Features

What is it about growing up in Indian River County that spurred two Vero Beach High School varsity soccer players – one from the class of 1993, the other from the class of 2001 – to pull up stakes with their families and head to Uganda as missionaries?

'Tis the season for glad tidings of musical joy as singers and instrumentalists tune their talents to celebrate this beautiful time of the year.

God Jul! It’s a Merry Christmas at Hallstrom House where the halls have been decked, the tree trimmed and the table set.

At first glance, it doesn’t look like much. A bumpy, dirt road. A small, steel shed. Steep banks that sink down to tea-colored water.

One of the first things Jim Ward did when he and his wife Judy moved to Vero Beach was check out the Vero Beach Power Squadron.

Steve Massey never knew Paul Kroegel, but tales of the German immigrant’s passion for protecting the wildlife on Pelican Island passed down by his great-grandfather was one of the things that prompted Steve to become a member of the Pelican Island Preservation Society.

Allen Cornell, Riverside Theatre’s producing artistic director, has long wanted to stage Broadway’s classic musical 42nd Street in Vero Beach, but how to finance the half-million-dollar extravaganza was always the big question.

This story begins with a woman’s smile. Glenn Northey was at a South Beach restaurant in Miami when he looked up and saw a beautiful brunette smiling at him. Deciding to seize the moment he had the waitress deliver a drink to her table in hopes of meeting her. He did. Her name was Vera Seemann, he asked for her telephone number and the rest, as they say, is history.

It’s a scene played out dozens of times each night, seven nights a week, at Bobby’s Restaurant on Ocean Drive along the Beach.

Ten years ago who would have thought Dan Simmons and Tim Smick would meet again, let alone form a partnership?

With anticipation shining in her eyes, Shannon Maloney first skipped through the doors of Riverside Children’s Theatre as a second-grader. On her way to an acting class, she was about to discover a world of wonder where she could be a princess or pirate one day, a flower or frog the next. Since then Shannon has participated in numerous classes and workshops that have enhanced her natural acting, dancing and musical abilities; she has also performed onstage and been busy working behind the scenes. For the now high school senior her RCT experiences have been so positive she plans to pursue acting in college.

By some people’s standards, Bobby Bird has never had a real job. Yet there probably isn’t a man in Indian River County more dedicated...

There is an art to science and there is a specific science to art.

What better way is there to celebrate “the wearing of the green” on Saint Patrick’s Day than at an Irish pub drinking Irish whiskey or green beer, eating corned beef, and listening to Irish music?

Greg Mortenson wrote his best-selling Three Cups of Tea to document his humanitarian campaign to build schools in Central Asia thereby attempting to improve the appalling lack of education provided for girls.

When Julianne Price and Teddy Floyd discovered that an elderly Gifford woman was living in her car, they knew they had to find out why.

Vivian Mosshart has never seen an empty tissue box she couldn’t transform into something useful.

When the last school bell of the day rings at 3 p.m. nearly 18,000 children throughout the county leave their classrooms. Some head home where a parent or caregiver is waiting, some participate in an extracurricular program, and others go off to work – yet far too many are left on their own.

For many years, surfing has been prominent in our own home town, largely due to one of the Holy Grails of East Coast surfing: Sebastian Inlet. Some influences are more visible than others, but local icons of surfing are all among us.

Nearly 420 acres of grapefruit groves stretched to the horizon when Canadian Galen Weston and his wife Hilary first set eyes on the property we know today as Windsor.