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Hometown Living At Its Best 53
Burroughs’s Tarzan in the school library. He quickly
moved on to science fiction, which he followed with a
good dose of classics. “Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein,
and Arthur C. Clarke. They were the big three,” said
Stacy. “People are still pulling from these guys for
inspiration.”
When he was 12 years old, his hometown of
Hazlehurst built a library. “I had my mama take me up
there as soon as it opened to get a library card.” After
reading through all the books in the children’s section,
he discovered a whole row of Zane Grey novels. “I read
every one they had,” said Stacy. Even though he enjoyed
a variety of genres, he never strayed too far from fantasy
and science fiction and followed closely the writings of
Piers Anthony, Stephen Donaldson, and Orson Scott
Card, infatuated with their genius.
By the time he graduated from Jeff Davis High School
in 1986, Stacy had begun writing his own stories. “Back
in the late 80s and early 90s, the way to break into
science fiction was to write short stories for magazines. I
started submitting my short stories to Asimov’s Science
Fiction magazine, and finally began receiving little notes
with my rejection slips rather than just the rejection
form letter. Those I would save,” he said with pride.
But life moved on. And for Stacy, life moved out to
sea. After one quarter of college, he decided to join the
Navy. “I needed some time to figure out what I wanted to
do with my life,” he said as explanation.
As an Operations Specialist on a destroyer, it was
Stacy’s job to watch radar screens and keep up with the
ship’s movements (coordinated with Sonar technicians
to track subsurface contacts). He also tracked air and
other surface contacts and assisted in navigation. In
1988, he did his first six-month deployment. “We
stopped in Nova Scotia before proceeding on to the
Azores, Norway, England, France, Germany, Scotland,
Belgium, and Denmark. I’ve crossed the Arctic Circle
and the Equator twice. During the first crossing of the
Arctic Circle, I was initiated into the Order of the Blue
Nose, and when I crossed the Equator for the first time, I
became a ‘Shellback.’ Navy veterans will understand,” he
said and smiled.
In July 1988, he was “in the North Atlantic when the
Piper Alpha oil rig blew up. We got the distress call and
went and did search-and-rescue for three days while that
thing was burning. There were other ships in the area
just picking up debris and looking for bodies.”
After a collision at sea with a German Oiler while
taking on fuel in the middle of the night, Stacy’s ship
stayed in Scotland for a month for repairs. “The
lieutenant that was the officer on deck basically saved
the lives of a lot of crewmen by acting as quickly as he
did.”
In 1990, Stacy was sent to South America for his
second six-month deployment. “We started by going
through the Panama Canal. We hit most of the coastal
countries on our way back to Norfolk: Columbia,
Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela.
We also went to Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Bahamas,
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