“Listen to your customers,” said Julian Holmes, who sold Holmes Hardware to Tubbs in 1979. “Don’t run your business from your office. Let your shoes be your office. You meet those customers up front. You have a want-list in your front pocket, and you find out what customers want, and you fill their needs.

At a horserace track. "It's a really big room," said Corbin, who designed the "Cinderella" section of this year's upcoming Christmas in the Sky event at Louisiana Downs. "I've had this room numerous times, so I'm very familiar with how big pieces have to be.

“Coach Francis was very demanding,” said Deans, who is in his fourth year as the head basketball coach at Captain Shreve High School. “He worked us hard. He told us if we could play for him, we could be successful at anything in life. That was the honest God’s truth.

“The utmost importance,” Barclay said of selling to people who live here. “That was the number one priority. I didn’t do this the last 27 years of my life for money. Granted, my wife and I made a decent and honest living. But I never did it for the money.

A story by CNBC.com reported the cost of turkeys is 75% higher than last year – if you can find one. Bird flu – which normally hits during colder months – was diagnosed last July. More than 47 million birds have been affected, which has resulted in a nationwide turkey shortage.

“Everybody is real excited about meeting over there,” Jones said. “It’s a new building. It’s something fresh in town. Seeing folks that used to meet at the brewery – everybody is looking forward to that. There’s an excitement. There’s a buzz around town about it coming back up.

His family’s suffering. “I was probably 11 or 12, and I remember her having to go through the surgeries. I remember she got breast cancer, went through everything, then it came back. I just remember watching her and my dad and my brother. It was just a very tough time for our family.

“It said, ‘Congratulations! You’ve been named a finalist for Opus Prize, which is one million dollars,’” said McCarter. “I was then expecting to read something like, ‘Just send us $10,000, and the million dollars is waiting on you.’ I thought somebody out of Lagos, Nigeria, is sitting in a café typing this thing out.