When Jane Bonomo opened her first boutique shop in 1973, it was in a small building on Church Street just off Main Street in downtown Blacksburg. Now she owns a whole plaza across town on University City Boulevard. Bonomo grew up in Pennsylvania and attributes much of her work ethic to her father, a newspaperman. She accompanied him to work at the age of nine and started doing odd jobs shortly thereafter. “I hung out in the printing plant and …
The annual U.S. market for the toy industry is $28 billion, so there’s a lot to know about something that seems as elementary as toys. Research shows that learning through play is …
The glow of the flame…the roar of the fire…the muscle feel of splitting logs. These – and more – are reasons folks use wood to heat their homes. The biggest driver of …
If your favorite color is not Burnt Orange or Chicago Maroon or the unusual combination of both, and you visit the Virginia Tech campus during Hokie football season, you might just change …
Now a beacon for branding and sparkly nuance, the American football helmet was once made of nothing but hardened leather. It is inarguably the most important part of the uniform yet, shockingly, …
Mickey Hayes’s first hotrod was a 1934 Ford sedan with a Chrysler hemi engine. His most recent hotrod came off the factory line fully optimized, with no improvements necessary: a 2011 Mercedes …
Growing old gracefully certainly has a delightful ring to it. Perhaps we picture ourselves flitting about our homes, doing much of the same things we’ve always done, living out the days surrounded …
Greg and Debbie Miller are not the first, and will not be the last, Virginia Tech grads to have arrived in the New River Valley for college and stayed for life. He …
Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying: “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain but death and taxes.” Franklin wrote these words in 1789, when the average life expectancy for …
When April Martin Danner set out to locate the graves of Civil War soldiers buried in our area, she kept happening upon something else [literally] hidden in the bushes – several small, …