The Thompson children returned to their play. Using a sewing machine motor and a vacuum cleaner belt, he also built mechanized splitters that could crack the rock shrimp's hard shell. The demand quickly outgrew the capacity of the family kitchen, so Thompson rented space at Port Canaveral and started hiring grown-ups. The rock shrimp were salty, which the bar owners liked because their patrons, who fished off their docks, would eat them and buy more beer. One kid would crack open the shrimp, another would wash it and others would pack the shrimp into boxes, which were delivered to dozens of bars and grills up and down the Indian River. Rodney Thompson enlisted the neighborhood kids to form an assembly line in his wife's kitchen after school each day. "That was probably the biggest, 'Eureka!' moment of all of our lifetimes," Laurilee Thompson said. They pulled them out of the oven and tasted them. The rock shrimps' tails curled up and the flesh pulled away from the shell, just like a lobster. And then the whole family gathered around and stared for the two minutes it took them to cook. Her mother, Mary Jean, melted butter, poured it over them, and stuck the shrimp in the broiler. Laurilee suddenly grabbed a steak knife and began cutting a half-dozen rock shrimp open along their bottom edges. "When I figured it out, finally, we were sitting there in our misery one day, wishing we were playing pool, and riding horses, and not looking at big piles of stupid rock shrimp on the table," said Laurilee Thompson, now 65. He asked his four children, Laurilee, Sherri, Tom and Tim, to help him find a way to cook them. So, Thompson turned to shrimp fishing to show off the boat's prowess, and began catching buckets of the inedible rock shrimp. But it was built on spec, and there were no buyers. Thompson, a taciturn man with an inventive mind, was a boat builder by trade in Titusville, which by then had gone from a citrus and fishing town to a bedroom community for NASA workers laboring at the neighboring Kennedy Space Center to land a man on the moon. Back in the 1960s, shrimp boats were still made of wood and many fishermen resisted fiberglass. It all began with Thompson's quixotic dream of building a 73-foot fiberglass shrimp boat. "He was the only one who saw the opportunity to get the meat out so you could eat them because they were so hard." "We call him the Daddy of the rock shrimp industry," said Bob Jones, executive director of the Southeastern Fisheries Association. The Thompson family's discovery led to the popularization of a cuisine that today is served all along the Florida Atlantic coast - most famously at a restaurant owned by Thompson's family in Titusville. Thompson's challenge to his children lasted for months, until his oldest daughter, a teenage Laurilee, had the idea to split them open, cut out the sand veins and broil them like lobsters. Their hard, spiny shells would split thumbs open and take forever to peel. He ordered his four school-age children to stop playing and figure out a way to cook them. TITUSVILLE (AP) - After trawling the Atlantic Ocean for days, Rodney Thompson returned to his Florida home and dropped buckets of rock shrimp in the middle of the kitchen.
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