Surrounded by photographs of friends, models of fighter planes, captain's hats, weaponry, and the computer where he is writing his memoirs, C. B. Harrison remembers his days as a Command Pilot in the US Air Force. This son of a turpentine distiller left his home in Hamilton County, Florida in 1947 to join the Air Force, and flew both overt and covert operations in the Korean and Vietnam Wars before his retirement. There are some missions that he still is not allowed to mention, and he holds his loyal silence without apology. "When you take something on, finish it," and "Each crew member is responsible for the other guy," are the lessons CB says he still uses from his days in the air.  He wishes young people could learn those lessons easily, but he figures that the only way to get stronger is to carry a heavy enough load that one has to depend on others. CB and his wife, Marilyn, came to visit us in Berea after Marilyn took Jennifer's dulcimer class at John C Campbell Folk School in July 1999.

The year was 1940 and Charles Chibitty was a senior at Haskalini High School in Lawrence Kansas. Charles and his friends, all full-blooded, card-carrying Comanche, knew that war with Germany was inevitable, and they wanted to do something important for freedom.  Charles and fourteen other Comanche joined the war effort as "Code Talkers," using their native Comanche language as a code to transmit important messages across enemy lines. Charles says of his war experiences in Europe, "Anybody that wasn't scared as hell and didn't talk to the creator out there wasn't there."  Charles has received numerous honors, including a WWII Victory Medal, European Theater of Operations Medal with five bronze stars, the Army Good Conduct Medal, and the Chevalier de l'Ordre National de Merite. The Comanche Nation honored Charles with a "Knights of the Plains" saber, the highest honor a Comanche warrior can hope to achieve. We met Chibitty at his home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Born the daughter of a civil mining engineer on the West Virginia and Pennsylvania line, Miss Mary Frances Davidson is full of stories. Her true stories of her parents' courtship and marriage as well as her retelling of many events in her life as a schoolteacher in White Sulphur Springs, Kentucky and later Oak Ridge, Tennessee, are peppered with personal commentaries. Of her early retirement from teaching high school math, she says, "As soon as I could get rocking chair money, I quit!" Asked why she never married, she replied seriously, "I never could find anyone who could park their shoes under my bed that I didn't have to cook three meals a day for!" Ambition and determination have taken Mary Frances a long way - from the mining community of her birth to the University of Kentucky and the graduate program at Duke University, to a full teaching career.  When she moved to her retirement home in Galtinburg, Tennessee, Miss Davidson decided to become a master craftsman, setting out to become an authority on weaving and dyeing. Today, at ninety-four years old, this author of "The Dye Pot" and veteran instructor at Arrowmont is using her time and resources to help the people in her church and community create and achieve their dreams.

Mother Maggie Carter was born in Valdosta, Georgia in 1915, and grew up as one of ten children in a family of farmers. “Working on a farm is good, honest work,” she says, and hopes that the younger generation will learn the value of it before it is too late. Mother Maggie has certainly left a legacy for the younger generation, with twenty-seven great grandchildren to her credit. She lives in Maryland now, and we met her at a restaurant in Springfield, Missouri in October 1999.

Per Boiesen (pronounced “Pehr Boy-sen”) is a perfect example of how deep still waters can run. He is a dairy farmer in Djursland, the north-eastern portion of Jutland, Denmark. Although he says he doesn’t speak English, be careful what you say in his presence - for example, an unsuspecting person making a remark such as “I would sure like to try milking a cow by hand someday,” will find themselves out in the barn with their arm stuck under Per’s most obliging cow! When Per and Henny’s son and daughter-in-law called from their trip around the world to tell them they would soon be grandparents, Per said, in English, with an enigmatic smile on his face, “Made in Australia!” Per and Henny now have three grandchildren, and they adopt us for an evening or two each time we go to Denmark.

"If you're born in the mountains, you're bound to end up in the mountains." Raleigh Adams was born on Long Branch in the Cutshin Creek area of Leslie County, Kentucky, the youngest of seven children. Although he was born in the year of the stock market crash, his family never felt the effects of the struggling American economy. "I grew up farming the hillsides," he explains, "We always had food to eat, clothes to wear . . . we were self-sufficient." Raleigh left home to study at Appalachian Bible College in Bradley, West Virginia, and spent time in the Army before returning home to Cutshin to work as a miner at Blue Diamond for eighteen years. Raleigh has black lung, but he doesn't let that keep him from enjoying his wife, children, grandchildren and community. He wishes no one had to deal with illnesses associated with mining, and believes that mining, "if it's done right, wouldn't be that unhealthy." Raleigh and his wife, Mary Jane were kind enough to offer us a room at their home in October 1999 while we were visiting the school where Mary Jane teaches.

Wife, mother, grandmother, doctor’s wife, author, church leader, and counselor are just a few of the titles that come to the minds of those of us who know Roberta Fry Schaeffer. Her thirty-eight years of working beside her husband at Redbird Mission in Eastern Kentucky taught her “that loving people is the most important thing in life. . . more important than salary, position, anything.” She and Doc are enjoying their retirement in Berea, celebrating fifty-seven years of marriage this year. “Now Doc works for me,” Roberta says, giving him complete credit for the fact that she looks so good. And how does Doc feel about that? “She’s the only house call I make now . . . and I love her better now than when I married her,” he says, with a happy grin and sparkling eyes.