The Year of Giving-Save the Stack

Paris has the Eiffel Tower. London has Big Ben. New York has the Statue of Liberty. My hometown has "The Stack".

It's hard to describe where I grew up. Well, I never had any trouble until I left and went to college. Being from small town Virginia, people in New Orleans would ask, "Where are you from?". I would always just say Virginia and no one would ever ask anything else.

My brother has the best explanation for where our town is. He says it's where the Potomac River meets the Chesapeake Bay. He tried this on a Navy Admiral one time in Hong Kong. The Admiral surmised from that description that he was from the Eastern Shore. My brother just smiled and nodded. Who was he to correct an Admiral?

The truth of it is, I am from Reedville, Virginia. You can Google it and get an idea what I mean. It is a place I loved as a child, was bitter about when I was a teenager and now think is one of the greatest places on earth.

Reedville when I was growing up, was essentially a fishing village. My family's income, like so many others, came from commercial fishing, crabbing or oystering (or all three). When I was a kid the creeks were full of remnants of the old fishing factories of the early 1900's. There were old docks and abandoned wooden boats. Those were mostly cleaned up in the 1970s. The one thing that remains from that era is "the Stack".

The Stack is 130-foot-tall and is in bad shape. There is a $250,000 campaign to save it. It has a 4-degree lean which needs to be addressed before any restoration can be done. The stack doesn't serve a purpose today, it just stands as a symbol of a time gone by and a time that is going to come to an end one of these days. That is why I am contrbuting to "Save the Stack".