because of the flying debris. He had gotten under insulation in a roof, and it had gotten wet. He was literally pink with that insulation in his clothes.

14 9 And so people like that, we just tried to do whatever we could do to bring them some kind of comfort, but I say, started out just kind of praying with them and talking to them. Pretty quickly that evolved into kind of a caregiver role, and as time went on, as the situation got more and more serious at the hospital, more and more people, less and less resources, the only building, I believe, probably with the exception maybe of the emergency operation center, in the county, that had power. There might have been a few private residences that had some kind of auxiliary power system. So it really was a beacon in the night, and we were also the only hospital in a long ways either direction that was still open. Biloxi Regional was washed out, Gulf Coast, Garden Park, all of Bay St. Louis, Keesler, everybody was full of water. And my wife, then, was involved in actually caring for the inpatients. They had some real horror stories of the way that they got involved with some of those people. But anyway, that s what I ended up doing, and then as people were released from the hospital or from the ER [emergency room], there was no medical necessity to keep them, but you couldn t throw them back out in that storm. They had nowhere to go, literally; so they just began to pile up. And one of the things, this is kind of a good story. They would give them a prescription for two or three days worth of medicine, and the pharmacy would fill it. The pharmacy was on the fourth floor, and we were on the first floor. So somebody had to run up and down the stairs because they d shut the elevators down to conserve power to the pharmacy to get the medicine and distribute it to the patients. And as we went along, I think it was the second day or maybe the third day, my daughter, the younger one, who I guess was thirteen at the time, ended up being the person who was running up and down the stairs and distributing. And I ll never forget, this nurse came in and said, We cannot have a child distributing class five narcotics in this hospital. (laughter) It s against the law. My daughter had been doing it for two or three days. She had the drill down. She d take the prescriptions, run up to the pharmacy; they d give her a box of drugs. She d run down; she d stand out there and call out their names, go give them to the people, and they d do whatever they were going to do with them. And after about one round of that, the nurse decided that she could just sit there and watch my daughter do it, and that would be within the bounds of the law. So I always thought that was a good story of just kind of how messed up things were. And then finally the National Guard came along and collected all those people up and took them away. Smith: How long did that take for the Guard to get there? Dickson-Rishel: You know, I cannot one of the real frustrations for me of that whole experience is I have chronological amnesia. I had pretty significant amnesia of everything before that for about a year, a year and a half. I knew I graduated from Long Beach High School in 1974, but I couldn t tell you one thing that happened to me while I was there. You know. I knew I grew up in Long Beach, but I couldn t tell you anything about the people that I knew. It was really kind of weird, and that s begun to wear off now after my kids would tell you it hasn t. But after two and a half years, I m beginning to regain some of my pre-katrina memory, but I had for at least a year, a really profound, I thought, kind of amnesia. But I still have that, what I call a chronological amnesia. I know, I can remember things that happened, but I

15 10 cannot remember, with one or two exceptions, when they happened. I knew that the evening of that Monday evening, I tried to come check on the house, and there was a little, old Long Beach police officer blocking Railroad Street. He was a young kid, and he had been there all day in that storm without any radio communication, and the only instruction he had had was, Don t let anybody pass here, either direction. And that was one of the few times in my life I thought somebody was going to shoot me because I told him my house was just right there, and I was going to go look at it. And he said, No, you re not going by here. (laughter) And we kind of had a standoff, and I decided I d better go back and spend the night at the hospital, which I did. And then the next morning, Tuesday morning, I was able to get out before daylight, and I got to the house and got in and checked on it. And of course we had about four feet of water in it, and it was right in the edge of the debris pile, and the campus was part of that, you know, in that debris pile. It was a pretty big mess. Found that the dogs were alive, which was a wonderment because we d left them shut up in the house, [and] it had been a couple of days. But again, the police officer came and told me I couldn t be there. And I told him; I said, No. You got two choices. You can shoot me, or you can give me fifteen minutes to look at this house because you re not going to arrest me. I m going to go check on my property, but if you want to shoot me, go and get your gun out and shoot me. You can do that. And he said, Well, I don t think I want to do that. I ll just wait right here while you go look and see. (laughter) So I did what I said; I spent about fifteen minutes to see just how messed up things were. And fortunately a lot of the roofing didn t blow off; we had some roofing that was off. We had some leaks, but we had an upstairs. So I checked out upstairs. Anyway, I went back to the hospital, reported to my wife and kids about, that we did have a house, which was really big news because it was unbelievable the number of the people in the hospital, the physicians particularly, who lived in the homes along the beach, who had nothing. And a whole new vernacular emerged out of that of you could look at somebody and say, How d you do? And they would say, It s gone. And that meant everything. It was really a strange way that people learned to use the language. Or if somebody said, It was OK, then that meant like us; they had six feet of water in the house, but they still had a house. But they had some of their possessions. Smith: In this neighborhood, we had deaths, people who stayed in their house. And you said in your church, your church routinely did a lot of calling around about evacuation. Do you have any insight about what it is that makes people stay in circumstances like Katrina? There might have been in your neighborhood or people in your church that you were aware of that had stayed. Dickson-Rishel: Some of our dearest friends live directly east of us, and they stayed in their home. And we didn t know where they were; it was five days. They were there; they didn t get water. They came within an inch of having water in their house. And we didn t have I mean, there was no way to find out; there was no way to get to them. I say five days; that s what my wife always says, it was five days. It was a long time. There s just this kind of sense of taking care of their stuff. I had two church members that stayed in a condo within a block of the beach that swam out, almost

16 11 died. And the man stayed; it was a couple. And he said, Well, I just thought I d stay here and kind of keep an eye on things for all my neighbors after the storm. When the looters came, we could kind of watch out and protect. There s a strange sense of connection to personal property, and a sense of place, too. It s profoundly disabling to lose your place, whatever the nature. It really doesn t matter if your place is a little single trailer down there on a trailer lot on Broad Avenue, or if it was a castle on Scenic Drive in Pass Christian. The sense of loss was equally profound for those people. There s something about that, and there s a lack of trust in the authorities, for lack of a better word, to protect or to enable persons to be able to recover and take care of themselves. And we ran into that with we lived behind the wire, we called it. But we lived in, we stayed in our house. Pretty quickly after the storm, we moved back into it. Smith: Are you talking about the razor wire that the National Guard spread across the railroad tracks? Dickson-Rishel: Right. We lived inside the wire; had a little pass that let us come and go. And we you know, I don t even know what I was going to say. That Smith: Sense of place? Dickson-Rishel: Yeah. That sense of being there. Well, not trusting the authorities, that people were told. I mean, a fireman came to our house when my wife was there I wasn t there at the time and told her she had to get out of the house. It wasn t safe. She couldn t stay there. And she told him to go to hell, and they left. And other people were Smith: And she s a preacher. (laughter) Dickson-Rishel: Yeah, yeah. Other people were told that their homes were going to be bulldozed. I mean there was all kind of crazy stuff was going on. So I think there is a lack of confidence in the system, if you like, to be able to protect a person s place, and their things, and their accumulated goods of whatever value they may have to the rest of the world. And so you want to stay where you can take care of that. Smith: Your house had water. You have a two-story. Is it a frame house? Dickson-Rishel: It s a little bit of everything. Smith: A little bit of everything. It s one of those that s been built on for many years. Dickson-Rishel: Yeah. Smith: On Beach Park.

17 12 Dickson-Rishel: They started building on it in I put a big addition on it about five years ago, so. (laughter) Smith: Uh-huh. So you were able to live in the house? You didn t have to go to a trailer or anything? Dickson-Rishel: No. I think it was twelve or fourteen days after the storm, our power was turned back on. And when we got our power back, we moved back into our upstairs. We had evacuated the kids. I say we; it was me and my wife. We d sent our kids to Dallas, and they did the whole refugee thing, enrolled in school and all of that, thinking it was going to be months and months before they would come back. We were able to get them out after two or three days. It was pretty quick. We evacuated our kids. So it was my wife and I. We stayed with my brother who lives here in town. We left the hospital after a few days; stayed with him for a couple, three days. And then when we got power on at the house, we came back to the house and moved into the upstairs. Smith: OK. What about your church? When did you become aware of its situation? Dickson-Rishel: Well, I was pretty sure through that Monday that it was going to be bad because of one of the stories I heard from the evacuees coming into the hospital. Of course we didn t have any TV or any kind of communication. That is what I always thought was one of the weird things; there were people a thousand miles away who knew more about our situation than we did, because there was no way to communicate. I went Tuesday morning. My truck, my old pickup truck was parked behind the hospital, and little did I know, veteran people who evacuated to the hospital knew that if you parked on the north side of the hospital that the wind would blow the gravel off the roof of the buildings and knock all the windows out of your car. I didn t know that. (laughter) So I parked my truck there. By the time the wind quit blowing it was a double truck, you know, a double cab truck; it had six windows. [By the time the wind quit blowing], I had two left. But one of them, thank God, was the windshield, so I could drive it. So I took my truck Tuesday morning early, after I found out about the house, after I checked on our home, I went, tried to make my way over to the church, on Courthouse Road. I was at Memorial Hospital. I went out the back way, and went down Pass Road, made it through all of that, and actually I had the girls with me, and went down Courthouse Road, got to the church property, and discovered at that point really how bad it was. Those church members that I mentioned earlier, the couple I knew had stayed, and I knew where they stayed. I d been to their home, and I knew they were going to stay in it. So I went to look for them, found some other church members who lived in that area who were kind of surveying the damage. I did not find those folks and fully expected that they would be found dead. I could not see any way they could have survived. I mean, it was just an unbelievable debris pile and a scene of destruction. Smith: What apartment complex was that? What condo was that? Do you know?

18 13 Dickson-Rishel: Tally Arms. It was the Tally Arms on Sixteenth Street, the north side of Sixteenth Street, and theirs was on the Sixteenth Street side, which is the southernmost side. So they were one block from Highway 90. So anyway, I did that for a while. I met with some other church members, talked to them, went by the homes of some people that I knew had stayed in the area but were north of the railroad track, some elderly ladies, and discovered that most of them were alive and safe, and kind of checked around there as much as I could get around. It was still really hard to get around, especially on the side streets. There was a lot of trees down and things and trash. It was hard to get around, but did the best I could Then we decided to come back to Gulfport via Highway 90, and got on Highway 90 and lo and behold, there were my two church members in somebody else s vehicle. So we were able to kind of help them get back to the hospital. And when they got back to the hospital, they met up with another of my church members (an older widow woman and her probably fifty-year-old daughter who lives with her) at the ER because she was a diabetic, and her insulin was no good. She was there to try to get insulin. Of course, no electricity, no refrigeration, no insulin. FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] says we do not need ice. They re dumb asses. We need ice. But anyway, that couple met up with that old lady and her daughter at the ER of the hospital and ended up living with them for the next three or four months after the storm. That was a kind of a warm, fuzzy thing. But anyway, my experience with that couple, it was a dramatic, and to this day, they will tell you how powerful my finding them in their distress was and helping them get back to the hospital and all that. I was just out sightseeing at that point. I did try to go down Highway 90 and made it all the way down to where the Holiday Inn used to be, which is right on the east side of downtown. Actually drove my truck into a manhole; there was a manhole cover blown off by the storm surge. Who would think that the manholes would be open in the road? At that point I decided I had probably gone far enough because I could see downtown Gulfport and all of the debris out of the port was all down there, all those containers and casino barges and all that. I told the kids, I said, We better go back the way we came. So we went back to Courthouse Road, almost missed it because there were no landmarks whatsoever; found that couple, took them, led them back to the hospital, got them situated. That was on a Tuesday morning. Well, then I began to try to track down my folks. I d had intermittent cell phone. I was fortunate; I could charge my cell phone because the hospital had electricity. I began to find folks and put the word out that we were going to hold church on Sunday at the site, regardless. And everyone---and this is a pastoral issue that was shocking to me; still is. Every single person I talked to the day after the storm, who had any awareness of the circumstances of the church, said, We re going to rebuild. Aren t we? We re going to rebuild. We re not leaving. Are we? We re going to rebuild. I mean, even those who d watched their homes wash away, who were slabbed, what they wanted to know was whether we were going to build our church back. There was enough of it standing to build it back. All of the masonry was still there. The roof was there. It was in a big, old mess, but it was there. Smith: It had washed through?

19 14 Dickson-Rishel: The storm surge I believe a tornado came by on the back side because an adjacent building had a big chunk knocked out of it, and then we had a little, what we called a youth hut, which was a wood-frame building in the back on a slab, and it evaporated. It was painted a very peculiar color, and I looked for weeks for a piece of that building in that debris pile and never found it, not one shred of it. Had I found either the sheetrock from the inside or any of the siding it had wood siding on it from the outside, I could have recognized it because it was a peculiar kind of yellowish-green color on the outside. It was blue striped on the inside. And I never found one fragment of that building. I m convinced that a tornado touched down there. Also our church van was inside the building, but everything else was outside the building. The storm surge went through right at six feet deep, and it must have been flowing really hard when it hit there, because it carried things like choir robes and some of the furniture two hundred fifty, three hundred yards. We found the pulpit almost two hundred yards from the church, choir robes in the tops of trees, two hundred, three hundred yards from the church, and then the pews and I don t know how the pews managed to tear loose from the floor, align themselves so that they could go out a door opening, because they were eighteen foot long, but they went out. There were pews and furniture; there was more of it outside the church than there was inside. And we were able to salvage some bits and pieces; still using the pulpit, still using the communion table. My library or my office was, it was hammered. The water went through there with enormous force. What was weird though, was everything that was above the waterline was intact. I had books on the shelf that were seven feet high that I still have, but all of the things that were below that, and only two or three of which that I really regret losing, that I lost. The rest of it was just a matter of money to replace, but some things there that were irreplaceable. But anyway, that was the condition of the building, and we were in the debris line. We had a fenced playground, and the neighbors to our west had a fence, and it caught the debris. We had about a five- to six-foot deep pile of debris in front of the church. Our stuff, everybody else s stuff, there was a kitchen floor from a home, a linoleum floor, that was sitting there, roofs, intact roofs. There was somebody [who] had a cedar-shake roof on their house, and there was a huge chunk of it just laying there. Vehicles, refrigerators. We inherited almost all of the barware out of the Ruby Tuesday s Restaurant and the alcohol out of the VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars]. Their bars ended up on our property. It was phenomenal what was there. We also had Dibs Chemical next to us who had a lot of pool supplies, and as a result of that, all their stuff ended up on our property, too, but that meant that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] came in with the guys in their white suits and their masks on to clean up our property. We were considered an environmental hazard area because of the chemicals. A fifty-five-gallon drum of liquid chlorine is pretty scary stuff. We had dumpsters, and we found out---i mean, it was, like, February when they finally came to clean it up. We had three automobiles under the debris that I never knew were there until after they cleaned up. I drove up, and there s three cars, junk cars, on the church property. And I said, Who s leaving their junk cars on the church property? And the guys cleaning up said, We found them under the trash pile. They were little, small Japanese cars, (laughter) but they were still cars. So it was messed up pretty bad.

20 15 Smith: Well, you said that you called up as many people as you could and had church. Your building is physically south of the railroad tracks. And was there not a security net to try to keep you from the building? Dickson-Rishel: Yeah. By the end of that week, they were, yeah. But we also had a chief of police as a member of our church, and he (laughter) made opportunity available, and actually at that point, they were being very reasonable because we weren t the only church that was south of the railroad tracks that wanted to hold services. The Episcopalians were just to the east of us, St. Mark s. You couldn t tell where they were. It was totally devastated, but they held services on their lot that same Sunday morning. So it was really, really difficult for the police to stand up to that. You know, it was obvious who we were and what we were about. We weren t basic thugs out scrounging junk. Smith: Well, talk to me about that service. How did you approach that service? What went on with the people assembled? How many people assembled? Dickson-Rishel: We had about, it was again about thirty-five. We got in the parking lot, and it was interesting because the church runs on a kind of a east/west line, and the east-facing exterior is, that exterior wall, if you went to the inside of that wall, that s where the pulpit and the chancel is. So we re just kind of on the opposite side of the wall. There s a big cross on the outside of the building that stayed on the building. It was beat up pretty bad, but it was still there. It s a big brick wall. That area right in front of that was not laden with debris. It was like a little cleaned up area, maybe fifty, sixty feet square. I went down with a rake and raked it out, cleaned it up best I could. We found the table, the chancel table, the communion table, drug it out and set it up there in front of the church. Somebody even found one of the pulpit chairs and brought it, and we ve got pictures of that. Again, I was at the hospital, so I had access to a copy machine. I wrote out an order of service by hand, made copies of it, and I scrounged up a hymnal from somewhere. I don t remember where I got it, but I could tell you a really indicting story of some Methodist churches in Jackson and their selfishness. It (laughter) probably ought not be in anybody s history. Some stories are better left untold. But any rate, I scrounged Smith: They didn t send you any hymnals. Dickson-Rishel: No, they did not, not one. And I won t name the church, but my daughter was in Jackson at that time with my sister. She hadn t gone to Dallas yet. I told my sister, I said they were going to come back and bring us some supplies. They said, What do you need? I said, I really need a hymnal so we can have the communion services and something to work with. Because in my office, I d lost everything. And of course, I said, Just go to the bookstore. Well, I didn t know that Jackson was out of power and messed up as bad as it was, either. It was weeks before I learned about that. And I said, Just go by the bookstore and get me a hymnal. Of course the bookstore was closed, but she went by one of the largest churches in the