Fred C. Millender
Fred’s Best Seafood
I32 Patton Drive
Eastpoint, FL 32328
(850) 670-1457
A lot of these guys—these oysterman—come in wanting a mullet. I give it to them to eat, check out. And they have a bag or something over there they give me. If not, they have some extra mullet they'll give me and said, ‘Just keep me up in smoked mullet.’ I don't charge them nothing. – Fred Millender
Fred Millender has been working on the bay since he was a boy. He was born in Carrabelle, Florida, in 1929. His family saw opportunity in Eastpoint and moved there in 1942. At one time, the Millender family had three seafood houses along the bay. When Fred managed his own place, he had twenty-nine boats harvesting oysters. The seafood industry was booming in Eastpoint. Among other problems, hurricanes have taken their toll on the area. Fred is a survivor, though. He has found a way to keep Fred’s Best Seafood afloat. Today his daughter Susan operates the seafood house. But Fred still has hand in the business. He can often be found at his colorful roadside stand, chatting with a friend or smoking fillets of mullet for local fishermen. Fred is as colorful as the hand painted signs that flank his little market. Filled with fascinating stories and songs to share, Fred is a stranger to no one and friend to all.
Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Fred Millender talking about some of his memories of oystering on the Apalachicola Bay. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.] 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: Fred C. Millender, Fred’s Best Seafood
DATE: December 4, 2005
LOCATION: Fred’s Best Seafood – Eastpoint, FL
INTERVIEWER: Amy Evans
Amy Evans: This is Sunday, December 4th, 2005. This is Amy Evans in Eastpoint, Florida, and I'm at Fred's Place. Mr. Fred, would you say your name and your birth date, please sir?
Fred Millender: Fred Millender and birthday is September the 22nd, 1926.
Were you born here in Eastpoint?
Born in Carrabelle [Florida] and moved here in [nineteen] forty-two.
Your whole family moved over here?
Most of the whole family moved in Eastport, uh-hmm.
What brought your family down this way?
We had more fishing areas, shrimping, and oystering and crabbing and some scallops and you’s right at the seafood here in [a] cluster. [It was] more handy, more economic.
So what did your family do? What did your parents do when you were growing up? Did they have an oyster house or were they working the bay?
We fished then. There was nine boys and we went totally fishing—offshore, in-shore, anywheres we wanted to fish.
Do you remember how old you were when you first went out on a boat to fish?
About four or five or six years old.
What were your parents' names?
My mother was named Willie Mae Millender, and my papa was named Marion Francis Millender.
What do you remember most about growing up in this area and living off the bay?
Well, it was real joyful in the good ole days. [Laughs] Right now it's a push and a shove and crowding out of your mind, and it's going to get worse—worser and worser.
And so this picture is of your father over here with this wheelbarrow of oysters, when was that taken?
That were about forty years ago.
And he had an oyster house then?
Yeah, we—it was four of us in the business. We had three plants, yeah. The hurricanes got them out of here. You know, hurricanes and things and the hurricanes—Camille and all back in there, they show you on—on Storm Stories on whatever channel—all them hurricanes that hit.
So the hurricanes took him out of business?
Gradually tearing it up.
And so is this—where you are now, is this one of your family's original spots on the water here?
From this beach here, from that house and back over here and about four hundred or five hundred foot, maybe better, was where all our business—we had a crab house one time, picked—[had] about forty pickers.
And when was that?
That was back in the late [nineteen] fifties and sixties..
And so you just came up here, working in all the houses and—
Yeah. And that's why we left Carrabelle down there—thirteen miles that way [to the east of Eastpoint]. Now that was a fishing port down there but now they—now it's tourists.
When your family came here, how many other oyster houses were along [the water] here?
Hmm, about three—and it was about fifteen or twenty in here, but the State come in and the hurricanes—so many violations. And it's—it's no way on muddy oysters that you can keep the spots—when they hit them, then when you wear out like—like a lot of these ladies here that works for a living and the husbands out on these cold weather days and low tides, you know, they wore down and they got a house full of youngin's to go tend to. They can't just stay right down here. We get out. Men that works in the house do a lot of it, but they wear down too. But I like to get some of those fishers out at Tallahassee in here and give them a job and be a number-one priority to keep everything right up to date. I just—he'd probably leave me the next day. He'd sing that Johnny Paycheck song [begins to sing] “Take this job and push it; I ain't working here no more.” That's what I'd tell them…I don't work. I work as I want to. I put forty-some years, and I don't—I don't get in here and—I used to work 'til three o'clock in the morning putting up 5,000 times, 10,000—run out on orders like South Florida, Tallahassee, Montgomery, Birmingham, all up in there and back towards Pensacola. We sold to all them in them seafood places, even as far as Gulf Shores, Alabama.
So when your family had all these oyster houses, were you working primarily in the houses or in the wholesale part or were you still—?
Wholesale. I just put—I just do this little market just to have—just to do something. Because as you go through life that many years tied up to the gills like a mullet in a net, you just can't sit around. I got a lot of music I play, you know. I got a Dobro. The bluegrass [music] I learned from Roy Acuff—Smokey Mountain Boys, Nashville, Tennessee—where I learned most of my music from.
You spent some time in Nashville?
I haven't been there, but they came down in this area and I would—we—we fished and done—done such as that, and we'd always accommodate them such as that. They loved that. They—you know, the most of the things that the Smokey Mountain Boys would ask for down here? Catfish. They got them ponds out there. They'd go out and fish with a fishing pole like Andy Griffith and his little boy back here. That little fellow that had the—always toting that little fishing pole.
Opie?
Opie. [Laughs] You know him don't you?
So the man that was in here yesterday said that y’all played in a band together.
Uh-hmm.
When was that?
That was in the late [nineteen] fifties and sixties.
What did y’all call yourselves?
Apalachicola Valley Boys.
Were y’all together for a while?
We was together, I imagine, for twelve or fifteen years. This [event poster] was found in the Dixie Theater. We played over there in Apalachicola.
My goodness. So when you play now, [do] you just kind of play for yourself? Are you still playing with some folks in town?
Well, I play for myself, and I got a son that plays.
So how often do you play for yourself?
Well I played some this morning, and I'll probably do some tonight and—.
Do you have a favorite thing to play?
I use all of the [nineteen] fifties right on up to the nineties and up through here now. There's still singing some of the fifties songs 
on TV now—on the satellite radio. This satellite starts from the fifties and sixties and seventies. You can turn it on in spots and it will just play continuous to that and go to the next—next one. I—my wife, she sings with me.
What's your wife's name?
Minnie. Minnie and when she gets really aggravated with me sometimes I get my guitar, and I sing that Short Jackson song that comes on about twelve at night on the Grand Ole Opry. And he's been bleeped up by that time; they get wild. I don't think they use much charged stuff; they use that Mountain Dew up there—that liquor. And they get kind of tipped and they always come in and out singing, “Don't be angry with me darling for the things that I have—. [Laughs] Don't Be Angry;” I sing that and we—we get along good. I got—I was clerk of our church for twenty years, and I had my music—I'd go all over this country—fellowship meetings, youth rallies, and things like that and they always wanted—my family and these girls sang with us—this one and that one.
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How many children do you have?
Three.
What are their names?
I have—I have a son—I'll show you his picture down here in a minute—three children—three children—a whole woods full of grandchildren and great-children.
What are your children's names?
Different. It's just many, many, many names—I got some name Aston here and I got some named Randy, and I got some named Andrea; I got some named Ashley and I got some named Skylar, and I got some named Peyton.
What about your three children?
Is Susan, Marsha, and Randy.
So how long have you had this little market here?
This here's been here about probably three or four years. I didn't run it for a long time. I let a guy—elder guy that used to work for me, he would—he wanted to use it a while, and I just let him get in here until I could—'til I could get that reorganized over there.
The oyster house?
Uh-hmm. And my daughter wanted to come in on it and do some work and her husband. Then by my experience and the timing that I was in this business—seafood business—she run into a rock and a hard spot. She was coming to me—what to do. So I would tell her. I said, “It's just something you're going to have to work out. One day you might do it two hours, you might do it, but it'll pick right back up. Don't give it up.”
Okay. And so then you keep this market upfront here for—?
I work in this—I work in this about—I come down just before you did from—I had a guy over there tending to it for me. He would watch out and come in here. I just keep this up. I meet a lot of people like you in here. I got people I told you from Connecticut, Birmingham, Michigan, New York, New Jersey right on up in Maine. They like this village up in here.
Do you like that best, meeting the people who come through [Eastpoint]?
Uh-hmm, I like to meet—I always did that. Right now, my wife says I want to go somewhere(s) people don't know you that we can shop and have a little time out there. So we went to Dothan [Alabama] and I had to go do some collecting way back here. So when we got up there and she says—asked the guy that was right in Dothan—said where's the shopping center at? He told her take one of the truck routes, the roadways right out, and so we did and went north of that. So when we got there we pulled out in front of this shopping center—huge thing. The first thing when I walked in somebody in the back said, “Hey, Fred.” [Laughs] She said, “Well there ain't no place we can go.” [Laughs]
Do you have some folks who come and spend summers on St. George Island and come back and see you every time?
Every day they'll come back here…The first place that they'll come in is look—I mean, if they don't find me, they'll walk ar
ound and around and around. But I don't—I stay home and do my own thing figuring—doing what little figuring, talking to my daughter [Susan], running, and walking her through some things she's never been through before.
So she's taken over the oyster house basically?
Right now, mostly, uh-hmm. And see like this bag [of oysters] I pulled—she's not here, but I cover for her. I know these people. By me being here she feels more safer with it. So that's—that's the family life.
Are you glad that she's carrying on with it?
Oh, yeah. She's—she's pretty smart. She's a pusher—pushing and shoving and crowding of the mind.
So I want to know about your mullet that you smoke out here. You've been stoking the fires [the] couple days that I've been here in a row. Tell me about that.
Do what? On the mullet that we smoke? A lot of these guys—so these oysterman that come in wanting a mullet, I gave it to them to eat, check out, and they have a piece of bag or something over there they give me. If not, they have some extra mullet they'll 
give me and said, “Just keep me up in smoked mullet.” I don't charge them nothing. They over there working in this—and I did that twenty years…I had my own rigs. One time I had twenty-nine boats and motors.
For oystering?
Uh-hmm, the three places—but this—this bay, the great—the last of the great bay is getting away from us. It's gone. What I'm telling you here right now, you play this in another year or two it won't be the same thing no more. They want to buy—buy all this out in here from me and to put thirteen townhouses and thirteen on top of it.
How has the bay itself changed over the years, do you think?
The bay has changed in the respect of the State Officials, pretty much from the government down to the lower part of the government, so many laws and bylaws and this laws and restrictions, so many restricted seafoods. They got it where you go out there, they'll put them bracelets [handcuffs] on you, if you ain't careful.
So do you ever miss being out there on the bay oystering? Do you miss those days?
Well, yeah. And I'm glad I'm here a lot of days with that rough weather. When you—back then, it was nine boys [and] we worked.
Do you have some stories from your time out there on the bay?
Well I got caught in a lot of squalls, a lot of storms, and a lot of bad crossways seas and foggy—you couldn't see from here to that building [about thirty feet]. You'd see a bird on the water, and it looked like a big battleship on it—that's happened right spur of the moment. But we knew about where we was all the time. We knew we was in the water. And we're out—now they got that GGP [GPS, Global Positioning System]. You 
know, you can mash a button and run out with it and you can run back on it. Go offshore there to—ten miles offshore where they put these bridges and things they tear down where spot or grouper is, and you mash that button on it, and you can come back in and go right out, and it will tell you when you're right there on it. So they got it more modern days. We used to use a sounding lead off of deep-sea fishing. I worked out there when I was younger, thirty days a time with ten men on a boat with two masts—five fishing on each side. And you—we used a lead with the bottom up and put soap on it and out there and drop it and let it hit bottom and pick up and tell them whether it was coral or rock or gravel or sand—it would tell them what it was. Now they got that button, modern days.
Can you tell me about your days oystering and what's that like?
Well I enjoyed oystering; the oystering I tell these guys—it's like a bank. You got to make it work; you cannot lay up on it; you got to treat the oystering like a business. Go for it. And I tell them that out there it's like a bank. You go out and throw your anchor right and then right then start drawing. You go over to borrow money if you can get on the list with them it takes you seventy-two hours before they'll let you but here you can start drawing just the time you get out there. They—they bring that up to me all the time; those little old bitty boys out there and always says which pole you want me to go to out there to draw? And then they come in and says I want to talk to you in the office like you here and I say you're right in the center of it right now—go ahead. I didn't spend much time in the office unless I was going to make an invoice or stuff. And they say, “Mr. Fred, can I talk to you business in the office?” I say, “You in it. Just follow me right in and talk to me.”
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.