a week to Fass Brothers Fish House in
Virginia, sell them up there and bring
the check back to these fishermen,”
Cordy says. “The guy that did all this
loaded 700 or 800 pounds of fish —
from three or four different boats — put
them on the truck and off to Virginia
he went. Well, the phone rang while
Glenn and I were there, and this guy
had wrecked the truck, turned it over on
its side, the door flung open, and these
blackfish were scattered all over the high-way.
And now Jackson had to pay the
fishermen for their fish, with of course,
no return. He was furious.”
Jackson said he’d sell the place to
someone if they were interested.
“Glenn looked at me, I looked at
Glenn,” Cordy says. “I wasn’t mar-ried.
I had a little bit — not
much — saved up, enough to
take a chance, and I didn’t
care if I took a chance or
not. If I lost it, I’d start
over again. Glenn, he was a
Piedmont pilot, had good
credit. So we talked with
Jackson, said if you’re seri-ous
about selling, we’d be
interested. To cut to the chase, we
bought the place from him.”
The first thing the brothers did was
close the bar.
“I got up on the roof and there was
a big metal sign that had Sea Bag on it.
There were some cables that held that
sign up, and I cut those cables, and the
sign came crashing down and landed in
20
WBM february 2011
the parking lot with a rumble,” Cordy
recalls.
Two elderly ladies were sitting across
the street on a porch.
“They both stood up and clapped…
because the bar was shut down. The next
day they brought a cake over, and we
grew to be friends,” he says.
The Hieronymus brothers, having no
real fishing experience except that which
they had managed to fetch over the stern
of Glenn’s old Hatteras, stepped onto
the docks of the Sea Bag and into the
wholesale fish packing industry, opening
Hieronymus Brothers Seafood.
“In the front end of it we had a cash
register, and we’d retail a few fish. Lots
of the locals helped,” Cordy says. “The
name Hieronymus is Greek. There’s not
much Greek left in me — it’s all been
diluted over the years — but when we
came to Wilmington, within the first
couple of weeks, when we established a
foothold here and put the sign up and
opened Hieronymus Brothers, within
the first two weeks, every influential
Greek in Wilmington — there’s a
dozen Greek families — those folks
came to us, whether they were politi-cally
connected or business savvy, and
each one of them shook our hand and
said, ‘We may not be able to help you,
but we’ll stick together and try.’ That
was a very warm thing, because we didn’t
know anybody. We remained friends
with many of these Greek families for
years.”
Top left, Cordy Hieronymus
inside the wheel house of
Hieronymus Brothers II.
Below center, Cordy on the
deck of The Lady Catherine
on Motts Channel. Bottom,
a fisherman watches as his
catch is packed out into
wooden fish boxes inside
Hieronymus Seafood.