All in Columns

Bryan Hanks turns 60 Part II: Electric Boogaloo

Everyone agreed to the plan too easily, therefore I sat in wait of the moment a fly would crash into the ointment. As it happened, the fly landed the Wednesday before the trip. Hanks decided to go to a hockey game in Raleigh on Friday night, which made sense as he'd gone upwards of three minutes without attending a sporting event that week.

Whitney Grady: Sometimes a dog needs a boy

At our house, pets are family too. After the loss of the dog that my husband and I bought on a Sunday whim at the flea market in Raleigh when we were young and dating (the same dog who appears in our wedding pictures, the one who greeted our newborns when we brought them home from the hospital for the first time, the one who stayed on constant watch near their cribs and then their strollers and then their tricycles and then their bikes after they ditched the training wheels), our hearts were shattered.

Jane Phillips: Man from Alaska visits site of ancestors capture on Wyse Fork battlefield

I answered the phone and it was Wilbur King on the other end. He had a gentleman in the restaurant that was from Alaska and was visiting Kinston because his great grandfather had been in the battle of Wyse Fork (on the eastern side of Lenoir County) and he had come to Kinston to see where his ancestor had fought in the Civil War. Wilbur told me the man was interested in purchasing a set of maps of the Wyse Fork Battlefield.