Calhoun’s Dancing with the Stars 2021: Abby Crowe and Ben Bingham
♦ An 82-year-old aims to be one of the oldest to through-hike the Appalachian Trial.
United Way of Gordon County Executive Director Jennifer Latour has announced the final presentation of Calhoun’s Dancing with the Stars.
The record-setting fundraiser will close with an April 16 finale presented at the Calhoun Performing Arts Center. It will feature a combination of adult and student dance teams and be presented by three premier sponsors: Mohawk Industries, CalhounGordon Community Foundation, and Morning Pointe of Calhoun.
“I have had the pleasure of working with the Dancing with the Stars Committee to help execute one show and plan two others since I joined United Way,” said Latour. “The tenth year of Dancing with the Stars is a blend of everything accomplished in the past decade,” she continued. “This may be our last dance, but the future is bright indeed!”
Latour went on to thank the DWTS Planning Committee-Andy Baxter, Kristy Brown, Jennie Coker, Bekah Kirby, Amy Parker, and Michelle Frix Ward—for their hard work over the years. She also thanked all the sponsors, especially Mohawk Industries, which has been the premier sponsor all along and has been joined by two others this year.
“Mohawk has been proud to serve as the title sponsor of Dancing with the Stars since the event’s inception,” said Robert Webb, Senior Director of Public Affairs and Corporate Communications with Mohawk Industries. “For a decade, the dancers have entertained audiences and raised over a million dollars to support the important work of United Way’s partner agencies. We salute all the individuals who have shared their talents to make this such a successful fundraising event year after year.”
The finale will include several special features, but the dancers will be the stars of the show. The ten teams, listed alphabetically by the female partner’s first name, are Abby Crowe and Ben Bingham; Aubry Dorsey and Isaac Nance; Carly Curtisand Skylar Benham; Carson Glaze and Grant Glaze; Joy Nudd and Garrett Nudd; Kaylan Gaines and Addison Baker; Lily Stephens and Nate Stockman; Megan Wright and Christian Lewis; Raven Pasley and Ian King; and Suzanne Roberts with Tony Pyle.
Abby Crowe and Ben Bingham will dance first. Abby is the daughter of Ben Crowe and Nichole Hawthorne. Her stepmothers are Lisa Hawthorne and Susan Crowe.
A student at Calhoun High School, she is President of the Musical Theatre Program. She is also a member of the Calhoun High School Dive Team. Abby works at SMA Athletics, where she teaches toddlers gymnastics. She is an AP Scholar with Distinction and has earned Distinguished Academic Achievement status as one of the top five in her class. She plans to attend the University of Georgia.
She attends North Pointe Baptist Church in Adairsville. Abby is a former CalhounGordon County Junior Mayor, having held the position in 2019. She is an animal lover and currently has three dogs, three cats, and a bunny running around her house.
Benjamin (Ben) Bingham will dance with Abby Crowe. Ben is the son of Doug and Shay Bingham. He is a student at Calhoun High School and plans to attend Harding University. Ben has participated in Drama and Chorus all four years of his high school career. He also has been involved with Band and Literary. Ben has been a One Act State Champion, a two-time One-Act Region Champion, and won Opening Number Top Four at the Thespian Conference.
He is actively involved in mission work, youth group and benevolence programs at Central Church of Christ in Dalton, Georgia. He is a big Denver Broncos Fan and knows NFL stats and history like the back of his hand. He is proud to share that he was born and spent the first half of his life in Alabama. He is also a huge fan of Disney’s CARS movie and has an Instagram CARS account with over 6,000 likes.
First and second-place winners will be identified in two categories-Judges’ Choice and People’s Choicefor both the student and adult teams. People’s Choice winners are determined based on their fundraising successes. Judges’ Choice winners are determined based on the scores the contest judges give their dance performances. The adult teams winning in those categories will receive trophies and bragging rights. The student teams winning in those categories will receive trophies, bragging rights, and college scholarships. Each student on the first-place team in each category will receive a $1,000 scholarship and each student on the second-place team will receive a $750 scholarship. A panel of judges will be assembled from field professionals outside Gordon County.
Tickets will go on sale to the public on Saturday, March 27. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, tickets will be sold on a first-come-first-serve basis. Sponsorships remain available for individuals or corporations wishing to support the fundraiser.
Those arrangements may be made by contacting the United Way office at 706-6025548, or online at https:// www.gordoncountyunitedway.org.
March
The Rome Chapter of The Compassionate Friends will meet Thursday at 7 p.m. at Life Church, 19 John Davenport Drive in Rome. This is a support group for those who have lost their child, grandchild or sibling. For more information contact Sandra 706506-6108 or DeeAnn 706936-9021.
Fellowship Baptist Church of Plainville will host a singing Friday, with doors opening at 5:30 and singing starting at 7 p.m. Greater Vision will be the guest singers and a lover offering will be taken. Everyone is invited.
Velo Vineyard will host a Sip and Snack Saturday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The cost is $40 and includes a 16 by 20 Canvas, juice or tea and brunch bites. Extra sips can be purchased. Contact @whitney_paradis to reserve a spot.
AdventHealth Gordon is hosting a diabetes education class on Tuesday, March 16, from 9 a.m. to noon in Conference Room A. Designed to provide information and education to those diagnosed with diabetes, participants will learn about diabetes management, exercise, long-term complication prevention, medications, diet, problemsolving, coping and more. Free glucose meters, diabetic-friendly foods and other free samples will be available. Classes will be limited to 6 participants and a guest. Masks are required to be worn while on campus of AdventHealth Gordon. For more information or to RSVP, please call 706-602-7800 ext. 2310.
The second annual Calhoun Recreation Department Miracle Run will take place Saturday, March 20, at 10 a.m. starting at the Black and Yellow Park playground pavilion. Registration is $20 and includes a T-shirt. The event benefits the Winner’s Club and Camp New Adventure. For more information call 706-629-0177.
Gordon Central High School Baseball is hosting a golf tournament Wednesday, March 31, at Fields Ferry, 581 Fields Ferry Drive. Lunch will be served at 11 a.m. with the four person scramble beginning at noon in a shotgun start. Cost is $100 per person.
Ongoing
The Gordon County Young Farmers will be having a Vidalia onion sale with orders through May 1 with pickup the first week of May (date TBD) at the Gordon County Agriculture Pavilion. For more information call or text Annemarie Carr at 706-519-3619 or by email at acarr@gcbe.org.
Tallatoona Community Action Partnership Inc. is hosting “Pathway to Empowerment,” a program that provides services and supports individuals and their families who are committed to changing their lives. Families can receive training and guidance regarding career pathways, education, financial literacy, job training and life skills development. The CAP program is by appointment only. Contact the Gordon County location at 770-817-4666 for additional information.
I’ve written to you before about the story of the goose and the golden egg. Just to remind you, it’s about a poor farmer who discovered he had a goose that would lay a solid gold egg each day. The farmer would sell that egg and then live lavishly off the proceeds.
Eventually, he became impatient with receiving only an egg a day and decided to lop of the goose’s head and retrieve all the eggs out of the goose at once. But when he did, he found there were no more eggs inside. And his daily income stopped because he killed the goose that produced the golden egg.
That story, like most of Aesop’s fables, has a great moral that can be applied to many different scenarios. For real estate investors, I submit to you that your rental properties are your golden geese. That’s because they produce monthly income for you as long as you take care of them. But if you kill them — i.e. sell them — the monthly income stops just like when the farmer killed the goose.
That being said, the current housing market has a lot of people questioning if they should keep their preverbal golden goose or kill it.
Take the conversation I had the other day with an investor pondering that question: He had a rental, on which the mortgage had just recently been paid off. It went vacant and once they inspected the property, they realized they were going to have to do a $20,000 rehab to get it rent ready.
Looking at comparable sales in the area, the investor deduced that the house would resale for $140,000 if it were all fixed up. But it would take $40,000 to get the house in good enough condition to sale for that price.
As we were talking, he wondered what he should do. I suggested we break down the numbers and see what made sense.
The first thing we needed to know was the houses cash flow. He said that since the house was paid for that after all expenses it would produce a positive cash flow of $650 a month.
That is a healthy cash flow.
So, if he got it rent ready for $20,000, and received $650 a month, he would recoup all of his rehab cost in just over 2 1/2 years. After that, the cash flow would be pure profit.
If he sold the place, he thinks he would pocket $86,000 after all closing costs and rehab expenses. I asked him if that was before or after taxes. He said it was before, but that he had called his accountant and she said after paying long term capital gains, he should still have $73,000.
I then asked him how long it would take for him to receive that same amount in rental cash flow. He took the $650 a month and divided it into the $73k and came up with 9 1/3 years. Then, he remembered that he had to add the time needed to recoup the $20,000 in rehab costs and added that 2.5 years to the timeframe.
He said, “It will take me nearly 12 years of uninterrupted cash flow to equal what I can make off this property if I sell it. Twelve years of no vacancy and no big repairs is a long time. I have to admit, even though I want paid-for rental property, I’m having a hard time not killing this goose.”
Looking at it from that standpoint, I could understand why.
But I asked him what he planned to do with the money if he sold. He said he would pay off two other rental mortgages, which would increase his cash flow by $1,500 a month. At that cash flow, he would make the $73k in only four years.
Where this investor differs from the farmer with the golden goose is that he has a flock of golden geese, not just one like the farmer. So, his income won’t stop when he kills this goose. It will actually be multiplied.
I understand the quandary here. He doesn’t want to give up a paid-for rental, but the gain here is almost too good to pass up. And I’m sure there are many of you pondering the same thing. So, look at the numbers from this standpoint, taking time into consideration, and let me know which way you go. I’d be interested to see if it makes more sense for you to keep it or kill it.
Meredith “Sunny” Eberhart is looking to walk his way into history.
Eberhart, 82, is seeking to become one of the oldest persons to through-hike the Appalachian Trail and he’s taking the extra mile by starting at Flagg Mountain in Alabama, the southern terminus of the Pinhoti Trail, which links to the Appalachian Trail in North Georgia.
Dale Sanders, another 82year old, did the entire Appalachian Trail in sections in 2017. He started in Georgia, went to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, then was transported to Maine and completed the journey by walking back south to Harpers Ferry.
Eberhart is known to his hiking comrades as the Nimblewill Nomad, as well as Sunny.
He’s already completed the Triple Crown of long-distance hikes: the 2,200 mile Appalachian Trail, in 1998; the 2,650mile Pacific Crest Trail, in 2008; and the 3,028-mile Continental Divide Trail, twice, in 2005 and 2007.
He said achieving the Triple Crown was the greatest accomplishment in his life.
More recently, he finished a concrete and asphalt walk along Route 66, from the Loop in downtown Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles — some 2,300 miles.
“I can’t think of a better way
(to see America),” Eberhart said. “If you really want to see what this country is, what it has to offer, and have a really deep appreciation for it, you’ve got to get out of the car and walk.”
He said the Continental Divide Trail was probably the toughest. Not so much because a lot of it is above 10,000 feet in elevation, but because it was so poorly marked.
“I was 17 miles off trail at one time,” he said. “If you want to see what kind of a cut you’re made of and what sort of person you are, that would be the Continental Divide Trail.”
He calls the Appalachian Trail a social journey, and said the Pacific Crest Trail is rapidly becoming that way.
Before he took up hiking he practiced optometry, but he’s
been an outdoorsman all of his life. He compares his childhood to the life of Huck Finn.
Eberhart hasn’t done a serious wilderness hike, up and down the mountains, in the last three years but he has been been banging out 16- and 18mile days in the weeks since this hike started on Feb. 5.
“My legs have come back under me pretty well,” he said while starting a day and a half of rest at the Hearn Inn in Cave Spring on Monday. Adding the Pinhoti Trail and a short section of the Benton MacKaye Trail to the AT will extend the trip to Maine by some 420 miles.
“There is a physical challenge, of course, but that gets easier as you hike,” Eberhart said. “But the mental challenge gets more difficult to deal with.”
Snakes and bears bother him a little — but when he gets closer to the northern end of the AT, the black flies become a real problem.
“I’ve had blood running down and dripping off my elbows from the black flies chewing on me,” he said.
He’ll leave Cave Spring after a couple of nights. The goal is to reach Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail in Maine’s Baxter State Park, by the second week of September.
Asked how long he could continue his long-distance hikes, Eberhart fired back with a question of his own.
“Do you know somebody 100 that’s still hiking?” he asked. “If you don’t, I’m going to work on being the one you find out can do it.”