Like many Guilfordians, David Grimsley ’00 read the early headlines coming out of western North Carolina last week and wondered what he could possibly do to help the victims of Hurricane Helene.
What lingers in the memory is how ordinary the weekend was shaping up to be. Barely 19 and a few months removed from Parris Island, Marine Private First Class Steve Hankins ’75 was loafing in his barracks when a news bulletin shattered the Friday afternoon calm.
Forty years after graduating, Brenda Esch ’83 is back in Greensboro, this time as New Garden Friends’ new pastoral minister.
A new school year means Leslie Alexander ’95 is on the road again with her spreadsheet riding shotgun. On the road to schools like Cove Creek and Blowing Rock, Green Valley and Bethel, Valle Crucis and Mabel. There are eight elementary/middle schools and one high school in Watauga County, whose postcard-worthy towns are found on the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina.
In a corner of Mark Dixon’s ’96 Hege-Cox Hall classroom is a portable wooden table that wasn’t always a table. In another lifetime, the table’s top, sides and legs were part of an upright piano. That was before Mark extracted the soundboard from the piano’s innards, sketched out a blueprint, pulled out some tools and – voila! – a table.
Over a career that spanned nearly three decades, Kenny Browning ’68 has seen and accomplished much. But what played out the evening of Sept. 20 at Northern Durham (N.C.) High School was a first for one of the state’s most successful high school football coaches.