Pop’s Pier

Book excerpt: For seven decades, Byron Calhoun overlooked the muddy brown water of Mobile Bay in Alabama. He’d seen it all throughout the years from the end of the pier—sailboats, tugboats, Jet Skis, and yachts. Byron and his wife spent hours on that pier trying to figure out the stories of the people and the events they watched year after year. In Pop’s Pier, author Donna Calhoun, Byron’s daughter, shares a collection of stories reflecting more than fifty years of life on the pier and her father’s unending love of his family, his friends, and the water. From Byron’s arrival on the island in the early 1960s, this memoir takes a walk down memory lane. It shares recollections of the experiences, both the good times and the sad, that shaped life on the bay—from fishing to weather patterns and the art of mixing a good drink. Pop’s Pier offers a loving celebration of Donna’s father and the legacy he left behind.