Saving the photographs and memories
Posted: Wednesday, September 7 at 10:23 am CT by Mike Brunker
PASCAGOULA, Miss. –- What would you take with you if you only had an hour or two to load up your car and drive away from your home, possibly forever?
For 80-year-old Tom Owen, the choice was easy. He loaded up a lifetime worth of memories in the form of his historic and personal photo collection.
Tom Owen, 80, of Pascagoula, Miss., displays a 60-year-old photograph he made while in the Navy during WWII. Owen managed to save about a dozen of his photographs (including his wedding photo) from the waters that destroyed his home by placing them in a foam cooler. He's now living, with all of his remaining posessions, at the LaFont Inn in Pascagoula. (Andrew Locke / MSNBC.com)
We met Owen, a Don Ameche look-alike, at the La Font Inn on Interstate 90, where we were lucky enough to find a room that hadn’t been rented because the air conditioning was out. The second-floor room was blazing when we opened the door, so we pulled two chairs out onto the balcony while we waited for the light sea breeze to cool it down.
As we lounged around and laid plans, we met several of our neighbors, all of whom were either local Katrina outcasts or folks with skills in high demand immediately after a hurricane – utility workers, security guards and roofers. But Owen took the cake in terms of memorable characters, approaching us to rail about the “insurance racket” that he and other Katrina victims are fighting.
A Northerner by birth, Owen served as a Navy photographer assigned to a blimp squadron in Elmhurst, N.Y., during World War II. He says he “ran away” to the South in 1969 and fell in with some boat workers in Slidell, La.
Owen, who later became a marine surveyor, has been through many a hurricane since, but says that none has been nearly as destructive as Katrina, which flooded his home chest-deep and also deposited his boat far up a landing, on top of two other vessels.
“It even floated my neighbor’s Delta 88 out of his driveway and dumped it in my yard,” he says.
He says that when he phoned the insurance company they urged him to remove the soaked carpet and ruined furniture from his home and to arrange to get his boat hauled somewhere to be assessed. He refused; That’s why he bought insurance in the first place, so he can pay someone else to do such dirty work, he figures.
“It’s nothing but a racket,” he says, between sips of Bushmills whiskey from a mud-encrusted bottle he found in his desk during a visit to his house earlier in the day.
After the talk turned to his years in the Navy, Owen invited us over to his room and showed us what he considered his most valuable possessions: A series of 8-by-12 photographs from his years of service in the blimp corps – stunning shots showing scenes such as a blimp hovering over a Nazi submarine whose crew had surrendered off the coast of Atlantic City, N.J., and the Queen Mary bringing returning GIs into New York harbor. Also in the Styrofoam cooler where he stores the images that illustrate his memories is a wedding photo showing a uniformed Owen at about 20 arm-in-arm with a beautiful beaming bride.
With the clock creeping toward midnight, we bid Owen good night, using a poorly chosen phrase to wish him continued good health: “May you ride out many more hurricanes.”
“Don’t say that,” he replied with a laugh as he returned to his own private museum.
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