BAY ST. LOUIS, ICE HOUSE AND BOTTLING WORKS- The movie, This Property is Condemned starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford was shot in Bay St, Louis in 1966 and the boarding house where most of the movie was shot is next door to what used to be the town's ice house. Coincidentally my dad was running an ice house in Birmingham when he and my mom married. Few people remain today who remember the icehouses in the days before refrigeration. Old non-electric iceboxes were often located on the back porch or in the kitchen and icemen had routes that they ran daily through the neighborhoods. Fifty pound blocks of ice were what most iceboxes held and the iceman would deliver the block of ice to the residence and put it into the family icebox as part of his delivery. In those days families also had a milkman who, daily, brought milk to the house and a laundry man who brought back our cleaned clothes and took with him our dirty clothes. I also remember Sam Rayburn, the Moseley family insurance man or what then was called a debit man. He would come by weekly to collect a few cents on my parent's life insurance policies. When my mom died in 2004, I cashed in that $1,000 policy that Sam sold my mom and dad in, probably 1943. The Bay icehouse has been torn down, but the boarding house is still standing and our depot, featured in the film, has been restored to its former beauty. My mom said her reason for doing this painting was, in part, in memory of my dad. His icehouse days were,financially, his glory days with new suits,new cars and a reputation as a man about town,as my mom would say. In 1929,along came the depression and electric iceboxes and the ice business quit being a good business to be in and the iceman would never again be a part of people's daily life.
