Features

The heinous bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday that killed three people and injured 183 others reverberated around the world and home to Shelby County.

There were a handful of persons who listed Shelby County addresses on the official marathon entry list, and some of the finished the event with an awed reaction for what happened shortly afterward.

Susanne Busey Osberg, a Shelby County native who has lived in Boston for 41 years, said the bombing brought back the horrible events of Sept. 11, 2001, to her in a very real way.

Shelby Countians must be doing something right, judging by the county’s steadily rise as one of the healthiest counties in the state.

Shelby County is up to third this year, according to the 2013 County Health Rankings of all states, complied annually by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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.”

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.

I have listed below a few remarks that stand out in my memory of service in the regular U.S. Marine Corps from 1937 to 1967, in the ranks of second lieutenant through brigadier general.  They appear in chronological order:

“Give it to 'em boys; give 'em what General Cheatham says!”

– Bishop-General Leonidas Polk at the Battle of Perryville (1862), conscious of his role as an Episcopal bishop, after Maj. Gen. Cheatham had shouted to his troops, “Give ‘em hell, boys.”

All over Shelbyville on Wednesday, people were texting each other, calling, and rejoicing when the news broke around 3 p.m. that a new pope finally had been selected.

When newly elected Pope Francis appeared on television before a huge crowd in St. Peter’s Square in Rome and asked for his congregation’s prayers, a Shelby County priest said he was overcome with emotion.

Have you ever seen a film that’s romantic but not sappy, humorous but not slapstick, with religious overtones but not spouting fire and brimstone?

That might be a way to describe Pieces of Easter, a spiritual movie created and filmed in Shelbyville, Simpsonville, Finchville, Oldham and Jefferson counties and in Indiana that hits theaters today.

Sitting at ease in his Shelbyville home, retired Shelby County High School teacher and coach Roland Dale, or "Coach Dale" as he's known to former students and athletes, shares his own history and some thoughts on the history of the county's black community; how it was, how it is now, how it ought to be, and his family's part in it all....