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Ronnie Moon is a familiar face on Pleasure Island’s North Levee and has been so for decades.

He visits the levee daily making sure it is clean of trash and a welcome area for people to fish and enjoy the outdoors.

He even partnered with ExxonMobil in 2003 for the first annual cleanup on Pleasure Island.

But Moon doesn’t get paid to take on this duty.

Last week Moon was recognized by the City of Port Arthur with a proclamation naming Oct. 22, 2024 as Ronnie Moon Day.

Ronnie and his wife Roxanne Moon are a team with their care of the North Levee. The couple talks to anglers and sees what’s being caught and Roxanne snaps a photo and posts them to social media.

Moon’s voice cracked slightly as he spoke at the podium, saying it means a lot to him to be appreciated before calling attention to others in the room that have also volunteered.

He said over the past 50 years he’s become a saltwater-blooded naturist and is doing everything he can to save some of it.

“I just love Pleasure Island. It’s shown me things that I never would have seen in my life, and met people from different places,” Moon said.

Members of the Pleasure Island Advisory Board presented the idea of honoring Moon to the Pleasure Island Director George Davis who, in turn, made the suggestion to the city.

Councilman Thomas Kinlaw III, who is an avid fisherman, thanked Moon for all of the work he does on the island.

“The things that you do on the island, we really appreciate it,” Kinlaw said. I see you there all the time, you’re out there asking questions. You’re out there saying, How are you doing today? What can we do to make this island better? A lot of people wouldn’t do that for free. And I just want to tell you, from the bottom of my heart as a fisherman and from Port Arthur thank you so much for the things that you do. Thank you, man. Thank you.”

Jefferson County Sheriff Zena Stephenson said Moon is a great ambassador for the city. He called her one day about eight years ago to ask for help cleaning the North Levee. Not only did she bring inmates to help, she also started bringing employees.

Then Stephenson and her husband, who is a fisherman, would go and pick up trash, saying it is a beautiful place for people to go and relax.

But Moon’s volunteerism goes further than trash removal. Dr. Matthew Hoch, coastal ecologist biologist at Lamar University, said both Ronnie and his brother Dennis Moon’s work on the Island began after the men returned from Vietnam.

Hoch called them “citizen scientists.”

He said the knowledge the brothers gathered in their shrimp fishery on the North Levee came in handy when the deepening and widening of the Sabine Neches waterway project began. There were plans for the North Levee Dredge Compartment 11 to be filled in with an additional 13 meters of depth of sediment dredged out of the waterway.

“Ronnie put up the fight to question, why are we ruining what has become well established as a local recreational resource, and what he proposed, or hypothesized scientifically as a fishery nursery, a source of new individuals of all species getting back into Sabine Lake by this very productive shallow water system,” Hoch said.

Hoch first met Moon on a call with representatives from state agencies with the question of whether the North Levee, from a scientific perspective, was a nursery.

Kole Kubicek, a “fish biologist” or ichthyologist, was hired and Moon helped Hoch receive funding from the Sabine Anglers League of Texas and Cheniere to start the study.

Then the Lamar Center for Resiliency supported the project with internal grant funds for the study that has been going on for a year now, he said.

The mission, he said, was not to stop the US Army Corps of Engineers but thankfully, the Corps has a new mission to use all the dredged materials for beneficial use and not place it in placement areas.

In 1978, Ronnie and his brother Dennis received approval from the Corps of Engineers and the City of Port Arthur to lease 2,000 acres of north spoils area for an aquaculture project called Moon Aquaculture Inc. During the first year they harvested and marketed only about 600 pounds of shrimp, Moon told the Port Arthur News in a 1979 article. There were mistakes along the way; one of them was in thinking the adult shrimp would migrate from the growth lands with the outgoing tide. Instead, the shrimp migrated against the tide and when the migration began it surprised the Moons and their volunteer helpers.

Hoch said the Moon brothers have been mentors for him and Kubicek as they spent hours explaining the timing of different species that move in and out of that levy throughout the year.

“This has greatly impacted our studies, and really is the model of how modern day scientists don’t just sit in their ivory towers, but we finally know now, although it’s quite common sense to engage with communities where people live and know the environment far better than anybody that reads journal articles exclusively would ever know.