It’s Time to Change, Mississippi

BILOXI, Miss. – The Mississippi Coast Coliseum is no intimidating structure by any means. The enclosed beachfront arena only seats about 11,000. It’s bathed in a dirty khaki color, a spherical blemish along the sandy white beaches of my hometown.

But to a six-year old boy, the coliseum was the place to be, one of the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s identifying symbols, right up there with boiled shrimp and fishing boats. Before the gambling barges opened their glamorous theaters in the 1990s, anything big happening, from Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula, happened at the coliseum.

Today, fading into the past, its better days long behind it, the coliseum still remains a symbol of this place. So much so…