Tuesday, January 2

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--The next morning, the worst of the damage was over. The hurricane had passed through. Phone lines were down, and people were outside, cutting up downed tree limbs and boarding up broken windows.

Heap got a newspaper and a map and looked for an apartment to rent, up by the school.

He got ahold of the landlord of a building at Walnut Street and Magazine Street, and arranged to look at a second-floor efficiency apartment. He had enough money to pay the security deposit and the first month's rent.

They rented the first place they looked at. It had a washer and a drier downstairs they could use and an enclosed courtyard, where Heap could barbecue. Heap had a cast-iron Birmingham Stove Works charcoal grill.

Driving through the streets of New Orleans with traffic lights out, towing a U-Haul trailer behind Uncle Wayne's unfamiliar car, was hairy.

For that matter, driving in New Orleans was hairy, for Heap.

Once they had rented a place, and unloaded the trailer, Heap and Brenda returned the trailer and drove Wayne's car back to Panama City, picked up their Corvair, drove it back.

They had to go way up into Mississippi and Alabama. US 90 in Biloxi, Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, and Ocean Springs was torn up, with boats up across the highway, and buildings blown down.

Heap bought a claw hammer, a torpedo level, and a crosscut saw out of the 99¢ tool bin at a hardware store at State Street and Magazine and built bookshelves for their stereo, and books. He hung hooks in the kitchen for their pots and pans.

Books, and pots and pans, were almost all they owned. Brenda had a Gibson guitar Potter had handed down to her, Heap had an Olympia portable typewriter his parents had given him, new, as a graduation present from college, and Brenda owned a Willey (1949). Archaeological Survey of the Florida Gulf Coast. Chief and the other Old Southeast Hands had helped Willey with the field work for that book.

Here's a picture of Willey in his Woody at Carrabelle, in Franklin County, in the 40s.

Willey in his Woody is who Heap and Brenda aspired to be like, thought they'd be like. The Woody belonged to the Anthropology Department at the college where they taught. The motor pool kept it up.

They also owned the Minolta camera Dr. Daily had sold them.

It wasn't as popular at the Nikon F or the Asahi Pentax, but it was a classic 35mm SLR camera, and they were proud to own it.

They took colored slides with it, for their presentations.

They had a stereo set Heap had built in the Air Force from a kit. With a turntable and an FM radio receiver.

They had no TV.

They used the pay phone on the corner, at Audubon Park Zoo.

The pay phone cost a nickel.