Rosenbaum headed to D.C. for competition

The clank of cans is everywhere. Church volunteers bag cans, count cans, throw cans into boxes.
Lillie Thomas walks from a back room at Ecumenical Faith in Action last Tuesday night carrying a cake. She places it on a table.
“This is only for a big family,” she says to a volunteer.
She talks slow and moves slow.

With the holidays forefront in our minds this time of year, most folks will give thought to the things for which they are grateful. For Smyth County natives Fred and Joy Dye Jr., it is an easy choice. They are thankful just to be alive.

Smyth County’s top law enforcement officer, Sheriff David Bradley, and prosecutor, Commonwealth’s Attorney Roy Evans, have a lot of education. The sheriff knows how to book ‘em and the CA known how to throw the book at ‘em. On Monday, however, both men learned a few things on ride-alongs with Smyth Regional Home Care nurses, seeing firsthand how they help patients carry out physicians’ orders in their homes.

So far, state budget cuts to area senior programs have caused only minor ripple effects. But the District III Governmental Cooperative is not out of the line of fire just yet.

Timber the German Shepherd and Molly and Stubby, both Boston Terriers, rough-house in the yard between repeated tail-wagging greetings given a visitor. Inside Bonnie Quesenberry’s house, a couple of Yorkshire Terriers are equally as welcoming.Out back, in a long kennel building, Boston Terriers and Yorkies yip and scramble toward Quesenberry, noses poking through gates, as she walks between the two rows of kennels and houses. The dogs are much happier than their owner these days following the publication of a Humane Society of the United States report on investigations of Virginia puppy mills that said one had been found in Atkins.

Recent talk of Virginia’s reported puppy mills and a complaint this fall about too many dogs in yards in the Chatham Hill area prompted Marion Town Council’s ordinance committee to consider limiting the number of dogs and cats permitted per household in town.

A Good Samaritan motorist died after stopping to help at the scene of an accident on Interstate 81 just moments after midnight Monday.

Chilhowie High School assistant football coach Alan Johnson is a quitter. And proud of it.

Local authorities were unaware of a puppy mill the Humane Society of the United States found in Atkins during a five-month investigation that triggered in Hillsville a dog rescue said to be the largest in U.S. history.