When it comes to Christmas – faith, family and giving come to mind for many.
And for the ones chosen to lead out in the 41st annual Destin Christmas Parade on Dec. 13, they check all the boxes.
Although not related by blood, they are bound together by their faith, involvement in the fishing industry and giving back to the community.
Marcia Green, Janie Browning and Peggy Davis, who were instrumental in starting the Destin Seafood Festival, which just recently celebrated 47 years, will be leading out as grand marshals for the parade on Dec. 13.
The Destin Seafood Festival was the brainchild of the Destin Charter Boat Women’s Auxiliary, of which the three ladies were a part.
So, what was the Destin Charter Boat Women’s Auxiliary?
It was a group of women who bonded to help support their men and their livelihoods.
The common dominator: They were all wives of charter boat captains in Destin, “The World’s Luckiest Fishing Village.”
Members of that first group included Browning, Davis, Green, Pattie Hails, Nancy Cheney, Dianna Cox, Fran Beaird, Bundy Walker and Anne Miller.
The premise behind the auxiliary was simple, “make money to help our guys,” said Browning, who served as the auxiliary’s first chairman.
The money was to help support their charter boat husbands who were trying to fight a fishing cause in Tallahassee.
Browning said they even chartered a bus for a group to go and fight and lobby for the fishermen in Tallahassee.
“It was all for the men,” Green said.
And having a seafood festival was just another way to make money and support the captains.
“Everybody was already coming to the Rodeo, so this was something to enhance the Rodeo and bring more people down and charter the boats,” Green said.
The Destin Fishing Rodeo just recently celebrated 77 years, in October.
“Every single thing we did was for whatever the men needed,” Green said was the task of the auxiliary.
“Whatever to keep them out on the sea,” Davis added.
The beginnings of the Seafood Festival
The auxiliary borrowed a few ideas from the Niceville Mullet Festival.
Browning met with Niceville City Manager Lannie Corbin, whom she went to school with years ago, to see how they ran their Mullet Festival.
“I said, ‘Can you tell me how you got started?’ and he laid it all out … that’s what we based it on,” Browning said.
The first festival was held at the harbor overlooking the charter fleet.
“Back then we used the local restaurants … it was a community thing,” Browning said.
“It wasn’t as commercialized,” Davis chimed in.
They had a lot of handmade crafts such as toys and paintings.
“I would do my Christmas shopping there. The vendors were all local craftsmen,” Green said.
After a few years, the festival got to be too much for the auxiliary, and they handed it off to the Destin Chamber of Commerce. This past year the festival, now back in the hands of the Destin Charter Boat Association, celebrated 47 years.
“It’s funny how it has come back around,” Green said. Her oldest son, Capt. Jim Green, is president of the DCBA and is very much involved in the workings of the festival and the Rodeo.
As for the auxiliary, it never officially disbanded, but became less involved about the mid-80s.
Meet the marshals
When the call went out to inform the ladies to serve as marshals, they were all honored and thrilled to represent the community they have called home for more than half a century.
Peggy Davis
Davis, 93, who now lives in Florala, Alabama, was born in Destin to Jewel and Ruby Melvin.
“I was born here, right next to the Episcopal Church … we had a midwife,” Davis said.
“Grandma Maltezo was a midwife back then. She brought a lot of children into the world,” Davis said, sitting at the counter at the Browning home.
“I’ve been in Destin forever,” she said.
The Melvins had an icehouse and a fish house in the early days of Destin.
Davis told of how her dad brought a boat down from North Carolina, which she and William Frank, her husband, now deceased, later bought.
“We named it Anastasia after my grandmother,” she said.
“William Frank was running the boat, and I was running the icehouse … and Tommy Green would help us,” Davis said.
“Tommy has been with us forever,” she said, noting he lived with them, worked as a deckhand alongside William Frank, and helped at the icehouse.
“Where we were … he was there with us,” Davis said.
Marcia Green
Green, 72, moved to Destin 1976 right out of college. She had a blind date with Tommy Green, and they were married a year later.
Her first job in Destin was working with the secretary of sales at Sandestin Resort, before she got an offer from Anita Kroha with the Destin Chamber of Commerce.
She took the job at the chamber to be closer to Destin and the charter boat industry.
Green was also involved with St. Andrew’s Church, which many charter boat women and their husbands attended.
“I just want to be involved in the industry,” she said.
Destin was not incorporated at the time, and the chamber of commerce was the hub.
“Anybody that had anything to do with Destin … they came to the chamber of commerce,” Green said. “It was a part of everything.”
She worked at the chamber until she had her first child, Jim. Tommy bought his first boat from William Frank Davis, and she stayed home with the baby.
Once Jim was in kindergarten, she went back to work.
Green went to work as the director of the Destin Fishing Rodeo. She worked eight years total with Rodeo between babies.
In the late 1990s, Tommy Green got out of the fishing business, and Green opened a restaurant – Another Broken Egg. Seven years ago, they rebranded and moved the restaurant which is now called Crackings. Crackings just celebrated seven years in business.
Janie Browning
Browning, 83, grew up in Fort Walton Beach and moved to Destin when she married Capt. Tommy Browning 63 years ago.
But she worked in Destin before she got married. She worked for her aunt Jane Perkins at the Destin Beauty Shop, and later bought the shop from her.
The shop was located on U.S. 98 in Destin in the space the old Landshark building occupied before it burned down in 2024.
Janie Browning tells the story of how she met Tommy.
“It was over a fish,” she said.
He was in a cobia tournament and was weighing a fish nearby.
“We all came out to see because there was a crowd out on the sidewalk,” Janie said.
Tommy spotted Janie and asked about her.
Janie was engaged at the time to a guy who was away at college.
“Tommy wouldn’t let up,” she said.
She finally broke it off with the guy at college. She and Tommy dated about a year-and-a-half and then got married — and the rest is history.
Browning struggled to have children, but as soon as Tommy Lee was born, she sold the beauty shop.
It was that same year that Tommy Browning bought his first boat from Cecil Woodward, later named the Finest Kind.
From that point on, Browning booked the boat.
“I met the boat every day. We had the most fun down there. I made more friends than I could ever imagine,” she said.
Favorite Christmas memory
For Davis, she quickly went back to family.
“When Momma and Daddy were living,” Davis said was her favorite memory.
“Her daddy was amazing,” Green said of Jewel Melvin.
“Momma always made Christmas special, even when they were poor,” Davis said.
“They always saw that we had Christmas.
For Green, her favorite times were spent with Peggy and William Frank Davis, who became her children’s godparents.
“We had Christmas with them,” she said, when their children were young.
“We always went to Christmas Eve service with them. All my little boys. Then we would go back to your house on Christmas Eve,” Green said to Davis sitting at the table.
“We had supper with you and then Jim, as a child, would climb up in pawpaw’s lap and pawpaw would read us the Christmas story, every year,” Green said.
And the children would get to open one present on Christmas Eve.
“That was just family,” Green said.
“That was the most fun for me,” she said.
As for Browning, she said her favorite Christmas was the year Tommy Lee was born.
“I had tried for six years,” she said to get pregnant. Tommy Lee was born in December 1968.
“I got an early Christmas present,” she said.
This article originally appeared on The Destin Log: Browning, Davis and Green to serve as grand marshals for Destin parade
Reporting by Tina Harbuck, The Destin Log / The Destin Log
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
