Temperatures are currently in the low to mid 70s, under mostly cloudy skies in North Mississippi. Scattered showers and thunderstorms are likely this morning and in the afternoon. Highs will be in the mid to upper 80s. Southwest winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Tonight will be partly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Lows in the lower 70s.
Scattered showers and thunderstorms will be possible each day through the weekend.
Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today
The Mississippi Capitol in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday, June 30, 2020.
The Mississippi House, reeling from its presiding officer, Speaker Philip Gunn, and multiple other members testing positive for the coronavirus over the weekend, sent most of its staff home Monday for two weeks.
The House clerk’s office will remain open to accept Gov. Tate Reeves’ signings or vetoes of the dozens of bills passed by the Legislature last week, according to people familiar with the operations of the House.
Reeves, who met with Gunn last week for the signing of the historic bill to change the state flag, announced Monday he was being tested.
A spokesperson confirmed at least one person on the Senate staff has tested positive for the coronavirus, and the Senate is following the recommendations of the Health Department concerning with COVID-19.
The Department of Health provided tests at the Capitol Monday, where people waited an hour of more in a line of cars that snaked their way through the Capitol grounds to be tested.
It was not clear Monday how or when the Legislature will address the budget for the Department of Marine Research, which is a regulatory and law enforcement agency on the Gulf Coast. The Legislature left last Thursday after funding all of state government for the new fiscal year that began on July 1 except for Marine Resources. There was a dispute over the $50 million the agency receives from oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. House leaders said the Legislature should have more oversight of the funds.
The Legislature was expected to come back late this week to try to reach agreement on a budget for the agency. Now it is not clear what the plans are.
Reeves, who was critical of the House leaders, saying they wanted to take over the funds to spend them on their own projects, tweeted that the agency can provide basic services without a budget for the new fiscal year, but for only a short period of time.
“We were able to find a temporary funding solution…to allow people to safely fish,” he said. “Won’t last long – still need Legislature to do their job and pass a budget.”
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Bruce Newman/MCIR
Johnny Douglas, a University of Mississippi student in the MBA program, said the presence of roommates made it difficult to achieve privacy during his telemental health sessions.
University of Mississippi student Johnny Douglas of Oxford was worried that his therapy for depression and anxiety might stop in its tracks when the COVID-19 pandemic started.
Instead, beginning in March, his private counselor and his psychiatrist tried out a method of meeting that didn’t involve Douglas leaving his apartment—wireless telehealth counseling and medication sessions – a mode of treatment that exploded in numbers in Mississippi during shelter-in-place orders.
Numbers aren’t available for the increase among patients like Douglas treated via telehealth through private insurance, but among those covered by Medicaid, the numbers soared.
“In state fiscal year 2019 there were 6,078 total telehealth visits for mental health services. By contrast, between March 1 and May 25 of this year – roughly three months – there were at least 14,852 telehealth visits for mental health services,” said Matt Westerfield, communications director for Medicaid.
Bruce Newman/MCIR
Johnny Douglas, a student in the MBA program at the University of Mississippi, had come to rely on counseling to help him deal with his anxieties and worried he’d lose that support when the pandemic shut down his therapist’s office. But he was able to continue his sessions via telehealth until he could resume in-person sessions.
Douglas at first was not enamored with the idea of using telehealth. But he had been seeing his counselor once every two weeks since January and didn’t want to lose that support he’d had since he’d begun going in November for stresses from law school and a bad breakup. He graduated from law school this summer and is now in the MBA program.
“I feel like it kept me in the habit of going,” Douglas said. He said that while he didn’t make as much progress as he would have liked in his treatment, it kept him from regressing into a deeper episode
Mississippi authorized the use of telehealth one or more chronic conditions, as defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, including mental health. It also requires health insurance or employee benefit plan to charge the same deductible, co-payment, or coinsurance for a health care service provided through telemedicine as it does for in-person consultation.
But the main block to Mississippi mental health centers using telehealth regularly before this time was that Medicaid did not reimburse centers for much of the care delivered over telehealth, insisting that the patient be seen in person by a clinician.
That changed when Mississippi’s Division of Medicaid put in place an Emergency Telehealth Policy on March 20, 2020, in response to the pandemic. “Essentially, the emergency policies temporarily increase the number of services eligible for telehealth and give providers the flexibility to deliver those services via audio only modes of communication,” said Phaedre Cole, executive director for Region 6 Community Mental Health Center and board president for the Mississippi Association of CMHCs.
“With regard to mental health, this ability to access services from their home is particularly crucial because beneficiaries can limit unnecessary travel and potential exposure to coronavirus while maintaining regular support,” Westerfield said. “Virtually every mental health service covered by Mississippi Medicaid can now be accessed through telehealth, programs such as individual therapy, group therapy, psychosocial rehabilitation, and peer support.”
Such emergency policies were to end June 30, Cole said. ”It is our hope that these emergency policies will be extended.”
Westerfield noted that the number of beneficiaries has not increased—simply the number of times they have used telehealth. “From what we can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a noticeable increase in the number of beneficiaries receiving mental health services as a result of telehealth because the volume of billing claims is comparable to pre-COVID-19 months.”
Cole noted that the visits are provided through whatever avenues are available to the center and the patient, including FaceTime, Skype, GoToMeeting, or simply in a phone conversation.
The use of telehealth or telemedicine in mental health treatment already was a topic of discussion before the pandemic. A 2016 analysis published in the National Institutes of Health’s Telemedicine Journal and E-Health explored the use of “telemental health” in treating mental disorders as a way of mitigating such factors as the critical shortage of mental health professionals. According to the study, there’s an estimated shortage of 10,000-20,000 psychiatrists in the United States with even more serious shortages of child and adolescent and geriatric psychiatrists.
The analysis assessed the merit of using telemedicine in terms of feasibility, acceptance, effects on medication compliance, health outcomes and cost. The global cost of mental health disorders, according to the analysis, is projected to reach over $6 trillion this year. The analysis was based on a review of 22 studies into the feasibility and acceptance of telemental health, seven that investigated medication adherence and five with cost. All feasibility and acceptance studies reached similar conclusions regarding satisfaction, and all treatment adherence reported positive results in terms of medication compliance. Cost-effectiveness and cost savings appeared to be volume sensitive with the minimal volume savings being 250 consultations.
In Mississippi, while the telehealth visits have dramatically increased since the beginning of the pandemic, barriers still exist for mental health patients seeking care, Cole said. “Many of our clients lack broadband access, do not possess the skills or equipment needed to engage in telehealth services, have limited data plans, and/or do not want to erode cellphone plan minutes on frequent or lengthy telephonic contacts. In addition to the technological challenges, valuable clinical information can be lost in a telephonic only encounter. For instance, nonverbal cues are missed, and rapport can be more difficult to establish.”
Douglas said early attempts at his telehealth visits were plagued by technical problems, with him not being able to log into the clinic’s telehealth software. He and his providers finally resorted to FaceTime on his cellphone to accomplish his sessions.
“It’s been an adjustment,” Douglas said. He said that the presence of his roommates sometimes made it difficult to achieve the privacy he felt he needed to discuss his difficulties.
Mental health experts understand that social isolation can have devastating consequences on people’s mental and physical health, according to Cole. Cole said that experts hope the reduction of cases in coronavirus will enable face-to-face communications soon between patients and clinicians. “The pandemic has forced social isolation upon the masses. While telehealth and telephonic services provide some level of human contact, it does not replace the benefits of face-to-face interventions.”
Douglas said he began regular in-person sessions again last week and was glad of it. “It was weird to have therapy in my room,” Douglas said. “I don’t know that I got as much out of it.”
This story was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that seeks to inform, educate and empower Mississippians in their communities through the use of investigative journalism. Sign up for our newsletter.
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Photo by Rory Doyle
A Confederate statue remains outside the Bolivar County Courthouse in Cleveland, Mississippi on July 3, 2020.
CLEVELAND — The Bolivar County Board of Supervisors has voted to remove the Confederate monument in front of the Cleveland courthouse.
Supervisor Jacorius Liner made the motion to remove it; no supervisors voted against the motion. At their last meeting, the board authorized attorney Ellis Turnage to look into the legality of removing the monument.
Turnage informed the board of state law at their regular Monday meeting — that for a Confederate monument to be moved it must be placed in a suitable location such as a cemetery or historical Civil War site.
No decisions have yet been made by the board as to where the statue will go, when, or how much it will cost.
“Our responsibility today is not to find a suitable place , but to make a decision to have it removed and then we can begin to have those discussions with the appropriate entities across the state later,” Liner said.
Board vice-president Donny Whitten initially wanted to delay the vote until the county had all questions answered about costs and logistics of moving the monument. When it came time for the vote, however, he did not vote against it.
“To move [the Confederate monument] without having all questions answered is premature. But I understand the heartfelt emotions and reasonings behind the motion. I absolutely do,” Whitten said.
Photo by Rory Doyle
Protestors demand the Confederate statue come down outside the Bolivar County Courthouse in Cleveland, Mississippi on July 3, 2020.
A group of about 20 people marched to the monument on July 3 demanding that the statue be removed, that no county or city dollars be used to remove it. The group also demanded that it be replaced by a monument honoring Black liberation commissioned by a Black artist from Bolivar county, and that the county and city shift resources away from policing and toward “community-led educational and recreational programs for Black youth.”
Liner, the supervisor, stated during the meeting that the county should bear the costs of moving the monument.
“It’s on our property, on our lawn. It would be our responsibility to bear the cost whatever the cost,” Liner said.
This decision is the latest in a flood of movement across the state and nation to halt the glorification of the Confederacy, the most notable example perhaps being the Mississippi Legislature’s recent decision to change the state flag, which was the last in the nation to bear the Confederate emblem.
The monument in Bolivar County was erected in 1908 and was sponsored by the Daughters of the Confederacy; their movement was part of a larger effort to re-write the history of the Confederacy and promote that the Civil War was more about “states’ rights” than it was about slavery.
Toward the end of the meeting, Board vice-president Larry King commented that Confederate statues celebrate, “those that enslave us (African-Americans). I think we’re doing right to end that celebration and celebrate something more positive.”
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Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, speaks to reporters after House lawmakers passed the two-thirds threshold needed to suspend its rules and introduce a bill to change the Mississippi state flag. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
Yard signs sprang up across the state the summer of 2015 proclaiming: “Keep the flag. Change the speaker.”
For many Mississippians that summer, no politician was a bigger foe than House Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, who had publicly said he supported changing the official state flag, the last in the nation displaying the controversial Confederate battle emblem.
Five years later, Gunn is still the speaker — in the first year of his third term as the House’s presiding officer — and the flag has been removed after lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the historic legislation last weekend.
“He was out there by himself (in 2015),” said Rep. Hank Zuber, R-Ocean Springs. “There was a sense it would take a very long period of time to change it, and through his leadership, you see where we are now.”
A number of factors led to the Legislature’s vote to change the flag last weekend: Organizer-led, grassroots energy for racial justice spurred by the police killing of George Floyd, an African American in Minneapolis; the public advocacy of key business leaders, sports figures and religious groups; the evolution on the issue of Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the presiding officer of the Senate, who had previously said the flag should change only by a vote of the people, not lawmakers.
“It was just time,” Hosemann said. “You know people started several weeks ago talking about this and the momentum…built until we had 71 percent of the Senate vote for this. It’s a tremendous vote when you looked at that — people from all across Mississippi. It was not just a Democrat measure… it was bipartisan. It was just time.”
But it was Gunn, who for years spoke and acted against the wishes of many Mississippians and even most of his own Republican caucus, who led the charge in changing the flag.
Over the years, few other Mississippi Republicans voiced support for changing the flag. The most notable Republican politicians to announce support for changing the flag since Gunn did were U.S Sens. Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker, but as federal officials all they could do was offer their opinions. They had no direct impact on changing state law.
But as the leader of the state House, Gunn did.
“I was more concerned about doing what was right,” said Gunn when asked if he feared political consequences for his stance in 2015. “It was not driven by any political agenda.”
And it was clear from early on that Gunn, a Baptist deacon, was influenced by his understanding of his faith.
“I believe what we did today honored God,” he said after the vote last weekend, citing Bible verses demanding people love and not offend their neighbor.
Gunn announced his support for changing the flag soon after a white supremacist killed nine African Americans churchgoers who were at a prayer service in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Despite Gunn being on that limb in Mississippi for years, Republicans increased their numbers in the House, and he was re-elected without opposition in the caucus as speaker. This past January, he was re-elected to a third term as speaker without Republican opposition. It did not appear Gunn’s support for changing the flag ever diminished his support among his House Republican caucus.
“You always worry about people stepping out on something controversial calling for change,” said Rep. Mac Huddleston, R-Pontotoc. “But we (in the Republican caucus) never questioned his leadership.”
But since 2015, the Republican caucus voted against Gunn’s personal position on the issue. In the 2017 session, a vast majority of Republican House members appeared willing to punish the state’s public universities for not flying the banner. Then-Rep. William Shirley, R-Quitman, offered a series of amendments to prevent public universities from receiving various state benefits unless they flew the flag. By then, all eight public universities had permanently furled the flag.
The first time Shirley offered the amendment, it passed by a narrow 57-56 margin with most of the chamber’s Republicans going against the wishes of the speaker. The amendments were eventually defeated thanks to a handful of Republicans who voted against it and nearly all of the chamber’s Democrats.
After that 2017 vote, Gunn told reporters it was obvious that a vast majority of Republican lawmakers opposed changing the flag — or at least opposed the change without a referendum — and that any serious efforts to push bills to change the flag would fail. Any change would have to be driven by some extreme circumstance, he said.
This summer — in the midst of an international pandemic, nationwide protests about racial justice and serious debate about Confederate imagery — Gunn must have known that extreme circumstance may have arrived.
In early June, the week before a large protest in downtown Jackson that renewed the state flag debate, Gunn sat in the corner of the ornate House chamber talking with House Democratic leader Robert Johnson, D-Natchez. No one bothered the two leaders, who could be seen smiling through the lines on the edges of their faces that were partially blocked by their masks.
“We were talking about two things that day: the flag and the pandemic and what we could do about both,” Johnson said. “He literally came back to my desk and said, ‘Let’s talk.’ I said, ‘I will come to your office.’ He said, ‘We can talk right here.’”
During that conversation, Gunn told the Democratic leader he believed he had 12 Republican votes to change the flag. With 44 Democrats and two independents in the 122-member House, 12 Republican votes would leave the speaker short of even a simple majority needed to pass the proposal as part of the normal legislative process.
But since it was late in the session, a flag bill could not be passed as part of the normal process. It would require an even more difficult two-thirds super majority to suspend the rules to take up the legislation. Gunn, touting just 12 Republican votes at the time, was far short of that super majority.
About three weeks after that conversation, during the key vote on that ultimately requiring a two-thirds majority, 38 Republicans voted for the change and 35 voted no. All Democrats and both independents voted for the change.
What changed in such a short period of time, from 12 Republican votes in early June to 38 Republican votes last weekend?
One thing was Gunn’s blessing of a bipartisan group of House members, which included many Democrats and primarily new Republicans, who whipped votes on the issue. As House members were lobbied by their colleagues, momentum for change both inside and outside the Capitol continued to grow. Senate Democrats, who earlier saw no opportunity to address the flag this session, also began to talk about the issue. They, led by Democratic Sens. Derrick Simmons of Greenville and David Blount of Jackson, filed the first suspension resolution.
But all the while, Gunn himself had private conversations with many House Republicans about the flag.
“I might get in trouble for saying this, but the speaker and I are friends,” Johnson said. “We can talk about anything whether we agree or not and in any manner…This would not have happened without that ability to talk.”
Both Johnson and House Pro Tem Jason White, R-West, in separate interviews had identical comments that “a perfect storm” occurred to pass the legislation to change the flag.
Both cited the George Floyd death in Minneapolis as shining a light on the Mississippi flag and how many viewed it as racist.
“There were conversations about the flag before George Floyd,” Johnson said, adding there were embers before the Minneapolis incident that George Floyd ignited into a flame.
“If it had not been for the pandemic, we would have been home by the time (the George Floyd death) happened,” White said. “But because we were still in session because of the pandemic, we were able to do something.”
In the years since Gunn came out for changing the flag, he had been criticized by Democrats and others for not doing enough to push legislation through the House to make that change.
White and others said Gunn never shied away from talking about his desire to change the flag with his Republican caucus, but he never tried to inflict undue pressure.
“He never pressured me one time,” said Rep. Jerry Turner, R-Baldwyn.
Still, White said when Gunn saw momentum growing to change the flag this summer, “He went with it.” That, undoubtedly, led to the historic and unexpected change.
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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today
Mississippi House speaker Philip Gunn, left, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann speaks after Gov. Tate Reeves press conference in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, May 7, 2020.
The Mississippi Legislature, finishing a historic stretch last week where it voted to replace the state flag to remove the Confederate battle emblem from its design, now faces a new challenge as members are testing positive for the coronavirus.
On Sunday, House Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton confirmed that he has contracted COVID-19, as did at least one other member of the House.
“Last week I was in close proximity to an individual, one of our House members who has tested positive, so I felt like I needed to go get myself tested just because I had been near that person and this morning was informed that I too have tested positive for COVID,” said Gunn, who noted he was not exhibiting any symptoms. “I am going to self quarantine for the requisite amount of time and going to do all that (state Health Officer) Dr. Dobbs has advised me to do.”
House Ways and Means Chair Trey Lamar, R-Senatobia, also confirmed Sunday that he had tested positive. And on Friday, Rep. Bo Brown, D-Jackson, revealed he had tested positive. Various sources have indicated that other members of the House have tested positive for the coronavirus.
Rep. Robert Johnson of Natchez, the House Democratic leader, said he had heard about five members of the House have tested positive.
In the Senate, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann’s deputy chief of staff Leah Rupp Smith said “A staff member has tested positive, and is now under quarantine. Senators and staff have been notified, and we are following instructions from the state Health Officer.”
The revelations on Sunday come one day after state Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said during a Mississippi State Medical Association conference this weekend that his agency was monitoring the Legislature for a possible outbreak.
“Dr. Dobbs spoke remotely via Zoom to the Mississippi State Medical Association physicians and indicated MSDH is investigating a possible contact within the Mississippi Legislature,” said Dr. Jennifer Bryan, chair of the MSMA board of trustees. “Our legislators visit within their communities a significant amount and this is not entirely unexpected. We hope that this will be a limited situation, but the investigation is ongoing.”
Mississippi Department of Health spokesperson Liz Sharlot said “We are aware of ill and positive cases among House members. I don’t have any numbers, we are in the midst of investigating and working in conjunction with House leadership.”
The Legislature finished most of its regular work for the 2020 session on Thursday, but did not pass a budget for the Department of Marine Resources, which provides regulatory and law enforcement services on the Gulf Coast. With a new budget year starting on July 1, the agency with no budget has been confined to performing basic services.
The Legislature was expected to return during the coming week to try to reach an agreement on the department’s budget. With the coronavirus outbreak, questions remain about how the department’s budget will be resolved.
In the midst of the pandemic, the Legislature took a long recess in March and when it re-convened in May and June, there were new safety precautions such as social distancing in each chamber and temperature checks before entering the Capitol. But in recent days many of those precautions were not enforced and fewer members have been wearing masks.
In late March, a Capitol Police officer reportedly tested positive for coronavirus while the Legislature was on hiatus because of the pandemic. Earlier this month Legislative leaders also confirmed that an employee who occasionally works at the state Capitol tested positive for COVID-19.
This news follows another record-setting week for coronavirus in Mississippi. The three days before the July 4th holiday saw 2,774 new cases total. Despite a sharp decline in daily cases reported Sunday — likely reflective of holiday reporting delays — the weekly COVID-19 positive rate and rolling average new cases have steadily climbed to record peaks. However, total tests have not kept pace with records set in May.
Hospitalization rates have continued to peak as well, worrying health officials who say intensive care units are filling up as continually rising cases risk overwhelming the health care system. COVID-19 hospitalizations grew by one-third in seven days and new daily cases have more than doubled in the last two weeks.
Erica Hensley contributed to this report.
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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today
Capitol employees remove the state flag in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, July 1, 2020.
Gov. Tate Reeves was not a participant Wednesday in the momentous occasion where the state flags that flew over the Mississippi Capitol were removed — the official retirement of the banner featuring the Confederate battle emblem that had flown over the state since 1894.
As Speaker Philip Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann delivered the flags to the Mississippi Museum of History in a ceremony officiated by the Department of Archives and History, Reeves was holding his first news conference since June 18 to give an update on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bobby Harrison
Reeves already had scheduled his news conference before the legislative leaders set a time and date for the flag furling ceremony.
Both Gunn and Hosemann spoke of the significance of the day where the flag was retired.
Perhaps it could be argued that the absence of the governor at such a pivotal event in the state’s history was itself symbolic.
The flag debate that culminated on the weekend of June 27 with the Legislature voting to replace the flag put Reeves in a near-impossible political situation — a situation he most likely never saw coming until it was on top of him like a ton of bricks.
During his gubernatorial campaign in 2019, Reeves made it clear he would not support changing the flag without a vote of the people. But unfortunately for Reeves, Gunn never made that commitment. Since 2015, the House speaker has been on record as supporting changing the flag.
And as momentum grew nationwide and in Mississippi in recent weeks to address issues of racial injustice, the state flag stuck out like a sore thumb. Soon media reports surfaced that there were behind the scene talks among a bipartisan group of lawmakers to change the banner.
Still, Reeves must not have been too concerned. After all, despite Gunn’s opposition, the speaker had never tried to pass a bill changing the flag because he could not muster the simple majority needed to pass it. And at the late date in the session, a renewed effort to change the flag would require what appeared to be an impossible-to-achieve two-thirds majority vote.
But as talk persisted about changing the flag, Reeves was asked about the issue at his near daily news conferences held to provide COVID-19 updates. He reiterated his belief the flag should not be changed by the Legislature.
As the issue progressed, members of the media began to ask Reeves whether he personally believed the flag was offensive and should be changed. He refused to answer time and again, though he did say he believed one day the flag would be retired.
At his June 18 news conference, which was his last before the one he held during the flag ceremony, Reeves re-stated: “I believe very strongly if you are going to change the flag, it ought to be the people of Mississippi who make the decision.”
Finally, on June 25, as momentum grew, Reeves appeared to relent. Reeves said on social media that if the Legislature voted to change the flag, he would not veto the bill. He said because he knew a veto would be pointless, considering it took a two-thirds majority to override a veto — the same super majority it took to remove the flag late in the session.
And then on June 27 — a rare Saturday session of the Legislature — as Hosemann worked to garner the final votes needed to obtain the super majority in the Senate, Reeves announced he would sign the bill to change the flag.
There has been speculation that Reeves’ announcement that day helped garner the final vote or two needed to pass the bill. Perhaps the answer to that question will never be known, but it is worth noting that what Reeves said that Saturday morning was not much different than what he’d said a couple of days earlier when he announced he would not veto the legislation. After all, there was not much difference in not vetoing legislation and signing legislation. Under either scenario, the bill would have become law.
At any rate, later that day, both chambers passed by more than the two-thirds margin the resolution allowing the bill to change the flag to be considered. Then the next day, that bill passed both chambers by margins larger than two-thirds.
Two days later, when Reeves signed the bill into law in a private ceremony at the Governor’s Mansion where only three “pool reporters” were allowed to attend, he uttered for the first time his support for a new flag.
By then, six of the eight statewide officials had voiced support for changing the flag.
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Demonstrators from around the Delta gathered in Cleveland on July 3, 2020, to protest the Confederate statue outside the Bolivar County Courthouse. Protestors, many carrying signs that read Black Lives Matter, were asking the county to take down the statue without spending county money to relocate it or build a new home for it.
The post Photo gallery: Confederate statue protest by Rory Doyle appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Courtesy Kolinsky family
Nick Kolinsky, right, with his dear friend, Jack Lucas.
My old and dear friend Nick Kolinsky, a patriot if ever there was one, died four years ago on July 5, a day after his 77th Independence Day.
Nick was a Mississippian by choice, not birth. He was an Army veteran, who loved his country and the men and women who fought for it. But he was much more than that, as we will see. He was a football star, a square-jawed, bull-strong guard on a national championship (1962) team at Southern Miss. A Pennsylvania native, Nick learned about then-Mississippi Southern College when he was in the Army and drinking beer with some other soldiers in a German beer hall. One of the soldiers had attended the Hattiesburg school and raved about it. To Nick, the place sounded idyllic. He decided right then he was going to go to college in the funny-named town. And he did. When he left Pennsylvania, he told his mama he was headed for Mississippi.
Her reply: “Son, that’s a river, isn’t it?”
When he got to Hattiesburg, he walked, unannounced into Hall of Fame football coach Pie Vann’s office. “My name is Nick Kolinsky, and I want to play football for you,” he told Vann.
Vann sized him up and quickly decided Nick passed that test. Vann gave him a tryout and then a scholarship. Nick flourished at USM, where he sometimes babysat for me and my little brother. And he never left Hattiesburg. He was an entrepreneur, a tavern owner who also ran a moving business. He was a devout Catholic, a family man, a husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He was a character, Nick was. He was a Hattiesburg icon, possessing remarkable spirit, energy and work ethic. He was an emotional guy, who laughed and cried often, with no apologies for the latter. He was a do-er.
Rick Cleveland
If you were Nick’s friend, he would do anything for you. If you were a stranger, he would do anything for you anyway, which brings us to today’s story, one I’ve told in other newspapers but deserves re-telling here.
In 1981, Jack Lucas was a stranger. One day after work, Nick was watching TV, flipping channels, until he saw a CBS news program with images of the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. He was hooked.
The program told the Jack Lucas story. How Lucas, from North Carolina, had lied about his age at 14 to join the U.S. Marines. How, on Feb. 20, 1945, six days after his 17th birthday, Lucas hurled his body onto two enemy grenades, saving the lives of three fellow marines. How Lucas somehow survived the grenades with shrapnel throughout his body. How Lucas became the youngest ever to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, pinned on him by President Harry S. Truman.
But the program also told how Lucas had fallen on hard times, was living in a meat locker in Maryland on a $200 a month stipend from the government. Because of IRS problems, all other government benefits were garnished.
Nick Kolinsky, in the stands at M.M. Roberts Stadium.
Nick Kolinsky was horrified. He could not believe his country would let this happen to such a patriot, such a hero. Nick cried himself to sleep that night and awakened in tears the next morning. Said his wife, Carol: “Well, do something about it.”
Nick called the CBS affiliate in Mobile and was told he should call the national network. He did so and was so insistent he was finally given the phone number of the program’s producer. Nick convinced the producer that all he wanted to do was help Lucas, and the producer gave Nick a phone number.
After several tries, Nick finally got Lucas on the phone. They talked and hit it off. Several more phone calls ensued. Nick also made another call to the late U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery, a champion of military veterans. Nick was convincing, and Montgomery had pull. Within weeks, Lucas was restored to full benefits.
That wasn’t enough for Nick, who knew Lucas was lonely. So he invited Lucas for a visit and then he offered him a place to live – and a family, his family. Nick and Carol and their four children. Nick and Carol Kolinsky’s daughter, Kim Kolinsky, became particularly close to Jack Lucas, like the daughter he had never had.
“I don’t have much to offer you, but I can offer you a family,” Nick told Lucas. And that’s the way it went down.
Rick Cleveland
Jack Lucas gravesite at Highland Cemetery in Hattiesburg.
Eventually, Lucas bought his own home in Hattiesburg, and just as Nick Kolinsky, he never left. In the Hub City, Lucas met and married his wife, Ruby. His final years were happy ones. More than 63 years after his act of heroism, Jack Lucas died on June 15, 2008. Yes, and the section of U.S. 49 between Wiggins and Hattiesburg is known as the Jack Lucas Medal of Honor Memorial Highway.
Eight years and a few days later after Jack Lucas’ death, Nick Kolinsky passed away, leaving behind untold numbers of friends and admirers – and also leaving his adopted home, Hattiesburg, a far better place.
Legions of friends attended Nick’s funeral four years ago. I was one. Appropriately, there was at least one stranger.
“I never knew this man Nick Kolinsky,” a man who said he was from Mobile told several of us. “I am here to pay respects because of what he did for Jack Lucas.”
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