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Columns

  • Ice cream social was sweet treat

    In a day when our world is topsy-turvy, it was nice to step back into a simpler time and enjoy an old fashioned ice cream social at the William Arnold Log Cabin in Williamstown on Sept. 16.

    The event was a joint effort by the Williamstown Downtown Merchants Association and the Grant County Historical Society.

    Having worked all day and gone directly to snap some photographs for the News, it didn’t take long for me to get hungry, smelling hotdogs on the grill.

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  • Family’s loss is heaven’s gain

    I’ve written about my Aunt Lucy many times because she’s been such an important and influential person in my life, but one of the other special women who had a profound impact on me never got much ink.

    Two weeks ago, our family had to say goodbye to Opal Smoot Hawkins. Opal was also my aunt. One of my mom’s older sisters.  Since my mom is the baby of the 12 Smoot children, all of them are older.

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  • Not an ordinary Tuesday

    I remember 9/11/01. It was a typical Tuesday at the News office. We were working on finishing up stories and laying out pages for that week’s edition of the Grant County News.

    I was on the phone with our printing plant in Cynthiana. The production coordinator there said, “Oh my gosh, we’ve been attacked.” I couldn’t comprehend what she was saying so I asked her to repeat herself.

    “America, we’ve been attacked,” she said. “Aren’t you watching the news on TV?”

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  • ‘A day that will live in infamy’

    Growing up, I was always told about Pearl Harbor and what a tragic day that was for Americans, as nearly 3,000 people were killed on Dec. 7, 1941.

    Flashback to Sept. 11, 2001, I witnessed on television a new horror as two planes struck the World Trade Center, a plane flew into the Pentagon and one crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.

    I was also told you will never forget where you were.

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  • Common sense casualty of 9/11

    We all remember when it happened. I was standing in my kitchen with a mixer in my hand, beating cake batter.

    I was watching the normally light-hearted, after 8 a.m. broadcast of the “Today Show.” Katie Couric and Matt Lauer suddenly seemed disoriented, as everyone tried to figure out what was happening.

    When they began rolling footage, I leaned toward my TV to watch what looked like a toy plane fly into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

    As many people have said, “I just couldn’t process what was happening.”

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  • I will never forget

    Growing up, I heard countless times older generations talk about how they would never forget where they were, what they were doing and what they felt like when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

    It was a landmark moment in their lives, as well as a turning point in the nation.

    I never knew exactly what that day must have felt like for them until Sept.11, 2001.

    I was a senior in college at the University of Kentucky. Like most mornings, I was running behind as I was trying to get up out of bed and get to my first class of the day.

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  • Be thankful for time with others

    In the past month, I have been to three concerts.

    One was to see Paul McCartney at Great American Ballpark, the best concert I will probably ever see in my life.

    Another was to see four men dressed up as the ‘Fab Four.’

    The final one was to see a classic, the Glenn Miller Orchestra outdoors at Conner Prairie in Fishers, Ind.

    You might be wondering why I would be talking about three concerts in one column.

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  • ‘Pill mill’ pipeline must be addressed

    It would be difficult to find a local elected official in Kentucky who doesn’t recognize prescription drug abuse as a major problem in his or her own community.  The facts are staggering.  According to the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy:

    • The abuse of prescription pain relievers is now only second to marijuana.

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  • Aggravations: I have a few

    Coupons have become big news again.  It seems every 20 years coupons are discovered again as if they had never existed.  Coupons have their own television show.  The big coupon story is how there is a national surge in stealing newspapers to get the paper gold.

    This isn’t new to us and I have written about it before.  We lose about $1,000 every six months to the theft of newspapers from newsstands. 

    We monitored this trend over the past several years that coupons were in our newspaper.

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  • Local pharmacists could be next

    The recent closing of the Borders bookstore has me wondering what the citizens of Grant County would think if they lost the services of their local trusted pharmacists. The possibility is real. The similarities to what shut down a mega retailer like Borders, and the economic pressures facing retail pharmacy are quite striking. Except for one thing: books are a commodity, drugs purchased at a pharmacy and the services provided by a pharmacist are not!

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