Look Back ... to a young farmer's beginnings with the land, 1949

July 21, 1949, in The Star: An outstanding example of a young veteran/farmer who’s making the most the Vocational Agricultural Training School at Jacksonville is William Lloyd Etherton, who bought 272 acres of land in the foothills of Colvin Mountain near the Oak Grove Church community when he returned from the service in 1946. Then in March 1948 he applied for enrollment in the Institutional On-Farm Training and was accepted. Among many improvements he has made to his land, Etherton during winter months fenced 120 acres of his farm so that it would be ready for livestock as soon as the grazing crops could be grown. He also planted six acres in cotton, from which he expects to produce a bale to the acre based on planting and fertilization recommendations from Auburn. He has one acre planted in hybrid corn as a demonstration plot.

July 21, 1999, in The Star: The federal government has paid for more than 14,000 radios to help warn residents of a chemical disaster at the Anniston Army Depot — in fact, free distribution of those radios was supposed to have started eight months ago. Instead, nobody in Calhoun County has one. More than 4,500 of the toaster-sized white boxes are sitting silently in an Anniston warehouse pending an Alabama Supreme Court ruling on litigation between two of the companies that bid to build the system.