"Stop & Sea"
A Tradition in Lent That Truly Galvanized One Southern Indiana Community to Come Together
In June 2023, I published a story similar to this one about the ‘Stop N Sea Hot Fish’ shop in Montgomery, Indiana on the site ‘Newsbreak’. The previous owner told me of the location to take this story down due to some misinformation from my opinion piece on this story. Remember, this editorial piece is not meant to offend any previous restaurant owner of these establishments and is only an op—ed and not a news story. This means, this is an opinion piece and not a news piece. With any issue, please DM me on Instagram at braydyn98.5amfm.
Close your eyes and just imagine being in southern Indiana during the height of the IHSAA Boys Basketball State Championship run in 2013, and you happen to go to Barr Reeve to watch the sectionals matchup in a few hours.
Before the game begins, a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant captivates you and you might have a different appetite for fish at the restaurant and not a buffet at the nearby Amish store called, “The Gaustoff.”
When you walk into the store, the crackling of fried fish sounds the building like a fire alarm. They fresh battered Alaskan cods dipped in a cornmeal breading dip into the fryer as you order the usual “fish sandwich with fries and an ice cream” and not the other things on the menu such as a hamburger, a grilled cheese with tomato soup (which my grandmother ordered all the time), or maybe even a breaded tenderloin and a bag of chips.
You may have made a great choice. Maybe, the best choice you ever made because that hot fish sandwich would be crispy on the outside and warm as a blanket on the inside.
Then, as owner Glen Spaulding greeted the customers as he took some sandwiches out to the local coal mine, the locals in Montgomery, Ind. stopped by and grabbed a bite to eat before going on their afternoon commute.
You’ll meet Ben Hager and his son Josh, or Jean and her husband Gary. The local fire chief of the volunteer fire department and his wife, two kids, and his new grandson as they chat about the Vikings and how they would beat nearby Loogootee. You even had Mary Ann Sue Graber walk in with her whole family and chat about her co-worker’s new boyfriend, and even 79-year-old dementia patient Carol Adam-Hall and her caregivers as they get a bite to eat.
You saw a mass of humanity at this place, and on Lent and Easter, they place would be even more packed with fish enthusiasts and local townies watching TV, reading The Washington Times-Herald, The Loogootee Tribune, or whatever they were reading, and chat, talk, eat, and pray.
Welcome to what was Stop N Sea Fish in Montgomery, Indiana. The place where I saw rural America at its finest.
The definition of rural America and masses of humanity were in that building. When it shut down during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I was devastated the place ended like it did.
For generations, my family harvested cash to eat a fish sandwich and chips as the British would call it, but in the midwest we knew it as hot fish.
In an article written by The Evansville Courier-Press in 2018, if you just traveled across, what is now I-69 to head up from Evansville to Bloomington, Vincennes through Loogootee was the hub for Hot fish sandwiches.
They were not hot because of the sandwich being hot or spice according to the article, but in heat.
There is only one fish sandwich shop left and it’s in Petersburg, but from the 1970s through the 1990s, hot fish in southern Indiana was a trend unlike anything anyone has ever seen.
Evansville through Loogootee had nothing but fish shops until financial distress and fires ruined a once crazy fantasy. Hot fish in a Catholic community was a hit during Lent.
My fondest memories at the Stop N Sea were with my cousins Garrett and Griffin as we ate sandwiches and gulped up salt in our crispy fries to wash it all down with ice cream and a white plastic cup of lemonade.
Before my grandmother passed away in 2020 from a five-year battle of Alzheimer’s disease, she would never eat fish. She would eat grilled cheese and tomato soup with crushed-up crackers in the middle of the night when she went to Jasper and even spent a long day shopping with her caretakers.
My mom always told me that her cousins would fight over fish sandwiches, and this would be constant because they were that good.
The restaurant has since shut down after poor management took over the shop, but every time we drive past the old now abandoned shop, I could feel America in that restaurant.
That place inspired me to become a journalist.
Hardworking, blue-collar Americans making ends meet to only grab a couple of bucks for a hot fish sandwich and fries is what America used to mean.
I don’t see that American dream living now, but you once saw what made America the best in the early 2000s with your grandmother before a sectionals high school basketball tournament in March and early April. At anywhere else but the Stop N Sea Fish shop.