Facilitating one miracle after another
Published: October 10, 2005
Acquaintances now friends
In her former life, before Katrina, Myrick worked as an independent financial adviser in Hattiesburg. Beane, 26, was an accountant at the University of Southern Mississippi. Smith, a 25-year-old Waveland native, owned Cingular stores in Hattiesburg and Bay St. Louis. They all live in the same Bridgefield Gardens subdivision of Oak Grove, along with Rick Maddox, a 53-year-old financial adviser. They were neighbors but more like acquaintances than good friends before Katrina passed through Hattiesburg on Aug. 29.
The neighborhood cleanup brought them closer together. When Smith got power back at his Cingular store, they set up headquarters there, providing hot meals, Internet access and phone lines for people in need.
“And it mushroomed from there,” Beane says. “We kept finding more ways we could help people who needed help.”
A Hattiesburg dialysis clinic was running out of diesel fuel to run its generators. Patients were going to die. A doctor came into Smith’s store and broke down crying.
Myrick went to work, networking through friends. She not only found 300 gallons of diesel fuel — at no cost — in Tennessee, she had it trucked down with a state police escort before the clinic ran out of fuel.
“One miracle after another,” she says. “That’s what we’ve seen. One miracle after another.”
Maddox, working with the Steve McNair Foundation and Brett Favre’s Four-Ward Foundation, provides many of the goods and ideas that help provide the miracles.
“I don’t know how to do much of anything, but I do know people who know how to do stuff,” Maddox says. “I know how to facilitate.”
After about 10 days of working out of the Hattiesburg store, the operation moved to Bay St. Louis and Smith’s Cingular store in the Bay Plaza shopping center. Evacuees live in their houses back in Oak Grove. Smith, Myrick and Beane have lived in the store for more than three weeks, at first sleeping in their cars, then on cots provided by the National Guard. Usually, by day’s end, they have been so tired, they could sleep anywhere.
Myrick has put her real job on hold. “This is more important,” she says.
Beane quit her job at USM to continue her volunteer work.
“This is where I need to be,” she says. “It’s changed my life. I wake up every morning with a sense of purpose, knowing that I have something to give.”
Maddox makes three to four trips a week back and forth between here and Hattiesburg, working as a liaison between providers and the distribution center. He says his employers at AXA have allowed him to do what his heart tells him he needs to keep doing.
Michael Smith grew up in nearby Waveland. His father, Mike Smith, is the assistant fire chief in Waveland, a town that now scarcely exists.
“My dad worked all day and night rescuing people after the storm,” Michael Smith says. “He and his men are heroes. When they slept, they slept in mud. He’s my inspiration for doing what I’m doing here.”
Mike Smith, the assistant fire chief, is a husky, powerfully built man with a deep voice that cracks ever-so slightly when he is asked about what his son and his son’s friends are doing.
“It’s incredible, really. They’ve helped so many people,” he says, his eyes misting. “Michael and them two girls, they’re like angels really.”
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