Today's Features

Each day – every day for nearly 16 years – Tania Williams awoke in the orphanage in Ukraine.  Sixteen – the dreaded age that orphans in this Eastern European country “age out” to the streets, often thrown into a life of prostitution, drugs and crime. For Tania, it was a time of fear and anxiety, faced with no family and no physical or emotional support.

In my 30 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, from 1937-1967, when I was promoted from second lieutenant up the ranks to brigadier general, I encountered a lot of interesting characters who had a lot of interesting things to say, some of them amusing and others career-changing. These appear in chronological order:

“The Marine sentry did not salute me when I came across the gangway. I consider this a reflection on the captain of Marines.”

How can you put a price tag on being able to help keep kids off drugs and make the community a safer place to raise a healthy, happy family?

That price tag is $100,000, said Elizabeth Pulliam, director of Shelby Prevention, a non-profit organization that works to provide programs, activities and community projects in order to build a drug-free community.

That is the organization’s yearly budget that she is trying to generate by September.

John David and Mary Helen Myles have a 174-year-old baby.

They have restored their 2-story brick Federal-style home they bought in 2002 with such loving care that the structure, known as the Dale Place, received the Ida Lee Willis Memorial Foundation Preservation Project Award in 2006.

Myles, a Shelby County Family Court judge, is widely known throughout Shelby County for his love of history, and he went to great lengths to ensure that the house, when restored, should be as much as like the original as possible.