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October 27-28, 2023
Southern Foodways Symposium ⟶
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October 27-28, 2023
Southern Foodways Symposium ⟶

Oral Histories

The SFA oral history program documents life stories from the American South. Collecting these stories, we honor the people whose labor defines the region. If you would like to contribute to SFA’s oral history collections, please send your ideas for oral history along with your CV or Resume and a portfolio of prior oral history work to info@southernfoodways.org.

< Back to Oral History project: Biloxi’s Shrimping Communities

ORAL HISTORY

Andrew "Fo-Fo" Gilich

Slavic Benevolent Association

For over a hundred years in Biloxi, immigrants have come to work in the seafood industry, fueled by the notion that their sacrifices and hard labor will bear easier lives for their children. Fo-Fo is two generations removed from people who came to America from Croatia, people who struggled and eventually found their careers in seafood canning. Even if he did catch hot shrimp cans off assembly lines as a boy, Fo-Fo today is a software developer and an entrepreneur (and a would-be Mayor of Biloxi, falling a few hundred votes shy in 2001), representing the forward-looking vision of his grandparents.

At the same time, as the President of the Slavic Benevolent Association, Fo-Fo presides over the post-Katrina rebuilding of their Lodge with an eye towards the past, recovering and restoring old photos, artifacts, and memories as he focuses on a new building to house the club. He wants to honor the generations of Croatian Biloxians through pictures and stories, even as he honors their legacy just by being.

Date of interview:
2008-07-28

Interviewer:
Francis Lam

Photographer:
Francis Lam

Download Transcript

“

Those folks knew what work was. The first thing they did was say, ‘My kids are not going to do the same thing I did. We’re here in Mississippi, in this country, to have a better life. I’m going to work as hard as it takes so that can happen.’ ~ Fo-Fo Gilich

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