Page 45 - Panama City Living May/June 2019

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Mexico Beach Mayor Al Cathey (right) and son Lee.
and their homes are gone or forever changed. And they’re wondering, ‘What do we do?’”
At the time, communication with the outside world was nonexistent. Law enforcement officers from the Bay County Sheriff’s Office were the first ones to arrive to check on Mexico Beach and its residents. Media correspondents filed in a day after the storm. Mayor Cathey can now laugh when he remembers the first phone call that he was able to make on Friday, the day after the storm. “Omar Villafranca, one of the CBS newscasters, was sitting down here on the road.” Cathey points out a tent towards the west. “He asked me some questions and I told him, ‘I'm going to answer all of those questions if you let me use your satellite phone.’ With a big grin on his face he said, ‘That's all?’ We made three phone calls: I called my sister, Carol’s sister, and my son Lee called his wife. My sister... that’s better than any newscast you can make,” the mayor says with a smile.
Mayor Cathey has seen Mexico Beach grow and change through the decades. He was a 5-year-old boy when he moved to the Gulf Coast town with his parents in 1953. Mexico Beach only had around 200 residents at the time, most of them fishermen and their families.
REGROWING
MEXICO BEACH
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It’s rather eye-opening: 75 percent of our residential properties
are non-homesteaded... they're most likely in the rental program ... they are what supports our economy.
The town got its initial start in the 1940s. When the nearby Tyndall Field gunnery range, later renamed Tyndall Air Force Base, was completed in 1941, thousands of Army Air Corps personnel flooded into the area. Businessmen Gordon Parker, W.T. McGowan, and J.W. Wainwright, seeing the prospect of growth, bought 1,850 acres of land for $65,000 in 1946 and formed the Mexico Beach Corporation. That same year, the first subdivision of Mexico Beach was platted and recorded in Bay County. The new town became a popular place for sportfishing, thanks to its prime location on the Gulf and its canal that could shelter large boats and offer quick access to the open waters.
Cathey’s family has lived in the city for generations. His uncle, Charles “Charlie” Parker, settled in Mexico Beach in the late ‘40s with wife Frances Cathey “Inky” Parker, and continued his father’s work of developing the city. Charlie became the first mayor of Mexico Beach.
One day, Charlie Parker called his brother-in-law, “Bubba” Cathey, and told him that the fledgling city needed a grocery store and somebody to run it. Not long after, Bubba Cathey and his wife, Marion Cathey, opened Mexico Beach Grocery and settled into their new home with their 5-year-old son, Al Cathey.
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