SHOP
From left to right: Designed For Joy co-founders Kristen Sydow and Cary Heise
Manager Dan Stewart
LOCAL CATCH Earp’s Seafood keeps it in the family by CATHERINE CURRIN
“T
he only thing that has changed is the generation,” says Kimber Salmon Stewart, granddaughter of Earp’s Seafood founder Herbert Earp. Her grandfather started the fish market 52 years ago on the corner of S. Saunders Street and Maywood Avenue. Even if you haven’t been inside, you’ve seen it: A white building hooded by a blue roof, Earp’s Seafood written in bold, no-nonsense letters, that has become a landmark as you approach downtown. The structure has origins in the 1960s, before Saunders Street became a major thoroughfare. “My mother worked at a hair salon in a house in Historic Oakwood, and she gave my grandfather $500 to start the
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photography by SMITH HARDY shop,” says Stewart. She says her grandmother Mary Earp was the backbone of the business, even making homemade preserves for the regulars in the shop. “It was the love and hard work that she put in that made it so successful.” Her parents, Nancy Earp Salmon and David Salmon (yes, she just happened to marry a man named after a fish), eventually took over the business. “Having the Earp name out there and carrying that on makes me feel proud. As a granddaughter, I feel like I’ve made my family proud,” says Stewart. Now, her husband Dan has been managing the market for eight years, and the shop has only closed long-term one time, when a tornado hit in 2011. The market was rebuilt, and the family business continued on.
