PHOTOS: Sometimes no news is good news. For Toni Stithem, a Victoria County volunteer firefighter, the relatively quiet Fourth of July weekend was a good thing.
Stithem was one of about a dozen firefighters assigned to fire watch at Patriot Park during the evening of July 4. They stood by just in case any fires broke out. Nothing much happened, Stithem said.
Luckily, no fires at Patriot Park meant no story to break — but, there is a story worth telling about Stithem. The 62-year-old mother of four and grandmother of three, joined the Victoria County Volunteer Fire Department in 2017, ostensibly to set up and manage a county fire department Facebook account.
Born and raised in a small town, Earlysville, in the middle of Virginia, Stithem moved to Victoria when she married David Stithem, of Victoria, more than 40 years ago.