To the Editor:

Our EMS and fire departments, law-enforcement and many in serving military units have come to our region’s rescue. They  and caring ordinary neighbors who have put on their boots and gloves and helped so many people in desperate need are our heroes.

Hurricane Helene was and continues to be a traumatic event for our region, but even within the worst of it, there are stories of resilience and ingenuity in ways that many had to deal with making or getting meals while having no power or water for days.

To the Editor:

This letter is in response to LeRoy E. Cossette’s letter stating how bad a Harris presidency would be for the United States, dangerous even, since he (incorrectly) states she is a Marxist socialist. 

AGAIN. For the second time in three years, Haywood County, the highest east of the Mississippi River, experienced devastating flooding from a tropical weather system that reached mountainous Southern Appalachia’s narrow, rocky canyons and broad, lush river valleys — wiping out whole towns, inundating normally impregnable areas and crippling the communications and transportation infrastructure that powers public safety, commerce and the dissemination of information. 

As state elected leaders toured areas of Haywood County decimated by deadly flooding that killed six people last week, local agencies were busy assessing damage and compiling reports in support of a federal disaster declaration that would bring badly needed resources. 

As The Smoky Mountain News went to print Tuesday, a potentially catastrophic storm was barreling down on the Carolinas, with North Carolina poised to bear the brunt of it. 

It was April 5, 1936, Palm Sunday, about nine o’clock in the evening. People were tidying up their kitchens, strolling home from church services, sitting in the local movie theaters, listening to their radios, talking to their neighbors. Just another ordinary spring evening. 

Close your eyes and imagine this: It’s another picture-perfect Western North Carolina Wednesday morning with Chamber of Commerce weather and nary a cloud in the sky.

An incident at a farm facility in Macon County last week left one worker dead and caused the hospitalization of more than a dozen people.

Editor’s note: Marie Cochran attended the production of the “Liar’s Bench” on June 20 at the Mountain Heritage Center on the WCU campus and wrote this review for The Smoky Mountain News.

I am very familiar with the term “the Liars Bench” in its practice of casual storytelling among Southern men sitting in the courthouse square and at barbershops; yet I was skeptical to hear this lighthearted phrase associated with the account of 19 Black men who drowned on a chain gang only decades after the Civil War.

As a disclaimer, for the last month I’ve been a witness to the assemblage of information and a participant in debates that raged about the proper way to engage a diverse audience. Yet, I waited like every other audience member wondering whether “Tears in the Rain” would be told as a gruesome ghost story, a sorrowful tale of faceless men who perished in an unfortunate accident, or an insightful portrayal of a human tragedy.