Age: 55 Location: Oak Park, IL For as long as she can remember, Julie Justicz has always felt a kinship with those who are struggling. Her dad always referred to her as “the tenderhearted one” among his seven children, and Julie says she always felt “a connection with and compassion for people who didn’t have as much as …
Location: New York City So one of the things I love about being in New York City (aside from the oversized hot pretzels available at every corner and the many languages you hear and ethnicities you see from one block to the next) is the ability to walk everywhere. I love to walk, and Manhattan’s city …
Age: 16 Location: Los Angeles, CA When Cooper Komatsu was two years old, he knew every car’s make and model. He could even identify a car based solely on its taillights. “I was always into memorizing random things,” he says. The car obsession was followed by an intense interest in dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures. So the fact that Cooper loves to …
Location: Charlotte, NC Yesterday afternoon, David and I hosted a meet and greet and fundraiser for two fabulous women running for local (Mecklenburg County, North Carolina) office. Elyse Dashew is running for reelection to one of the at-large seats on the Board of Education and Leigh Altman is running for one of the at-large seats on …
Location: Charleston, South Carolina Travel, even under the best of circumstances, can be trying. My day would have been a long one even if everything had gone smoothly. And it did not go smoothly. I left my hotel in Salt Lake City about 7:30 am and had a connecting flight in Dallas, slated to arrive in Charlotte at …
Location: Memphis, Tennessee One of the things that most appealed to Eliza about Rhodes College, where she just completed her sophomore year, was its commitment to service. Lots of schools talk the talk, but it was clear on the first day of orientation -when Eliza and her fellow freshmen were sent out into the Memphis community …
Age: 24 Location: North Shore, Hawaii Growing up in Bend, Oregon, Kiki Nakamura-Koyama was painfully aware that the central Oregon town was 94% white. In the International Baccalaureate Program she pursued in high school in the hope of a more diverse student body and curriculum, Kiki was one of two Asian Americans and one of ten people of …
Location: Reno, Nevada Hannah and I just spent five days in Reno, Nevada competing in the National Scrabble Championship. According to my nametag, which indicates the number of national championships I have played in addition to my player number and hometown, this was my twelfth NSC. I had thought about missing it this year, since Reno is not …
Age: 61 Location: Plymouth, MA When Marilyn Gallagher met her husband Jim, there was no sign of the heart troubles that would ultimately claim his life. “He was very fit,” Marilyn says, recalling meeting him when she was 20 years old and he was 22 and they played pool at a local pub on Christmas Day 1978. “He played …
Ages: 35 Location: Charlotte, North Carolina On their first date, what seemed like a really nice evening ended with Adrienne in tears. “We were walking around uptown,” Emmanuel says, “and I look over at her and she’s crying.” He wondered if he had done something wrong but Adrienne explained that her tears were for the person they had just …