Stories from Sunday, July 19, 2015

The backstage area is strewn with the building blocks of show-making. Cans of hairspray, make-up brushes, and hairpins litter the dressing room tables. A clothing rack on a side wall is hung with costumes for an upcoming show. Overalls, flower print dresses, and straw hats await the young actors portraying characters from Mark Twain's imagination...

Collectors and lovers of pig memorabilia gathered at Bedford County Agriculture Center Saturday morning for the Happy Pig Collectors buy, sell and trade event. Happy Pig Collectors Club members spent a few days exploring Bedford County for their annual get-together. 2015 marks their 20th year as a club...

Many children will be back in the classroom in just a few weeks, and so Bedford County Health Department is reminding parents to get their children's back-to-school immunizations now. In Tennessee, children enrolling in school for the first time and all children going into seventh grade must provide schools with a state immunization certificate before classes start. ...

A homemade water bong and lighter were brought to a Bryant Street shed where a television set and several glass jars were smashed between Monday and Thursday, police said. The bong and lighter, which were not there previously and do not belong to the shed's owner, were confiscated by police...

Liberty Middle School standout baseball player Mason Landers is living a dream many young baseball players would love to experience. He currently plays for Team Southeast in the 13U Series Classic being play at Jet Blue Player Development Complex in Fort Myers, Florida, the Boston Red Sox spring training facility...

Shelbyville Post 23 Junior Legion brought out the heavy lumber against Collinwood Post 254 on Friday in the state tournament, rocking Post 254 15-7. Post 23 plated the game's first run in the top of the second inning, but Post 23 saw Collinwood rally for a pair of runs off starter Crawford Baker in the bottom of the first...

The River Bend Country Club PGA Junior League finished up its regular season on Thursday afternoon at Champions Run Golf Course. The team is comprised of junior members from River Bend Country Club, ranging in age from 7-12. The team competed in the Middle Tennessee Region this summer and completed its regular season with an undefeated record...

Inside Charlie Williams' office in Shelbyville, two circular wall decorations resemble globes. On one, the Americas are represented; on the other, Europe, Asia, and the rest of the continents. It's a fitting decoration for a man who has spent a great deal of his life between one side of the world or the other. Fitting and interesting -- considering there was a time when Williams had no inclinations toward living in another country...

T-G: How long have you been involved in health care and when did you know it was what you wanted to do?... Womble: I began working as a registered nurse in 1995 and my first job was at the old Bedford County Medical Center....

The Anne Stubblefield Cancer Outreach was formed by Dwight Stubblefield in 2006 in honor of his late wife. The mission of his outreach is to provide people struggling through chemotherapy with Boost and Ensure, nutritional drinks that were the only thing Anne could stomach while she underwent chemotherapy. Following his wife's passing, Stubblefield wanted to help others battling cancer...

"April, May, and June is shearing season," says professional shearer and llama/ alpaca lover Gerdi Laems while shearing a llama named Joseph. Joseph is new on the farm and hadn't been sheared in almost two years. "When a llama hasn't been sheared for two or three years, you never know what's under the hair, I've found feed, a lot of grain, and even a bird's nest," Laems said...

Faith, music and movies are coming together in a powerful way to reach a demographic that has seemed elusive to many evangelicals: The Millennial generation. In 2015, the movie "God's Not Dead" drew headlines for its evangelistic outreach and smashed box office records. The film was headlined by stars like Kevin Sorbo (the "Hercules") and Dean Cain ("Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman")...

I've been keeping up with the story of Forrest Fenn and his hidden treasure for a while now. While most tales about hidden treasures typically involve dead folk, pirates, or scandalous adventurers, Forrest Fenn's treasure is a little more complicated...

On any given day there are so many people who are suffering in one way or another. People experience hardships in life; family troubles, physical ailments and frightening medical diagnoses, financial despair, loss of a loved one, or serious accidents and tragedies...

With all the buzz about dinosaurs because of the new "Jurassic Park" movie, I found myself thinking about what a timeless connection there seems to be between human kids and dinosaurs. I remember when I was in grade school, the dinosaur picture books were always the ones that were the most tattered because we all propped them open and drew our own pictures of them. ...

I'm not a political person. I'm okay with this. Know why? Because talking politics makes people overly emotional. It makes people, what I like to call, "judgey"...