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.

Grady Leavins is a self-made man. Growing up in rural Bagdad, Florida, he sought out opportunity at every turn. He spent a couple of years at a community college, but he was anxious to work. He worked part time at the Arizona Chemical Research and Development Laboratory in Panama City. He commuted to Apalachicola to work extra hours harvesting oysters. In 1976 Grady moved to Apalachicola. Living there, he immediately recognized opportunity in the oyster industry. He started small, but he was soon selling the oysters that he caught all over the state of Florida. He saw even more opportunity when he opened his own seafood house. With his laboratory experience under his belt, he helped develop a new way to package oysters. His “Frosted Oyster” is an oyster that has been flash-frozen and automatically shucked, using liquid nitrogen. Although he came into the industry as an outsider, Grady has earned the respect of his employees, his neighbors, and his peers. Today he is among those leading the industry in production and innovation. And he is just getting started.

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Grady Leavins talking about when he first arrived in Apalachicola, and how he got started in the oyster business.
[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: Grady Leavins – owner, Leavins Seafood
Date: January 9, 2006
Location: Leavins Seafood – Apalachicola, FL
Interviewer: Amy Evans

Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Monday, January 9th 2006 in Apalachicola [Florida] on Water Street with Mr. Grady Leavins, and we're walking across the street here. Where are we headed?

Grady Leavins:  We're going over to our freezer plant for automatically--to observe the automatic shucking of oysters after they have been frozen for half shell consumption to kill the Vibrio that—Vibrio that live in the oysters itself.

And this automatic shucking is something you developed?

Yes, I did. I started working on it a couple years ago. And knew I could automatically shuck by using liquid nitrogen and started visiting a private lab up in Chicago and came back and forth to develop the process and this is—this is the result right here.
What they're doing right here is spreading out the oysters on the conveyor to be frozen. The temperature is most of the time—I don’t have that —I don't want it a matter of record so I'm not going to speak to that.

Where are you from, originally?

[Near] Pensacola, Florida—Milton and Bagdad, Florida-you probably don't know what Bagdad is but you came past it when you crossed from Pensacola across the Bay Bridge, I-10 coming this way and about two miles down the road to the left coming from Pensacola was Bagdad—just a small community, and that's where I'm from.

May I ask your birth date?

Eight—eighteen—forty-three [August 18, 1943]. I'm sixty-two years old, so I've been in Apalachicola for going on thirty-three years now. And my wife and I, we were working in the Research and Development Laboratory, and I started moonlighting as an oyster fisherman on the weekend. And I loved the outside work. Loved it. And it was quite challenging. I can't be second best to anybody; I've got to be the best. So [I am a] highly competitive individual. I couldn't help it, I had to outwork everybody—out do anybody at anything I ever did…But that pretty well characterizes the kind of person I am to have accomplished what we have in this business.
And when we first moved to Apalachicola thirty-three years ago and became kind of friends or acquaintances with people, they told us the first thing we needed to do was leave. We'd never make it here. And I was too dumb to believe them, I guess, so—but we—we stayed, we worked real hard.

Did you come to oyster, or did you come because you saw possibility?

I came [to Apalachicola] as an oyster fisherman and leased a very small place with an option to buy right where we're at [on Water Street in downtown Apalachicola]. And I started as an oyster fisherman. And my wife, after the third year—six months or so—started running the little shucking plant that we had here then, which had nine positions [or shucking stalls] in it. And she would go out to—and you could do this then—out to a competitor and get four or five sacks of oysters in the back of her Buick—in the trunk—at a time and bring them back, and the shuckers would help her drag them out of there and put them in their positions to shuck. And then we decided the only way we were going to be successful is go out and get our own business. So I put like a camper shell on the back of my pick-up truck that I had then, and she literally put gallons of oysters in an ice chest and sacks in the back and went to Panama City and sold them. And then I bought us an International with a fourteen-foot box with a [refrigerator] on it, and then she drove it to Panama City and then Fort Walton and Destin peddling oysters right by herself because I was in the bay and had no choice. [I] had to go work and harder. So for a long time, I was the only oyster fisherman that Leavins Seafood had. And I saw that right away that we couldn't—the local oyster fishermen didn't necessarily trust us because we were outsiders, and the only way we were going to be successful was to buy the out-of-state oysters. So I took this same truck and drove the first time all the way down to Grand Isle, Louisiana, and all I could get on the truck was 150 sacks and—and drove them all the way back, you know. And with 150 sacks of oysters—I think I paid like four dollars a sack for them then and—and I was out for about—I don't know—about three days and I got back here and my wife called me and she said, “Look, you know the guy that was supposed to unload that truck quit. You've got to come back.” So I—I had just gotten a bath and ready to go to bed, and I came right back down here. So from Sunday night to Wednesday night it was completely without sleep, but that's the way it was then. I mean, you know, we did what we had to do to survive.

Can I ask you to clarify that a little bit because I'm a little confused about you coming and being an outsider. So nobody was selling to you? None of the locals were selling to you, so you had—?

None of the locals would sell to me because they didn't know me. They didn't trust me. They didn’t trust anybody from another town—coming in here…So I started going to Louisiana to purchase oysters so we would be in the oystering business here. And as a result of that, I am still buying the majority of what we sell from the states of Louisiana, Texas, and not—you know, I'd love to buy everything out of Apalachicola Bay; it just doesn't produce enough because we—we're—we're buying everything we can get out of Apalachicola Bay and—and as much as twelve to fourteen trailer loads a week, which is forty-thousand pounds per trailer load, if they're safe round numbers—twelve—that's a half million pounds of oysters in shell a week that we're buying from out of state, basically, and then everything we can get out of Apalachicola Bay. But we have a fleet of eight tractor-trailers, two of which are going to Louisiana or Texas to pick up the oysters. And we got six of them that's running routes throughout the Southeast. We deliver to throughout Florida, a lot of Georgia, some of Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and into the edge of Ohio. So we get around.
     Now this—this plant across the street that we visited, that's where the frozen half shell, and you saw the name Frosted Oysters. And we have a Professor Atwell from the University of Florida that I helped get a grant assigned to the University and he—I told him that I could automatically shuck these oysters with liquid nitrogen. Number one, he didn't believe me and—and—but I needed a reservoir of liquid nitrogen to prove a point, so he with an engineer that works for him under this grant got a big huge flask with the liquid nitrogen and put it in their—back of a station wagon and drove it from Gainesville to Apalachicola as it was evaporating and had to drive with the windows down so they wouldn't be asphyxiated. [Laughs]  But we got it here. And I had forgotten the formula. I worked on this in 1989, and I knew I could do it, but I had forgotten exactly the residence time and everything. So—so when they got it here, and we had little things to drop—so we put about a dozen oysters in there at one time—three or four on little tables or shelves that stacked up, so we could drop it down into liquid nitrogen. And then I started off with twenty seconds, thirty seconds, forty seconds, and by the time I got a minute, the Professor was feeling—he was feeling embarrassed for me and—and he would walk around shaking his head like all of his time was nothing. But when I got up to where the range was supposed to be to, where the [oysters] automatically shuck [themselves], I pulled them out and they hit the table and all the shells popped off and [there was] a perfect oyster. And he just lit up. He said, “Oh, my God I never believed it would happen.” I said, “I know you—you didn't think I could do it, but I knew what I was doing.”
And then [the oysters] laid around and collected frost. It was fairly humid that day, and they just frosted over. He said, “I've got the perfect name for that; we should call that Frosted Oysters.” And so that's how we arrived at the name. And we get better—better bacteria—Vibrio [Vibrio vulnificus, a bacterium] kills with this process than anything that's been documented, I think, in this country now.

Did you have a hand in designing that rig that's across the street or how did that work?

Praxair is the company I buy the liquid gas from; they're also the company that designs equipment. So I met with—they—they did something very similar to this; number one it's a freezer tunnel—a nitrogen freezer tunnel in a nitrogen immersion bath of which they—they had but they had to redesign both these pieces of equipment to fit my application and so they did that and when they—when they put it in place they sent a whole team of engineers and down to install it to make sure it was—it—it would fit the criteria that I needed fit, and so far it's been right on you know—no problem and the only thing I forced them to do is do a confidentiality agreement so that—and so they couldn't—wouldn't divulge what I'm doing because they know more than anybody what I'm doing because they designed the building and equipment. Now if I should ever decide to sell it off or something that would be a different story or franchise it another story but then I—I kind of like being the only person in the industry that's got one thing specific to a certain thing which is such a great quality product and so—I—I—there's not enough you know—there's not enough room in this industry to be a McDonald's out there or anything; so I don't plan to go there. And as far as the oystering establishment over here, we—we didn't—we were not born and reared here, so we didn't know how things had historically been. And when I took a look at it, I said my God there's room for all kinds of improvement here. So we designed a conveyor system to deliver oysters directly to the shucker, rather than shoveling them off the floor. They way they used to do it—high concrete bins capable of holding a—an oyster fisherman's catch for a day, and he would come in and dump them on an elevated piece of concrete in the evening, when he came in, and his wife would shuck them the next day. So they laid completely out of refrigeration all night long, which was not good. And then the next morning the guy came in and shoveled them up into a position for the wife to shuck. Well, what we did was go to a—a stainless steel conveyor system that we could put oysters on the conveyor, and they could raise the door; they'd automatically feed into them and—and 20 shuckers as we have it and there or 30 could have oysters in a matter of minutes, rather than putting them—abusing them, putting them on the floor and all this stuff; they come directly out of the cooler straight to them within a period of just a half hour—they're already back under refrigeration—or less time than that and the length of time it takes for them to shuck a gallon, you know.

Are the oystermen able to come up from their boats or do they come and hand-deliver those?

They—they came—they come—they could come by boats in here but they come by truck because years ago when I first started as an oyster fisherman everybody had good boats and big motors and gas wasn't so expensive and you could run from one end of the bay in just a short period of time and—and now they've cut down the size of the boat and the size of the motors for fuel economy and people just don't work the way we used to a long time ago. They just—I mean my God, thirty—I started part-time from Panama City over—over 35 years ago and my gross pay thirty-five years ago getting two [dollars and] twenty-five [cents] a sack, I made eight hundred dollars a week on a consistent basis. I mean my God, what would that equate to now—several thousand in—in a week's time; so. I just—but it—it took hard—it took hard work and—and these guys today are not willing to work as hard as I worked—we worked then because driving from Panama City I was crossing the bay at daylight and I was coming in at dark, all right; and then I had an hour and a half drive in the morning and three more hours, so you know I was spending fifteen hours working in commuting back and forth. That's the reason I elected to move to Apalachicola, because I started as an oyster fisherman, and I was working in the Research and Development Laboratory in Panama City called the Arizona Chemical Research and Development Laboratory and I worked for—I was—as a Technician for one of the brightest PhDs I've ever seen. I worked for several people but undoubtedly he was the brightest I had ever seen. He—he could look inside of a molecule and—and tell you exactly how it was structured. And I still—we're still friends, we still communicate, and it's been you know thirty-five years since we had—since we had anything to do with each other as far as a friendly—well we're still friends, but then we just—I find it so interesting to talk with him.

Did you go to college?

I went to college. [M]ostly at night because, you see, I've had a very interesting life. I moved away from home when I was thirteen years old and moved into an apartment and walked to school every morning and rode the bus. I worked in a supermarket and then I decided I didn't want to do that the rest of my life because I—there was better things out there. So I started—I went to Pensacola Junior College, and then I went to Marianna [Florida]—a junior college out there [Chipola Junior College], but that's—and took courses and that was about the extent of—of probably a couple years—something like that but other than that it's just a self-motivating individual as far as I can say.

So what was that momentum like when you came [to Apalachicola] in [nineteen] seventy-two? What were those steps that kind of happened over that time span to get to where you are today?

I was the oyster fisherman, and finally I had two or three more come to work [for me]. But then, I mean, we realized right away that we had to pursue—there was plenty of oysters in the state of Louisiana then, so we had to pursue getting those in. So with the small place that we had here, there was another one down on the other side of the bridge, and we leased it for a couple years, and we moved our shucking operation from here to there, so we could take this place down and build a new facility here. And so we started, like I said, the one truck into Panama City, Fort Walton, and then Destin, and we were running Panama City twice a week. So what happened, it got too much for [my wife] to handle to drive the truck and be the delivery boy at the same time, so I came out of the bay two days a week in—in the beginning to—to drive the truck and unload, while she went in and wrote invoices and everything. And then we decided to go on into Fort Walton and Destin, and I came out of the bay two more days a week, which were four days a week to run these routes. And so that—that was the basis of it.
     And then it got to be entirely too much for her because she stayed—as things progressed and we grew, she had to stay in the office, and I ran the routes over there and delivered the product and everything. And then—then I decided well, you know, I think we can get a better price if we go to Miami and on into the Keys. So I just took off and went to Miami and to the Keys of Florida. I never will forget, Leo Cooper—he's still a dear friend of mine—he said, “Grady, you just hang it up. You'll never break in down here. People will not buy that little Florida oyster. I said, Well Mr. Leo, if you buy from me, that's a start.” [Laughs] And he did. I guess he felt sorry for me. [Laughs] So I started there, and then I bought a tractor and trailer and—and hired a guy to run it to go into Miami. And I would take a flight to Miami, and I decided that was one place I didn't want to drive in. So I wouldn't even rent a car; I'd get down there and contact a major cab company and say, “I’d love to rent a cab for today.” They know the addresses, and I had a phone book, and I'd pick out people to go talk with. And this is the way I built a route in Miami and then in the Keys.
     So then, you know, I said well, we have the ability to do more so let's look at—the Hooter's we got a contract with the Hooter's—a bunch of those. So then they would send a truck in here to pick the product up. Well, then they decided they didn't want to do that any longer, so I bought a truck. So we had to deliver to Naturally Fresh in Atlanta. Well since we're going up there we might as well drum up more business and then—then after that when we started—well the Coast of Georgia, South and North Carolina looks like a wonderful place, so she and I decided I'd go up there, too, and establish another route. So we got—we have one route going through Atlanta onto Tennessee and Kentucky and the edge of Ohio. We have actually one guy running two routes into Georgia, north part of Georgia, North and South Carolina. He's up there twice a week—have another guy going twice a week going up there. Have one that's going once a week, so—and then twice a week into the southern part of Florida and then through Tampa—I mean Jacksonville and on into Orlando and Tampa. So we—we move a lot of seafood in a week, a lot of oysters in a week’s time, and that's predominantly what we sell.

——-

Well do you see yourself retiring any time in the near future?

Well I—right now my—I have a wonderful staff of people, and I'll take off a—I work probably two or three days a week as it is right now anyway. So I mean why worry about it? They're fully capable and they're paid well and I treat them right and—and they're honest and just—they're family. I mean they're family; so what else can I say. I just—they know any major decision—if they don't think they can handle it they call me because they know where I'm at twenty-four hours a day. But they can handle; I mean and they do.

How many employees do you have now?

Hmm, probably—wow. Oyster fishermen and all, it's over a hundred.

Now the oyster fishermen are they have an allegiance to you or do you just—?

They don't have allegiance to anybody. They sell to me because they know I can move their product easier and better than anybody else. So but they move around. We maintain about the same amount all the time one way or another and some of them are really trying desperately to get to work here, and if somebody drops out we just put another one in his place because—but what I try to do is look for those that are—number one catch a good quality product which is very hard to find. But secondly, that one is going to be here and be devoted to the company and I offer some incentives. I mean with my key employees—or all of them as far as that goes—we offer a profit-sharing retirement plan, which is very uncommon in this business.

For an oysterman, wow.

We offer—yeah, we offer a health insurance program of which the company picks up part of the—part of the tab for and you don't find that in this industry. So overall what—I mean, I've always believe and it's been my philosophy if—if there's someone that comes to work here, let's don't get them upset and make them quit. Let's just grow old and die together, but let's live to be old, you know. So and—and it works. I mean, I have a staff meeting every morning at eight-thirty [a.m.] and of all my key people and—and if there's a problem we discuss it and—and then—and that's—I started that about two years ago; it's probably the best decision I ever made because, you know, this guy in this department thinks he does more than that guy in that department, and it keeps everybody communicating because there's a lot of hard work here and a lot of hours, too. So if everybody knows what's going on and what everybody is up to then—then there's fewer and fewer problems.

About how many oystermen do you keep on at one time?

Probably about fifteen…And that would be fifteen boats and—and then you start breaking that down and some of them have their wife with them or their partner, so there's thirty people there. And then over there [in the frosting plant] I've got probably a total of twenty people. And then shucking I've got thirty people; I've got about—I've got at least eight truck drivers; I've got a maintenance staff with three in it; I've got five just in the packing—packing room in there; I've got three in addition to the shuckers in there; I've got my outside staff that wash and prepare the product—it's probably fifteen of those. So you start adding them up, you know it's—it's—it's kicking a hundred-plus. But then all I do is say, Hey, this is your job; if you need me I'm here. And this is yours; if you need me I'm here. They know what to do. Most of them have been with me for twenty years and—and it goes back to the same old philosophy. You know, I don't like changing people. Let's get a good one and treat him right and pay him good and keep him and keep him happy. If—if they have a problem, I want to know about it because it can affect their work. If they need help—if I can help them I do that.

How have the frosted oysters affected—I mean, [they’ve] obviously affected what you can turn out as far as quantity, but as far as that system of employees and working, are there fewer people that it takes to work that frosting machine?

Yeah, there's fewer people that it takes, but then that will never take the place of this over here. That's in addition to because I mean we're killing Vibrio over there. This market is—I never thought it was as big as it is for the frosted oysters and the frozen half shells. It is a very, very big market. And I'm just really shocked with the fact that it is so big. Last year we—we froze until I ran out of money and then I borrowed some and ran out of it again and then because it takes a lot of money to inventory this product, and I thought I had more than enough. And then we had the storms and everybody else ran out because there was no fresh product around, so they tried this and they liked it and—and so as a result of the storms we were thrown into markets that we probably wouldn't have had and I ran out two months before I—I thought I should have run out; so—and it's good and it's bad. I mean we built—we're building a heck of a market for the product and we've already sold in the last two months almost as much as we sold all last year, so I mean we've got a substantial increase in sales as a result of being thrown into the market much quicker but it's—it's a very high quality product.

And as a product you were explaining to me in there that there are a dozen on the trays that are open in the half shell that are frosted.

Yes.

They're microwaveable and—?

Well the ways—you can microwave them and put toppings on them. You can just let them thaw at room temperature and eat them half shell. You can thaw them in the cooler. You can thaw them in the microwave. So I mean, I have thawing instructions on all of them. Now when I've finished this conveyor system that I'm putting in then I'll do—then I'll do toppings myself and package them with—what do you call them—Rockefellers.

——-

Well let me ask you this, with all this high production and volume that you can do now with all of this technology, how does that balance out with, you know, environmentally speaking what the [Apalachicola Bay] can produce as far as oysters are concerned?

Well any way you look at it there's going to be a balance one way or another. There's a shortage of oysters this season, and with the shortage the price gets higher, which back people off from eating them so much and then as they—we get over the hurricanes from Louisiana, production gets high again, the price starts coming down, people start buying more of them, so it's—it's a natural balance that's there. So it's nothing to be concerned about even though the—our technology is capable of doing it. I mean, of the production capacity to really make a difference. I mean, first of all, you know, I've got to go somewhere, and it wouldn't be Apalachicola, but the cost of real estate is entirely too high right here. Taxes are entirely too high. Would it be possible in the state of Florida? I'm not limited to where I have to put that piece of equipment. I can put it in Georgia as far as that goes, where they give you tax incentives and property is cheap and labor is available. I mean, you know, those Mexicans over there—we have to bring them from Quincy [Florida] every day down here to work because there's—there's no labor resource here either.
So would it hurt Florida for this to leave? Yes, it would hurt Florida. But it probably won't happen because at sixty-two years old I'm not really the Donald Trump of the oyster industry. We—we're making a good living and we've developed something that I think is precious to the industry, and I have a highly qualified staff capable of running—I'm not going to go out and—and—and build a major, major production facility to try to dominate the country and frosted oysters. It's not worth it to me because number one, I know these guys that I compete with, and they could be vicious if they had to be. There's room for everybody to make a good living and that's all what we—it's what it's all about, you know.

And what about the immediate future, then, of this area here on the waterfront [in Apalachicola]?

Wow, that's—that's a good question. There's—I can call the name Steve Rash. I don't know whether you met him or not; he's basically in—in the fish business up the river up here. He wants to relocate out of town somewhere and have the availability of unloading his fish catch and moving it to the plant because he'd love to develop condos up there. It would mean more money to him, but then he's got to weigh where his values are. Ultimately, will he make more money in the seafood business or in the—in the condo business, and will—how long—how much of a fight will it be to be able to switch it over from seafood to condos for—from the county level and the state level with the Environmental Protection Agency we have. From my perspective, sixty-two years old, I ain't worried about it you know. I mean, I'm not ready to die, but I'm not ready to start all over again either, is about what it amounts to. I'm satisfied with my achievements. It could be better. I could work more. It could still be better. But I'm very—at my age, I'm very selfish with my time also. I mean I want to enjoy my environment, I want to enjoy my lovely wife, and we have a lake house in Georgia. It cost a lot of money, and I'd just as soon spend as much time up there as I have right here. Even though I love my environment here, you know. This—that's—I can kind of chill out up there and—and if I'm here I'm always working and I'm always busy. You can't ever tell; it might add another two or three days in my life [Laughs] by doing it that way.

Well then how many buildings do you have here on the waterfront?
 
[W]e have two hundred feet on the river. We have half a block, plus a corner of which they're selling lots over there and a lot of—I mean we're worth a fortune in property.

What was here before you?

There was a little oyster house right here next door, [from] about the turn of the century there was an oyster canning plant there. The guy set up shop with—and his name was Roy V. Smith—he invented an oyster shucking machine, the original that was ever produced for the industry. And I don't know—Barbara may still have one, the secretary in there, but he was a genius as far as I'm concerned. He tried to develop and invent a wheel of perpetual motion; he worked on it all his life and never did develop it, but some of the things that he did do is just phenomenal. He was a great, great guy…But you know it's been so many interesting things like that have occurred throughout time and some of the most lovely people in the world that I've met and I'm so thankful that I got to get to know them, you know.

You talk about coming here in the '70s and not being able to get a foot in because you're an outsider, but then you're leading the industry in Apalachicola.

Well, and you're right. And—and I think probably I'm still resented because we have been so innovative and everything. In fact, you can see that plastic gallon bucket on that top shelf. When I—when we were here and first moved here they used metal cans—tin cans, gallon buckets. In a matter of five days, if you put—put oysters in them they would rust. I just could not see a food product going into a tin can and it rusting. So I got approval for—that's made by Mammoth Plastics. I don't know what they're doing now but anyway, that was—in the whole industry that was the first thing that ever helped. A plastic—for plastic container that helped oysters…And then from there on it went and then I decided that there used to be little tin cups with a plastic see-through window in it to hold oysters, and I didn't like the tin cup. I went to a Sweetheart cup—or made by Sweetheart Plastics and we started packaging oysters in that. Another industry first.

Well as a former oysterman yourself, do you ever go out [on the bay] anymore?

Oh gosh, I stopped working in the bay twenty years ago, I guess, and I have a lease in perpetuity down there, and I have a dredge boat—another battle I fought because the oyster fishermen didn't like the idea that we were pulling what they call a dredge. It's not like you go dredge up the bottom; it's like you're scraping oysters of it and my lease got completely destroyed with this hurricane, you know. It just swept everything off of it.

May I ask how you acquired the lease?

Yeah, I don't have a problem with that because back in the twenties—1920s, thirties and forties, the Legislators decided that they would do some political favors by leasing part of Apalachicola Bay. Now the State of Florida ten, fifteen years ago decided that they were going to make us comply to a lot of rules and comply with a lot of rules that I didn't think we should have to. And there's several lease holders here, but all of the sudden you know I lost my temper and I said, “Well, one of two things are going to happen—.” And they were going to try to take it away from us. I said, “They are going to take it, or I'm going to kick their butt in court because I am taking them to court.” And I took them to Court to decide what my rights were. And the Judge in his closing arguments said, “Well, our Legislators back in the [nineteen] twenties, thirties and forties, in all their infinite wisdom, decided to give part of Apalachicola Bay away. This guy owns part of it in the form of a lease, and the way this lease is written, there is nothing y’all can do about it but respect the fact that he has a lease. And if he wants to give five acres of it to [someone] or cash on it and give it away for a debt that he owes or whatever he decides to do with it, that's his business. Y’all got to follow through with all the transactions and—.” But I bought it from a guy that had probably cashedin one of these political favors and because you can trade them, barter them, give them away, sell them—anything. I mean that's the way the contract is written up, but there's no more leases like this, nor there will be ever anymore, and there's about between six and seven hundred acres, total, and I have fifty-five acres, and I manage another one hundred.

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Do you see the leases as always being worked, or do you think there's a time when the leases will be just kind of preserved?

I think it's the most wonderful thing that ever happened because I think dredging is probably the best thing that ever happened to an estuary because they really cultivate the bottom and make them much more productive. That's the reason the States of Louisiana and Texas are so productive. This bay could be the same way because—visualize and I'm sure you've seen an oysterman tonging oysters. They tong them and pile them up on a culling board, they anchor, they sit down, they rake them all—all the babies—back overboard. They're stacked up in a pile and most of them smother. So that's what happens to about fifty-percent of the oysters in Apalachicola Bay: they're covered up in these cull piles, and half of everything that goes on the culling board, if it's not taken, is going to die anyway. So it's not a very good management practice. Don't even want to talk about that right now as far as the [Oyster] Task Force is concerned because some other people have got to see more clearly the way things should be managed, and I think that's a very important part of the future of Apalachicola Bay.

Well what about that lifestyle and that history [of tonging]? I mean, it's such an immediate history that is disappearing. And talking to Corky Richards today, you know, [the] one guy in town who still makes tongs. But you have to use tongs in the bay, and it just seems like these dominoes are just set up to fall, and it's going to happen any minute.

And it's happening. When I moved here thirty-two years ago, there were sixty-five oyster places in Franklin County. There's five or six now. So they've been—they've been falling ever since I've been here. So what you do is make it—you know you try to—you don't change the lifestyle. That changes people. You make people to where they can make a good living out of it, so they'll stay there. From the oyster fishermen on up through people like me. Now, we've done well but then I think—I didn't know how things were historically—should have been done, so therefore I changed things to—for the best interest of our business and in doing that, I played a major role in changing the entire industry, which has been for the best. But no, I think a lifestyle should be preserved. It won't be preserved, if we don't make it better because the younger people are not going to work as hard. If they can get out there take most of the work, hard—back breaking work out of tonging and go to dredging, you're doing two things; you're making it more appetizing for them to stay there, but you're also cultivating and better developing the bay. Will they change as a result of it? They’ll just have more money to spend. [Laughs] And that's not bad.

Well, what I started kind of trying to ask you earlier was, talking about how you have experiences in oystering and working the bay, and you said earlier that if it wasn't this, you'd be doing something else—making strides in some other business or industry—but there's obviously a passion there about the bay and the oystering.

Oh yeah, there is. I'm just glad I found this place. I mean, and that's what I was referring to. I would be doing something but I discovered Apalachicola, this is where my heart is you know.

Can you articulate that a little bit and tell me where that came from and how it manifested itself?

Well, yeah, because you just said it yourself. It's a way of life and it's the independence of the people that are here. They're so independent, but yet so dependent at the same time, if you really get down to the nuts and bolts of it. But it's their lifestyle, their attitude and everything. Mine is different, and I don't know whether that's good or bad, but I was not born and raised here, so therefore, maybe I don't really fit into the niche the way maybe the person that was born and reared here was. And even my friendly competitors on the local level, they have a different perspective than I do on any and everything, and I respect the way they think and their attitudes, you know. But it's—still, I just can't go there, unfortunately. But I love it, and I love the way they think. And it's just—it's—it's a way of life for the environment, you know, and for the people that have grown up here. And I've enjoyed it so much and the characters that you mentioned as I have gotten to know and many of them have died, but it's still a unique way of life.

Well what do you think the future of the bay in Apalachicola is with you leading the industry? And [Leavins Seafood] obviously isn't going anywhere, but there are so many other changes, when we talk about real estate and, you know, cosmetically, working on the river and things like that [in a tourist town].

Well, I think the future of Apalachicola Bay lies directly in the hands of our County officials and the planning for Apalachicola Bay. If the water quality goes south, then the oyster fishery itself is going to go south. I was reading an article from Bob Jones, Southeastern Fisheries this morning the way there's a lady—I think an individual in St. Augustine has studied one lagoon there that was filled with oysters, and they're slowly disappearing. And her decision—final decision has been that the weight from boats have played a major role in killing off the oyster industry—or the oyster. They're literally destroying oyster beds in that particular lagoon in St. Augustine, Florida. Is that happening here? I've watched the demise of the oyster industry production-wise for the past thirty-five years, and when I started thirty-five years ago there would be fifteen-hundred boats out on Apalachicola Bay and every one of them catching the living daylights out of oysters to the fact that they were literally loading boats, and you could walk from boat to boat to boat on St. Vincent's oyster bed out there. And it's gone downhill ever since then. And why? I just really don't understand why it has gone south the way it has…I don’t know. You know, I think if the water quality goes, then the bay is going to go, and that's a natural thing. And this is the reason I want to put cultch material [material (as oyster shells) laid down on oyster grounds to furnish points of attachment for the spat] in the bay to try to bring it back. I would love to reduce my dependency on the State of Louisiana. By doing that we've got to have more production here.

Is that a possibility?

Oh, yeah. That's what I'm—this [Oyster] Task Force, this is what I'm going to be working on, yeah. And two hundred million dollars is really—you know, I don't know whether this has been appropriated where the nursery people get most of it, the poultry people get it all, but you can bet one thing: I’ll be in Washington with my hand out, now. [Laughs] I mean, [for] part of [that money to go] to planting cultch material in Apalachicola Bay.

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