Most "professional" writers produce between one and two thousand words a day. On a good day, I can easily do between five and ten thousand. Even if half of that is garbage (which it often is), I'm still ahead of the game.
What kills me is the process of going back and not only correcting grammar and sentence structure but deciding what stays and what goes. I'd rather have dental work than spend a day doing that. Most of the time, for blog and Facebook stuff, I don't do it. For that writing, I'm just making words for the sheer exhilarating pleasure of it.
My other Achilles heel is that I'll often get eighty percent finished with a project and have not one clue on how to close it out. Most people like writing with a dramatic conclusion to the conflict, but you almost never get that in life, so I'm not very good at imagining it. As a result, I have about two dozen pieces in a folder named "unfinished" because I couldn't figure out how to end them.
One of these pieces I started a long time ago. Before they renovated the King Edward Hotel, young people who weren't very good at balancing risks and rewards would sometimes break into the abandoned hotel and explore. I always found that block of West Capitol Street fascinating. There were all these really cool buildings with nothing inside them. I knew they had histories, and I would often imagine what they were.
One of these long abandoned buildings had an elaborate green and white mosaic in front of it that read "Bon Ton Cafe." There were several places around West Capitol Street that had inlaid tile decorations like that. The Mayflower has probably the most elaborate mosaic, but even Lott Furniture had one. The Standard Life Building has one, but it uses big cut sheets of stone rather than square tiles. I imagined, back in the 20s or 30s, there was a guy who went from business to business, selling his skills at laying mosaic tiles.
Back before the explosion of the internet, if I wanted to find out something about Jackson's past, I had to go to the library. I could ask the librarian, but if they didn't know off the top of their head, they pointed me to their extensive collection of Jackson papers on microfilm and microfiche. I got pretty good at using those machines. While they were fascinating to use, there wasn't such a thing as a text search feature. The papers were organized by date, so the best you could do was to go to the date you were interested in and scan whole editions to see if they had the information you wanted.
Without a specific date in mind, I tried just pulling random dates in the 20s and 30s in hopes of finding maybe an ad or a review of the Bon Ton Cafe. No such luck. Since I had to make up a lot of the details anyway, I decided to make up all the details and create a false history for the Bon Ton Cafe, based on what I knew about The Mayflower, Primos, The Rotisserie, and The Elite.
Now that I have access to newspapers.com, I've gone back and checked for real information about the Bon Ton Cafe, and it turns out a lot of my guesses were right, but some were terribly wrong. Since every restauranteur I ever met who got their start before 1960 was an immigrant from a Mediterranean country, I assumed the guy who started the Bon Ton was too, and said he was Lebonese. That was wrong; he was from Germany. The imaginary menu I came up with turned out to be exactly right.
Between the end of the war and 1960, businesses on that block of West Capitol did pretty well. With the train depot on the other side of the street, they could always count on business. They couldn't always count on the depot, though, by 1960, passenger travel dropped off considerably. Dumas Milner bought the King Edward in 1955. He modernized it by replacing the grand staircase with an escalator, then considered fantastically modern and impressive. By June 1967, he locked the doors on the King Edward, never to open it again in his lifetime.
Milner was a friend of my grandfather, and in all my studies of Jackson's history, he's the most interesting to me. There were always rumors that Milner was connected to the mob. Those were kind of true, but mostly not true. My father explained it to me once. In the old days (before 1980), all the banks had a policy that automobiles were not considered fixed assets (because they moved), so dealerships who borrowed money based on the value of their inventory had to pay off the entire note once a year, and then once the old note was paid off, they would write a new note so they could buy new inventory. If the time came to pay off the annual note, and a dealership didn't have the cash on hand, it wasn't unusual for Jackson dealerships to borrow the money from New Orleans bootleggers or Memphis merchants and then pay them off once the bank wrote a new note. If this sounds convoluted and unnecessary, the banks eventually decided it was too.
Even though Milnew owned hotels and restaurants and Pinesol, he made most of his money from selling cars, so when he had to, he would borrow money from these guys. Besides all that, being in the hotel and restaurant business in Mississippi before 1966 meant you had to deal with New Orleans bootleggers because every hotel in Jackson had a bar, and selling alcohol was illegal (although, if you did, you had to pay tax on it) and at one point, Milner owned The King Edward, The Robert E Lee, and the Sun n' Sand. To get around the laws against serving booze, these bars were all legally set up as clubs. To gain membership to the club, you paid the hotel clerk a buck or two, and you got a card saying you were a club member and you could drink. Milner owned the Patio Club, among others.
The King Edward Hotel Died because Mississippians quit using passenger trains, but they switched to America's new obsession, getting every human being in the United States to own a car, which Milner also made money on, so no matter what, he was in the good. By the time I met Dumas Milner, he had retired after a stroke. Most of his businesses were either sold off or closed down. The Sun 'n Sand was still going strong. My grandfather loved him and loved the fact that a guy who could be successful at so many different things lived here in Jackson.
I'm going to try and finish my piece on the Bon Ton Cafe this week. It's an utterly meaningless story, but I enjoyed it. It reminds me of being a little boy and eating at the Mayflower or Primos downtown. When they reopened the King Edward Hotel, a whole bunch of ghosts flew out. Maybe one of them wanted me to write this story.
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