Twelve names went up on a graduation list in Murfreesboro this week. A hundred thousand dollars went to help build homes for wounded veterans. And a man who spent his career animating snowmen and princesses for Disney built something new: a free app to teach people how to sign. None of these stories need much dressing up. They just need telling.
Twelve Murfreesboro Firefighters Earn Their Smoke Diver Badges
Smoke Diver Class #013 graduated this week from Murfreesboro Fire Rescue Department, twelve firefighters who spent four days in some of the hardest training the department offers.
The course puts firefighters through high-stress scenarios in full protective gear, breathing on limited air supply, while they’re tested on endurance, problem-solving and their ability to work as a team when conditions turn extreme. It’s built to simulate what a structure fire actually demands: no clear sightlines, a clock running out on your air tank, and people counting on you to know what to do next.
The twelve who finished are Gregory Andrews, Joshua Burns, Christian Denton, Riley Fuson, Austin Hawk, Jordan Jackson, Paul Lankford, Alex Ogaz, Luke Scheffler, Kemonta Smith, Jaycee Walker and Sladen Wilson.
MFRD congratulated the group for their determination and professionalism, and credited the instructors, medical staff and support personnel who ran the four days without incident. It’s the kind of training nobody hears about until the night it matters — which is exactly the point.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
A Nashville-Area Diner Turns Its Front Porch Into a Tribute to Veterans
The Cracker Barrel at 100 Herschel Drive in Mount Juliet is one of only ten stores nationwide hosting Rockers Across America this month, and the four rocking chairs on its porch aren’t just furniture anymore.
Each chair’s headrest carries original artwork from one of two painters, Victoria Barnhill of Atlanta and Emma Gilbert of Birmingham, and each design is tied to a real story. One chair, “The Aviator,” honors Glenn Carr, a 91-year-old Army veteran and longtime regular at a Cracker Barrel in Braselton, Georgia, painted with an eagle and Army aircraft over American landscapes. Another, “Serving Others,” honors Mike Madden, a former Marine who has spent sixteen years as a Cracker Barrel district manager — one chair holding both halves of a life, the uniform and the apron.
Barnhill painted “The Guardians” thinking of her own husband and other veterans she knows, oak trees and yellow ribbons standing in for the families who wait for someone to come home. Gilbert’s “Grandma’s Cookin'” draws on her cousin’s service and her own family’s history around a kitchen table.
Alongside the display, Cracker Barrel marked Veterans Day on November 11 by giving veterans and active-duty service members a free breakfast, continuing a tradition the company has kept for years. And the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Foundation, together with Cracker Barrel itself, donated $100,000 to the Gary Sinise Foundation’s program that builds custom homes for severely wounded veterans — the kind of gift that doesn’t make headlines so much as it makes a house someone can actually live in.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
A Disney Animator Built a Free App to Teach Sign Language
Josh Staub has animated some of the biggest films of the last two decades — Wreck-It Ralph, Tangled, Frozen. A few years ago he started sketching out an original animated series, Small Talk, about family and the ways people communicate — and realized the family at its center needed to include deaf characters.
Staub, who is hearing, didn’t want to just translate a script into American Sign Language. He started learning ASL from a Deaf teacher, which he says is simply the best way to learn, and the friendships he built along the way turned into real collaborators on the series. “I began learning about Deaf culture and fell in love with the Deaf community, forging deep friendships,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Along the way, he leaned on ASL apps to supplement his lessons and kept running into the same problem: most used static photos or short, flat video loops of someone signing with little expression. So he built his own, centered on an animated character named Oscar, who Staub describes less as a teacher than a friend. Users can rotate Oscar to see his hands from any angle, slow down or speed up his signing, and watch his facial expressions — which, in ASL, carry real grammatical weight.
“Deaf folks in general are extremely outgoing and ‘animated’ when they communicate, so why not express that in the character?” Staub said. He’s been clear about one thing above all: the app is a supplement, not a replacement for learning from a Deaf teacher — and he’s committed to keeping it free.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
Three different kinds of work this week, and the same thread running under all of them: people showing up for others in ways that take real effort and don’t ask for much credit. A firefighter training on limited air, a painter listening to a 91-year-old veteran’s story before picking up a brush, an animator sitting down to actually learn a language instead of guessing at it. If something is going right in your corner of the Boro, we’d like to hear about it.