Sopchoppy Lions work to keep their city clean

Keep Wakulla County Beautiful’s many projects depend on volunteers. Nowhere can you locate harder working and more dependable people than those who participate in our county’s Adopt-A-Road program, and the Sopchoppy Lions Club is one of the volunteer groups.

Seated from left, oberts, Robert Roddenberry, Bobby Vause, John Walker, Franklin Roberts and Randy Anderson, Standing from left, Larry Sapp, Dan Strickland, Elaine Herndon, Richard Harden, James Thompson, Daniel Corley, Bernie Kemp an Maxie Lawhon.

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Men and women of the Sopchoppy Lions Club have picked up trash along our roadsides for about a decade. Can you imagine 10 years of rising early on Saturday mornings to spend a couple hours cleaning litter dropped by others? Well, that’s what they’ve done.

Member Bill Roberts was responsible for encouraging the group to perform this service. One day, he saw an Adopt-a-Road sign, and thought about it. Since the Lions Club’s main service project has always been to support sight conservation, this idea of road cleaning was another type of conservation. Maybe we can call it “site” conservation!

Sopchoppy Lions Club members took on the challenge and began the task of picking up litter at least four times each year from two miles of State Road 375.

After a while, they asked to pick up another road. They added a mile of Curtis Mill Road. When you consider each mile, remember that every mile of road has two sides. At this point, the Lions were cleaning six miles of roadsides.

That still was not enough. Now they are cleaning a mile on State Road 22 as well. This makes a total of eight miles of roadside cleanup every three months.

How about a roar for the Sopchoppy Lions?

To initiate a road cleanup, at one of the Lions meetings, Bill will ask if a particular Saturday is available for most members. When the date is agreed upon, they decide on a starting time as well. It’s usually around 8 a.m.

“If you started feeding us breakfast, you’d have even more volunteers!” laughed SLC member Franklin Roberts.

Bill purchased 5-gallon buckets to make the trash cleanup easier. He stenciled the words Sopchoppy Lions Club on one side, and the letters KWCB (standing for Keep Wakulla County Beautiful) on the other side. Most of the volunteers use trash pickers, too. They spread out over the four miles of “adopted” road, and, since eight to 10 members participate at one time, the work is finished rapidly.

Robert Roddenberry, President of the Sopchoppy Lions Club, invited us to their club meeting so we could see their creative buckets and meet the men and women who have volunteered in the Adopt-a-Road Program for so many years.

Have you considered “adopting” a road? Call our Adopt-a-Road chairwoman, Lara Beck, at 926-0919.