Importance of static variables in C

In this post I am going to tell you about why you need to declare the local variables of a function as a static?
In the below example there are two functions getBuckets(uint32_t key, struct Table *td) and lookup(uint32_t key, struct Table *td). The lookup() function internally calls the getBuckets() function. The getBuckets() function returns an array of integers, which can be then accessed by the bucketList variable of a lookup() function.
If I did not declare the bucketID variable as a static then soon after the execution of the getBuckets() function the stack will flush out and all the local variables will be reinitialized. So I declared it as a static variable so that the system will allocate memory separately not on the stack. So you can still excess values  of that particular variable out side from that particular function.