Mullet festival's quest for new name baits trouble

SWANSBORO -- For 57 years, this tiny coastal town has feasted and hobnobbed around a skinny, bony, jumping fish that shares its name with the world's ugliest haircut: The Mullet.

More graceful than a shad, more vivacious than a shrimp, this strong-tasting swimmer made a noble mascot for the town's annual festival - a fish that said Swansboro, with feeling.

But now the town's festival committee has raised some old and bristly hackles by suggesting that the October mullet gathering be renamed.

It seems like small change, from "Swansboro Mullet Festival" to the "North Carolina Mullet Festival of Swansboro" - a move designed to bring wider appeal and sponsorship. But in the new version, Swansboro comes last.

Hearing news of a name change, Gregory Guthrie imagined his late grandfather McNeely Lisk, the longtime Swansboro mayor and festival founder, spinning wildly below ground.

"I'm highly ticked," Guthrie said. "My mother liked to had a heart attack."

Oily and pungent, mullets show up as a purple tint in the water. When caught in the more rustic fashion, they get hauled to shore by nets hooked to tractors on the beach.

Back in 1954, fried mullet fed the workers building the new White Oak River bridge, a vital link between Onslow and Carteret counties.

When they finished, Mayor Lisk and Police Chief M.T. Maness dreamed up the festival to celebrate the modern era's arrival in bridge form. It was basically a potluck then, and Guthrie remembers sitting on his grandfather's knee as a 6-year-old boy.

"It was pleasant. It was pleasurable," said Guthrie, who lives in Virginia. "Now you can't find a parking spot. You've got so many vendors there it's pathetic, and they're not even from Swansboro. They don't take the parade down the main street. They take it down N.C. 24. It's like going to a fake fair."

To Guthrie, renaming Swansboro's namesake festival for North Carolina would further strip away its golden-age hue.

When he called the festival committee to protest, he said, the woman who took his call hadn't even heard of McNeely Lisk.

"I've got 322 cousins," Guthrie said, "and I sent an email to every one of them."

Needless to say, none of his criticisms sat well with the Festival Committee, particularly not with Linwood Hood, its president.

"Mr. Guthrie is in Virginia - not here," he began. "I've never heard his name before."

A misunderstanding?

There's been some confusion in town, Hood said, about the severity of the name change. Much of the hubbub stems from the incorrect belief that Swansboro is to be dropped from the festival's name altogether - which Hood insists isn't true. He stresses that they're not dropping anything from the name, but rather adding to it.

Swansboro is struggling to get sponsorship for the mullet party, which, along with the committee's other three festivals, costs $80,000 a year and is free to the public. Last September, the committee practically begged people to join the parade, which cost $25 to enter. When Hood warned that the parade might be canceled in the future, people howled. But he hasn't heard a peep from those outraged citizens since, and the danger still looms. "The economy has gone all to kaput," Hood said. "I'm a businessman myself, and I can't give the sponsorship money we had in the past."

He's a volunteer. So is everybody on the committee. The criticism hurts. The hope is that the Onslow County delegation of the legislature will put forth a bill making Swansboro's festival the official North Carolina mullet party.

Guthrie scoffed. "It's all about money," he said.

Everyone's hometown seems idyllic after 50 years have passed, I think. The county fair wasn't a muddy hayride with cheap souvenirs and rickety Ferris wheels. It was pavilions and warm breezes and summer bonnets.

Who's right in this tempest over a fish festival? I couldn't say. I'll mullet over.