The Coast Men Behind Family Businesses
There is something particularly Southern about learning a business from your father.
Long before there are titles on office doors or decisions to make about payroll, expansion and the future, there are smaller lessons—show up, work hard, treat people right, know your customers, take care of your employees. And never ask someone else to do a job you wouldn’t do yourself.
Across the Gulf Coast, those lessons have helped turn family businesses into local institutions.
Few illustrate that legacy better than F.E.B. Distributing Company in Gulfport.
The business began in 1934 when Salvador J. Bertucci founded S.J. Bertucci Company and began distributing JAX beer along the Coast. In 1946, his son, Frank E. Bertucci, joined the operation, and the company took the name it still carries today, F.E.B. Distributing.
Salvador’s grandsons, Frank and Paul Bertucci, later joined the family business and eventually took leadership roles. Beginning in 2008, a fourth generation followed, with Ryland Bertucci, Matthew Hessell and Jeff Bertucci coming aboard.
More than 90 years after it began, F.E.B. remains family-owned and operated.
That kind of longevity isn’t unique on the Coast.
Dixie Glass in Pascagoula has built a family legacy of its own. Founded in 1946, what began as a hometown glass shop has grown across three generations into a company serving South Mississippi from multiple locations.
McMurphy Homes represents another Coast tradition passed through generations. The family-owned company has been building homes in South Mississippi since 1955, leaving its mark not only through the family business itself, but in the homes where generations of other Coast families have built their lives.
Allen Beverages traces its history to 1947, when Cleve Allen founded Spur Bottling Company in Gulfport. Its first delivery was made with a single Army surplus truck just one day before a hurricane struck the Coast. His son, Drew, joined the company in 1975 and later became president and CEO. A third generation followed when Drew’s children, Andrew and Grace, joined the business.
Perhaps no Coast family business, however, has received quite the national spotlight as Bradford-O’Keefe Funeral Home.
Its roots stretch back more than 150 years and six generations to Edward “Ned” O’Keefe, an Irish immigrant whose Ocean Springs livery business began providing funeral services following the Civil War. The business passed from one generation to the next, eventually becoming Bradford-O’Keefe Funeral Home.
One chapter of that history even reached Hollywood.
The 2023 film “The Burial,” starring Tommy Lee Jones as Jeremiah “Jerry” O’Keefe and Jamie Foxx as attorney Willie E. Gary, was inspired by O’Keefe’s real-life legal battle against a large funeral-home corporation.
At the heart of that fight was something generations of Coast families understand well—protecting what a family has built.
Today, sixth-generation members of the O’Keefe family continue the work begun more than a century and a half ago.
Five businesses. Five very different industries. Yet the lesson is remarkably similar.
A successful family business requires more than sharing a last name. Each generation has to earn the trust handed to it, preserve what worked, and be willing to change when necessary.
Perhaps that’s why these companies feel so distinctly at home in South Mississippi.
The Coast knows something about rebuilding. It knows about staying when leaving might be easier. And it recognizes that the most worthwhile pursuits are often those too significant for any one person to accomplish alone.
Sometimes the measure of a man’s work is what he builds.
Sometimes it’s what he leaves strong enough for the next generation to carry forward.
