This is the first time this has been cut off in my lifetime.
You mean it's been on for your whole life?
Long as I can remember, yeah.
It stayed about, we kept it about five below zero.
Of course it always had product in it from spots or flounders, shrimp, oysters, clams,
whatever, you know.
And here there could be as many as 30 people in here working.
Lot of people worked here all their life, you know.
I mean, we had one fellow, I think he worked here 40 years.
When I started working here full time back in the 70s, I mean we were going wide open.
We had loads of help in here working and just about all the boats that we could handle.
'Course my granddad started the business and then my father and his brother came along,
you know it last so long, it was just my brother and me.
If somebody comes along's interested in the property, we're going to sell the property.
And I don't foresee it ever opening back up as a seafood plant.
There's just too much expense in running and maintaining this plant.
With the imports taking hold more all the time, it's just making it harder for the American
fishermen to make it.
It's making it hard on to 'em, because you know, whenever they catch anything they depended
on us to buy the product and pay them so they could pay their bills.
And now they're running into problems of getting it from the boat to the processor, and
course the one left business over here, he's trying to do all he can, but it's a job to
take care of all the fishermen, you know.
We did have two fishhouses here, we just lost one of those.
Clayton Fulcher Seafood closed it's doors after nearly 90 years of being in business.
I just really miss going down there and just seeing the people that worked there.
They had 8 or 10 people that worked there year round and now they're all gone, they're
dispersed here, there, yonder.
So, I don't know.
I don't know what's going to happen.
I don't know.
I don't know what people's going to do.
You know, a lot of local people...
I don't know.
Granddaddy used to live with just buying salt and grease and that sugar and that was it.
They didn't have no lights, you'd pay the doctor with a chicken or a hog or something
like that.
The doctor ain't going to accept a chicken or a hog no more.
So you're caught up in life's cycle.
While everybody else does it.
That's just like when you see these boats, just outside here today, it's a shame.
It hurts my heart to see them here tied to the dock.
I was just telling him a while ago, I worked with a man for 13 years taking clams and we
caught our limit every day.
And it just got to the point, he was one of them that says, "Well, I'm not going to do
it no more."
And now the boats gone, sold, he's gone off.
And there went my job.
There went MY job that I was doing all winter to pay MY winter bills that I bought my Christmas
with, my young'uns.
But that was took from me because they just won't get you nothing and that man was fed
up with it.
Now he's gone on and got on a dredge boat and he's doing well.
But that's just not for everybody.
What I mean, is just like me.
I've tried it three or four years.
But to be gone and never be home, and never be around your family, I just can't do it.
I'm a family man, and I love the water, and I want to work and catch fish, and I want to
go oystering and I want to go scalloping and I want to go shrimping, and I want to keep
doing it as long as I can.
I'm one of the ones that's going to keep struggling and do it as long as I can keep my head afloat
and keep something to eat on my table, I'm going to do it.