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.

Anthony Taranto is the son of Italian immigrants. His parents, Joseph and Madeline Taranto, met in Apalachicola. In 1923 they opened their own seafood house, Taranto’s Seafood. Anthony was born nine years later. As a kid, Anthony remembers his father employing more than fifty shuckers, mostly African Americans. When he was old enough, he helped pack shrimp. They would pour the shrimp into wooden barrels, pack them with ice, and send them to New York on a train. Anthony took over his father’s seafood business as an adult. But today Taranto’s Seafood is closed. Anthony retired in the late 1990s. No one else in the family wanted to take it over. The building still stands on Water Street in downtown Apalachicola. Anthony rents the waterfront access to some commercial fishermen. The building is empty, but the story of Taranto’s Seafood is still very much connected to life on the bay.

Listen to this 4-minute audio clip of Anthony Taranto talking about his childhood memories of spending time at his father’s seafood house, Taranto’s Seafood.
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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: Anthony Taranto
Date: December 2, 2005
Location: Mr. Taranto’s Home – Apalachicola, FL
Interviewer: Amy Evans

Amy Evans:  This is Amy Evans on Friday, December 2nd, 2005. I'm in Apalachicola, Florida, at the home of Mr. Anthony Taranto. Sir, would you mind introducing yourself and also listing your birthday?

Anthony Taranto:  I'm Anthony Taranto, and I was born August 12th, 1932.

Were you born here in Apalachicola?

I was born in Apalachicola and been here all my life.

And can you tell me a little bit about how your parents came to be in Florida?

My father [Joespeh Taranto] came over from Sicily, and I don't know what year, but he said the first time he came over he was thirteen or fourteen years old. And then he went back and came back when he was around sixteen and just settled here. Dad said that the reason he left home [was that] there just wasn't enough to eat over [in Sicily]. Things were bad, you know. And he had a brother out in Mississippi, and he went by and saw him, but he also had a cousin down here. They were first cousins, and that's how he got down to Apalachicola. And they went in the seafood business together, and then finally one of them got out of it, and my dad took it over. And my mother [Madeline Taranto] came also from Messina, Italy—well, I think it's Sicily also. But anyway, she came through New York with her parents, and she said when she came over, she was about three years old. And her mother had a brother that lived here in Apalachicola, so they came down and settled here, and her dad worked at the Cypress Lumber Company as a night watchman, and that's how they started here. And then my mother and dad met here at Apalachicola and later on got married.

Do you know where in Sicily your father was from?

He was from a town called Acitrezza. That was the only thing I knew.

And then the folks that he met up with in Mississippi, do you know their names and where that was?

His brother lived in Gulfport, I think, or Biloxi, I'm not sure. But he went back to Italy, so we don't have any—I don't think we have any kinfolks over there. There's still some Tarantos, but I don't think they're kin. Well, they might be in some way. We don't really know them. I do have cousins in Pensacola [Florida], but they are fourth or fifth cousins, and I know some of them. But I think my dad came down here because of his double-first cousin—two brothers married two sisters, and then they went in the seafood business together when they got down here.

Do you know about what year that was?

He said they started in 1923 in the seafood business.

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And so what from those early days of the seafood industry and your father's business did he tell you growing up?

Well, I was down there a lot, you know, and things were different back then than they are now, you know. The state is putting us all out of business with all their regulations and things like this, you know. But back then he probably had—as I got up a little bit, I mean, like I say, nine, ten years old, I'd go down there a lot. And he was in the oyster business and also the shrimp business and also handled fish, and he probably had fifty, sixty people shucking oysters, you know. Most of them were black. What I remember so much about that when they were shucking, you know, they would all get to singing or chanting and stuff like that, you know, and they'd carry it on all the time. [Laughs] All day long. I mean that's the way it went, you know. They paid them off—they had these little tokens, and every time they'd get a gallon of oysters, they'd give them a token. At the end of the week they'd count them up, you know. If you lost some, you just lost them. But that's how they kept track of the oysters.
And he would buy the oysters from boats that came in. Of course, most of them were his own boats. And they had these big barrels that unloaded, and they'd pay so much a barrel for them, and then we'd put them in the house and shelf them up on the—what we call stalls and the shuckers would shuck about half. They had a block of wood, something like a knife sort of, but it was driven into the wood, and [it] had a sharp point. And they'd lay the bill of that oyster up there and crack it and then take a knife and open it up.
And [Laughs] I can remember some of these other black people that worked for him, you know. He had an old fireplace down there, and they would actually cook on that thing. They'd have a kettle that swung in there, and they would cook stuff like [rac]coons, and it smelled so darned good. And he wouldn't let met eat it. [Laughs] Coon and rice. It just looked so good, and smelled so good. I have eaten it, you know. Not down there but it was—it's good, if you prepare it right.
But I remember all that kind of stuff, you know, and then—and the seafood part of it, sometimes, well, you saw how the big building was right? So one of the buildings in the center I can remember we had shrimp in boxes just all over the floor. We never had so darned many shrimp. You couldn't hardly do anything with them. You had to unload the boats to get through with them before you could put them in the icebox or the refrigerator or something like that, you know. We had refrigeration. But there would be so many shrimp back in those days you, just couldn't hardly sell them and couldn't hardly do nothing with them. And we'd ship them a lot of times—we'd put them in wooden barrels and ice them down and put them on the train—Railway Express—and they'd go up to New York. I used to hate to do that. [Laughs]

Why?

That barrel weighed about two hundred-and-some pounds, and you had to load them and get them up on a platform and then have to get them up on the train, you know, and they were heavy. But it had to be done back in those days, you know. And sometimes you'd send a carload of shrimp out, you know. The same way with fish. We packed those in barrels and put ice on them and sent them up too. And then later on the trucks came in, and they took away from the Railway Express, which was the train, you know, and everything went by truck freight then. So you just put it on the truck, and it would go to New York in just no time. On that train it probably—sometimes they would have to switch trains, you know—switch tracks and stuff like this, and they'd take sometimes a week to get up there, and they'd just have to keep re-icing them. And every time they re-iced it, what they did, they would cut a hole in the top of this burlap bag that covered it and put ice in them. But usually these people would get them a handful of shrimp to take home. [Laughs] So every time they got up there the weight was short. I was glad when those days were over.

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When [your father] started his business, did he start with one boat, or how did that work?

At one time they had—he and his cousin there had about thirty boats, you know. They'd start off and buy a boat, and then they'd have a boat built and as they could do it, you know. Because back then you could get a boat built for just a little bit of money. Nowadays it costs a lot, but back then a little bit of money was a lot of money. [Laughs] You know, a hundred dollars back then was about like ten thousand dollars now. But they had all these boats, and most of them were I'd say twenty or thirty and thirty-five-feet long, which now is a small boat. And those same boats were used for oystering. They were used for shrimping and whatever anybody did. They just used the same boat. If they went out oystering—like now, most of these oystermen now go out in what we call a skiff with an outboard motor, and they go out there and they oyster and come back in the evening. But I can remember these boats going out oystering, and they would spend the night, and it would be three or four people on it, and then they'd come in the next day and the fish hold would just be full of oysters. They'd be sticking up out of the top, you know, and come in the next day and unload. It never was just a few hours, you know. Just a long trip like that.

Can you talk about that relationship of the oystermen and the fishermen to the wholesaler and how that works?

Well what they—like Dad owned the boat. Well the boat goes out, and they catch X-number of dollars. Let's say one thousand dollar, an easy figure. The boat usually got maybe a third of that to keep the boat up, you know—overhaul the motor and paint the boat and all this kind of stuff. Then the rest of the money was split between the men, and they'd have to pay their own expenses, you know, for groceries and stuff like that.

Is there anybody who had their own boat that would—?

Yeah, some of them would have their own boats, and they'd just buy from them, you know. But usually the price they paid was about the same price. It didn't make any difference whether you owned the boat or somebody else owned the boat.

So then what about other competition along the waterfront with wholesalers? Is it just per price what they pay for the catch or—?

Well normally, like on the oysters, everybody paid the same thing. Now sometimes on the shrimp you would find somebody that would pay five cents more—ten cents more, just to get somebody to come down there and unload. And then once they started unloading, after a time they'd drop the price back. But as a rule, they would pay almost the same price everywhere up and down the dock. They almost had to, you know, to stay in business.

So was there an allegiance at all between the oystermen and the fishermen and whatnot to a certain wholesaler?

No. [Laughs] Some people—well, everybody back then knew just about everybody, and they either liked to work for you, or they didn't like to work for you. And if you had your own boats, of course, they had to unload with you. But there really wasn't an allegiance like you're talking about. I mean, they tried one time to start a co-op here, but it didn't work. Shrimpers particularly. Not so much the oystermen, but shrimpers, in particular, don't want to go out here and unload their product and, you know, wait for their money or something like that. Usually a fisherman, once he unloads, he wants his money right then; that's about the way it works. We had a few that unload all week and get paid at the end of the week, which are the ones that could save a little bit of money. They were better off doing that because they had it all at the end of the week.
I had some fishermen that would catch trout for me, and they would fish all season and not settle up until Christmas time, and then they had several thousand dollars coming to them. All of them don't do that, just a few of them. [Laughs] Now if they needed some money, they'd just come say, “Look, I need two hundred or three hundred dollars to buy something.” Of course, I'd write them a check for it. That's about the way it worked.

Okay. So, say your father had a wholesale order for X-number of oysters, but he couldn't fill it. Could he go to another wholesale and top off his order that way?

Yeah, they worked with each other that way. You know, if you needed some—now at times we would sell—well, later on we mainly just dealt with shrimp instead of oysters. He ran into a problem one time with oysters, and got them all in here and nobody wanted to shuck. He went out of the oyster business. He just quit. He told them, he said, “Y’all are going to have to shuck these, or I'm going to get the police on you.” You know, about losing the oysters and stuff like this. He said when he got through, he said, “I won't handle no more oysters.” He quit. But on shrimp, sometimes we were getting small shrimp, and they would have to go out to a cannery somewhere in Mississippi or Louisiana or someplace like that, you know. And what we'd do sometimes—they'll talk to everybody on the dock, you know, and if we could get up truckload and get the truck loaded—and I'd go out there with the truck and take it out to where we were going and make sure that everybody was treated right on it, you know. And we've done that lot of times. Everybody just trusted then. We worked it that way.

Did your father ever work on the bay himself?

Yes. I don't remember it but he said he did. In fact, I still have two pair of his oyster tongs down there at the fish house that he said were his tongs. He was working with them. Of course they're probably no good now, but they've been up in the ceiling of the building and probably dry-rotted, you know—after they sit out a long time, but—but I got them jammed into one of the rafters, and they're going to stay there as long as, you know, I have place.

Just part of the architecture, huh?

Well they—just sentimental value, you know. I just don't want to get rid of them. They were his.

Did he build that building?

Yeah, I remember him building the building. I don't remember the exact year but I would guess it was somewhere in the [nineteen] forties. Forty-five, maybe. And the one building, it was another wood building, and I did it have a picture, but I don't know if I have it anymore. But the building—like if you're facing it, to the far left, he rented it to a man. And this was during the War [World War II], and the man made concrete blocks…Well he traded his rent out for blocks and he built one building and then he built the other building and built another building. That's the way he built them. He didn't physically build, it you know. He had a block layer that came in.

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What about what's coming out of the bay now? Do you think the fish and the oysters that are out there, do you think that's been over-fished?

Well that's hard to say. I don't think it's—well, let's put it like this: certain times maybe the oysters have been over-fished. But shrimp, they're not really over-fished. I mean there's so many more boats now that, you know, it looks like they're being over-fished. Of course, some of them have quit even shrimping on the count of the price of the fuel. But you can have a lot of shrimp in the bay, and when you get some bad weather or a cold snap they're gone. If you don't catch them before that, you won't catch them. They just go out, and once they go out in the Gulf [of Mexico], they're gone. Fish—well, take for instance like a speckled trout. They had a size law that they had to be something like twelve inches. At one time I can remember when that was ten [inches]. And I was glad to see them go up to twelve because you couldn't sell that little fish. Unless you had a decent size fish, you just couldn't do nothing with them. And we'd get some of the trout that we wouldn’t know what to do with them when we got them, and eventually we had to freeze some because we couldn't sell them. But they have changed the laws on trout to where you can't sell them when you can catch them. It just doesn't make sense. Now I haven't kept up with it lately, but the last time that I read it, I think you could sell them in June and July. And our best production is in September, October, and November, and you can't sell them.

Why in the world would they do that?

That's the State. [Laughs] I don't know, but it just looks like they're trying to put everybody out of business…I know they don't intentionally do that, but that's what it looks like. But they take and they'll kind of have a quota, and we catch fish out there at a different time than they do down south. And I guess there are more people down there, so they go by what they're doing instead of what we're doing.

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How old were you when you first started going down and really kind of working at the fish house?

[Laughs] Probably eight or nine—ten years old, I don't know. I'd just go down with him. I remember one time Daddy would buy fish, you know, all over, and we went over to Lanark Village [Florida, about twenty-eight miles east of Apalachicola]. Of course, it wasn't anything like it is now, you know. But this fellow that he knew had a seafood place over there, and he caught fish and stuff, you know, and he caught a bunch of red fish. And I was just a little old boy, and my dad got me to go over there with him on evening or one night, you know. And, of course, I had school the next day. But he had a pickup truck and we loaded that truck with red fish. Just laid them in there like you would stack wood in the back of that truck and had a truck full of them out there. Of course, they bought all they had; I remember that. And then I remember being so darned tired after we got through unloading because we had to box them up and ice them, you know. And then I had to go to school the next day. But just things like that all the time. And also, he'd send me down there when I got a little bit older, you know, and I could drive. I'd go as far as Cross City [Florida], Steinhatchee [Florida] and places like that and pick up speckled trout and stuff and bring it back home. He knew people everywhere and, you know, he would buy stuff from everybody—anything he could sell. Well Daddy would buy anything, and he would ship it to New York or do something with it. Sometimes he'd make money on it, and sometimes he wouldn't. Sometimes he'd lose. So that's the way it went. [Laughs]

What was your mother doing at this time? Was she a housewife?

Well she was a housewife, but she also kept the books and whatnot and wrote checks for him and all this stuff. We lived right across from the [Gibson Inn] hotel, you know. I don’t know what's in the building now, but that two-story house right on the corner. And she just walked right through the alley down there and would go to the fish house, and it didn't take any time to get there, you know, if he needed any help. When we were small, she was there more so helping him do things, and she'd have somebody taking care of us.

Is it just you and your sister, Dolores? [Dolores Roux, who owns and operates Dolores’ Sweet Shoppe in Apalachicola.]

No, it was—well, my mother had seven children, but two of them died real young. And then there was five of us growing up, and the only ones left now—I have two sisters left; I have Dolores and I have one sister in Georgia. There's three of us all left.

How many brothers did you have?

I had—well I had one that I knew and I had one that was—well he died about six months old—something wrong with him. So I knew the one boy, he died at seventeen. He had some kind of stomach trouble and ate something. Back then you didn’t really have the hospitals like you do now. They could probably save him now, you know. [But] back then, everybody had big families. You had big families to help work. [Laughs]…The only day [my dad’s business] closed was Christmas Day. And then I can remember working all day long, I mean, on something like the Forth of July. Well you worked—if you had boats come in with a lot of shrimp, you had to do something with them, you know. You just couldn't just let them wait, that's all. And we just worked all day and partied all night. [Laughs]

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Well with the fish house, is that something that if—do you have kids? [D]o they not have any interest in the fish house?

I got two: a son and a daughter…My son's name is Joe or Joseph, and my daughter's name is Angela…Well, they were getting prepared to back then. My son now kind of sometimes thinks that—he works for the forestry, and the way seafood has gotten now he won't go into it. It's hard to make a living in seafood now.

Are you glad that he didn't take over the fish house after you then?

Yeah, I think so.

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[N]ow you say that you're renting out the fish house. But from what you said, it sounds like you're just renting out the waterfront so that that boat can dock.

Well, what's happening there, these boys, they've got several boats that work for them. They don’t own the boat, you know, but several boys unload them, and want to sell them their product. And all they do is go down there and unload them, and they'll close up and go back out. Amison [last name] has a place out here—Brownsville [Road], if you know where that is—well it's out toward the Air Base—othat old road—and he's out there. He's got a freezer and a place that he handles shrimp and grades shrimp and all this kind of stuff, and—so he needed a place to unload fish, you know.

And so that building down there, it kind of looks like it's falling down around itself a little bit. Is that just wear and tear or did something happen to it?

Just wear and tear. No, it's just wear and tear. Well, storms help a little bit too, you know. I really don't want to rebuild it. The property values have gone up so high that I'll probably wind up selling it, you know. It's just not worth staying in business at my age, that is.

Well how about that? How about how Apalachicola is changing and all these property values going up?

Well it's—tax wise, it's hurting us, you know. Taxes are doubled—over doubled what they were last year on the business. Some places in town are not quite as much, I guess, because they got more people paying taxes, you know. But it's good and it's bad. I hate to get rid of the waterfront property, you know. When you stop and you look and see what the property is bringing—I know like over at Eastpoint, several people sold their property for four and five million dollars, you know. And I don't know what mine will bring, but it would have to be up in the millions for me to sell, you know. And, you know, I could take that money, and if I just put it in the bank and lived off of the interest for the rest of my life—anyway, and still have some left for the kids.

Sure but then what about the industry? Is it getting squeezed out?

Well, the industry I think is gone. I mean I can see it going down. It's declining all the time. I think at the most, you know, you're looking at maybe twenty years. And it won't be very many in business in twenty years.

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What about the bay? How do you think the bay itself has changed?

Well the bay—I think sooner or later it's just going to be strictly used for pleasure. You know, I think eventually it won't be anymore commercial fishing. Commercial fishermen can't afford to go out and catch four or five fish. They've got to be able to catch you know a thousand, two thousand pounds. And if they don't watch out—like one time I think the law on trout was five—they're going to get it to where you're sport fishermen can't afford to come out here and catch five fish. It's going to cost too much. And I think eventually it'll just get to the point where nobody wants to fish. I don't know how long this will take, but that's the way I see it.

But then you have Apalachicola oysters that have such a reputation. Do you think there will still be a demand for that that can be met with the local industry?

No, I don't think so. I think as they take more water away from us, you know, and the river and stuff like that, it's going to wind up destroying the oysters. I don't think it will continue to be like this. I can't see how it can keep on. I hope I'm wrong. You know, I don’t eat oysters. I'll eat them fried. And they got to be fried crisp. I don't eat raw oysters. I don't like them in a casserole. I don't like an oyster stew. I was the only one in the family that just didn't acquire a taste for them. Everybody else loves them. But that's the way it goes.

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