Features

Dee Duffy knows Stump, the winner of this year’s Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, well. She’s one of his breeders.

    The Montvale resident was in Indiana on Dec. 1, 1998, when Stump was born and she watched with tears in her eyes Feb. 10 as the Sussex Spaniel was named “Best in Show” at this year’s Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, outclassing some 2,500 other champion dogs for the title.

Goode’s Country Kitchen closed its doors for the last time Sunday.

    The restaurant has stood on U. S. 460, on the eastbound lane just east of Bedford, since 1981 when Betty and Norris Goode acquired the shell of a building and turned it into Bedford County’s first country buffet. It finally closed, a victim of steeply rising food prices and the passage of time.

About 2 million people were on hand for President Barack Obama’s inauguration, but  only saw him on a TV screen. Cory Watkins, of Bedford, saw President Obama from about 20 feet away.

    Watkins, a 2006 Liberty High School graduate, is a member of the Hampton University Marching Force, the university’s marching band. The junior, majoring in business management and  minoring in Spanish, plays clarinet, the instrument he took up in sixth grade.

    Bedford Ride could use some more volunteer drivers, according to Ira Doom, the non-profit’s director.

    Bedford Ride, which first got rolling in the early autumn of 2001, provides non-emergency medical transportation for people who have trouble getting to medical appointments or to get to a pharmacy to get a prescription filled. Doom is one of the organization’s two paid employees. The rest are volunteers. The volunteer drivers use vehicles that are provided, and fueled, by Bedford Ride.

    The Wharton Memorial Foundation and the Bedford Academy for the Arts ended the old year by becoming one. The merger took place in September.

    The Wharton Memorial Foundation was formally organized in 1997, according to Fred Duis, the foundation’s vice president and a founding member. Its roots go back to the desire to set up a public garden.

Shayne Tracy is a different kind of massage therapist. His clients are big, big as a horse. In fact, they are horses.

    Tracy started out with people and did massage therapy on humans for 20 years. After doing some research, he began working with horses.

    “It relaxes them,” he said.

Calvin Rice has worked along the Blue Ridge Parkway for half a century.

    He’s currently the dining room manager at the Peaks of Otter Lodge.

    Rice started working at a service station along the parkway at Otter Creek, near Big Island, right out of high school. This is 28 miles north of the Peaks and the parkway was not yet complete at that time. There was not yet a bridge carrying the road over the James River and motorists, upon reaching that point, had to get off, cross the James elsewhere and then return to the parkway.

    The Bedford Historical Society held its annual Hanging of the Greens lunch at the Bedford Historic Meeting House.

    Hanging of the Greens is an old English tradition observed in many churches. It marks the beginning of Advent, the period leading up to Christmas. It got its name because of the green wreaths that were hung as decorations for the season. It marks the point when many churches put up their holiday decorations, leaving them up through Epiphany, which comes on Jan. 6 and marks the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child.

    Ruth Crouch has been the manager at D. Reynolds for 32 years, but she's known about Bedford as the pie lady. As a sideline, she bakes pies to order.

    “I made six this morning before I came to work,” she said when interviewed the day before Thanksgiving. 

    All told, she's baked 220 this year. That includes more than 40 for Main Street United Methodist Church's bake sales in July and August. Each year she contributes at least 40 for this fundraising event.