Timber king Howard Powell shuns retirement for a chance to dive into Florida's clam farming industry

B Y - A L E X - C R E V A R - ( A B '9 3 )
P H O T O S - B Y - C A R L Y - C A L H O U N - (A B '0 2, - A B J '0 2)

orning light bounces from Gulf of Mexico waters through big bay windows and into Howard Powell's kitchen. Ibises and white pelicans fly by as Powell eats his grapefruit in precise, spoon-carved sections. A great-horned owl stares inside—seemingly snatching glimpses of the morning paper—from the crux of a live oak's shaggy limb. Powell rises when he hears people waking from elsewhere in the house. Standing next to the speckled, green Corian countertop, he awaits an audience. It's his 77th birthday—January 6, 2003.

Island life suits Powell (BSA '50). He did, in fact, move to Cedar Key, Fla., to retire seven years ago from his position as owner and founder of the world's largest, private forest products inspection and testing agency: Timber Products Inspection. But for anyone familiar with him, the image of Powell in cabana wear at the shuffleboard court is downright comical. And true to form, he wasn't on Cedar Key for even a year before a new business proposition made itself available. Aside from normal financial objectives, this one would be profitable for another, less fiscal, reason: it would support the emerging clam farming industry and give Powell an opportunity to work with a group of local families. This group's partnership has had a two-fold positive effect. As family dreams of self-suffiency have become reality, they have in turn helped to make this tiny island hamlet the nation's number-one producer of farm-raised hard clams.

Powell is a quintessential Southern storyteller, with a tendency to smile (making his eyes disappear) and a congenial, small-town propensity for talk. His favorite salutatory responses rotate regularly like country music refrains: "Walkin' slow and talking' low," or "Not doin' too bad for old folk," or "I'm pretty good for the shape I'm in." Powell's down-to-earth positivity has served him well. Beyond helping him succeed for more than 50 years in the world of business, it has enabled him to age with profound grace.

As his houseguests gather around him on this birthday morning, filling mugs with steaming black coffee and picking from a bowl of fruit grown and gathered right in the yard, Powell cracks two eggs into a glass, dabbles a bit of tabasco over them and drinks.

"Ahhh," he smacks his lips for effect, "very healthy."

"You do that every morning?" asks one audience member. Powell nods. "A health trick—one high in protein with almost nothing else," he explains. "Like the bristle cone pine, which only forms needles every 30 years instead of every year. That tree has all the tricks to exist. The species has learned that it's not so important to live a long time, but die real slow."

After breakfast, Powell and his wife Sally Beveridge—who crunches the numbers for the couple's aquaculture partnership, HPSB Clams, Inc.—lead a tour of the grounds around their home, which was built by and for an architect and finished in rare, pecky cypress wood. The dwelling is isolated by big trees in an upscale part of the island, and covering the home's side and front yards is every sort of citrus, all plump and begging to be picked. Lemons the size of softballs, satsumas, grapefruits, kumquats, oranges, and tangelos are plucked throughout the tour and collected in sacks or, yielding to temptation, eaten—the peels separating from the fruit in one piece. In the back yard, and just on the edge of the Gulf, are a series of raised vegetable beds built from 2x4s and plywood. The boxes are filled with Powell's own secret soil recipe and brim with Swiss chard, broccoli, potatoes, tomatoes, and onions. For many, tending such a variety of produce would seem either a wonderful hobby or a demanding chore. For Powell, the product of poor South Georgia dirt farms, it's instinct—regardless of need. That the harvest is of luscious, five-star quality is merely a happy consequence.

here's no off-season for Cedar Key clammers. Though January winds blow cold and stiff against the rush of a clam man's vehicle of choice, a flat-bottomed boat called a birddog, when the call comes for a "sale" (selling to an individual, restaurant, or wholesaler), it means getting out on and into the water. Rory Cantwell keeps one hand on his baseball cap and one on his boat's steering wheel as he puffs a cigarette and squints an eye to keep out the smoke. He's skipping toward his lease—2.2 acres of sandy, muddy depth and four feet beneath the surface. He is one of the many lease owners whose plots are delineated within rows by striped poles here at the confluence of the Suwannee River and the Gulf of Mexico in the crux of the big bend section of Florida, 50 miles west of Gainesville. He is also one of a group of clammers with whom Powell partners.

Cantwell is what is known in the industry's broad, text-like terminology as an aquaculturalist or an aquafarmer. A half step down, or up, in the vernacular makes him a clam farmer. Anybody who wakes up in the early chill and races his boat to a lease to get chest deep in a wetsuit mended multiple times with duct tape calls him a clammer. Cantwell moved here from New York, where he had been a wild clam digger—translation: he picked clams one by one at low tide and placed them in his bucket to sell to a waiting wholesaler. He came to Florida because the weather and clam conditions were better, and there was plenty of work. Before he met Powell, Cantwell had worked for half of the clamming operations on Cedar Key. But much like the frustration one feels continually paying rent instead of a mortgage, Cantwell was looking for the opportunity to make a go of it on his own. That's when he met Powell, who was already working with other clammers and offering each the same deal: Powell pays the overhead, the clammer brings in the catch, and they split the profits. Each clammer has the option of going solo at any time. They are essentially their own bosses and yet accept a limited amount of risk.

Cantwell cuts the motor just when all exposed extremities are at their limit of feeling. He then pulls his boat alongside another Powell partner, Bruce Marshall.

"Hey Brucie, how's it going?"

Marshall and an assistant have a sale today and they are standing in the water next to their boat. "I guess this work'll do if you don't mind not thinking for a while," jokes Marshall, a retired military man with a double master's (engineering technology and systems management) from UT-Knoxille. Marshall and helper drag their bootied feet along the bottom so not to step on stingrays and then bend over to pick up a mesh bag, twice as fine as fishnet, full of clams. Marshall is aware of his crop's age rotation and knows the "grow-out" bags on this area of the lease are around 15-months-old and ready to be harvested. He and the assistant pull up the bag, which is submerged by the clams themselves in the mud; the potato sack-shaped bag of about 1,000 one-inch "little necks" is barely outlined on the Gulf's floor. The clam's size—little necks are most popular—is determined at its hinge and changes with the growth time allowed. The clammers swoosh the bag back and forth, each holding one end, to rinse off the mud. Then, with an extra heave, they pitch the bag into their boat.

"There's nothing easy about this job," says Cantwell in an accent still more blue-collar Long Island than North Florida cracker. "The money might look good but it's tough. You earn everything. And you can't do nothing about Mother Nature. When weather comes and you can't bring in sales, all of a sudden you're broke again."

			With the fishing industry dead and El Niño a problem, Powell invested in his hometown
			In the "tumbler" clams are categorized as they fall through rungs and into buckets. They are then shipped to restaurants all over the country and sold for $8 to $12 per dozen.

It was during such a weather-driven situation, shortly after purchasing his house in 1997, that Powell became a clamming financier.

The area was still in the throes of the El Niño weather system, which had changed the water salinity around the island by irregularly sucking freshwater along the coastline from the Suwannee River. The effect on clams was devastating and many farmers lost entire crops. As well, an inordinate number of clammers were especially unprepared because of their neophyte status in the business, which had begun in Cedar Key just two years earlier when a gill net ban meant to remedy over-fished waters ended the island's fishing industry.

"There is a different mindset as a farmer than there is as a harvester," says Leslie Sturmer, a Florida extension agent who, after the ban, ran the retraining program for area fishermen to become clammers. The training provided watermen low-cost leases ($50 per year), expertise, and clam seeds (tiny clams about 1 mm in size) from which to harvest their first crop. "As a harvester [of fish] you bring product in every day, but when you are a farmer you have to lay seed and then wait for more than a year. For some, that transition is hard. At least though, [clamming] has allowed people, who have made a living through a heritage on the water, to continue to use those skills."

Lifetime Cedar Key resident Tommy Smart was among those banned from net fishing and left financially compromised following a profession change and El Niño. And on one idle day he knocked on Powell's door to ask if he could look for arrowheads and Indian relics on Powell's shoreline. After the two spoke and he learned of the industry's dilemma, Powell suggested a working relationship with Smart, who then suggested two other families. "I was profoundly impressed with Tommy's knowledge of the water and his honesty,"says Powell. "He was rough-sawn but solid oak." In his Cadillac (which he calls, laughingly, the clamillac), Powell pulls a match from a matchbook he keeps on hand as a set of toothpicks and in typical Powellese, he speaks of his decision six years ago: "One of my great pleasures of these associations is working with individuals who want to be self-sufficient and independent."

edar Key is actually a town on a group of islands known as the Cedar Keys, where large stands of cedar trees once stood. It was the original terminus of Florida's first trans-peninsular railroad, which ran from St. Augustine and serviced vessels from New Orleans and Havana. What some tourists are surprised to learn upon visiting "the other Keys" is that regardless of how "Gulf Coast island chain" sounds, this is not a beach community. Wayfarers who stumble upon the place thinking they have found a sandy getaway soon drive back across the four-mile stretch of four bridges to the mainland.

What many coastal nature lovers already know though, is what the Cedar Keys, collectively and officially, do offer—a federal wildlife refuge protected for its bird nesting areas, which crowd the nine islands the way condominiums cramp typical beach destinations. The pristine, sheltered waters and environment make for world-class birding, low impact sport fishing, and a thriving colony of poets, writers, and artists. The term most often applied to Cedar Key is "Old Florida." One-story, tin-roofed "Cracker construction" houses and front porches bejeweled with rocking chairs dominate the cityscape, which boasts a year-round population of 700.

"People come here to enjoy what's not here rather than what is," says Gina Steffani, co-owner of the Island Room restaurant, where the panoramic views of the historic harbor are complemented by a crab bisque so thick you could eat it with chop sticks. "You happily realize the things we don't have when you see a bald eagle soaring in the sky above you."

Cedar Key's sheltered position along the coast, its shallow, sun-incubated waters, and its proximity to the Suwannee—which acts as a filtering system (unless unusual flooding or irregular weather patterns arise)—make it the capital of Northwest Florida's Nature Coast. These conditions also make it intrinsically successful as a place to grow water-based crops. Still, after the potentially fatal gill net ban of 1995, it would have been hard to predict that from such dearth Cedar Key would emerge as the nation's number-one clam-farming spot. (According to Sturmer, the statistic is based on Florida's top clam status and Cedar Key's as the state's dominant grower.) But the fisherman embraced the government's offer to retrain them and today, some 200 people harvest clams on some level. Though there were growing pains, few would argue that clam farming has brought anything but stability to the region. And beyond simply reducing local unemployment, lease-filled waters mean a cleaner Gulf. "Because clams are filter feeders and have a concentration of everything in the water in their gut," explains Sturmer, "clammers have to become [environmental] advocates whether they want to or not."

The inherent need for industry mindfulness has been a motivation for both Powell and his wife. "The wild, unmanaged product—mullet fish—that clams replaced was both wasteful and caused catastrophic imbalance in Gulf waters," says Beveridge. "Now the waters must be pristine." But arguably the motivation for the pair, and especially Powell, was as much about community participation and helping to put able-bodied people back in the work force. "Aquafarming is the in thing right now," says Powell. "Others have tried to be absentee partners in clamming operations, but I wanted to be involved. A fringe benefit to this involvement is that the efforts contribute to the economy and particularly to my own home town."

On a trip to Vero Beach, on the Atlantic side of the state, Powell drove his clamillac four hours to pick up the tiny clam seed specks. The journey is symbolic of the energy Powell brings to any project—and clamming is no exception. Within the hatchery, he follows technicians around a building that resembles a large greenhouse. He stares with child-like fascination into each vat of algae grown to feed clams, or into the containers of water, where temperature variation induces clam spawning.

"Howard!" the hatchery's owner shouts."How are you?"

"Not too bad for the shape I'm in."

Powell leaves the complex with a $10,000, quart-sized container of seven-week-old, freckle-sized clams, which under a microscope look mature. In a year and a half, that quart of around a million will fill an 18-wheeler. Driving home from the hatchery—back across the width of the state—Powell stops at an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant, which offers a curious mixture of foods: chow mein, sushi, ice cream, and pizza. "What I enjoy, more than anything, I think, is relating to people and learning from them," says Powell. "It's best to listen and learn. You can't judge somebody for their code because they may not like yours." Powell cracks his fortune cookie, laughs, then passes it across the table. It reads: "You will conquer obstacles to achieve success." The slip of paper also offered the chance to "Learn Chinese: Shi-Jian = Time."

Back in Cedar Key, the seeds Powell provides will be groomed for open water in shallow trays called nursery raceways, where native saltwater is pumped over the clams until they reach sufficient size and are transplanted into fine mesh nursery bags. After this growth and acclimation to Cedar Key waters, they are staked to a lease's muddy bottom until they reach "grow-out" size, when they will be transferred to a bag of larger mesh and staked to the Gulf floor. A year to 18 months later, the clams are harvested, cleaned, sized, and shipped away. Due to warmer and more conducive waters, the process takes about half the time in Cedar Key as it does in the Northeast, the place most people associate with clams.

"Cedar Key clams are the tastiest," says Marshall with a conspiratorial grin while sending a basket of harvested clams through a tumbler, which categorizes the shellfish by size. "They're sweeter than any others. Most people like 'em steamed with butter and wine but I like mine grilled with hickory chips and mesquite." Until Marshall moved to Florida, he'd never eaten a clam. Now he cultivates more at any one time than he could eat if he consumed a dozen a day for the next 200 years. A big part of that success can be traced to Powell, whose group of clammers—seven in all—is in the top five of group producers on the island, tending to more than 18 million clams at a time. "Howard's the best," says Marshall. "He is exactly the kind of partner anyone could ask for. All he ever wants to know is, 'How are you?' and 'What do you need?'"

n crowded Saturday afternoons in the 1920s-30s, when families came to town to go to market, Powell's hometown of Kite, Ga., midway between Macon and Savannah, bulged to a total population of 375, including hound dogs. Automobiles were still such an oddity that when one rolled into town no one thought it strange to grab hold and jump on, regardless of who was driving. Powell grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing and slept with his brother in a bed heated with a brick. His chores included gathering eggs, plowing, and hunting for squirrel and rabbit, which he was allowed to kill only in exact numbers to guarantee enough food for the future. He received his first dress shoes for high school graduation, and even then he had to borrow slacks and a white shirt.

"We were like a lot of families of that time, real poor but we grew nearly all of our food and I don't remember ever being hungry," says Powell. "We grew our own corn and then took it to the mill for meal and grits. We'd charge necessities at the grocery, then paid our account when the cotton sold and we were broke again."

As with most success stories, Powell's path has been one marked with fortunate, albeit unintentional, guidance. In 1943, he joined the Navy but was almost immediately separated from his "group" after catching pneumonia. Following reassignment, an accident—resulting in a cracked vertebra—split Powell from his "Black Cat" squadron, which had a 50 percent death rate in the Pacific theater of World War II. Just as he was to be shipped out for a final time, the Allies claimed victory. The war's end meant Powell's new assignment would not be military but collegiate—the 1946 UGA freshman class.

Powell came to Athens as a 6'3", 150-pound, southpaw pitcher for the Charlie Trippi-coached Bulldog baseball team. "I was a lefty—my right hand was on the wrong side (pause for laughter). But I had control," recalls Powell. "That was unusual." He was offered a contract in the Brooklyn Dodgers minor league system but turned it down because he liked what he was doing, which was studying forestry. "The courses suited me because I was out-of-doors like when I was a youngster in the woods hunting for the family," says Powell. "Back then, sometimes I'd be out there looking for squirrels and after only a moment among the trees I'd daydream and forget why I was there." Soon, that enthusiasm for the woods replaced baseball altogether when spring games got in the way of science lab time. But his love for UGA sports—football before Sanford Stadium was enclosed and where everyone was admitted, and basketball in Woodruff Hall—has never waned. Powell can quote current Bulldog rosters and discuss how the latest recruits will likely fare in future seasons, This passion, he believes, was likely due to the camaraderie on campus at the time he attended the University.

"A bunch of veterans lived in $13-per-month trailers that sat where the Hoke Smith building sits now," says Powell. "The places were perfect: a bed and a table to eat and study on, and at the end of the week I would mix all my leftovers together. There was a mature mood about the student body. We were there to learn, but also to enjoy UGA. There was no time for hazing on campus in those days like you hear about now. We were already men."

After graduating in 1950, Powell entered the lumber and timber industry, where he'd spend the next 50 years, working for the South's largest companies. He began his career "cruising timber" (a process in which a representative, of either a lumber buyer or seller, surveys acres of timberland) but, in time, he moved away from what some call "Smokey Bear forestry" and into the quality control sector. It was here that Powell would change the industry. After a decade at other corporations, writing "standards" for timber usage—which included everything from railroad ties and telephone poles to home construction material—Powell decided to start his own enterprise. His idea was to combine the savvy of private industry and the integrity of a non-profit. The result was Timber Products Inspection. Powell moved TP's headquarters from Mobile, Ala., to the more centralized Atlanta in 1970. "To be totally candid, I was anxious to get closer to my alma mater," says Powell, who still holds season football tickets.

Over the next 30 years, Powell redefined timber inspection. He was the longest-serving appointee to the American Lumber Standards Committee, which reports directly to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and assures fairness across the industry. As importantly, Powell traveled the globe working in more than half of the world's countries at the request of governments aware of his reputation for writing fair standards. And in 2001, in recognition of his service to the industry, Powell received the American Wood-Preservers' Association Award of Merit—a lifetime achievement award. "I am most proud of the fact that serving on the ALSC and earning the AWPA award was based on nominations from not only my peers but my competitors."

An example of Powell's influence, one which reflects the type of work TP did (and still does) and the effect it had on American lumber markets, was Powell's involvement with the Arabian American Oil Co. (ARAMCO) in Saudi Arabia. ARAMCO was buying lumber from European companies and using European standards and classifications for the purchases. But there was a problem: ARAMCO had unwittingly purchased millions of feet of board lumber and thousands of telephone poles that were either sub-par or simply inappropriate for their end use. Powell was called in to remedy the situation. "We wrote new standards to comply with U.S. standards, not European, and we wrote them to more appropriately apply to a hostile [desert] weather environment," says Powell. "The end result was satisfactory products produced economically by American producers." That consultation and inspection by Powell meant that only U.S. companies would be qualified to fill orders worth billions of dollars.

By the time Powell sold TP to his employees in 1995, it had become the world's largest private forest products inspection agency. He went from a staff of one, working 15-hour days, to the industry model, employing more than 100 in 37 states and several foreign countries.

"Quite simply, it's his genuine personality that makes up his magic," says Mike Dilbeck, who worked for Powell for 24 years. "You could tell what kind of boss he was by looking at our personnel and how long many of them had been with TP. When someone had a personal problem, he was always there, and when there was a need for stern conversation you could count on that, too. I always thought of him as a second father."

With a rare employer's sense of noblesse oblige, Powell helped many of his Timber Products employees pay for their own and their children's college educations. He also had a running policy to pay employees $100 per month for at least six months to quit smoking.

"Howard may have grown up a country boy, but he was an astute businessman," says James Carter, executive vice president of Wood Quality Control, Inc. "He had an ability to instill in his employees the same dedication to the business that he had, probably due to the fact that he didn't treat them as employees, but more like family.

"I wasn't surprised Howard didn't retire and sit back with a drink in his hand. I figured if the right opportunity came along, he wouldn't be on the sidelines for long. One thing is for sure . . . if Howard's going to get in the clam business, just like his former inspection business, he's not going to do it halfway. No doubt he's got plans to become the Florida clam king. Knowing Howard, he won't settle for less."

owell's living room has a 20-foot ceiling with a lit cupola apex. "People ground their boats in the inlet or get lost and come here because it looks like a lighthouse," he says. Within the cupola is a fan with paddles meant to resemble giant palm fronds except they're made of richly stained oak. On this evening, those fronds are pushing the almost tangible smell of clams bathing in a 14-inch skillet of butter, white wine, and garlic around the house and out onto the back porch that overlooks the Gulf. On the dinner table, Beveridge places a serving bowl overflowing with clams that have opened, signaling they're ready to share their meaty succulence. She follows with two empty bowls for shells and before she has the ramekins of melted butter on the table, Powell is seated and three clams into the meal. "Good golly, I love clams," says Powell, who is equal parts voracious eater and dedicated exerciser and who is tonight in his typical uniform: a pair of tan wind pants and a tee-shirt encouraging blood donation.

By the time those at the table have eaten five clams apiece, Powell is in high spirits—both genuinely excited about the company present and the virtually endless supply of clams. That excitement has Powell extracting the mouth-sized morsels with a seafood fork and chain-telling stories, leaving appropriate gaps for laughter—both his and those of the dinner guests.

"Years ago, I cruised timber on an elephant for the Greek government in India," says Powell intently removing every bit of meat from a clamshell. Her name was Lucy."

"Who?" asked a guest.

"Oh, Lucy was the elephant I rode. She sure did love me," Powell says seriously. "And I loved her back."

The phone rings. A clammer has a question about boat equipment. Powell tells him to spend what's necessary. He puts down the phone and doesn't miss a step.

"Clams are good for you, too! They are a complete food. If you add butter and roughage, you'd need nothing else."

A new bowl of clams replaces the old.

"Do y'all realize that if we were in a restaurant, we'd have just eaten more than a $100 in clams?" declares Powell. The table stops eating. "But you ain't in a restaurant, you're here! Keep eating! I remember one night I was driving to San Antonio on business and Georgia was playing Kentucky and as I drove along, I was trying to find a radio station that carried the game. As I topped a little hill, I was able to pick up the game on WSB in Atlanta. I pulled over among the tumbleweed and jack rabbits and listened until the game was over. Georgia pulled it out and I drove into San Antonio late, but happy."

After a rare moment of silence when Powell's joviality isn't inspiring another story, a table member asks, "Howard, do you think you'll expand your clamming operation?"

"No, I think we're where we want to be," he says. "But seeing into the future is one thing I haven't perfected yet."

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