Message #103048

[Bianca]

Newcomers, too, will help keep the city alive.

Sitting in line at a mobile Federal Emergency Management Agency aid station, Melinda Frazee savored her first cigarette in days. The 51-year-old maintenance engineer grew up in western Kansas, where she says "nothing ever happened." It had been a lifelong dream to live near a beach. A year and a half ago, she and her son rolled into Galveston, and drove to the seawall. They got out and took a walk on the dunes.

"My son looked at me and he said, `I've never seen you smile so big in your life, Mama,'" she recalled as she sat with a dirty rag around her neck. "He said, `Is this it? Is this where we're going to stay? I said, `This is it! This is the place.' ...

"Nasty, filthy, trashy little tourist town. And I love it."

Already, Galvestonians are putting on a brave face.

On Thursday, rows and rows of tables covered in gleaming white linen tablecloths and napkins appeared in front of Gaido's restaurant, which first opened on Murdoch's pier in 1911.

National Guard troops, electrical workers and other first responders filed in for plates of Gulf shrimp and red potatoes boiled over propane flames as the Beach Boys played over the loudspeakers. Big black letters on the marquee declared: "We Will Return/So Also This Island."

"We realized that if we made it really nice and it became a bright spot in everybody's miserable week, then it gives you a sense of normalcy," says Mary Kaye Gaido, the restaurant's wine buyer. "Somebody said to me today, `It was so great to hear music. We haven't heard music in five days.'"

Taking a page out of the New Orleans restaurant industry's post-Katrina playbook, Gaido's hopes to reopen soon in a smaller location with a limited menu.

"We're here for the long haul," Gaido says.

Galveston goes on.

Tilman Fertitta, who owns five beachfront restaurants and three hotels in Galveston and an entertainment complex in suburban Houston that was submerged, vowed that spring would bring resurrection to the island.

"Anybody can come to Mardi Gras in February, and I will guarantee they will be able to say Galveston is back. That's a guarantee," he says.