Category: Main Stories

By Zane Turner | Living 50 Plus Impersonation scams and other types of fraud targeting older residents have become a problem, Decatur police say, and one scheme cost a local senior $150,000. Michael Ferguson has been a detective in the Decatur Police Department’s financial crimes unit for six years and said he sees people lose money from scams “more often than

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By Deborah Storey  | Living 50 Plus Earnest Lee of Morgan County enjoys participating in a few — well, really most — of the activities in the Masters Games of Alabama, a sports competition for seniors.   “I play dominoes. I play checkers. I play three-on-three basketball when they have it. Sometimes I can’t find a team to play on,” said

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By Catherine Godbey | Living 50 Plus Two months before Susan Thompson retired as the drama teacher at Austin High School in 2017, she began making plans for a project to fill her time. She called her good friend and fellow theater lover Deanna Knox. “I answered the phone and Susan said, ‘Hey, do you want to restart Dream Weavers

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By Catherine Godbey | Living 50 Plus In 1980, wooden bird sculptures at Calhoun Community College’s Wildfowl Festival captivated the imagination of a then 20-year-old Danny Rodgers. “They were amazing. I thought one done by Dirk Sibrans (of Decatur) was a stuffed bird. I came home and that’s all I could talk about,” Rodgers said. That Christmas, Rodgers’ older sister,

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By Deborah Storey | Living 50 Plus Stay active. Make new friends. Inspire young people. Stay sharp. For seniors and retirees, these are great reasons to volunteer. Another is that volunteering in the community just makes people feel good about themselves. Lacy Slaten, volunteer coordinator at the Cook Museum of Natural Science in Decatur, said the museum has roughly 100

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By Catherine Godbey | Living 50 Plus Stories of a church founded by slaves, a bank that served as a hospital during the Civil War and a riverboat captain and his girlfriend, a brothel madam, await participants in Decatur’s self-guided walking tours. With flat streets and at a pace set by each participant, the self-guided walking tours offer seniors an

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By Deborah Storey | Living 50 Plus Laura Stewart once landed her hot-air balloon in a field of cows that rambled over to investigate the stranger from the skies. They “thought we might have food,” Stewart recalled. That’s the thing about piloting a hot-air balloon — you never know exactly where you’ll end up. As the wizard famously said in

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