There are many intelligent ways to sell king cakes. Standing on a frozen sidewalk in Gulfport while the wind removes your will to live is not one of them. And yet. Twenty-eight degrees. Wind like a razor. A line of 125 people who didn’t care.
Neither did I.
Our first attempt the week before was a mess. We took 75 king cakes down to the coast and pulled up to find 125 people, most of whom had been waiting in line for 45 minutes. The math didn’t work. The two team members running the event had never done a pop-up and were letting early arrivals grab multiple cakes. By the time someone realized we’d never make it to the end of the line, it was too late. The media gave us glowing reviews. But as a 45-year veteran of this business, I was not happy.
Yesterday we regrouped. We strategized. We brought 200 king cakes. This is what passes for crisis management in the restaurant business—you fail publicly, go home, stare at the ceiling for a while, and then solve the problem by throwing more pastry at it.
This time, 125 people showed up again—the first couple in line got there 90 minutes early. A man drove from Fairhope, Alabama. It was 28 degrees outside with 20 mph gusts. The Gulfport Main Street Association bought king cakes for the first person in line and the hundredth. We were fully staffed with our bakery manager and three others. I was there as an expensive luxury—essentially a mascot with a checkbook. Everyone was bundled up, breath visible in the cold, and everyone was happy.
After a quick TV interview inside the construction zone of our soon-to-open restaurant, I met up with Poem Love.
Poem is the daughter of the owner of the former Triplett Day Drugs, which occupied the corner of 14th and 25th in Gulfport for more than 60 years. She grew up in that pharmacy. Ran it in the later days. And until I started working on opening a restaurant in that space, I had no idea what that corner meant to the people of Gulfport.
I’ve heard from hundreds of them. Sons and grandsons of local businessmen and judges who were part of the morning crew of guests. Or the mid-morning crew. Or the afternoon crew. People who had coffee and breakfast there every day. People who ate pork chops at lunch for decades. Triplett Day wasn’t just a pharmacy with a lunch counter. It was the center of everything social in downtown Gulfport for over half a century.
I love this. Because what I’m working on is opening a true community café. If I do my job, The Downtowner will be the most Gulfport restaurant ever in Gulfport.
Poem was gracious enough to bring massive scrapbooks she’d kept from those years. A stranger shows up wanting to open a restaurant in the space where her father built his life’s work, and instead of holding those memories close, she spread them across a table at the White Cap and, while we ate oysters, she walked me through 60 years of her family’s history.
There was one photograph I kept returning to. A group of men in the 1970s gathered at the counter—coffee cups, cigarettes, folded newspapers. You could tell by the way they were leaning in that this was ritual. This was where they belonged. That photograph is what a community café looks like. I’ve been trying to build that for 38 years. Triplett Day had it all along.
And here’s where I have to be honest.
I’ve owned a restaurant at 3810 Hardy Street in Hattiesburg for 38 years. Thousands of team members have worked there. Tens of thousands of guests have dined with us. First dates. Anniversaries. Graduations. Funeral lunches. Thirty-eight years of life happening in that building.
And I don’t have a photographic record of any of it.
Sitting across from Poem, watching her turn those pages, it hit me how badly I’d failed to document our own history. All those faces. All those moments. Gone except in the memories of the people who were there.
As the old saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 60 years ago. The second-best time is today.
So here’s my ask: If you took photographs at Purple Parrot Café, Crescent City Grill, the old Purple Parrot Grill, or Mahogany Bar over the years, please send them to robert@robertstjohn.com. I’d like to start our own book. It’s 38 years late, but it’s not too late.
My original goal at 26 was to own one restaurant so I could wear T-shirts and shorts to work every day. That was it. That was the entire life plan. I had a deep and unwavering commitment to casual footwear.
But over the years, I’ve met a lot of the right people and been in a lot of the right places and stayed open to opportunity when it came my way. There’s also a ton of dumb luck involved. And a little bit of kismet.
Case in point: at a book signing in Pass Christian this past December, a gentleman named Paul Jermyn walked up and handed me a flash drive. Thousands of images of Gulfport and the Gulf Coast.
Paul is a retired military engineer and a serious local historian. I would say amateur historian, but there’s nothing amateur about Paul. After our third hour together, I realized he wasn’t giving me a history lesson. He was giving me a history degree. I should owe him tuition.
Yesterday, after my meeting with Poem, Paul came to the White Cap with more images and memorabilia. Then we went to his house, where he gave me more still.
I saw the Gulfport harbor in the early part of the 20th Century, shrimp boats lined up like piano keys. Old downtown buildings before hurricanes took them. A Fourth of July parade down 25th Avenue in 1957—children on bikes with streamers, their parents long gone now, maybe their children grown with children of their own. History pressed flat and preserved by a man who understood that someone, someday, would need it.
It was going to be a challenge to fill the walls of The Downtowner with images of Gulfport. I needed a thousand. Thanks to Paul, the problem now is deciding which ones to use.
Mid-afternoon, Paul and I sat in the White Cap—him with a beer, me with iced tea—and I listened as he covered Gulf Coast history off the top of his head. Street names. Businesses that thrived and vanished. Families who built this coast. I thought, there are probably a lot of people who would be bored with this.
Not me. I was enthralled.
I’ve always loved local history, and I spent five hours yesterday steeped in it. Could’ve spent another ten. There’s always another story down here, and always someone willing to tell it.
The private dining room at The Downtowner will be dedicated to Triplett Day—its walls covered with 60 years of photographs from that corner. We will continue that history, serving breakfast and lunch to the community.
The entire community.
Yesterday morning it was 28 degrees on that sidewalk in downtown Gulfport. Wind cutting through like it had somewhere important to be. But I never once thought about the temperature. Too busy thinking about Poem Love trusting me with her father’s legacy. About Paul Jermyn handing over a lifetime of history to a man he barely knows.
It comes from people who show up. People who share what they have. Poem with her scrapbooks. Paul with his flash drives. A hundred and twenty-five strangers who didn’t mind the cold.
Yesterday was one of those days.
Onward.
