An author’s journey from a small town newspaper to Hollywood

Tanya Biank is the author of Army Wives, a nonfiction book first published in 2006 with the title Under the Sabers. The book was immediately optioned for television and Army Wives, the hour-long drama, is now in its fourth season and remains the Lifetime channel’s most popular show. Biank now lives at Fort Stewart with her husband, LTC Michael Marti, and 3-year-old son, Jack.

For the better part of the past year, 2,400 ordinary Georgians have taken off their civilian clothing, picked up rucksacks and rifles, kissed their families good-bye, and headed off to what is arguably the deadliest place on earth: Afghanistan. Journalist Michael Jordan followed, bravely documenting the journey.

These Savannah movers and shakers are pros at using their skills to give back.

Being a professional isn’t easy – no matter the job. Those who remain at the top of their game often put in long hours and make huge sacrifices for their chosen craft. And in a day and age when Blackberries, iPhones, and other “smart” devices have permanently exploded the traditional notion of working a 9 to 5 schedule, spare time has become a luxury to say the least. So it’s heartwarming that some of Savannah’s leading professionals use their only leisure hours to serve the community. Whether it’s helping animals or children, these stars show how to do business with benevolence.

Everyone has an adventure side, but not eveyone gets it out in the same way. Some people gamble, risking their hard earned cash for quick thrills and big purposes. Others seek speed and danger, cruising down dirt roads on motorcycles and ATVs. A few Savannah residents, however, have found ways to use their wild streak to complete some truly daring and courageous feats.

By: David Gignilliat

Tell me a little bit about how your project and applying for the grant evolved?
I’ve been working 15 years on trying to understand how bacteria — really small organisms — compete with the relatively large algae for the most limiting nutrient in the ocean, which is nitrogen. That’s been a long standing interest of mine, this competition between these two different groups of organisms. And the reason why that is importnat is because the algae are really the ones that are responsible for, at the base of the food web, for things that we like, like fish and everything ‘big’ And whereas bacteria can do their own thing without having to contribute to the grazing food level. And that’s sort of the setting for the questions. The project with the Arctic is that, with climtae change and warming especially [in that region], what’s happening is that everything is beginning to melt, and that’s really changing how nutrients go into the Arctic. And what we think is going to happen, especially with the melting of the permafrost, which is a kilometer or so of frozen, ancient marshland and peat bog, is that all of that material is going to get into the Arctic coastal ocean and intensify the limitation of nitrogen. And we think that’g going to advantage the bacteria, to the disadvantage of the big things. So in the past five or six years, the world governments have begun to recognize all the profound changes that are happening due to climate change, especially in the high latitude regions of the Arctic and the Antarctic, so there’s been new research resources to try to understand and predict what’s going to happen up there. And not that we can necessarily change it, but we need to be able to react to it. If we think that this change is going to reduce fish yields by 30 percent, then we need to be to able to accommodate that fishing is going to have to decrease by 30 perecent for example …
So the research process is that a couple of years ago really, there was these new programs from these various funding agencies, including our National Science Foundation, to ask for people to make proposals and submit ideas to how we can better understand the changing Arctic system,. And we applied for one of those kind of programs, but it was based on research that had been going on in my group for 15 years or so. So we took our understanding and our questions that we’ve been working on for a long time, applied them to the requests for understanding what’s going to be happening in the Arctic. I guess the reviewers liked it, because they funded it. So, that’s how we got started.

Chapter 18 from Bruce Feiler’s The Council of Dad’s

Bonaventure Cemetery, just east of Savannah, has two side-by-side stone gates at its entrance. The gate on the left has two chiseled stone pillars capped with female figures cradling crosses. It is known as the Christian gate. The gate on the right has similar stone pillars topped with Stars of David. It’s called the Jewish gate.

On a swampy, mosquito-plagued afternoon I drove through the Jewish gate, grabbed my crutches, and climbed the few steps to the visitor’s center. Inside are sample stone carvings, assorted porcelain urns for ashes, and portraits of famous people buried here, including governors, ambassadors, and Confederate generals, along with Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken and four-time Oscar-winning songwriter Johnny
Mercer.

Drawing divine inspiration from the world around her, a few years ago Tiffani Taylor descended onto the national art scene garnering widespread recognition and a long list of devotees. Now, she’s spreading the love to other local artists and keeping a few Savannah students under her wing.
Some might call Tiffani Taylor a prophet of sorts and rightly so. As she walks around her home studio, she describes the warmly-lit space as her personal sanctuary and points to her bright paintings, explaining the inspiration behind them.
“I had this vivid dream of a red poppy field, and I was sketching in the field, and I saw the sheet music,” she says describing what is now a series of large landscape paintings that incorporate clips of vintage sheet music. “And I saw truth depicted in the middle of the bulbous red blooms.”

Click here to view the exclusive video of Tiffani Taylor’s interview and photo shoot.

What happens when a Southern sporting tradition, a cast of characters and a whole lot of firearms mix together? Friendship, competition—and yes, a few cock-and-bull stories.

Shooting shotguns is really fun. Whatever your politics, there is no way around that simple fact. To brace the stock in the nook of your shoulder, to look down the sight, trace a target, squeeze the trigger and watch the flying orange clay disc disintegrate as the gun explodes back into your body is a rush without compare.

“It’s like potato chips,” explains retired Air Force chief master sergeant John Culpepper, one of the older pro shooters at the Forest City Gun Club. “You can’t eat just one.”

Sixty-eight years after one of the deadliest attacks on American soil, Judy Weiher can’t shake the smell of smoke.

“I thought the whole world was on fire,” remembers Judy Weiher.

To a 4-year-old girl, that’s probably what it looked like at 8:00 in the morning on December 7, 1941, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The infamous attack on Pearl Harbor had begun—to the complete surprise of the United States Navy and Army. Just a few months earlier, Judy Weiher’s father had received orders to be stationed at the Army base on Oahu, known as Schofield Barracks. Weiher, now 72 and living on Wilmington Island, was just a toddler at the time, but the images she saw from her front row seat to history have remained with her for nearly seven decades.

Her first reaction to the bombs that morning, however, was not one of fear but of astonishment. The raid officially began at 7:53 a.m. with an attack by the first wave of Japanese “Zero” fighter planes. Weiher’s father, Ralph Mullis, a Signal Corps staff sergeant, ran out of their quarters in his underwear. As a child, Weiher was more concerned with her father’s appearance than the bombs exploding overhead. “I was absolutely appalled that he’d run outside in his underwear,” Weiher recalls thinking at the time. Moments later, her father rushed back inside, quickly got into his uniform and ran to the area known as the quadrangles to see what he could do.

He’s not some card-trickin’, wand-wavin’ backdoor magician: He’s Magic Marc, the most fun a kid can have in a hospital.

Though his step is brisk, his emotions are drained. Not because he’s leaving an auditorium of thousands as he once did when he opened for Bill Cosby and Aretha Franklin—and performed at private parties for Oprah—but rather because he has just left a hospital room. Marc Dunston, better known as Magic Marc, traded the celebrity life to bring healing to children who have forgotten how to smile. And he has no regrets.

With his bag of tricks and contagious exuberance, Marc makes his way to two very special, private shows. Despite the vibrant colors in his signature patchwork vest and the underwater art that decorates the hallways around him, the reality is that Marc is at Backus Children’s Hospital at Memorial Health University Medical Center.