Ladies in black appear once a year to weep on Augusta Street. Tantaras of trumpets and drumrolls are harbingers of their coming. They lead a funeral procession from their husband’s grave to the home he shared with his only legal wife and wail toasts in his honor, taking sips of their cocktails under the veils shrouding their faces. Liquor leads them to bicker, and each of the widows proclaims to all that will hear that their dearly-departed groom loved them best. Sorrow moves them to hysteria. They reach into their handbags and fling black garters and beads into a sea of mourners who claw the treasures out of their neighbors’ hands. As suddenly as the widows arrive, they depart, taking their brass band and grieving cortege with them. It’s a tableau that Becky Pomrenke watches from her house every Mardi Gras. She welcomes the pandemonium. It’s a celebration of a Mobile luminary’s life, and the widows put the “fun” in “funeral.” It’s just part of living next to the Joe Cain House.
Being the neighbor of the father of modern Mobile Mardi Gras wasn’t part of Pomrenke’s plan when she moved from the Chicago area to Mobile. The little house in the Oakleigh Garden District just had everything she was looking for — charm, history and winters that didn’t chill her to the bone. “Everyone thinks that the cold is great, but unless you’ve ever walked outside and had your eyeballs freeze, you don’t know what cold is. After I graduated from the University of Iowa, I went back to Chicago where my parents were, and I knew I had to get out,” she says. A trip to see her brother and his family made her fall in love with the warmth of the people and the weather in Mobile. “I came to visit them and was like ‘Okay, this is cool. It’s historic. So, I started looking for jobs. USA Health had a whole bunch of job postings, and I’m not even kidding, I applied for just about every job they posted.”
Her plans to move to Mobile fell into place in a whirlwind, proving that big, exciting changes rarely wait for the perfect moment. “They called me to offer me the job and I said, ‘Yes, I will absolutely accept this job, but can I please call you back? There’s a limo in my driveway waiting to take me to see The Rolling Stones,” Pomrenke recalls. “They were like, ‘Of course! Go have a good time! Call us tomorrow.’” She arrived in Mobile about a month after accepting the position during BayFest. One drink-in-hand walk through the street party that had taken over Downtown, and she knew she was where she belonged.
Pomrenke first settled in West Mobile when she arrived in the South, but she quickly realized that it didn’t quite feel like home. She was drawn to the turn-of-the-century architecture in Mobile’s historic neighborhoods, where she found a house that seemed to have been waiting for her. “I just really liked the historic neighborhoods and areas,” she says. “I remember being at work and looking at the newspaper, and there was this little ‘For Sale by owner’ ad. I called my realtor and said, ‘I think I want to look at this house.’ So, we did, and from the minute I walked in, I thought, ‘This is my house.’”
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