FLORIDA’S FORGOTTON COAST: LIFE ON THE APALACHICOLA BAY
WORKING THE BAY
Melaine Cooper Covell
James Hicks
Monette Hicks
Monica Lemieux
Carl McCaplan
James & Betty McNeill
Charles & Rex Pennycuff
A. L. Quick
Henry Tindell

TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Wes Birdsong
Corky Richards
Bobby Shiver
Charles Thompson
Genaro “Jiggs” Zingarelli

PROCESSING THE CATCH
Terry Dean
Grady Leavins
Lynn Martina
Fred Millender
Janice Richards
Anthony Taranto
Tommy Ward

THE SWEET SIDE
Donald Smiley
George Watkins

VINTAGE APALACH
Seafood & Honey

WHERE TO EAT
Apalach Eateries

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Interviews & photographs by Amy Evans

This project sponsored by the St. Joe Company.

Terry Dean’s grandmother, Monette Hicks, came to Eastpoint with her parents in 1916. Terry grew up listening to her grandmother’s stories of what Eastpoint was like in the early days, when oysters were shucked in lean-tos on the shore and there wasn’t a thing on St. George Island—not even a bridge to get there. Electricity didn’t arrive in Eastpoint until the 1950s. Still, dozens of seafood houses dotted the waterfront. In every family there was an oysterman, a shucker, or a crab picker—probably all three. Today only a handful of seafood houses line the water’s edge through Eastpoint. Terry works at a retail market called Island View Seafood. There she cleans fish, bags oysters, and counts crabs. She has spent some time away from Florida. She wanted to show her children that there’s a whole world out there. But she eventually ended up back in Eastpoint. To her, it will always be home.

Listen to this 5-minute audio clip of Terry Dean talking about her family’s history in the seafood business in Eastpoint.
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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: Terry Dean – employee, Island View Seafood
Date: December 4, 2005
Location: Island View Seafood – Eastpoint, FL
Interviewer: Amy Evans

Amy Evans:  This is Sunday, December 4th, 2005, and I'm in Eastpoint, Florida at Island View Seafood with Terry Dean. And Terry if you wouldn't mind saying your name and your birthday, please ma'am.

Terry Dean:  Terry Dean—it's February 26th, 1955.

And you're a native of Eastpoint, correct?

Yes.

And you were telling me yesterday that your family goes back about four or five generations, is that right?

Well, it's about six now. [Laughs] Yeah, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather moved here and settled here. They're one of the first families here.

And you were saying your great-grandfather was Indian?

Uh-hmm,he was Indian. We don't know exactly what kind because he wouldn't talk about it because nobody wanted to claim to be Indian back then, you know. And my grandmother was Irish and he was—he was like—he was six-seven in height, and she was like five foot. [Laughs] So they were—but they moved here when they first got married.

And do you know about what year that might have been?

Yeah, it was right after the turn of the century. I don't know the exact year.

Well and you started telling some stories about them and those days and how they would work the bay and stay on the shore. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, they didn't have motors, so they had to use sails or oars to get where they was going. And so everything was done without machines. They would go out and oyster, and they'd bring the oysters into the beach and they had these—it was just poles in the ground with something to give shade, and the women would stand in there and shuck the oysters into big vats. And in the evening, then, the men would haul the big vats to the one oyster house that was down here and sell them. Of course, Eastpoint is not where it started out. Eastpoint used to be what they called Cat Point now—down there by the St. George Island Bridge—at the bottom of it. In 1929 they had a real bad hurricane that come through, and it wiped everything out down there except one or two houses, so everybody moved up here so that they would be further from the water when another hurricane came. And so they just sort of moved Eastpoint up this way. [Laughs] But she used to walk from Cat Point down there—my grandmother [Monet Hicks]  did. She walked from Cat Point down there all the way out to Porter's Bar to go to school—her and my granddaddy did.

How many people were here in this area when they got here?

There was only a few families. The Browns were here. They had the actual—they had the first post office here. And there was another family here, and the Browns and that other family had money. Now a man came from Carrabelle that lived in Carrabelle. He come over here and built an oyster house, and then my great-grandfather ran it for him until he built his own. But they would bring in shuckers from like South Carolina to come down here and teach them how to shuck oysters. That's how they all learned. There was no ice or anything so that's how they get—don't eat oysters unless there's an “R” in the month because the months that don't have an “R”—the hot months of the year and they had no refrigeration.

So then what about when [Doctor] John Gorrie was over here in Apalachicola, and all that refrigeration business happened over there?

Well see my grandparents—my great-grandparents were the first family to get electricity. They had moved up here where Eastpoint is now and built them a house. And it was like in the 1950s when they got the first electricity, and when you know—they didn't have any electricity, so they couldn't run a machine, so—and there was only a few cars here. Everybody kind of used everybody else's cars, if they had to go somewhere, but usually it was an emergency if they went anywhere.

And then your grandmother, when she was on the beach shucking oysters, what did she use to open them?

A hammer and knife. And that's the way I learned. It's only been since—let's see, I was probably in my early twenties when they started using machines. And there's been quite a few people hurt with them machines, too. Uh-hmm, you get your hand in there or it pulls your hand in there, and you've hurt your hand.

How much faster do you think people go using them? Do you think it makes that big of a difference?

Well that depends on how ambitious the shucker is. Now, I got a cousin and she can use one of them machines and she can shuck eighteen gallons in a day, if she's got the oysters. But then there's some that don't shuck, you know, no more than they would if they had a hammer and knife because that's all they want to shuck.

Are there a lot of people who prefer to use a hammer and knife just because that's the way it's always been?

They hardly ever use it anymore. Hardly ever do they use a hammer and knife anymore. Commercially, the machines has took over with the shucking, so you get people that don't even know how to use a hammer and knife to do it. They don't even know what a striking block is, so [Laughs] it's just—you know, that's changed a lot.

And is it mostly all women who shuck?

Yeah, there's very few—it has always been very few men that shuck. And it's always been the woman's thing to shuck and the men went out and oystered—because that's really hard work out there on that oyster bar. They got to where probably in the late [nineteen] seventies, they got to where women started going on the oyster bar, and the men would do the tonging, and the women would do the culling. But there was a lot of men that didn't want their wives out there because there's no bathroom or anything you know. [Laughs] And—but there are still a few women that goes with their husbands and oysters. But the shucking is majorly women, and the oystering is mostly men.

Do you know any women who have tonged?

They might have tried it once or twice, you know, to—you know, just to do it. But as far as women going out there and tonging oysters by their selves or something, no. It takes a lot of upper body strength to do that and women just don't want to do it. They can do other things, you know. They can do the culling, which they sit down to do that. That's not really—you know, and they don't have to lift anything or any—or they shuck.

Well and then back to your family, the older generations of your family, let me get their names first.

Okay, my great-grandparents were Charlie Evans and his wife's name was Lizzie and then my grandparents—that was Louis and Monet Hicks and then—which my great-grandparents had three daughters, but my grandmother is the only one that had children. Then there's my momma, Eunice Smith, and then there's me, [Laughs] and then there's my kids and my grandkids.

And then I was going to ask you if your great-grandfather, when he went out oystering was he using pretty much the same kind of tools that are used today?

Yeah, the tongs are the same. They make them a little bit different but not enough to really, you know, matter. And the culling iron is just a piece of iron—anything they could use to knock the oysters apart so they were just singles instead of clusters. We still use croaker sacks—burlap bags to put the oysters in. The knives that they used to shuck have changed over the years. You used to—it was just a blade stuck in a piece of wood that your husband fixed up for you [Laughs] but then they said that was unsanitary. [Laughs] So they went to PVC pipe and put it around the wooden handle, and now they have plastic knives that are actually made by a factory.

So then when you were coming up, you shucked and you picked crabs and—?

Well, I shucked, and I've never been fast at it, so [Laughs] I mostly did it just to make a little spending money. I used to—okay, when they oystered, they oystered during the winter, and three months in the summer the oyster season was shut down. Nobody oystered. Okay, and everybody done other things. They caught crabs, they shrimped, they caught fish. And so during the winter us girls could piddle around shucking and make us some spending money, and during the summer we picked crabs.

And you have gone out crabbing?

No. [Laughs] Women don't tend to do that either. If their husband is a crabber and he needs help they'll go but it's—it's a male thing, you know, to go out there and pick up them crab baskets because they're pretty heavy.

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So what do you think is going to happen and when to the oyster [industry] and the bay?

I think there will always be oystering on the bay, but I think that it's going to dwindle down to where it's just a recreational thing—or maybe they let them go out there and catch so many for the tourists that's going to be here. But this is going to end up just like everywhere else in Florida. It's going to be a tourist thing and not a local thing.

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[Tell me] about when there was just one oyster house that opened up here in Eastpoint and how the industry grew around that.

Well a guy came from Carrabelle, and he had an oyster house built down there at Cat Point. Like I said, that used to be Eastpoint. And he brought in shuckers from South Carolina [and Maryland], and it was there it was mostly men, and he built sort of like a bunkhouse for them to live in. And my great-granddaddy and grandma sold their oysters to this man, and that's how they learned how to shuck because they had been farmers up 'til then.
And then my great-granddaddy built another oyster house down there, and he put in a store and one gas pump because one gas pump was all you needed back then. Oh, they put in a cafe and my grandmother cooked in it, and they'd run the oyster house and the thing, and they did that until the hurricane come through in [nineteen] twenty-nine, and their house made it down there but the oyster house and stuff didn't. And the beach used to be real, real wide down there, and it's gone. There's a very narrow beach on it now. And then they moved their house—they come up here where Eastpoint is now, and they built them a house and they kept shucking and oystering, but they did it for somebody else after that.
And then a few days before I was born, so in 19—in February of 1955, my great-granddaddy died and my grandma Lizzie lived on until I was twenty—no, no, I was twenty-four when she died. So she lived to be ninety [years old]. And my grandmother [Monet Hicks] started shucking when she was a little girl, you know, with her momma, and she did that up until they quit doing that, and they opened a grocery store here in town and they ran that for a while—for a few years. And they run an oyster house for a few years. And then they had their own oyster house. Then they—they built their own oyster house, and they ran it until they retired in the [nineteen] seventies. They retired and then they just fished and piddled around. And my granddaddy [Louis Hicks] died when he was eighty-six, and my grandmother [Monet Hicks] now is [ninety years old]. And their son, my uncle, he has shrimped, oystered, a little bit of fishing; he's owned an oyster house; he owns one now. He has a route—he takes up into Georgia and Alabama—that hauls seafood up there, but they're real small; it's a real small place and they just—because he's retiring next year. So they're not into any big operation. I don't think any—maybe when my granddaddy was young he crabbed, but most of them—most of them in my family didn't crab.

Was there a reason for that?

If there was I don't know it. So I don't—well, one thing, my grandma and granddad didn't like crabs. She said anything that would eat a dead person, she weren't eating, you know. [Laughs] So they didn't really like crabs. So nobody ever done it, you know, commercially in my family.

Would most people shrimp and oyster and fish and everything just depending on what's out there?

Yeah. Yeah, well see back up until the late [nineteen] seventies, I guess—early eighties, like I said, you oystered during the wintertime and then three months out of the summer the oyster bars were closed and you went fishing or you went crabbing or—or you went shrimping but you shrimped year-round. And them three months, it's a lot of people—they just didn't work at all. They took them three months off. Of course, they watched their money; they saved back so they could, you know—but like my uncle, he shrimped for years and years and most of them shrimped by their selves. So if something happens there's no help, you know. We've had quite a few people that's drowned oystering and shrimping. But they would just—but like during the winter, they would not shrimp, you know. During the day they'd oyster, and they'd get some sleep and they'd go back out shrimping, you know. The men in my family have all—my granddaddy and my uncle built shrimp boats, built oyster boats, freshwater fishing boats, you know. They all did that. Nowadays, hardly anybody does it.

What was the name of your great-grandfather's oyster house and cafe?

They didn't have a name. They didn't name the restaurant or their oyster house or anything like they do now. You didn't have to have a seafood license, and you didn't have to have a business license or anything, so they just never named any of it.

Who came to the cafe? Were locals coming in or people coming through?

Some of the locals but the shuckers that were—that were coming in, the road crew that was building [Highway] 98 when they were doing that came in and ate, and then she fed her family out of it you know. That's where they had their dinners…fried chicken and roast and, you know, just all different stuff but—and seafood.
Also, there was a big huge shell pile. My grandma said it must have been three stories high down there at Cat Point. And when they built [Highway] 98 through here, they used all those shells for the road, and so it's gone from down there, but they—that's where they dumped all their oyster shells when they shucked, and it got that high. And then the State come in to build that road, and they used all them shells for that.

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Tell me about [the business here at] Island View [Seafood, owned by Mike  Millender].

Just retail.

And so then can you explain how people come in and bring their catch and how those relationships work?

We can buy from the catcher fish and shrimp. We cannot buy shellfish—oysters, claims, scallops—we cannot buy them from the catcher. Those things are so regulated, and so we have to buy them from a wholesale place. Now there are a lot of fish that we can't sell in here, we can't legally have in here, and we can't have illegal catches in here where the—the flounder is too small or—or if something is out of season, we can't, you know, have any in here even if it's frozen or, you know, whatever. But some of the stuff we can buy from the catcher but, you know, the rest of it we get from wholesalers.

And then does Mike go out and [catch] his own stuff to sell?

He used to when he first got started in the business. He did, hhe went out and caught his own oysters, his own crabs, his own mullet. That's about—basically, about what he started with. Over the years, well, it got so busy until he had to quit going and catching and start working here full-time, and—but over the years it's just gotten to where it was—he couldn't go out and catch enough to bring in here. Especially during the summer, when we got the biggest season.

So you have fishermen and shrimpers and whatnot who you work with regularly and bring their catches here?

Uh-hmm.

And only here?

No. Like the mullet fisherman, he might come by here, and we might need ten or twenty pounds. He's got a hundred fifty pounds. He's going to go on down the road somewhere and sell the rest of them. Shrimpers, the same way.

So like those guys that were in here this morning, they were going out [fishing] and you told them that y’all were low and could use some mullet, and they'll bring it back?

Uh-hmm, uh-hmm, that way we get fresh stuff.

And so tell me about mullet. What you were saying over there when you were cleaning that fish.

My brother went to Jerusalem. He actually ate mullet over there. But mullet is the only fish in the world that has a gizzard, like a chicken does. But it's a strong tasting fish. Unless you've just been raised on it, you're not particularly going to like it because it is real strong. But it's a good fish and it's—they ate boo-coos of it during the Depression and all.

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And what about the young people now because your son came back to Eastpoint?

Yeah, this is their home. They wanted to, you know—which I did move them around a lot. They've seen quite a bit of the world, but this was home and yeah, he wanted to come back here. He bought a piece of land and he put a double-wide trailer on it, and he got married. But now the taxes are so high. Everything has went up but wages. And so he can't afford it. He just can't afford it. My youngest son, he can't find a job around here. So he moved to Missouri where my sister lived too and found a job up there. Even if he had found him a job, he couldn't make enough money to buy him a home because everything is so expensive around here—land and all. But I mean you can't—seventy and eighty-thousand dollars for a piece of land with nothing on it, you know. And then you've got to put the septic tank and the—and the well down or hook up to City water which to hook up—to hook up just to the water is fifteen hundred dollars. And then you've got to put a house on it and everything, so you're really—you can't afford to do it.

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So do you see a day here in Eastpoint where all the locals—generations of locals are squeezed out, and there are places here that are serving seafood that's not even from the area?

Right. I'd say yeah, it's pretty much already happening. I mean, they sold all that land on the east end of Eastpoint, and they're going to make that into a tourist thing with the condos and restaurants and shops and a big marina. And that's all well and good except there's no beachfront for an oyster house down there. We lost three oyster houses when they bought that land, and they're wanting more land. They say that's only like a fourth of what they need for what they want to build. So you know it's—the beachfront is being gone. You can—you don't necessarily have to have your oyster house on the beach, you know according to the law, but you really need it on the water so the boats can get up to the dock and unload their catch, whatever they're—you're buying. A lot of the younger kids are going to restaurants and getting jobs as short order cooks and waiters and stuff like tha and they're not trying to get on the water.
People tend to help people around here that know you, you know. If you need something or you need help doing something or—they'll pull their oyster boat out, and they'll clean the bottom. They'll flip it over; they'll paint the bottom of it and everything. Well, all your friends get together and help you flip it over you know—pull it out and flip it over. They'll come back down there and they'll flip it back over and help you get it back in the water. I mean, you get these people in here that aren't from here and they ain't going to help you, you know. They're a different breed. But it used to be a really, really tight close community. I could go anywhere in Eastpoint when I was little. I knew everybody. Everybody knew who I was. Now you don't want your kids walking to school, and you don't want them out walking after dark because you don't know everybody anymore. And it's like everywhere else, I guess.

So back in its heyday how many oyster houses were here along the bay?

Oh gosh, let me think. [Laughs] We had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen—about thirteen.

And now there are four?

Yeah. Bad, bad.

Did you witness that change happen kind of slowly, or was it a pretty dramatic change?

Well I don't know if it was really slow like one would shut down, you know, and then—how to explain this [Laughs]—it was—well, it was like the Flowers. They had a big oyster house. They did a lot [of business]. They shipped everywhere—California, New York, everywhere. And they retired, and when they retired, the kids tried to run it for a couple of years, and they just couldn't do it. And they just didn't have as much business sense as their mom and dad so they closed it down. The kids went and done something else. One oyster house, the lady got sick. She run it by herself. She got sick and she just—she closed it down because she couldn't run it no more. A couple would retire, like my parents retired, and they sold their oyster house to somebody else. Well they turned it into a retail market. Well when he died, she just shut it down. They ended up selling that to somebody else. And they just, you know, it either got shut down or, you know, they just either closed it up, or they sold it to somebody else, and it just—they just dwindled on down. But I would say in the last fifteen years—but then we lost four oyster houses in the investors down there all at one time, you know, so that was pretty—.

What about people who were the tong makers and the net makers and—?

Well there's very few people that make them anymore. There used to be—everybody knew how to make their own tongs and build their own nets, and if you didn't somebody you was kin to knew how and would help you, you know do it and all. Now days I think there's one guy in Apalach that still builds nets—shrimp nets and stuff, but a lot of them are buying them from other places now because of the regulations and all. Tongs, I think there's two or three people that knows how to do it now.

So nobody is going to know how to make handmade nets or tongs after a while here?

Well, eventually they won't because like my uncle, he knows how but he didn't pass it down to nobody because nobody was really interested in learning how to build their own nets, when every year the law changes and you have to build it a different way or something. My son knows how to mend his own cast net, you know, if he gets a hole in it. He can fix it. Mike's son knows how to do that. But as far as actually laying one out and building it from scratch, there's not that many people that knows how anymore. Used to, the men built their wives knives and hammers and, you know, stuff for shucking but they don't do that no more because of all the regulations and stuff. You've got to buy them already made. There's a few people that works on the oyster machines, but that's something that's just started, you know, since the [nineteen] seventies because they didn't use them before then.
But it's the kids, you know. You know, used to, you could take a boy out there and put him in a boat and leave him in the middle of the night in the pitch black dark, and he could find his way to the beach. He'd know how to get home. Now you put them out there, and they don't know what they're doing. So it's—it's just different. The kids are being raised different—computers and technology and tourism. And think there's an easier way to do it, which oystering and all is hard work. But we're missing out on some of the good stuff. Stuff that we might not get back. There's nothing better than being on a shrimp boat out there in the middle of the bay and you can't see anything but a few lights in Apalach and Eastpoint and St. George Island, and you feel like you're the only person in the world and there's dolphin swimming along the side of the boat with you and you can watch them and—and it's just great. But that's something that a lot of these kids won't never get to see.

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Well let's talk about mullet again because I want you to get to talking about the roe and stuff that we were talking about before.

During the end of October, the first of November they start roe(ing). Usually when they roe, they'll get close to the beach. The female has the yellow roe—red roe. The male has the white roe. And they—all mullet has gizzards like the chickens do and everything, and it's an inexpensive fish. A lot of the other—like Texas, they don't eat them. They use them for bait for fishing. We've always ate them here, you know. And so it's a real pretty white meat when you cook it. It's really good but—and we eat the gizzards. [Laughs] We eat the roe. So it's just—most of them now days just cast net. They just go out there and throw a net and bring in—pull in whatever they're going to catch. They don't use the big gill nets and the—any of the big nets anymore except one or two of them still does. And usually, you end up getting in trouble when you do it [because of the net ban].

How is the roe prepared when you eat it?

You meal it or flour it and throw it in hot grease and deep fry it. When it floats to the top, and it's kind of brown, then it's done. You do the white roe the same way. You do the mullet the same way, the gizzard the same way, but—or you can make fish stew out of it. My granddaddy used to do that. You can bake it, you can smoke it, you can grill it, you can just—[Laughs] just—they used to salt them. They used to get them and they would cut them open, butterfly them is what we called them and they would salt them down. And they would last for months like that. Some of the older men used to salt them, and they'd leave them overnight, and then they'd rinse the salt off real good, and then they'd smoke them. Now days they don't even salt fish anymore. They just don't do it anymore.

So how long have you been working at Island View Seafood?

About two years.

And you said you moved all over.

My step-dad was in the Air Force and so he moved us all over the place and then when my oldest daughter—when I was seventeen—when I was sixteen we moved back here and at seventeen-and-a-half, I got married and then we eventually—we got a divorce and my daughter was twelve, and a lot of her friends were starting to date at that age, and all this and I thought I need to get my kids out of here. Mostly so that they can see that there is another life different than this one. So I moved them to Alaska, and we stayed there three years.

Wow, Alaska?

Well I had lived there during my childhood a lot. My mom and my step-dad lived there, and my sister and her husband was living there at the time, and my brother, he still lives there. My brother is the only one left living up there. And then I came back to Eastpoint, and my oldest daughter got married. I moved back to Eastpoint, and I stayed here about two years, and then I moved to Missouri, and then we moved to Mississippi, and then we moved back here. So my kids has really had sort of a wide variety of seeing how everybody else lives and kind of broadened their horizons. There's more in the world than just Franklin County [Laughs], which a lot of them don't get that here.

But you came back because your roots go back so deep?

Yeah, because this has always felt like home. This has always been home.

Do you like being here in Eastpoint and working here at this place?

Yeah, because I know everybody and, you know, I've got friends. I've got—my girlfriend, her kids and my kids were raised up so much, and so they think they're cousins, and they're not even kin to each other. [Laughs] And but I've known her since I was seventeen years old, so you know, and we're still friends.

Well tell me what all it is that you do here.

I clean fish, I head shrimp, I peel de-veined shrimp, I put stuff out in the display cases, I clean, I wait on customers, I answer questions and just, you know—just like it is in a clothes store, you know. We put the stuff out to sell and sell it to the people. That's about what I do.

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