Ava Rowan, president of the Fort Oglethorpe Kiwanis Club, stacks hotdogs at Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School in July during a fundraiser for Ringgold High School athletics and band facilities.
Photo by Allison CarterRINGGOLD, Ga.-Brent Tucker and Robert Akins were surveying the ongoing work to rebuild the athletic facilities at Ringgold High School recently when a stranger approached them.
Since the tornado of April 27, strangers don’t come to Ringgold any more — only new friends waiting to be discovered.
“He walked up to us and said, ‘I need to find Coach Tucker,’ and I quickly said, ‘You’ve found him,'” the head baseball coach recalled. “He introduced himself — and he didn’t want any publicity — but he said he was from Chattooga High School and that he had a small collection he had taken up and wanted to help out in any way possible.
“Those kinds of things … they really blow your mind,” Tucker said.
Those kinds of things have happened almost daily in Ringgold, the state’s hardest-hit community on that ominous spring day. The Ringgold campus took a direct hit from a category EF4 tornado. Every athletic field received some damage, with the baseball field being demolished and one end of the football stadium blown away.