Page 178 - South Mississippi Living - November, 2017

INMEMORIAM
WALTER J.
BLESSEY, IV
4/17/1939 - 9/17/2017
story by Tamalane Blessey
Walter was born in 1939 to Walter J. Blessey, III, and Geraldine Fountain Blessey. Academics took him from public school to Ole Miss for degrees in accounting and law. After service in Vietnam, his career began in Houston in accounting, then venture capital investments. In 1987, he joined Gulf National Life as executive vice president and CEO, later working in private practice.
Known for story-telling, musical, culinary, hunting and fishing talents, and community service, Walter was a man who filled the room. To me, he was simply a wonderful brother. I arrived seven years after Walter, figuring out soon that he was exciting to be around. (That never changed.) Brother Gerald, born halfway between us, recalls running to the Roxy on Saturdays to see the Three Stooges and Lash Larue. They had to run, Gerald says, because
if you walked past Black’s Bar you would get jumped by those guarding Point Cadet from invaders from Possum Neck. Gerald says Walter could thank the Point Cadet boys for helping him get a track scholarship at Ole Miss, since they had to “burst out of the Roxy at high speed all the way back to Holley Street.”
Walter learned sailing from our grandfather, Henry Fountain, Sr., and uncles, Buddy and Stanton. As a teenager he joined the Biloxi Yacht Club for $8 per year, exposing him to competitive racing on fish class sloops
to further his expertise. Years later a Houston colleague invited him on a sail from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard. “I was the only one in the office who could sail,” he told me.
Love of the outdoors that began on Biloxi beach and
Deer Island would take him to the Caribbean, Hawaii, and Bermuda for marlin fishing, plus to Alaska for salmon. His son John says Walter introduced grits for breakfast at that
remote fishing post.
At age 13, Walter worked as a short-order cook — his
passion for cooking had begun. After years of lavish meals for family and friends, he and Katherine began catering with the B&B business built into their Katrina-ravaged beachfront home. Visitors were treated to tunes on the piano, a history of Biloxi, tips on how to open oysters, peel vegetables, or build a toolshed. Walter loved to cross Highway 90 with a seine, where his grandchildren (and mine) would know the fun of catching small sea creatures and learning about them.
Walter took an oyster knife on fishing trips. Gerald remembers Chandeleur trips on the Comptons’ Happy Landing when Walter would lead the gathering of shoreline oysters, then open them for all to enjoy. His expertise came from rising at 4 a.m. as a teenager to open oysters on Point Cadet for $1 per gallon.
I’m running out of space without getting to rock’n’roll/ lifeguard/jitterbug years or college summers working
for our Grandpa Fountain. I haven’t touched on charity events, or Irish-French Walter becoming a regular at the Slavonian Lodge, or all those years ago balancing me on the handlebars of his bike, or taking me for a bareback ride at Ramsey Springs. From beginning to end, wherever Walter was and whatever he did, his heart was fully in it, a generous heart that was big enough for all of us to own a piece.
178 SOUTH MISSISSIPPI Living • November 2017
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