Today's Features

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.

If you’d like to settle down with a good book, chock full of colorful characters, such as  moonshiners, long-haired, pot-growing Vietnam veterans, and even a man so scary everybody started locking their doors at night after he moved to town, you might want to check out The Cornbread Mafia, which was published last year.