Shrimp sale to benefit train restoration

From staff reports
Published: July 1, 2008

Ed McCann looked in his freezer not too long ago and found all the low-country shrimp were gone.

“We’ve got to stock up again,” he said.

That’s the plan. On Aug. 21, McCann and Max Meador, another member of Kiwanis Club of Lynchburg, will head to Georgetown, S.C., where they’ll stop to get a low-country dinner and a good night’s sleep. The next morning, they will go down to the Georgetown docks, pick up some 1,500 pounds of fresh shrimp and drive straight to Lynchburg.

Back home, they’ll park at Holy Cross School, where between 5 and 7 p.m., customers pick up the shrimp they’ve ordered through the annual Kiwanis shrimp sale.

The shrimp sale raises money that will be targeted to finishing restoration of the train in Riverside Park, a project near and dear to the hearts of Kiwanis Club members and Boonsboro Elementary School children, who’ve raised money for the project.

The club is spearheading the $60,000 effort to revive the train’s constituent elements: an old C&O Kanawha locomotive, a coal tender and a Virginia type C-1 caboose. Left exposed to the elements over the years, the train fell into a state of disrepair.

Kiwanis started selling shrimp last year with the train project in mind. The sale’s a riff, if you will, on another annual Kiwanis fundraiser, the lobster sale. Each November, members venture up to Maine and within 24 hours are heading home with a truckload of live lobsters.

The idea behind the shrimp sale is to bring back wild American shrimp. Unlike some of their imported cousins, McCann said these shrimp will not have been frozen, will not have had any chemicals put on them and will not have been raised on a fish farm.

“They’re right out of the Atlantic Ocean,” he said.

Orders for the shrimp, which will sell for $8 a pound, can be made by Aug.15 by calling McCann at (434) 384-2149, by getting a brochure from a Kiwanis Club member, or by mailing a note with order details and a check to the club at P.O. Box 604, Lynchburg, VA 24505.