Remembering Lena
The indomitable fisherman who became the eloquent voice of Stump Sound
During my more than 50 years as a journalist, I have interviewed thousands of people. Most are forgettable. Some make lasting impressions. A few, like Lena Ritter, become dear friends. Lena was the indomitable fisherman who fought developers to save an island and a way of life and in the process became the eloquent voice of Stump Sound. She died of cancer nine years ago this month.
Lena, who was 80, had deep roots in western Onslow County. She lived with her husband, Graham, on a piece of family land a mile from the sound, land she used to proudly say had never been sold for money. Lena, like all her people, was a fisherman. She wasn’t a “fisherwoman” or a “fisher.” She would have none of that. She was a “fisherman” and proud of it. “She loved that water,” Graham told me soon after she died. “She always lived for that water and tried to look out for it.”
That water turned her life upside down in 1983 when developers announced that they would build condominiums on Permuda Island, an undeveloped, one-and-a-half-mile long strand of sand and scrub pines in the middle of Stump Sound. Lena was unschooled in the ways of ecology, but she knew instinctively what would happen to her water if the pines were cut down and the sand paved over. “The runoff would have ruined it all. A whole way of life was threatened,” she once told me. “I couldn’t just sit by and let that happen.”
One of the first things she did was call Todd Miller, a native of Carteret County, just up the road, and the founder of a new environmental group called the North Carolina Coastal Federation. They would work closely over the next three years. Miller was the guide and interpreter for understanding state rules. “He was leading the blind through the woods,” is the way Lena explained it.
She was the organizer, riling fishermen in language they understood. The bond between the two became close. “Lena was a remarkable person,” Miller said. “She had a deep love for Stump Sound and the way of life it supported. The people of the sound respected her and listened to what she said because she was one of them.”
Lena and the other fishermen of the sound, people like the late Bill and Bernice Rice, had clam bakes and fish fries to raise money to hire a lawyer out of Wilmington. They spoke out at public hearings before the Onslow County Board of Commissioners and at meetings of the state Coastal Resources Commission. Lena led the way, speaking from the heart about her water, her way of life, her home. “It was all very personal to me,” she told me. “I never spoke in public before. I remember how scared to death I was at that first meeting in Jacksonville. All I knew to do was to speak what was in my heart.”
I had first met Lena at one of those meetings. She later took me clamming as part of a reporting trip. We stayed in contact. When I moved to the coast in 2002, I visited with her anytime I was in that end of the county. She made sure to send me home with a container of her delicious clam chowder. Graham gave me a bottle of his undrinkable homemade wine.
As often happens with causes, the fight to save Permuda Island took over Lena’s life. This was a woman who rarely ventured outside the county and was rarely seen in a dress outside of church. Before long, Lena was putting on her Sunday best and attending so many meetings in Raleigh and visiting so many politicians that she had to quit fishing and take a job on the graveyard shift at the local pie factory. “It freed up my days and gave me money to go down the road for meetings,” she said. “But, oh, was I tired.”
Lena had joined the federation’s board of directors while all this was going on and would serve as its president from 1987-90. She sometimes went to board meetings, laid her head down on the table and fell asleep. “But she persevered,” Miller remembered. “Through all the meetings and long drives, she persevered. Some county commissioners even threatened to sue her for harassment, but she persevered. Lena always credited the federation for saving Permuda Island, but the truth is that her perseverance and her indomitable will saved the island.”
In the end, the island was set aside as a state coastal preserve. In 1986, Ritter was chosen from 400 nominees to receive the first Nancy Susan Reynolds Award, which is given annually by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation for exemplary leadership in North Carolina. “My knees is a-knocking and my teeth is chattering, but I’ll talk,” she told me at the awards ceremony that night in Raleigh. She later didn’t remember a word she said, and, frankly, neither do I, but they roused the audience enough that it gave her three standing ovations.
With the fight to save the island over, Lena worked for a time as an environmental advocate for the federation. She also helped the organization acquire Morris Landing, a boat landing on Stump Sound that has been preserved and opened to the public. The federation in 2013 gave Lena its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Aunt Lena was an inspiration to her niece Tina Sanders-Hill. “She was unlike any other woman her age that I’ve ever known,” Sanders-Hill wrote on Lena’s Facebook Page after she died. “She was a strong leader before it was cool for women to be strong. She paved the path for so many us of that followed behind. She was one of my very first role models on how to be a strong woman. But she balanced it with love and care and humor.”
Before he died in 2017, Graham could go down to Morris Landing, stand on the shore that his wife helped buy and gaze out over Stump Sound to an island she helped save. “That’s as good as way as any to remember her by,” he said. “She loved that water.”
The federation installed a permanent memorial at Morris Landing so people who visit can learn about what Lena did to protect our coast, said Miller. “Unspoiled coastal places like Morris Landing and Permuda Island are her enduring legacy,” he said, “and we want people to know what she did to keep them that way to inspire future generations to be coastal stewards as well.”
Lena was one of a kind, a fighter, I admired that about her.