Features

KENANSVILLE — Since 2022, Duplin County has received almost $1.4 million to help fight opioid abuse. Another $3.2 million is on the way, spread out in annual payments (of differing amounts) through 2038.

DUDLEY — Here’s an unlikely statement about a rock: “It does its own thing now.”

Leora “Sam” Jones was just having fun playing backyard basketball with her childhood friends growing up in Mount Olive.

In Greenland, climate change looks like a rapidly melting ice sheet. In Southern California, it looks like raging wildfires. Off Australia’s coast, it looks like degradation of the Great Barrier Reef.

One evening, with a storm looming on the horizon, Roberta Best brought her car to a quick stop when she came upon a lonely, velvety-black kitten. Best stopped her car, scooped up the tiny ball of fur, took him to a vet and had him neutered, and has been caring for him ever since. She christened him Storm and she’s praying for the day when the right person will adopt him and give him a loving home.

KENANSVILLE — With the start of a new year, many of us resolve to “do better,” sometimes pledging to eat healthier, exercise regularly, or spend less. One area of self-improvement we might want to consider is improving our digital skills — and East Carolina University is making it easy and affordable (free!) for people in eastern North Carolina to do just that.

WARSAW — Just inside the door of the Duplin County Veterans Memorial Museum is one of the museum’s most important items, according to Museum Curator Earl Rouse: It’s a thick, loose-leaf notebook containing the Roll of Honor, an ever-growing list of U.S. military veterans who lived in Duplin County at some point in their lives. It’s important to Rouse that the list be as complete as possible, and to that end, he spends 10 to 15 hours a week, scouring online obituaries and cemetery records, searching for men and women whose names deserve to be added to the Roll. He estimates that when he began working with the museum approximately 10 years ago, the list had no more than 2700 names; it now contains 10,725. He figures there should be about 15,000 total on the Roll — so he continues to look.

FAISON — As he reflects on his first year as mayor, William “Billy” M. Ward II admits, “My biggest surprise is just how much goes on even in a little, tiny town,” he says. “I mean we’re doing the same thing that they do in Raleigh, the same thing they do in Charlotte, it’s just a smaller scale. Our budget’s not as big, but as far as what we do, we do the very same thing they do.”

FAISON — This day was seven and a half years coming, but it was well worth the wait for those in attendance.

DUDLEY — On any given Wednesday, Thursday, Friday or Saturday, the parking lot at Grady’s Barbecue is packed full at lunchtime, as folks in the restaurant queue up for some serious ‘cue. But on the first Friday and Saturday of this month, the gravel lot sat eerily empty; the restaurant inside, strangely silent. This was not, however, a sign that something was wrong. In fact, quite the opposite: The restaurant shut down for two days, while owners Steve and Gerri Grady jetted off to Kansas City, Missouri, for Steve’s induction into the American Royal Barbecue Hall of Fame.