To the Editor:

It is my great pleasure to be a neighbor of the Creek Side Ahoskie Recreation Park. I have a vantage point to see how often the park is used. Parents bring their children, single dads, single moms and grand-parents with their little ones. The swings, the slide, and the ‘rock wall” are most popular.

One occasion recently a dad brought his young daughter (about three years old) and she was full of energy and she soon “tackled” the slide and learned to go down that slide, even wound up going down head first. Then she took to the “rock wall’ and with great confidence she mastered the climb. From that point on her dad could not keep her off. It was a great experience

Now to the point I want to make. I have lived in Ahoskie for about 45 years and the ever occurring cry is we need more recreational facilities for our children We have many parks all over Ahoskie.

What saddens me is recently I had a member of the recreation department say it costs the recreation department a great sum of money to keep the rest rooms in repair due to vandalism. These rest rooms are placed in our parks for the convenience of persons who use our parks. Why oh why would you want to vandalize the necessary rooms?

People, we can do better, this is Ahoskie not Chicago or New York. The person or persons who have vandalized in the past may never see this letter, but hopefully your friends will tell you about it. Trashing the rest rooms in our parks is not just clean fun (no pun intended).

While I am on a roll, one more suggestion with helping keep our highways more attractive as it relates to trashing. A good bit of the litter we see along our highways are plastic bags (the kind we receive our groceries). A simple suggestion as we discard these plastic bags is to tie a knot in the bag and it will prevent a child from suffocating and also prevent the bag from being air-borne to blow across fields and into trees.

I know we each can do our part. Let’s work together to make our town and our county more attractive.

Oliver Fleming

Ahoskie