Ed Phillips looked like a man you might have seen sauntering down the gangplank of a Mississippi riverboat at the foot of Canal Street sometime in the mid-1800s. Barrel chested, uncommonly handsome and with a voice that rumbled like distant thunder, Ed would have been a more-than-adequate stand-in for Clark Gable in that actor’s most memorable role.
Ed died Saturday a week ago. He was 80.
I can think of no one the term “outdoorsman” better fits than Ed. He was the consummate hunter-gatherer. He fished, hunted and reveled in the bounty of the woods surrounding his home near Catalpa Creek on Old West Point Road. Years ago, when I frequented that route, rare was the day I passed Ed’s house in deer season when a fresh carcass wasn’t hanging from a tree in the yard.
He sold jellies, preserves and seasonings he concocted under the label L.A. Gourmet. Somewhere in the recesses of our refrigerator are jars of mayhaw and pawpaw jellies of his making. You could find Ed’s offerings at select local retailers or you could order them by mail or leave a message on his answering machine. Despite friends’ efforts to convince him otherwise, he had no use for the Internet.
I’m not sure where I first met Ed — maybe at The Depot, a restaurant he and his then wife Judy owned back in the 80s. I remember an outing on the Tombigbee — a boat party of some sort — where Ed was the caterer. We’d gone up and down the river, and as memory serves, bad weather was looming. As we approached the landing, Ed began making Bananas Foster, a dish made with dark rum that involves fire.
As the boat pitched and rolled — we may have had no lights at that point — Ed executed the Bananas Fosters with grace and aplomb. I remember thinking, “This guy can cook anything anywhere and make it look easy … and it will taste good.”
My hypothesis was borne out later when I was invited to one of the storied wild game feasts in his shop, across the road from his house. While it would be futile to attempt a precise description of Ed’s shop and contents, it would not be inaccurate to say the decor was dominated by rusting tools, weapons and mementos of the hunting exploits of Ed and friends. Attached to the doors of two aging refrigerators were hunting photos and newspaper columns clipped from this newspaper, most notably those of Charley Reese, an iconoclast based in Orlando who from time to time wrote about the virtues of Southern chivalry.
The evening’s fare often came by way of one of the regulars: a wild turkey killed in the Prairie, pheasant from the Midwest, crappie caught in a local lake. On one of the nights I attended, the piece de resistance was a raccoon dish, the raw ingredients furnished by Armstrong Walters, who had pen raised and corn fed a half dozen or so raccoons for the occasion. Another night it was turtle, fried and in a soup with sherry.
As the host and chef made final preparations, guests, most of them regulars, stood outside with their libation and cheroots on a crumbling cement pad within sight of a listing concrete silo and growled about issues of the day. Dinner was served on a table freshly covered with butcher paper, on which one evening I saw Ed spread French fries, the evening’s hors d’oeuvre, with the flourish of a blackjack dealer displaying a winning hand. Diners poured ketchup on the paper and treated the tabletop as a communal serving platter. The food was always delicious and abundant and the fellowship nonpareil.
Occasionally I called Ed to ask about a tree or some woodland shrub. Rarely could I stump him. Last summer he brought me two pawpaw trees. “If you want to know anything about pawpaws,” Ed said in that rumbling baritone, “call Tim Brooks.” And he gave me Brooks cell phone number. I still have the scrap of paper on my desk.
I only mention this because as I was waiting for Ed’s funeral to begin, I introduced myself to a person I didn’t recognize, Tim Brooks.
“You’re the pawpaw expert,” I said. “According to Ed.”
Brooks, a wildlife biologist for the Corps of Engineers, allowed he might be, and we proceeded to have a lively discussion about native plants, one we both agreed later Ed would have loved to have known he was the cause of.
Friends and family buried Ed in the prairie Thursday after the Rosary, a full Latin mass and a graveside service. Fittingly it was a day Mother Nature chose to flex her muscles, adding to the proceedings ice, wind and sub-freezing weather. Ed would have approved every minute of it.
One more thing. They buried Ed in a casket made by his son Joey and a group of friends. The boys used 5/4-inch unfinished cypress for the job. The box was distinctive; it was big, sturdy and very much of the natural world. A perfect description of the man whose remains it contains.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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