Slavic Benevolent Association
700 Howard Avenue
Biloxi, MS 39533
Those folks knew what work was. The first thing they did was say, ‘My kids are not going to do the same thing I did. We’re here in Mississippi, in this country, to have a better life. I’m going to work as hard as it takes so that can happen.’ – Fo-Fo Gilich
For over a hundred years in Biloxi, immigrants have come to work in the seafood industry, fueled by the notion that their sacrifices and hard labor will bear easier lives for their children. Fo-Fo is two generations removed from people who came to America from Croatia, people who struggled and eventually found their careers in seafood canning. Even if he did catch hot shrimp cans off assembly lines as a boy, Fo-Fo today is a software developer and an entrepreneur (and a would-be Mayor of Biloxi, falling a few hundred votes shy in 2001), representing the forward-looking vision of his grandparents.
At the same time, as the President of the Slavic Benevolent Association, Fo-Fo presides over the post-Katrina rebuilding of their Lodge with an eye towards the past, recovering and restoring old photos, artifacts, and memories as he focuses on a new building to house the club. He wants to honor the generations of Croatian Biloxians through pictures and stories, even as he honors their legacy just by being.
What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Subject: Andrew “Fo-Fo” Gilich, President, Slavic Benevolent Association
Date: July 28, 2008
Location: Slavic Benevolent Association, Biloxi, MS
Interviewer & Photographer: Francis Lam
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Francis Lam: This is Francis Lam for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday, July 28, 2008. I’m here with Andrew “Fo-Fo” Gilich at the Slavonian Lodge in Biloxi, Mississippi, and today we’re going to be talking about the Slavic community he grew up in here. Would you please state your name, your age, and your occupation?
Fo-Fo Gilich: Okay; I’m Andrew “Fo-Fo” Gilich, Fo-Fo being the nickname, but I’m actually Andrew Gilich, Jr. and I’m head of a software development company located here in Biloxi, Mississippi, a very special place.
And you were born here?
I was born here 1947.
Where did the name Fo-Fo come from?
Well, I had two older brothers and they would read to me. I guess a point in Jack and the Beanstalk there was a fe-fi-fo-fo-fum, and every time that part was read to me I would start smiling.
Everybody has a nickname here in Biloxi. In the old days you were named after a grandfather or—or an uncle or—or that sort of thing. So I think a lot of it came about where, you know, Nick and his dad’s name was Nick so they had to call him something else but Nick. I mean everyone has nicknames down here, you know? And you probably have seen a lot of that coming around our organization here. But anyway it’s fun. Fo-Fo is on my high school graduation diploma. [Laughs]
Where did your family originally come from?
Well my grandparents on the Gilich side and the Sekul—that was my mother’s family—
they originated from Croatia, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And they hit here about 1903—1904. But primarily relatives started landing here and finding jobs in the shrimp and oyster industry. I guess word got around because all four grandparents were from an island called Brac— they were fishermen. The climate was similar and there was opportunity here and that’s how they got here.
The Croatians started as laborers and got into fishing and got into packing, so by the 1920s they were able to put partnerships and JVs together, joint ventures and that sort of thing, and usually with relatives or brothers. And they wind up in the seafood processing end of the ballgame instead of just fishing. So they were able to really dominate; by 1923—1925 even up to the Depression they had more Croatian-based operations than anything. Today, if you look at Point Cadet, which is east of Oak Street, that’s where all the canneries were; that’s where our original Slavonian Lodge was. And right now you see a lot of casinos. After Hurricane Camille wiped out a lot of those operations, now we got casinos on most of those sites.
My first job was at—my grandfather and his brother had a cannery called Sea Coast Packing Company and for $1.35 back then, I was catching cans off of the canning line. That was before IQF, individual quick freeze and that sort of thing, so you would can shrimp and send it across the country. That was my first job along with all my other cousins that were here at the time. The seafood is in your blood, and I could almost still smell the shrimp as it’s being cooked on the line and put in cans. So it was an interesting childhood. I moved back to Biloxi after graduating from college, so my kids—and now my grandkids, can enjoy Biloxi with the relatives and the colorful folks that kind of made up our community.
Who were those colorful folks? Can you talk a little bit about the neighborhood that you grew up in, who your neighbors were?
I actually grew up in Central Biloxi but most of my roots and most of my heritage and most of my friends that I hung around with were Point Cadet—East Biloxi folks.
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Just different characters; a relative of mine, Peter Scrametta. His nickname was Troubles because every conversation he’d start with he would make some trouble [Laughs]. So there was all kinds of nicknames and characters that are a part of this Biloxi heritage. Some of it’s related to gambling; some of it’s related to some of the card games that used to take place and that sort of thing, so it was very fun.
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Everyone knew everyone. I had four or five aunts and uncles on each side of the family and so you really couldn’t raise too much Cain because word would get back, so we would run to New Orleans when we wanted to raise hell. [Laughs]
Do you recall there being very many recent immigrant families, families that were just coming over?
Just one or two. In my high school days we had a group that came over —a family at a time. It wasn’t 20 or 30 families, but you’d have a family of five or six that that I remember picking them up to go to school. And so I can remember several families but not like it was in 1910 and 1915, when a lot of stress and strife, especially World War I was getting ready to crank up and that was a massive group coming over.
You mentioned earlier about going to your grandmother’s house and Croatian language spoken there, was there an emphasis in your family to pass on that language?
No; it really wasn’t. I guess that sense was that you’re an American first. Now I know when people were mad at me in Croatian. It was expressing some things you wouldn’t say in public [Laughs] but I got those—I know all those words. And of course I know those words in French too, so—because here we have a big French community here too. [Laughs] So it really wasn’t; I mean I wish it would have been. I really—I really do.
Immigrants constantly have to make decisions about what to leave behind, what to try to preserve, what to adapt in the new place. Can you talk about some of the traditions that your family or families around really tried to keep?
Yeah; well I can remember the songs, so the songs of the old country, it was a big thing. It’s a big thing around Christmas time and even Easter. And some of the costumes: I don’t know if I showed you that little picture of 1937 in the National Geographic. My mother was a big proponent of keeping that feel and that look and that sort of thing alive. And of course my singing days and all—I lost track of when those were. [Laughs] Saint Nikola—the Mass of Saint Nikola was sort of our patron saint of fishermen. So that feast day was always big and Christmas was always big. And it was just a time for song; that’s when you’d crank up the Croatian. Not so much the language was not stressed in my childhood anyhow, but I can remember it fondly, going to my parents’ house and bringing some of my friends. And they would look at you—what are they speaking? [Laughs]
And where there any foods associated with these traditions?
Oh yeah; a lot of great food. Around Christmas time there was some pastries that looked like donut holes we called pusharata, and they use nothing exotic, but they had a lot of a little whiskey, a little bit of onion peel, some pecans and they would fry them. And they still do. It’s one of the biggest fund-raisers for the Ladies Auxiliary is the— thousands of these pusharatas they’ll sell throughout the community, and everybody lines up. So they’ll be taking orders and they can't make anymore. They’ll start a day and a half ahead and pusharata—it’s there at almost every wedding. Even non-Croatians want to have—. And there was a pastry, hrstule, we called it a bow-tie and I can't even describe it to you, but it’s like flour and powdered sugar and that’s all very [Laughs] low-fat. But I’d say you’d eat a few of those pusharata and it goes right to your toes and you can't shake that weight off. It’s over with.
I remember my grandfather, they’d prepare eel and squid and stuff like that, fishermen kind of food. And baccala was a dried cod-fish, and it actually came over from Croatia. Well, that was a fish that you could hang at the back of your boat without refrigeration and you would make a stew—like a potato stew out of it and it stinks to high heaven, but I mean, it’s good. You can buy them at Central Grocery in New Orleans. It’s a fish about 18-inches long once you’ve removed the head and everything and it’s dried. It’s hard as a rock; you can actually assault somebody with the thing.
You had mentioned earlier that a lot of the people who came here from Croatia were originally from areas that were sea-faring. Do you recall the recipes that you would eat at home as being adapted to some of the seafood here that they wouldn’t have had?
Well — there was a court-bouillon, it was like a redfish court-bouillon that was—they use a lot of tomato paste and that sort of thing and I’m not sure how much tomato—on the island of Brac, I mean how much vegetables they had. I know they ate a lot of olive oil; I mean olive oil was big and so that was everywhere. Olive oil, onions, garlic, and that— they used a lot of that. I don’t know how much was American. They took some of those dishes but I think you grew up with a lot of oily food [Laughs] and tomato gravy and that was in a lot of things.
One of the big dishes that people turn out for at this organization is called daube spaghetti so it’s a sort of—I couldn’t tell you what part of the beef it is but it’s cooked with tomato gravy and spaghetti, and then this meat that just breaks apart and melts. So it’s not a meatball but it’s got the gravy like a spaghetti and meatball. But we actually cook it with mostaccioli, the little thick little pieces of pasta. Everybody that was Croatian loves daube spaghetti. I don’t know how much was adapted from over there—over here, but I know that’s still a big deal around here.
Can you talk a little bit about the events and the meals that you have here at the lodge?
Certainly. We’ve got 284 members and of course this present hall [a temporary facility; the original hall was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina], we can stuff about 150 in here for a meal but that would be crowded. We’re building a bigger hall; in the process right now of breaking ground on that. But every Thursday there’s some sort of social event that’s based around a meal, so we’ll have baked chicken and dirty rice one day and then we’ll have daube spaghetti. We’ll kind of vary the menu, but every Thursday there is a social function that everybody gathers, and you can bring your guests. Every third Thursday there’s a business meeting. We have a monthly business meeting and that’s a prime rib or steak night, so that brings— we always have the max that we can there.
We have a golf tournament once a year. It’s a big operation and it takes a lot of 200 or so volunteers to make it happen. We wind up feeding about 1,800 to 2,000 people on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, about 800 players. It’s one of the biggest in the Southeast and maybe in the country. Our Ladies Auxiliary prepares all kinds of dishes on the golf course so you eat and drink—not so much play golf, but you eat and drink for four days and [Laughs] both at night.
The organization established itself in 1919 and built that building in 1939. [Hurricane] Camille [in 1969, the benchmark storm prior to Katrina] put about 18 inches of water in it. Katrina, all that was left was a few bricks, and it did damage. Driving around there you can see what it did. And it was unprecedented as far as the water and the damage that it did. So it wiped us out and some of the history and pictures and so forth; we lost—we were able to recover nicely with the help of some relatives that had some pictures to supply us.
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You had mentioned that you were glad to see more younger members joining the organization. Had that slowed down for a while? Had the interest in the younger generation sort of waned for a period of time?
Yeah, but I know it really took off after the storm. People got together and saw some of the things that we did as an organization. I mean we bounced back; I’m telling you. We got it back, and I think some of that generation that saw that wanted to be part of that. And the golf tournament played a big part; this is our thirty-fourth year and some of these kids grew up listening to their parents and said, “Hey, I’m going to be a part of the golf tournament.” So I think that kind of naturally spurred some of it.
That’s interesting. So it sounds like what Katrina showed was you can lose the past.
Oh yeah; that’s true. That’s true. And I’ve seen other organizations in Biloxi struggle. We’re related to a lot of them too. The Fleur De Lis Society was the French; they reached here before the Croatians got here, [when] there was just one or two seafood factories. Some of the French came in from South Louisiana and formed their community. That’s why you hear a sort of a South Mississippi Cajun accent that’s unique. The French had their Fleur De Lis Society and they were able to rebuild, of course we were all located on Point Cadet. There’s an Italian American Society and now the Vietnamese community is putting, having their —you drive down Point Cadet and you see the Church of the Vietnamese Martyrs. That’s a big operation and they did a fine job on putting that church together. They have their celebrations and of course it’s great—it’s still Point Cadet and that’s where the culture is, you know? You can see East Biloxi is where the roots are; West Biloxi you have a lot of the different kinds of casino workers, military, retirees and those kinds of things, but ask them who is born in Biloxi and everybody that was born in Biloxi was born in the east end of Biloxi.
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When we first met, I didn’t talk to you for more than maybe 30 seconds before you opened up your computer and started showing me photos. You were obviously really enthusiastic in talking about the history of this community and of the relationship with the seafood industry. Can you talk a little bit some—about some of the historical documentation work that you’ve done?
After Katrina, losing all the memorabilia that we had, pictures, we were at a loss. And through relatives and some folks that live in DC, we did some good things with some old photographs.
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There was a picture of my grandfather’s cannery with snow on the ground and the snow was covering oyster shells. So [Laughs] that was kind of cool. And when that’s your first job, $1.35 an hour when you’re 11 or 12 years old and you remember that—we used to go, it seemed like a World War II truck that we would load up and go to Pascagoula and pick up the cans so we could process. Some of my first opportunities to drive was to go take my grandfather to the Slavonian Lodge so he could play poker on Sunday afternoon because he never drove, you know? And so you see some of those things that you’re just looking around here on the wall. You remember those spots that you can only relive when you see pictures of it. And we had some great pictures of what Biloxi was and it’s been the ’38, ’39, ‘40s and that sort of thing. So yeah; it uplifted a lot of us to see—man, we’d put it on that projector on the wall over there and just go through them. We had about 100-something of them. And then people just—I mean their eyes are wide open and the jaws are dropping to say, “Man, I remember that,” or you look at some of the fish and look at some of the shrimp that they get or throwing the cast net. Those are things that only in Biloxi it means so much to you. And you don’t have to be just Croatian; I mean the people that were raised on the Point and part of this area knew what it was to throw a cast net or to go pull a seine and those kinds of things.
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We all grew up, all our first jobs were in those areas, and so everything was related to how many barrels of shrimp that you were going to process that day. That was something I wanted my children and my grandkids to see. That heritage and that history is important to me, and hopefully as it goes on and as we preserve, because now we’re digitizing a lot of things and we’re putting them in a lot of places and we won't ever lose that again.
Your professional career didn’t take you into the seafood industry but when you were younger, your first jobs you had worked in the factories. Could you talk about some of those jobs?
You worked the shrimp in the summertime. And there was always a job, whether it was to put labels on cans or catching the cans after they came off the production line. As the shrimp are dumped and peeled and deveined and cooked, well, there were people in line making sure the shrimp are graded the right way and no bad shrimp get canned. Well, here we are at the end of the production line and these little six-ounce cans was scalding hot. So we would take four at a time and put them in a cage about a foot and a half deep and put them in a pressure cooker, so it really cooked the stuff, so it would stay good for a long time. (That was in ’58, ’59, ’60, ’61.) Anything from shoveling shrimp off of the basket into the peeling and deveining tub, and then catching cans or putting labels on cans or stacking the boxes up or putting boxes—. If you wanted to make a little money to go buy a little something or go to the show or take your girlfriend, there was always an opportunity to work.
During the wintertime the oysters would come in and it was always an enjoyable thing. There was a crew that would get on the boat and it’s usually cold and you’d shovel the oysters that were stacked up almost making the boat sink. You’d put them in a bucket, like a train car on tracks, and it would go into a steamer, it would relax the muscles in the oysters. And then the tumbler would break the oyster out and the oysters would fall through holes; this was an automated way. [Laughs] It didn’t take a lot of brains but it was fun to be working with everybody.
Did you think that you would grow up to work in that industry?
No; I didn’t, I didn’t. I just knew that my degree was mathematics and I started working with computers in 1968. And of course by that time, Camille had come along and removed a lot of opportunity. It was a tough time. So I mean as I graduated from college I knew that there was not a lot of opportunity in the shrimp and oyster industry. It’s turned around, but I think today 85-percent of the shrimp that’s consumed in this country is imported. I mean it’s a tough ballgame, you know?
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As I said, my parents, what was stressed to them was education. And that was stressed through my growing up. They said, “You’re going to get an education. You’re not going to be a shrimper. Life is going to be better for you than for me.” So it was never a question of going to college. I was going to go to college, you know? My aunt Clare Sekul Hornsby was the second female graduate from the University of Mississippi Law School. Well I asked my aunt; I said, “Why did you go to Law School, Aunt Clare?” She said, “Because my mama told me to go to Law School.” Doctors and we had dentists and physicians, and we were all real proud of that generation, as well as the generation that came here not knowing English and some of the things that you see some of the communities face now.
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Those folks knew what work was. The first thing they did was say, “My kids are not going to do the same thing I did. We’re here in Mississippi, in this country, to have a better life. I’m going to work as hard as it takes so that can happen.”
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But when you were growing up did many of your—the friends and family around your age, did they feel like they were going to work in that industry?
No; not really, not really, because there were only x-amount of things you could do. Be a part of the management or just be a laborer. And there were opportunities at the time: if you were a pipefitter at Ingalls Shipbuilding, they had 25,000 jobs over there and they had benefits. You didn’t have a bright career path in that industry unless you were a part of the team, a part of the owners.
Even from the boat standpoint it was a tough business. The price of shrimp was always— the middle man would wind up making the money, so it’s always been a tough future. And I can see where my grandparents said, “Hey, you’re not going to go shrimp for a living.” They were able to do what they needed to do at the time because there was opportunity and they took it. And they got in the right spot but I just don’t think from the ‘60s on… There were a few families that were able to kind of survive and do it, but for the most part of the people I graduated from high school with, and went onto college, they were looking at professional ends of the ballgame: doctors, lawyers, and other kinds of business opportunities. I was just thankful I could work back home and that was Ingalls Shipbuilding. They had computers and we actually did a lot of the utilization of mathematical models; those kinds of things computers were naturally setup to do. And that’s where I was able to move home and have a decent job there. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity like that to move home and work in a shrimp cannery, you know?
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But it’s cyclic. It will come back again as someone figures out the niche. The industry will always be worth saving and it will always be here in Biloxi, because there will be an operation that will be successful by having a tight enough operation to be successful, to be profitable. But if I’m a shrimper I’m selling for 1980s prices but I got 2008 costs. So it remains to be seen how much will be around. But I think it’s definitely worth saving because that’s our heritage.
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.