For the Love of Amory (From 2021)

How a small Mississippi town weathered the pandemic, Written in 2021

Amory, Mississippi, 2021:

“Go!”

I looked left and right for one final check to make sure no cars were coming and sprinted up the rocky hill to get to the railroad tracks. Halfway up, my girlfriend Riley shouted the one word I didn’t want to hear,

“Car!”

We fell to the ground, desperate to blend in with the grass and escape the searching headlights coming around the bend. If the headlights found us, it could be the kiss of death for our adventure. The passerby would call the cops, and soon enough the blaring red and blue lights would get closer and the frequency of the siren would get faster and faster until they finally stopped ... and the sounds and lights would be replaced by the gruff voice of a policeman shining his flashlight onto us. 

That was the fate of so many high school students who tried this rite of passage journey. But not for us. The lights passed, leaving us undiscovered. And as we caught our breath, the horn of the train finally came roaring above our heads and over the bridge across the Tombigbee River. We slowly summited the hill as the train (driven by a conductor known to call the police if he sees teenagers) faded into the shadows of the woods on the other end of the water.

Finally, out on the metal grating over the meandering water, I took a moment to look back to Amory, where only a couple of lights lit up the midnight sky to accompany the billowing smoke from the smelting furnace of the Enviva wood pellet yard a block off downtown by the railroad tracks of the former train depot.

Just a couple hundred yards away is Blackcat Road, where teenagers go to fight. On fall nights, trucks will park in a row on the asphalt, blocking the entrance and exit, and differences will be settled or escalated by fist. Eventually, a police siren will blare down the road, and the lookout will send a signal to the teenagers illicitly drinking alcohol to speed away. By the time the cops get to the scene, there is silence. The teenagers are gone, and the only evidence that will remain is the murmur in the school hallway the next week and a black eye or two.

My mom sat in a car on Blackcat Road in the late 1970s, scared to watch the fight. And more than 40 years later, I sat next to the kid with a black eye in school. 

Amory is a small town in Northeast Mississippi, with a population of around 7,000 (and slowly declining, that’s the rumor the old men around town will have you believe). It is the halfway point between Memphis, TN, and Birmingham, Alabama, originally serving as a stopping point for the railroad. The legacy is still embraced, as the Frisco train car President Franklin Roosevelt rode in during his passthrough in 1934 still sits as the centerpiece of the park downtown decades after the train station closed down.

These places - this life - is multigenerational. And you can’t ever completely escape, no matter how hard you try. 

I should know. Several months after I carefully tiptoed on that metal bridge above the Tombigbee River in the spring of 2019, I moved over a thousand miles away to college at Yale University. But the Coronavirus pulled me back home. How could home, with all of its rigidity and tradition, adapt to a global pandemic?

It began with a dusty white binder sitting on a shelf in Wayne Knox’s home. 

Knox graduated from Amory High School in the shadow of 9/11, which pushed him to enlist in the Navy. Following the logistical decimation of the Navy  during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Knox was tasked with creating a readiness plan should another major disaster strike. The immediate concern was a pandemic, specifically the Avian Flu of 2005. Knox decided he needed to double his duty. Not only did he need to create a plan for the Navy, but he also had to create a plan for Amory.

“I put together a deep dive into the history of pandemics and the issues they might cause in the 21st-century context. And after I did that, I started to think about Amory. It’s my hometown and I care about it. So I started thinking about how a pandemic would impact the people I care about back home.”

Knox called for a meeting with the aldermen and then Amory mayor Thomas Boozer to give an overview of what Amory should do if a pandemic hit. They listened, but Knox wasn’t sure if any of it would stick. 

He moved on and filed the binder containing the Amory response plan away on a shelf. And while it sat collecting dust for over a decade, he did a little bit of everything, working as a web designer,  an information specialist at a furniture company, a welder at his family’s construction business, and, finally, as a full-time bitcoin trader. He loved to travel, spending months at a time traveling through European countries. 

After becoming tired of his nomadic lifestyle, Knox retired back to Amory and joined the board of the Amory Regional Museum as a volunteer in October of 2018. A month later the current director of the museum took another job, and Knox became the museum’s director. 

The museum was originally built in 1916 as the Gilmore Sanitarium - Amory’s first hospital. Two years later in 1918, it accepted patients diagnosed with the Spanish Flu. In 1960, the sanitarium began its conversion into a museum. Pre-pandemic, the museum would host around 300 visitors a month, with a good day bringing in 9-12 people through the doors.

In February 2020, Knox was in Puerto Rico when he realized the building would have to confront another pandemic.

“One night, I was up pacing thinking about all the different issues that could come into play. And it dawned on me that I needed to sit down with the mayor as soon as I got back from Puerto Rico and say, ‘hey, look. I have been thinking about this off and on for about 15 years. Y’all don’t have to reinvent the wheel here.’”

As soon as he got home, he called for the meeting with Amory’s mayor, Brad Blaylock, where he offered up the museum to become the nucleus of Amory’s response in the first week of March. Knox knew the museum would close down in a pandemic regardless. He was already on the city’s payroll, so the city wouldn’t have to hire anyone new. 

From there, he met with the city department heads to discuss what steps they would each need to take in their respective areas, with changes ranging from small details to major changes in the operation of the city.

Zack McGonagill, the fire chief, immediately followed Wayne’s advice, splitting his crew up into different shifts where they would essentially live at the fire station. No visitors were allowed, and the entire department was disinfected at the changing of shifts. The strategy paid off and saved lives, as the Amory department eventually was dispatched to respond to calls in nearby Aberdeen after their department fell ill.

Other questions were more basic but still logistical nightmares. How would the city deal with the garbage of someone who was infected with the coronavirus? 

Knox noted that the heads of the city were extremely receptive, which he took for granted until the pandemic became politicized. When he reflects now, he isn’t sure he would have gotten the same cooperation if he would have addressed the issues a month later.

Towns near Amory, such as Houston and Aberdeen, issued strict curfews in early March. But Amory didn’t. Instead, on March 23, the mayor and the board of alderman issued an order to suspend all indoor dining and limit non-essential businesses to ten people indoors at a time. They urged citizens to use common sense and comply with the current orders to avoid any executive action, a mindset officials kept when it came to mask mandates. In late June, as towns across the state began to enact local mask mandates, Amory did not. In two separate posts on June 29th, the city posted to Facebook:

“We are calling upon you as good citizens, good neighbors, good family members, good business owners, and good patrons to PLEASE….PLEASE wear a face covering inside public and business indoor spaces.  A few cities have created executive orders either recommending or requiring the wearing of face coverings in their cities. Some of these orders include fines and penalties. The City of Amory believes that we can all work together to protect our family, friends, and fellow Amory citizens.”

On June 29th, Monroe County, whose biggest city is Amory,  had 355 confirmed coronavirus cases.

 If it were up to Knox, he would have enacted a city-wide mask mandate, but he knew of the logistical difficulties with such an order. Namely, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) couldn’t provide enough masks initially for first responders and healthcare workers.

The museum stepped up to fill the need. Volunteers from across the community began sewing masks to give to the museum to distribute. A few volunteers, including college students back home from school, would come into the museum to sew in person.  In one week, they were able to churn out 300 masks for local healthcare workers and first responders.

The museum also acted as a donation center. After an initial run on cleaning supplies and personal protective equipment, the museum used Facebook and Instagram to solicit donations to redirect throughout the town to those in need.

As of May 14, 2021, Monroe County has accumulated 4,113 reported cases of the coronavirus and 133 deaths.

When I talked to Wayne at the beginning of the pandemic, he warned me about possibly needing to document the worst-case scenario. What would happen if the hospital was overwhelmed?

The max amount of hospital beds in Monroe County was 135, with the majority being at the hospital in Amory. These were just beds - not rooms, not ventilators. Wayne spoke about the possibility and readiness of the town to wheel in beds to the old National Guard Armory downtown. The armory, decommissioned decades ago, is where all of the high schools hold their proms every spring. I shuddered at the visual.

The hospital had a different plan. If max capacity was reached and overwhelmed by a substantial number, they would convert the adjoined fitness center into a treatment area. 

It would never come to that. But at one point, the hospital did turn away patients with “mild” cases due to a lack of space.

‘If you can clock in right now, you have a job.’

In April 2020, the cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer sat neatly on a display at the front of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. Hastily taped to the top of the display was a bright white piece of copy paper - an invoice. It showed what price Joe McGonagill, the owner of the store, was able to purchase the goods for. Right beside that piece of paper was the price sticker. The numbers were the same: $9.98.

“I didn’t make a penny on hand sanitizer. I never wanted to be called a price gouger. Somebody who wants to take advantage of someone because of the situation they are in...you shouldn’t be in business.”

The store’s revenue skyrocketed as pandemic fears heightened. Before the pandemic, Piggly Wiggly had $65,000 to $75,000 in sales weekly. Beginning in March, the sales ballooned to around $275,000 a week.

McGonagill quickly realized the numbers didn’t add up with Amory’s population.

“There ain’t $300,000 in groceries to be sold in this town for all of us!”

So he started walking the aisles and talking to customers - people he had never seen before in his nearly 40 years of being at the store. Some were from Tupelo, a larger city 35 miles north, others were from Sulligent, Alabama, a town about 25 miles east. The trend continued as he kept asking customers where they were from. Some customers were traveling upwards of an hour to come shop at Piggly Wiggly. 

To keep up with the demand of multiple towns’ worth of shoppers, McGonagill needed more employees. Most of the Piggly Wiggly employees are high school students. And due to the pandemic, all of his former employees were back in town and home from college. He began reaching out to them one by one and hiring them back.

When he wasn’t out looking for employees, they came to him. On several occasions, former employees and restaurant workers who had lost shifts due to dining room closures would walk in the door hoping to pick up some hours. McGonagill would ask one question:

“You don’t have anything going today, do you? Because if you can clock in right now, you have a job.”

Piggly Wiggly isn’t the only grocery store in Amory. There is a Food Giant and a Walmart. But they both are limited to buying products from certain suppliers in specific quantities. Piggly Wiggly, which is a locally owned and operated store, could source from any supplier. McGonagill took advantage by purchasing items in bulk at any local or national distributor he chose before prices jumped. Therefore, he was operating on a lower unit price than the other stores in town who bought on a day-to-day basis. 

Being independent also allowed McGonagill to be creative with exactly where he sourced goods from. At one point, he began buying excess products, such as hamburger meats and steak, from Cisco, which is primarily a restaurant vendor. Companies like Cisco were typically wary of selling to non-restaurant vendors, but Joe felt like he could talk his way around that hesitancy. Cisco bills monthly for the goods they sell. Mcgonagill expedited the payment.

“I told them, ‘look I will write you a check as soon as you get to my backdoor.’”

One day, he got a pallet of steaks from St. Louis by using the truck of a performance vendor like Cisco. It was about chest-high, and it cost him $17,600. 

They were all gone within a day.

McGonagill also made deals with local Mississippi meat distributors. It was a simple arrangement: he would buy whatever they had.

His supply method had a downside. While other grocery stores were steadily increasing prices as their distributor prices increased, Piggly Wiggly’s held firm due to an insistence on keeping an excess stock. Until they ran out. Then, McGonagill would have to restock at a higher unit price, causing the store’s prices to jump suddenly. And customers noticed. At the Nettleton Piggly Wiggly, a customer confronted a cashier about the price hikes and later took to Facebook to complain about price-gouging.

McGonagill responded through his Piggly Wiggly Facebook page, describing how their pricing works. He credits Facebook for being the major driver of his business. Through the pandemic, he posted daily photos of his stock, cleaning precautions, and hours. In one viral post, he detailed how the store would begin staying open for an extra hour for first responders and healthcare workers to exclusively shop.

Facebook controversy or not, Jamie Morgan, Amory’s city clerk, puts the conclusion plainly:

“When his numbers go higher, [Amory’s] numbers go higher.”

And Amory’s sales tax numbers show the city’s success. In March 2019, Amory collected approximately $140,000 in sales tax. In March 2020, Amory collected approximately $148,000. The trend continued as the pandemic intensified. In May 2019, the city collected approximately $173,000 in sales tax. In May 2020, the city collected approximately $200,000.

Alyssa Benedict, the Amory Main Street Director, credits business success to several factors. First, main street businesses pulled together to share their importance to the community through targeted social media pushes. Second, the businesses offered discounts and incentives as a unit. A purchase at one store could lead to a discount at another store down the street. Third, local businesses found new ways to meet their customers. Suddenly, sales weren’t just taking place at the register or at the curbside pickup. Instead, they were happening through Facebook and Instagram. Finally, the draw to the nearest city, Tupelo, was gone. Most businesses and dining options there were closed, shortening the orbit for Amory residents to shop and entertain. 

But the survival and eventual success of business in Amory wasn’t expected in early March.

As shoppers rushed McGonagill’s grocery store, less than a mile away Shannon Hyatt sat alone in her newly-opened Brown Eyes Bakery in tears.  

She called Alyssa in tears. Hyatt was already struggling to find a clientele, and she feared that the pandemic could put her under.

“She told me to ‘think outside the box.’ and I didn’t know what that meant,” Hyatt recalled.

The Brown Eyes Bakery was new to town. Hyatt, who lives outside of Pontotoc about 45 minutes away from Amory, found a passion for baking when enrolled in culinary classes with her daughter Macy in 2012.  Six years later, Macy, now a real estate agent, found a building suitable for a bakery in Amory. Shannon quit her job, bought the building, and started the bakery. It was initially hard to get customers, especially considering she didn’t live in Amory. And the coronavirus threatened to take away the business she did have.

She started Googling unconventional ideas for bakeries in the pandemic and decided to completely shift her business model. Instead of focusing on sweets, she began selling pre-made meals, such as frozen casseroles, Rotel chicken spaghetti, and lasagna.

It was a hit. Through the pandemic, Hyatt would wake up at 5 a.m. to arrive at the bakery at 6. From there, she would determine what supplies she would need for the day. Due to supply chain issues, she was only able to purchase enough goods to get her through each day. Often, finding the supplies to make just one day’s worth of products meant traveling to 7 or 8 grocery stores across Northeast Mississippi.

Hyatt noted that many of her customers were adults seeking easy-to-make food options for their elderly parents. To allow for more flexibility in purchasing and pickup, she offered a delivery service, which meant staying in Amory until 7 or 8 p.m every evening. Alongside her own deliveries, she would deliver goods from other main street businesses as needed. She wanted to show and prove that she cared about this community and was there to help out in any way she could. Hyatt hoped these sacrifices could bring her more business based around sweets when the pandemic eased away.

It worked. Hyatt’s bakery is booked for events, such as bridal showers and weddings, for the next two months, and her primary concern now is hiring more employees. 

Maintaining business success without the staff necessary is a common problem today in Amory. On May 12th, 2021, there was a hiring fair in Frisco Park that 12 businesses participated in and offered a total of 112 jobs.

Chad Houston was never sure his business would be open today and looking for workers. He bought a building downtown in February of 2020 to open the Gemstone, which would be the first bar in Amory since prohibition. In late 2019, a referendum made Amory a “wet” city, meaning alcohol could be sold and consumed within city limits for the first time in a century.

Shortly after Houston took the first steps to get the construction and necessary renovations, the pandemic began. On one hand, it was a logistical nightmare. Electricians were cutting back their hours, the construction company slowed down its timeline, and the health department removed many of the appointment openings for inspections. 

But on the other, it was a blessing in disguise. Houston, who had a job at the Toshiba Corporation, was furloughed every other week, meaning he could draw unemployment and invest that money into the Gemstone.

The restaurant opened for several nights in early July for invite-only soft launches. In late July, the Gemstone opened for reservation only, which Houston says was their biggest blessing. A reservations-only model allowed him to predict how much supply he would need. Through the Fall before restrictions were eased on dining limits, the Gemstone was booked solid for every available reservation. 

Benedict even brought in other main street directors to see Houston’s restaurant: it was one of the few restaurants across the state to open during the pandemic. Houston finds comedic relief in this distinction.

“All these restaurants were dropping like flies across the state, and here we were trying to open one!”

Business is still booming for Houston, whose main worry now is finding more help to hire. He is taking meticulous notes of everything the store is experiencing with the plan of writing a book about it one day.  But his motive hasn’t changed:

“I did this with a love of Amory in my heart. I want Amory to be better.”

Telling the story of a ‘tornado that kept churning’

The Monroe Journal Managing Editor Ray Van Dusen knows how to cover tornadoes.

He is acutely aware of the destruction they can cause because he has seen it firsthand multiple times. In 2011, a tornado swerved around Amory and decimated Smithville, a small town of about 600 residents ten miles away. 

Every spring brings a similar threat. 

Waking up in the middle of the night to lay in the bathtub under a ceiling of pillows is a Mississippi tradition. 

In 2019, Van Dusen slept in his car to continue reporting on the damage a tornado caused in Monroe County. The roads were blocked off. If he went home, he couldn’t get back in.

As Van Dusen accepted Mississippi Press Association awards for his coverage of the 2019 twister, a new storm lurked on the horizon. He wasn’t prepared or experienced for it.

“This was the tornado that kept churning.”

On March 16th, Monroe County reported its first coronavirus case. It took over the front page of the Thursday print edition of the Monroe Journal two days later. And the coronavirus didn’t leave the front page for two months straight. In early June, it took a backseat to a George Floyd protest downtown.

The amount of news exponentially increased, but the size of the paper shrunk. Across the country, local newspapers struggled. Sixty newspapers closed their doors during 2020, adding to the total trend of over 2,000 that have closed down since 2004.

As the pandemic took a grip on the country, Van Dusen and the rest of the Monroe County Journal staff were called into a company-wide meeting, where they were told things would “get tight.” Van Dusen had to confront the possibility of furloughs and layoffs in his already small staff of 6.

But that didn’t happen for the Monroe Journal. The staff was never furloughed, and most of their advertisers stayed on board. Most of the advertising inside of the paper was from grocery stores, which thrived in Amory. Through the pandemic, Piggly Wiggly kept a full-page ad in the newspaper.

Some staff found benefits in the turmoil. Melissa Meador, the sports reporter for the paper, initially was dejected over the halt of athletics but also saw some benefits in writing news for a change. She had more news clips for her portfolio should she decide to pursue a different opportunity in the future.

I asked Ray whether he thought the pandemic would have long-lasting effects on the newspaper. His answer slowly fell out, almost as if the accurate answer didn't seem to be the right one.

“I don’t think so. I don’t really see it.”

The Amory School District struggled financially as I rose through its grades. When I was in middle school, we took tests using our notebook paper and answered the questions as they were projected onto the whiteboard.

Since Ken Byars took over as superintendent in 2015, the district has been righting the ship. And Van Dusen wondered if the school saved a large amount of money due to the pandemic closure, primarily in the form of gas and electricity.

When I asked Byars about this possible silver lining, he sighed. The school has an approximately 16 million dollar operating budget, which utilities, such as electricity and gas for buses, only make up 1% of. 70% of the budget goes to salaries, which were still fulfilled whether the building was open or not. The school did receive substantial federal grants, but they were earmarked for specific uses. 

Unlike some Mississippi school districts, Amory never had to decide on whether to go virtual or continue in-person learning in the spring of 2020. The district released students for Spring Break in early March, and Governor Tate Reeves began delaying a return for schools statewide until the eventual cancellation of in-person schooling for the remainder of the school year was announced.

Distance learning brought many challenges for a rural area like Amory. The first issue was many students not having access to a stable internet connection at home. As a solution, the school offered paper packets of work to turn in, and they placed hotspots in buses outside the three schools in the district. 

Overall, the district had inflated grades for the final nine weeks of the school year, meaning the graduation rate was not negatively affected.  The work was primarily graded on completion, so students who turned in their work did well. Byars expects to see the graduation rate take a hit this year due to these relaxations. 

The district was able to continue providing lunches to students at no charge through federal and state funding. There was a drive-through station, manned by volunteer teachers, set up outside of East Amory Elementary daily offering lunch and pre-packaged breakfast for the next day.

When schools returned for the fall semester, Amory offered both in-person and virtual options. The virtual option was initially popular, as nearly 200 of the approximately 1,600 students in the district opted to learn remotely. However, many of those virtual students quickly shifted back to in-person learning before the end of the semester. But the overall amount of students in the district had fallen to record lows, with some parents opting to enroll their children in homeschool programs or sending them to smaller private schools nearby.

For the fall of 2020 and the majority of the spring of 2021, students came to school every day of the week except Wednesday, which provided an opportunity for the school to clean and also for teachers to continue learning how to teach effectively through virtual platforms.  

The district was never forced to close a school for an outbreak during the school year, and the virtual Wednesday was eventually eliminated as the school year drew to a close in April.

Overall, Byars sees some silver linings in the challenges the school district faced. First, every student was able to receive a Chromebook to complete their schoolwork through the Equity and Distance Learning Act. Teachers were pushed to learn new technology to teach their students in new ways.

Yesterday, on my first day home from school, I drove downtown and parked my car. As I turned the ignition off, I got a news alert on my phone from the CDC announcing that the fully vaccinated no longer needed to wear a mask.

I left my navy blue mask on the driver’s seat as I shut the door and headed toward Bill’s Hamburgers. The business is an Amory staple that first appeared on the block in 1929 and hasn’t left since. I opened the door to see several old men sitting on stools, reading the newspaper. The cook behind the counter welcomed me with a question:

“What can I get to drink for you?”

I smiled and asked for a Sprite as I maneuvered past the bright red bar to the tables in the back. When I was little, my dad would take me to Bill’s once every couple of months on a Saturday for lunch. We would sit at the bar and enjoy each other's company. 

After the final softball game of my senior year, all my friends came to Bill’s for a casual last meal together before the school year’s end would tear us apart.

I sat down at a back table and ordered my usual - one “without” (meaning no cheese), fries, and a cookie.

And Riley and I talked about life. Where we are now, what’s next, what’s behind us…just like we did on the bridge above the Tombigbee a year earlier.

The conversation eventually came to the question I have just started to scratch the surface of - how did the pandemic change Amory?

I’m not sure yet. 

But it is inspiring to me that a town steeped in tradition and proud of its ability to keep its form through the generations was able to pull together to adapt to a monumental challenge.

So I think that is where I will leave this for now...with me, receipt in hand, walking out of Bill’s Hamburgers into the first sunshine glimmers for the dog days of summer. 

“Have a good day now, y’all!” the cook shouted.