Financial planning: Making the most of your retirement years

By Rev. Charles Moreland | February 17, 2008 |

Retirees appreciate and enjoy the free time available once the mandatory 8-5 work week responsibility is over. It is interesting that the Army retirees I have been connected with are so busy with volunteer work. Army retirees are redeeming their free time for service to the community.

Not everything as a retiree is peaches and cream, though. There is the challenge of making ends meet economically; freedom from financial worries in retirement is possible but necessitates proactive financial planning and the establishment of priorities if working from a fixed or reduced income. Enjoying retirement requires long term planning and a bit of luck mixed with savvy decisions.

One serious challenge is the coaxing of enough income from savings to maintain a healthy standard of living. As we prepare for retirement, we had been advised to change our investment strategy by going to conservative funds, CDs, and money market funds, which are safer. Today’s financial planners are taking a second look at this advice. «Read the rest of this article»

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Face of fashion: You can be too thin!

By Christine Anne Piesyk | February 16, 2008 |

Europe’s fashion community made a bold move this month with the enforcement of Body Mass Index requirements for its high fashion models, refusing to use runway models who fell below BMI standards. In other words, you can be too thin.

Yes, the models will still be tall, thin, willowy, perhaps angular, but emaciated is OUT. It is a long-needed move toward better health with a long range goal of changing the perception of beauty from bone-baring thin to a more healthy shape.

In Hollywood films, on every TV channel, and in thousands of pages of fashion magazines, the icon of beauty for the past 20 years has been the ever-diminishing body mass of models. The concern exploded into public consciousness a few years ago with the skeletal form of TV’s Ally McBeal, and cross cuts social strata in the form of bulemia and anorexia, the health-endangering weight loss tactics used by too many women and girls in their efforts to be fashionably thin or meet some unrealistic standard of beauty. «Read the rest of this article»

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My Way: Sixty years of Sinatra songs showcased at Roxy Theatre

By Christine Anne Piesyk | February 15, 2008 |

As a little girl, one of the stories my mother told me was of a trip to New York City with fellow singers to see a Carnegie Hall concert. My mother had other plans though, an ulterior motive for this Big Apple sojourn, and gave up Carnegie Hall for a chance to see a new young heart throb, a skinny crooner with dreamy blue eyes in one of his earliest performances … Frank Sinatra. It was 1942.

For nearly 60 years, old blues eyes — Frank Sinatra — was larger than life, a singer, movie star, and worldwide legend with 1300 songs to his credit. The Roxy Regional Theater captures a collection of the very best in their current production of My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra.

Even before the show began the mood was set with soft music from yesterday that hasn’t lost is charm — hummable, dance-able music that continues to endure. As the combo took their seats and began to play, as the singers stepped back in time, they carried their audience with them all the way. «Read the rest of this article»

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Citizen concerns, ideas and input “vital” to successful downtown redevelopment

February 15, 2008 |

Patsy Sharpe, a downtown property owner, submitted the following letter to Clarksville Online, with the following note: “The Leaf Chronicle is refusing to print letters to editor on the blight issue. They always give different reasons but none are truthfully a good one. I am sending my letter to [Clarksville Online] in hope that you will print what a biased newspaper like the Leaf, won’t. ” The following is Ms. Sharpe’s letter:

I would like to address the upcoming talks on the controversial Redevelopment Plan that blights the entire downtown. The idea of involving the residents and business owners in the affected area is, of course, the only right thing to do. They should have been notified from the beginning and one can only speculate as to why they were excluded, referring to the Emerald Hill and Dog Hill residents. The Brandon Hills and Red River residents were notified. If proper procedure is followed, there will be a series of meetings and discussions on how redevelopment should proceed and all should have a voice in the matter. For the record, we are not anti-redevelopment. We just want redevelopment that is fair and beneficial to the residents as well as to the city. «Read the rest of this article»

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Tennessee Trails: Volunteers clean trails, remove litter from walking trails

By Debbie Boen | February 15, 2008 |

Not far from Clarksville are walking trails in parks and at nearby Land Between the Lakes. A great way to walk them is with the Tennessee Trails Association.

This last weekend our local Tennessee Trails Association did a litter pickup and debris removal in Rotary Park and on a north-south trail at Land Between the Lakes (LBL). The group removed several bag fulls of trash and moved many wind blown tree limbs off the trail. They left tired, but with a feeling of pride in knowing that they had left the trails in better shape than they found it.

James Arthur Neblett participated in the litter pickup hike this year and last year. He said that it beat staying inside no matter what the weather was, and he is anxious to participate in this endeavor in the future.

One of the local Tennessee Trails members is J. R. Tate (at left). Among other trails, he has walked the Appalachian Trail four times. It took him six months each time. During his 2006 walk, we got a glimpse of his adventure through diary passages he sent to the Leaf Chronicle. When I asked him his secret to success he said, “Hiking is a matter of moving your right foot, then your left foot. Repeat until you get from where you started to where you end up”. He found that the mental part of hiking is a lot more important than the physical part. He kept himself going sometimes on the simple thought of a warm sleeping bag or a great meal ahead. «Read the rest of this article»

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Global Warming is everyone’s responsibility

By Beth Robinson | February 14, 2008 |

Unlike 1999, tornadoes spared Clarksville this time, but ripped through Tennessee and neighboring states on February 5th. In Madison, WI, where my sister lives, it snowed one foot in less than 24 hours. They’ve had over six feet of snow so far this season, so severe that she and others were told to leave work because snow came down so fast that the plows weren’t going out until it stopped. When it comes to climate change, we have our heads in the sand.

The cold and snow is also a symptom of global warming: more heat causes the air to hold more water vapor and more heat dries out some areas — then dumps snow/rain on others. The weird result is both floods and droughts — and snowstorms. The United States hasn’t yet recovered from Katrina, but the United States and the rest of the world will have many ‘Katrina-like’ storms if we don’t make huge changes now. I keep writing my senators and congress to pass sweeping legislation to lower carbon emissions (Kyoto). I wrote them recently to make investments in clean energy and ‘green’ rebates instead of the across-the-board tax cuts. «Read the rest of this article»

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Faces of the Montgomery County primary

February 13, 2008 |

We apologize that we are posting these so late, but here are the photographs we took during last week’s Presidential Preference Primary. Clarksville Online visited most of the Montgomery County Polling places, and these are representative images from that day.

On the Democratic side: Hillary Clinton took Tennessee with 54% of the vote, followed by Barack Obama with 41%. Even though he had already dropped out, John Edwards still took 4%.

On the Republican side: Mike Huckabee won with 34% of the vote, followed by John McCain with 32%. Mitt Romney garnered 24%, and Ron Paul, who has a vocal group of local followers, took 6%.

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Redevelopment firestorm still going strong

By David W. Shelton | February 13, 2008 |

Mayor Johnny Piper’s letter to affected residents attempts to ease concerns

The Clarksville Center Redevelopment Plan (CCRP) has been met with extreme opposition from residents in the affected area, who jokingly (or not) call their part of Clarksville “Blightville.” I’ve had the opportunity to attend a few of the meetings where the plan was discussed, and as a member of the Human Relations Commission, I’ve been on quite a few of the email lists where this topic has been the point of a lot of major contention. This has been so important that City Mayor Johnny Piper has distributed a letter to affected residents, which reads in part:

Recently, a group calling itself the Clarksville Property Rights Coalition has been distributing a flier that has false and misleading information about the redevelopment plan. I am particularly concerned with the allegation that the City desires to take property from business owners and residents and sell it to developers as part of eminent domain.

The flier states: “Your property can be condemned by a majority vote of the City Council and then resold to private developers.”

Please do not be frightened into believing what the Clarksville Property Rights Coalition is misrepresenting about the plan. The City of Clarksville has no intentions of taking your property. The redevelopment plan ordinance actually makes it harder for any government to exercise eminent domain. There are many layers of protection for property owners built into the ordinance that are not being revealed to you in these fliers distributed by the Clarksville Property Rights Coalition.

Note: the full text of the Mayor’s letter is provided at the end of this commentary.

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