SHORELINES

17 Shor e l i n e S | 2014 Vol :3 It's easy to imagine why Harry Reich spends every weekend he possibly can sailing on Logan Martin Lake. The 86-year-old Trussville businessman is a mainstay at the Birmingham Sailing Club's vast property on the lake. When he's not helping tend to the grounds and facilities or helping others cast off, Reich is out on his own sailboat. With the waves playing patty-cake on the boat's hull, the fish hopscotching out of the water and Reich playing hide- and-seek with the wind, recapturing a youthful joy would seem all too easy sailing on the lake. So it must be the calming escape and the thrill of feeling young again that draws Reich to sail on Logan Martin, right? Not exactly. "I'm thinking about how I can go faster," Reich says with a sly grin. While there may be a place for nostalgia, it's not on the sailboat with Reich. He doesn't see the sailboat as a time machine for traveling backward, but rather as a way of marking time in the all-important present. Reich uses sailing as a way of harnessing the current joys of life itself, racing against the clock as if he knows that, like the wind in the sails, life can be fleeting and lost just when things are going perfectly. Sadly, Reich knows this to be true. Harry Reich ended up in Alabama when his father decided to establish a Birmingham office of the Reich Companies, which makes machinery and equipment for foundries. After earning a mechanical engineering degree at Notre Dame, Reich spent some time working at ACIPCO in Birmingham before going to work for his father in 1953. Reich would later lead the company and blended U.S. and European technology to grow the company. That led to a partnership with German engineer, Joachim Laempe, Above: Photo by Bernard troncale — Harry Reich, an avid sailor with the Birmingham Sailing Club, honors his son Tom, who was diagnosed with lymphoma at the age of 26.

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