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Robert Morgan interview airs Sunday on UNC-TV

Etowah Life

MOREHEADS LOOK BACK: Swift plunges into religious studies

It’s not often that Henderson County sends a Morehead scholar to UNC at Chapel Hill. It’s rarer still for the county to send two. Four years ago, Catherine Louise Swift, of West Henderson High School, and Andrew H. Wells Jr., of Hendersonville High School, each won the prestigious four-year scholarship, now called the Morehead-Cain. The award is a full scholarship covering all costs including housing and meals plus a summer enrichment program. Both Swift, the daughter of Rebekah Ellsworth, and Wells, the son of Dr. Andrew Wells and Katherine Wells, were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. The Lightning caught up with Swift and Wells after graduation to find out about their college experience and what they plan to do next. * * * * * Catherine Swift smiles easily when she talks about her experience as a Morehead-Cain scholar at UNC at Chapel Hill. You’d never know how much death is a part of her life.“My personal experience includes growing up in Elizabeth House,” she says. Instead of going home after school, she went to Four Seasons hospice’s end-of-life care facility, where her mother, Rebekah Ellsworth, was director.Catherine’s father, Tom Swift, suffered under the long and certain death sentence of ALS, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He died in January 2013, in Catherine’s freshman year at UNC.“Conversations (at home) were often about death in some way and I spent a lot of time in hospice facilities,” she says.Swift’s personal experience gave her an almost insatiable curiosity about how people respond to imminent death — both the dying and the loved ones — and how a third-party counselor can help ease that transition.Under a special program in UNC’s honors college, Swift designed and taught a course called Modern Perspectives on Death and Dying. In the two-hour class once a week, she led 12 students through the curriculum and guided class discussion in a study of “how different people look at death and dying in different ways,” she says. “There’s not a right way and a wrong way. I was hoping to get at some of those things you can’t get through textbooks. One thing I tried to do in the class was bring in their own ideas and their own questions.”The Morehead’s summer enrichment program starts with a challenging outdoor leadership experience and continues through fully funded experiences in public service, personal exploration and private enterprise.Swift’s Morehead summers took her to exotic places.The summer after her freshman year she flew to India to work in the city of Ahmedabad, an experience she recalls as the most meaningful of her four Morehead summers.“You actually did work that people want and need,” she says. “Everyone who works there has become part of this family. They start every single day with an all-religion prayer … in nine different religions or something like that.”If the leaders were spiritual, the work was practical.“They had a preschool,” she says. “They had boarding school for orphans. They feed tons of kids in the city. They had health programs, they had programs for the elderly.” * * * * * Her third and fourth Morehead summers each brought challenges.After her sophomore year, she signed on as an intern for Spirituality & Health magazine, which had editorial offices on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Two weeks before she left Chapel Hill, she got word that the magazine was scrapping its print version.“That was kind of weird walking into a company that was in the midst of shutting down,” she says. She still had a job, working for the online version. “It was interesting to see how things can shift.”The summer between her junior and senior years, she took an internship with a nonprofit in Ecuador. It was not as good an experience as India had been. She found the nonprofit organization to be dysfunctional.“It was kind of the opposite experience,” she says. “I learned how to trust my moral compass. I learned to deal with conflict… I worked really hard. I learned a lot of Spanish. So that was an interesting summer.” * * * * * Growing up, Swift attended Blue Ridge Christian Church and a United Methodist Church and sometimes attended St. James Episcopal with her father, who was an active member.At Carolina, her course of study presented itself naturally.“I just really fell in love with religion and studying religion and how people interpret religion in their personal lives,” she says. “I just loved every single class in religious studies. It combines anthropology and history and literature and the social sciences and psychology and brings them all together to try to understand this thing, religion, that touches every single person.”Four years of studying the religious imagination left her with an informed objectivity.“I can’t say that any religion is right,” she says. “I think they all have a lot of truth in them and they all have a lot of bad in them.”Asked what she’ll miss the most about UNC, she says her friends and professors.“Honestly, the best part of it was the people,” she says. “It’s an incredible family, incredible mentors…. The professors at UNC generally are just incredible and the religious studies department has some of the rock stars of religious scholarship worldwide.”Although she’s delaying graduate school for a year, she’s moving to Pittsburgh, where her married sister, Emma Swift Lee, lives.She plans to participate in a Clinical Pastoral Education program. Used primarily by seminary students, the program trains hospital and hospice chaplains in spiritual care of victims of trauma and their families and in end-of-life counseling and support. Swift plans to begin pursuing a masters degree in social work in the fall of 2017.   Read Story »

Hendersonville Life

MOREHEADS LOOK BACK: After UNC, Wells hits the trail

It’s not often that Henderson County sends a Morehead scholar to UNC at Chapel Hill. It’s rarer still for the county to send two. Four years ago, Catherine Louise Swift, of West Henderson High School, and Andrew H. Wells Jr., of Hendersonville High School, each won the prestigious four-year scholarship, now called the Morehead-Cain. The award is a full scholarship covering all costs including housing and meals plus a summer enrichment program. Both Swift, the daughter of Rebekah Ellsworth, and Wells, the son of Dr. Andrew Wells and Katherine Wells, were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. The Lightning caught up with Swift and Wells after graduation to find out about their college experience and what they plan to do next. * * * * * Andrew Wells, mock trial star, math whiz and varsity football player, would not ordinarily reside in the same sentence with the word lazy.But Wells does it himself.“Freshman fall,” he says, “is probably the best I will ever be at ping pong and the laziest I ever was as a student. I was taking 13 hours, four classes and L-fit (lifetime fitness).”He’s talking about what became a four-year blood rivalry with one of his best friends.“We played like an hour or two almost every weekday,” he says. His ping-pong rival, the son of medical doctors from Turkey who were pediatric specialists at UNC Hospitals, was from Chapel Hill.“That family sort of became our surrogate home base,” Wells says. “Every Sunday night for the last two years of college we would all go over there and watch ‘Game of Thrones’ together. He had read all the books and I had read all the books, and he had a giant TV with HBO.”Wells’ workload picked up when he chose economics as a major. He decided on the major because he enjoyed Econ 101.“And secondly I wanted to do it because it was only eight classes,” giving him flexibility to explore other subjects. “That actually turned out to be a much more important reason because after taking Econ 101 my enjoyment of the economics department deteriorated significantly.” * * * * * After his freshman year, Wells flew to London, where he and moved into Winston House, a UNC Honors College-owned home in the middle of London.“All the classes were centered around the experience of living in London,” he says. “That was the best part. I took a literature class that was called the Literature of London. The only books we read were based in London, so you could walk around the settings of the all the books.”He worked as an assistant to a liberal Democrat member of Parliament from Cornwall.“It convinced me that I had no interest in going into politics,” Wells says. After his sophomore year, Wells plunged into a job that was “the most formative experience of my college career in terms of what I’m interested in doing.”He worked for the criminal law internship program in Washington, D.C., a program where public defenders sent students out to “gather as much evidence as you can about these crimes that had just occurred.” Working as investigators for a public defender representing juveniles, Wells and his partner, a rising senior at Penn State, drove around poor neighborhoods tracking down defendants and witnesses and investigating cases.“I went from having to wear a suit and tie and walking into the House of Parliament to going into D.C. and being told how best to interact with people in Anacostia,” he says. * * * * * Back at school, Wells had joined the student attorney general’s staff. He worked his way up from managing associate to deputy attorney general on the honor court. His honor court work, counseling students on their cases and later working on the prosecution side, “was the thing that was the most constant outside of school,” he says.The summer after his junior year, he worked for Frontline Solutions, a nonprofit in Durham that works with teenagers in the African-American community.“Literally my first day of work was the shooting in Charleston,” he says. * * * * * His single best experience at Carolina came at the end, in dramatic fashion.On his very first day at Carolina, Wells met the seven guys who would become his best friends. By junior year, they all rented a house together off Cameron Avenue. Senior year, about February, as the Tar Heels were starting to gel into a contender, the housemates rolled the dice and bought plane tickets for the Final Four in Houston.“However it happened, it actually worked out,” he says. “We got to go. We ended up being in the front row of the student section. We were all together.”With 4.7 seconds left in the game, Marcus Paige hits the miracle shot to tie the score. Pandemonium. It looks like overtime for sure and every Carolina fan on the planet has no doubt the Tar Heels will win in the extra period. There’s a TV timeout. Every seat came with an orange seat cushion. In the delirium someone flings a cushion high into the air.“The entire stadium just took their seat cushions and started throwing them,” Wells says “Orange disks are flying everywhere. People are hugging each other, people are crying. It was the most jubilant sports experience I’ve ever had, made that much more poignant that it didn’t last. Never going to forget that.” (Three seconds later, Villanova’s Kris Dunn ruined the moment for Carolina fans.) * * * * * Wells’ post-graduation plan had its seed in his first Morehead summer experience, in the National Outdoor Leadership School in northern Wyoming.“It was a perspective-expanding experience,” he says, “understanding that I can do this, understanding that there are lots of things I really didn’t think I could do or would enjoy doing.”Three years later, the seed sprouted in “a casual conversation” with a housemate, a close friend from New Hampshire named Ian Gallager.“I say, ‘Ian, got a crazy idea for you. Wanna hike the Appalachian Trail after we graduate?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, yeah I do.’ Now it’s coming in much sharper focus.”(Wells and Gallager left on June 20 from Maine. Hiking southbound, they plan to finish by Thanksgiving.)Wells took the Law School Admission Test in early June, and he plans to enroll in law school in the fall of 2017. Wells’s father, Andrew, is a radiologist, and his mother, Kathryn, is a lawyer. When he’s asked how he tilted toward the law over medicine, the son chuckles.“The first inclination that I wanted to go to law school was I believe when I was 11,” he says. “Me and my sisters had just finished a particularly enthusiastic argument, and my mom sat us all down and she says, ‘I have faith in all of you. You can do whatever you want but just please don’t go to law school.’ And my 11-year-old mind says, ‘Yep. Guess that’s what I’m doing.’”He cites his mock trial experience under Jerry Smith at Hendersonville High School, too, and his work on the UNC honor court and his Morehead summer experiences. Those things “created a path that looks far more structured than when I was on it,” he says.   Read Story »

Hendersonville Life

Two men, four wings and a dream

Landing back home in Hendersonville after a round trip to the Pacific Ocean, vintage airplane pilot Ken Stubbs summed his trip with his good friend and copilot, Dennis Dunlap.   Read Story »

Flat Rock Life

Camps, Playhouse wary of HB2 effect

While the 2016 summer camp season is shaping up as a good one, some camp owners have concerns that HB2 over the long run could cut camp attendance.   Read Story »

Hendersonville Life

Bicycle enthusiasts weigh in on greenway plan

Bicycle evangelists like Joe Sanders invariably peddle a famous study that categorized the universe of bicycle riders or potential riders. Less than 1 percent are the fearless “spandex warriors," about 7 percent are confident and enthusiastic and a third are “no way no how.” The vast majority — 60 percent — are "interested but concerned" about safety.   Read Story »

Hendersonville Life

LIGHTNING PHOTOS: Meet all 21 Bearfootin' Bears

The 2016 cast of Bearfootin' Bears made their public debut on Friday. Here are all 21 bears, their sponsors, artists and beneficiaries.   Read Story »

Hendersonville Life

Bearfootin' bears debut

The Bearfootin’ Bears of 2016 made their debut Friday afternoon as an overflow crowd chuckled at and clapped for downtown’s best loved public art.   Read Story »

Henderson County Life

Lazy River Outfitters to offer French Broad floats

HORSE SHOE — Matt Evans thinks river tourism is on the rise in Henderson County. By summertime he will have the only Henderson County-based canoe and kayaking business to take advantage of it.   Read Story »

Henderson County Life

WEEKEND TIPOFF: Guitarists, 'On the Verge,' May Day concert

Guitar virtuoso opens Magnolia series The 2016 Magnolia Concert Series presented by Morris Broadband kicks off with international guitar virtuoso Hiroya Tsukamoto on the stage at Flat Rock Cinema. The live concert, produced by Howard Molton, will be at 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 1, followed by a meet and greet with the audience members. Tsukamoto is a one-of-a-kind composer, guitarist and singer-songwriter from Kyoto, Japan. He played to a soldout crowd at last year’s Magnolia Concert Series and people were turned away at the door.The concert series is also sponsored in part by Carolina Investment Brokers, Hampton Inn of Hendersonville and WTZQ-FM95.3 and AM1600. Tickets are $20 plus tax. For information visit www.MagnoliaConcertSeries.com or call (828) 697-2463. Guitar concert benefits the arts Guitarist Marc Yaxley will perform in concert at Cummings Memorial United Methodist Church in Etowah on Sunday, May 1, at 3 p.m. The performance is a benefit concert for the Arts Council of Henderson County. Yaxley has recorded six CDs and performed at the Grove Park Inn Jazz Festival. For more information contact the Arts Council at acofhc@bellsouth.net or call 828-693-8504. ‘On the Verge’ opens at Community Theatre Hendersonville Community Theatre continues its 50th season with Eric Overmyer’s comedy ‘On the Verge’ opening Friday and playing through May 8 at the theater on Washington Street.Al Edick directs the tale of three Victorian females who begin their journey in 1888 and continue their travels through different times and places. The cast features Veronica Brown, Sally Burnett and Lynn Place with Sam Teague appearing as eight different beings that they encounter throughout their journey.Performances are 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $22 for adults, $18 for students and $12 for students under 18 and may be purchased on line or by calling the Hendersonville Community Theatre box office at 828-692-1082. Brevard Music Center, HSO playing free concert Brevard Music Center, in partnership with Brevard College, the Osher Lifelong Learning Center in Asheville and Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra, will play a free concert on Tuesday, May 3, at 12:30 p.m. at First United Methodist Church.The program will include Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op, 11, No. 4, Nicolai Kapustin’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 69 and Eduard Putz’s Blues for Benni for Viola and Piano. Community Orchestra performs May Day concert The Community Orchestra of Hendersonville will perform a one-hour May Day Concert at 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 1, at Trinity Presbyterian Church, 900 Blythe Street.The concert includes works by Frescobaldi, Boyce, Tchaikovsky, Grieg and more. Soprano Katie Cilluffo, guest soloist, will sing Mozart’s ‘Alleluia’ and Puccini’s ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ from Gianni Schichi. Ms. Cilluffo studied music at the Interlochen Arts Academy, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan.The May Day concert is free. A love offering will be taken to benefit the non-profit Hendersonville Community Music Center, which provides affordable music lessons for all ages, toddlers to seniors. For class and scholarship information, contact Hendersonville Community Music Center Director Andrew Hiler at andrewhiler76@gmail.com. For more information, call 828-692-6114.   Read Story »

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