REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: Everyone’s got a story in Pascagoula

Knock on the door of any home in a place like Pascagoula, Miss., and there’s bound to be a story on the other side. Some are sad. Some make you chuckle in spite of yourself. Others make you think about your own story and appreciate the people in it a little more.

I knocked on Jesse and Myrtie Mae Lennep’s front door Wednesday morning as volunteers from Palm Harvest Church in Costa Mesa were moving furniture out of a small detached apartment in the back of Jesse Lennep’s property, where his daughter Lee Ann and 11-year-old granddaughter lived before water and wind damage left it uninhabitable. Lee Ann and her daughter have lived in a FEMA trailer for the past two years. The volunteers began laying tile in the apartment Wednesday, which will make it possible for Lee Ann and her daughter to return.

A woman with kind eyes and white hair opened the door and offered me a cup of coffee without batting an eye. You’d think a strange reporter from a small newspaper in California knocked on the Lenneps’ door every day by the way the couple invited me into their home with no questions asked.

Myrtie Mae told me how she and Jesse had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary last week.

“We’re newlyweds,” she said.

He was 80 when they wed, she 86.

Myrtie Mae and Jesse’s older sister were close friends as children growing up years ago in Mississippi. Jesse was fascinated with his sister’s playmate, and he would go to great lengths to spend time with her.

“I was a tough nut, but it didn’t matter if they were playing paper dolls, I would do anything just to be around her,” he said.

Myrtie Mae didn’t pay much attention to Jessie at the time, who was six years her junior.

“She had coal-black hair,” Jesse said. “I knew she was a good person, and I admired her for it.”

Myrtie Mae married while Jesse was serving in the Army during the Korean War. Jesse married two weeks after leaving the service.

Jesse and Myrtie May didn’t see each other again for the next 60 years.

The couple met again after Jesse’s first wife passed away after an extended illness a few months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged Pascagoula. His sister still kept in touch with her old playmate and had her phone number. Myrtie May’s first husband, a Baptist minister, passed away in 1992.

“I never though I would marry again,” she said.

The two were wed in an outside ceremony under a large oak tree three months after they were reunited.

“When I was a boy, I wanted so much just to touch her and I though about brushing my arm against her when we were playing Monopoly, but I wouldn’t dare.” Jesse said. “Now her hands are wrinkled, but she’s still beautiful to me.”