Taking Heart

HeartsApart.org provides soon-to-be-deployed service members with professional photographs of their loved ones at no cost.

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Man! You should have been here last week!

It’s 6 a.m. on a humid summer morning at Kure Beach Pier. The sun begins to rise over the ocean. Shades of blue and magenta grow more prominent with each passing minute. There are fishermen at the end of the pier. Some have been here for hours; the pier is open 24/7 for 240 days…

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Meditations in Color

Painting has always been about connection and balance for Bradley Carter — connection with his art and the process and balance between his life and career demands. Carter cultivated a love and natural skill for art with encouragement from his grandmother while growing up in Virginia and he later received a degree in painting and…

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# DOIN’GOOD

Comfort Food By Simon Gonzalez Think “first responder ” and the image that comes to mind probably isn’t a chef. But in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence one of the first nonprofits to arrive in Wilmington was Mercy Chefs an organization that prepares and serves restaurant-quality meals in the aftermath of disasters. “Mercy Chefs is…

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Cheesemakers

North Carolina is getting cheesier and cheesier. Over the past couple of decades our tastes have expanded from Monterey Jack and cheddar to include the delights of stinky nutty and moldy cheese. Terms like washed-rind alpine and mold-ripened have started to creep into our lexicon. With a growing number of small artisanal farmhouse operations the…

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First Family of Opera

Dr. Michael Rallis hoped his daughter Nikoleta
would follow him into the medical field. Instead she followed him into another of his passions singing opera.

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Rooms with a View

Nick Nixon and Beth Connell fondly recall the first time they drove down the narrow road off Masonboro Loop heading toward the Intracoastal Waterway. Nixon was in the process of selling the North Myrtle Beach-based self-storage business he owned with his brother. When the sale went through he and Beth — who runs a physical…

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etc.

Coach Lenny Simpson had planned to take half a dozen youngsters from his Wilmington One Love tennis program to the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows New York this year. It was the natural progression. In 2016 benefactors David and Caroline McLemore made it possible to take two kids. Four went last year. “We were going…

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