JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
This weekend, thousands will gather at the Flora-Bama, a weathered roadhouse that straddles the Florida-Alabama state line, to see who can hurl a dead fish the farthest. It's an old and odd tradition in Pensacola where the mullet is a kind of symbol for a landscape and a culture in flux. T.S. Strickland with WUWF in Pensacola reports.
TS STRICKLAND, BYLINE: The Interstate Mullet Toss is just around the corner. But today, at Perdido Bay Seafood, the only mullet in sight is on a T-shirt. Teresa Pitts, better known as T.C., runs this place. Her family has been in the seafood business for generations.
TERESA PITTS: All the time, people call and ring that phone off the hook - you guys got mullet?
STRICKLAND: These days, the answer is usually no. Mullet is a silvery bottom-feeding fish, once central to working-class life along the Gulf. Like the haircut of the same name, the mullet has long been a symbol of Southern grit.
PITTS: Back in the day, I mean, the mullet were everywhere, and there weren't as many houses all over the waterway. Any Joe Schmo could go down to the water and throw a cast in it and catch some mullet, fry them up right there on the beach, invite all their friends.
STRICKLAND: But these days, that's less and less the case. Gina Alvarez, a state fisheries biologist, says that over the past five years, the mullet harvest has fallen to its lowest level since the 1990s. And she says it's not clear why.
GINA ALVAREZ: We need further analysis in order to really determine what is going on exactly.
STRICKLAND: She says it could be that there are fewer mullet in the water or just fewer people fishing for them. What is clear is that mullet is no longer as central to Gulf Coast culture as it once was. Even as this iconic fish has faded from markets and menus though, there are still plenty to go around at the Mullet Toss this weekend. And if you want to know what to do with them, well, you just have to ask Sherry Fundin. She's been a fixture at the toss for nearly three decades.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: From Pensacola, Florida - this is not Sherry's first Mullet Toss.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Shouting) Let's go, Sherry.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Shouting) Sherry.
STRICKLAND: This is from a video of Fundin taken a few years ago. She's 72 now, and the walls in her Pensacola home are lined with more than 20 awards, each a testament to her fish-throwing finesse. She won't be tossing this year due to a back injury. Considering her mullet-tossing technique, some might call it karma.
SHERRY FUNDIN: You break its back and fold it over, and you throw it like a baseball.
STRICKLAND: Fundin started tossing in the mid-'90s. But even in all of those years competing, she's never actually eaten mullet.
FUNDIN: I've had the opportunity. Don't know - I'm just not a big fish person.
STRICKLAND: These days, fewer and fewer even have the opportunity to try mullet. And yet, as tastes change, the toss endures. Throwing a dead fish across the state line might seem absurd, but for many who do it, it's a reminder of a time when there were fewer borders in the sand, more boats on the water and always enough mullet for everyone. For NPR News, I'm T.S. Strickland in Pensacola.
(SOUNDBITE OF L.A.B. SONG, "TAKE IT AWAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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