Ghosts of old Gulf Shores trigger memories

After moving to Gulf Shores, I went through several barbers before I found Wayne’s Barber Shop. It’s a bit off the beaten path. Of course, that’s not what Wayne intended. In fact, 50 years ago, he built it right on the “main drag.”

Out the window in his shop’s back, you can see the little cinder block building that once served as the Gulf Shores town hall back then. The whole thing would probably fit in Mayor Robert Craft’s palatial digs in the City Hall Annex a few blocks away.

Back in 1965, when I first came to Gulf Shores and about the time Wayne was building his shop, this was the main non-tourist commercial area. The tourists had the Rexall Drugs, Jeannie’s Food Mart and other spots down at the “T” where Alabama 59 hits the beach road.

But up where the draw bridge crossed the Intracoastal Waterway, where the ground stayed a little drier come hurricane time was Wayne’s shop, the building supply store, the Army-Navy store, the flower shop, a gas station or two and Buck’s Fried Chicken.

For the most part, tourists drove through it on the way to beach, a mile or so farther south and saw it again on trips to the smattering of local restaurants and on the way out of town. Today, they won’t see it at all unless they go to Tacky’s Jack’s or decide to go from Gulf Shores to Orange Beach by Canal Road.

My parents first brought me to Gulf Shores on vacation in 1965. We stayed in a little gray house that today would be rough by hunting camp standards, with no paneling or sheetrock to cover the studs and exterior walls and only a window unit AC to combat the August heat. We never stayed there again since my Mother’s idea of roughing it was doing without room service.

But I couldn’t have cared less. I romped on the white sand and splashed in the Gulf all day, turning from lobster red to golden brown as the week went on. At night, I slept the deep, exhausted sleep that only children sleep on a lumpy mattress under a droning window unit after a full day of unrelenting, carefree fun.

As we left town at the end of the week and crossed the small bridge over the bayou that feeds Little, I burst into tears and declared that I would live there some day. And here I sit, in a somewhat nicer, but simple, little gray house 18 miles down the road at Fort Morgan. The place looks a bit like Gulf Shores did in 1965.

My family found accommodations more to my mother’s liking at the Teh-Lou Motel. It had a tiny kitchenette, a living room, two bedrooms and a tiny dining area. It was not The Breakers at Palm Beach but even my Mother loved it.

Our days were spent all day, every day, swimming or fishing on the beach. My folks figured that was entertainment enough and didn’t go in for the kind of foolishness folks went to Panama City for – go-carts and carnival rides and reptile farms and such.

We usually ate out twice, once at the Friendship House, a block or so from Wayne’s shop. While we waited for a table, I ran across the street to the Army-Navy store.

Unlike a lot of shopkeepers, the owner welcomed kids digging through the surplus military accouterments. There were mess kits, entrenching tools, gas masks, blankets, pouches, hats, belts and uniforms and they were immaculately ordered and arranged. I rarely left without nagging my father into buying for me some useless piece of paraphernalia.

The food at the Friendship House was wonderful but the quintessential dining experience of every trip was Meme’s. We arrived there after a journey back up Highway 59 and down some winding county roads through the bucolic Baldwin County countryside that brought us to Bon Secour. The final leg of the journey was a narrow lane overarched by live oak limbs that terminated at the Bon Secour River.

Beside the water sat what looked like a small house. But inside were served incredible delicacies like fried shrimp, oysters, crab claws and fish-in-a-sack. There were usually people milling around in the yard because there was always a wait and little place else for the overflow to go. The starvation that set in during the unbearable wait for your party to be called and for the food to arrive after ordering made it that much better.

My family hit hard times around 1970 and the family vacations ended. We went once for a weekend in 1974 and I never saw Gulf Shores again until after Hurricane Frederick took out the whole beach front, including the Teh-Lou.

My wife and I started making Fort Morgan or annual vacation spot in the late 1980s. Her family had always gone to the beach in Fort Walton Beach where her uncle lived and she knew nothing about Gulf Shores. So, my endless rambling about what had and had not been there when I was a kid meant nothing to her. I think she thought I was crazy when I kept riding up and down West Beach looking for where the Teh-Lou had once stood.

The drawbridge had been replaced by the tall bridge over the Intracoastal even before my family quit coming there. The Friendship House was long gone, replaced by a series of restaurants, now The Diner. The old white wooden Buck’s Fried Chicken building stood empty for years but now, only a sand-and-scrub lot remains in the curve next to Walmart.

The Army-Navy Surplus survived, along with its elderly owner, into the 1990s and I visited it religiously. It had changed little. In 1996 I returned with my wife carrying my unborn son to discover a radio station where it had been. And I mourned that I would never sort through the tables and shelves of stock with my son and inhale together the distinct smell of old canvas that permeated the store.

I eventually wandered around enough until I found where Meme’s, which closed in the 1970s, had stood. The little building that housed a restaurant famous throughout the state was rotting and falling in.

These days, before or after haircuts, I usually drive through that little strip in Gulf Shores, just south of where the road turns 90 degrees to go from being East Second Street to Canal Road. Occasionally, I’ll drive through the beach district of Gulf Shores and see a little house with louvered windows and a flat, sloping roof and remember when the whole beachfront was filled with houses like it.

It’s not as if I don’t love the present reality that is Gulf Shores and Fort Morgan. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But when I brush against these ghosts, for a moment, only a sweet, fleeting moment, I can feel again what it was like to be in that place that exists only in the past. And all the people and things I loved that are now gone are with me again.

About the Author: Robert DeWitt has worked for more than 30 years as a reporter and columnist in Alabama and has won numerous awards. He was a member of the staff at The Tuscaloosa News that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the April 27 2011 tornado. He is a native and lifelong resident of Alabama