Features

The shop on the corner of Hawkins Drive and Valley Creek Road has attracted a variety of visitors during its 46 years of operation, and Elmer Hicks is one big reason.

As owner of Hicks Repair Service, Hicks, 88, has received visits from customers looking for lawn mower parts, friends looking for conversation over cups of strong coffee and even a rooster with a fondness for cherry tomatoes.

Facts and safety tips from the National Fire Protection Association Public Education Division

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Sandra Cilyok of Elizabethtown looked at a yellow gourd in her hand and saw a penguin.

“He just looked like a penguin when I looked at him,” she said.

Cilyok once held a fuzzy newborn penguin at an aquarium and is a fan of the animated movie “Happy Feet,” which is about the animals.

A lifetime of work in politics and government began for Radcliff resident Les Dawson when he was growing up in West Point.

Dawson, 83, recalls being as young as 7 when his grandmother — who he described as a “strong Democrat” — would take him along with her on local government visits.

“She knew everybody in the courthouse,” he said of his weekly trips there.

Beginnings are the sweetest. An innocence permeates the beginnings of friendships, professions and professions of love, an innocence that takes the heart to a different place. I have stayed in that place often enough and long enough to know its magic.

We live better; we love better; we think better; we are better in the beginning.

Some beginnings are firsts and other times, we begin again. But all beginnings require courage, because they are filled with risk.