Buddy Wayne Butler celebrates 80th
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Buddy Wayne Butler celebrates 80th

At a small dinner party Dec. 28 at the Red Pirate Family Grill & Oyster Bar in Eastpoint, the family of Apalachicola’s Buddy Wayne Butler celebrated his 80th birthday. Atop the cake was emblazoned a photo of Buddy Wayne and his late wife Carolyn, working together in Apalachicola Bay on the oyster boat that they…

Dear Hero: Schoolkids pen Christmas letters to soldiers
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Dear Hero: Schoolkids pen Christmas letters to soldiers

For many years, the Times and the Star have run Letters to Santa from school children, affording readers an opportunity to peer into the hearts of the minds of youngsters during the Christmas season. This year, we are again offering them to readers, but with a twist on the tradition. The idea comes from a…

Christmas cookie crumbles
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Christmas cookie crumbles

Forget your fruit cake and your figgy pudding. If there’s one sweet delight that best symbolizes Christmas, it’s a cookie, and area school kids, from Wewahitchka to Apalachicola and parts in between, got in the spirit of cookie decorating last week. In Apalachicola, it was a chance for Head Start kids and pre-kindergarteners from the…

A day to celebrate service to country
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A day to celebrate service to country

In three separate ceremonies over two days, the county paid tribute to its veterans. The first Veterans Day program was at the First Baptist Christian School on Friday morning, in the church sanctuary where the students there presented a traditional program of songs and readings, blending historical passages like the Gettysburg Address, the preamble to…

Trinity ordains its new priest
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Trinity ordains its new priest

From the very last pew of the overflowing sanctuary, Dot Hill raised her hand softly when the question was asked if any congregants had been present the last time Apalachicola’s Trinity Episcopal Church ordained a priest.  That ordination, in the 1838 sanctuary of what is now the second oldest continuously serving church in Florida, had…

Secret compartments inside of ourselves
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Secret compartments inside of ourselves

Aboard my boat “Lily,” we take folks on eco-tours up the Apalachicola River into the pristine 246,000-acre  estuarine reserve on average of some 125 times a year. We’ve operated for 13 years. My license allows us to take six folks so let’s say we average three folks per cruise. If you multiply that out, that’s…

Reenvisioning the sacred
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Reenvisioning the sacred

It’s been a labor of love, an act of providence, a modernizing and an upgrading, and at a festive celebration Sunday, attended by the bishop, St. Patrick Catholic Church put a giant exclamation point to the nearly two-year-old effort. “It’s beautiful,” said Bishop William Wack, who oversees the Catholic Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, as he enjoyed…