By Lulu

So for those avid Thunder Roads Florida Readers who will chastise me for pulling the Joker’s Wild page from this month’s issue, we had to go up 18 pages to get all the events on the Calendars and all the Bike Week related ads in (which helps us pay for the rest of the year!) and I felt it was extremely important to get the coverage of the clean up of Pinewood Cemetery into the Bike Week issue. Pinewood Cemetery is directly across from Boot Hill Saloon on Main Street and is a landmark of Daytona Beach. It had fallen into complete disrepair between storms, overgrowth of weeds and vegetation and vandalism. Eddie “Heavy” Kastrul owner of Midwest Motorcycles decided something had to be done about it. He organized a grassroots effort that was amazing. I saw twin little girls with their mother in little dresses and gloves picking up debris. When I thanked the mother for teaching them civic pride. She said their tattoo business was right next door, and the girls thought it was a very scary place with the vagrants, overgrowth and just being a cemetery. When they woke up that morning and saw all the people it was like “bringing sunshine” to a scary place. There were Outlaws and Warlocks in large numbers working on this event together! This was a GREAT event! Citizens of all walks of life and all ages showed up to volunteer to rake, push wheelbarrows, gather bags of debris, fix broken headstones, scrub headstones, trim fence lines, trim palm trees. For Daytona Beach this should be a treasured piece of history, and a place tourists could visit. John Smith purchased this land in 1873, and the first grave was for his 19-year-old daughter buried there in 1887. A 300-year-old tree known as Grand Dad is worth the walk through this hallowed place to see. Thank you Heavy and Christine and to all the volunteers and sponsors, there is more work to do but what a difference already! Be on the lookout for a future poker run to fund some improvements and another clean-up day!