A.R. Perry Inc. Named Chamber’s 2023 Small Business Of The Year

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Over its more than 100 years, A.R. Perry, Inc. has provided vital services to the community and its residents. First established to repair Corbitt buggies and farm equipment, it went through a period that handled scrap metal and more before evolving into a glass repair and replacement service.

Of the many employees that have worked at Perry Glass (as many locals know it), owner Richard Davis said there have been 8 sets of brothers, 4 sets of sisters, 5 sets of fathers and sons, 3 sets of mothers and daughters, 3 sets of mothers and sons, and 2 sets of fathers, sons and daughters.

Gives new meaning to a family-operated business, doesn’t it?

But since Davis’s grandfather, A.R. Perry, first set up shop in Henderson, there have only been 2 married couples who have worked together. One of those couples is Richard and Mariana Davis.

They joined other Chamber of Commerce members and board representatives at a luncheon, during which A.R. Perry Inc. was named 2023 Small Business of the Year.

Chamber Board Chair Margier White introduced the winner, calling it a company that provides “top-notch glass products and installation,” as well as commercial oxygen for welding.

Perry and his brother-in-law were the only employees when they launched their business, but the company creates lasting personal relationships with its customers in the local area and beyond to keep the company vibrant.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Perry Glass installed countless plexiglass and glass protection barriers throughout the community – often free or at-cost. And it’s not unusual for Davis himself to answer “glass emergencies” nights and weekends.

The company volunteers throughout the community to provide their professional services to make repairs or to donate to local events. The Davises are very involved in various aspects of their church, The Church of the Holy Innocents and are instrumental in the upkeep and preservation of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Williamsboro.

In remarks at the awards ceremony, Davis said it’s an “extreme honor” to be recognized as the Small Business of the Year.

It hasn’t always been easy, he said. In fact, it has taken lots of work to stay viable. “There are some tough days – years – in a business like this,” he said.

“I’m here because all of you are here,” Davis said. He recalled the heyday in Henderson – when like textile mills and Rose’s Stores kept smaller companies like Perry Glass busy. “They fed us business – from all over the state and all over the Southeast…that’s what Henderson people did – they took care of their own,” he said of those big corporations that called Henderson home.

Today, you’ll find A.R. Perry in the Mobile community of Henderson. But when it was in the scrap metal business, there also was some property on Ruin Creek Road, Davis said.

In those days, there were no fences to keep people out – or inventory in, he said. “People would come in and get pieces of iron, pieces of cars,” and then bring them back to Davis’s Uncle Vernon.

He knew where the scrap had come from, Davis said. But, “he’d always buy it back from them.”

TownTalk: Beard Discusses Rural Health Care

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Maria Parham Health CEO Bert Beard said the state of health care in this area is in a pretty good spot these days. That doesn’t mean that rural hospitals like Maria Parham don’t continue to face challenges, but Beard said hospitals in other markets are facing some of the same things.

Beard was a guest on Thursday’s TownTalk to discuss some of the trends that he’s seeing from his vantage point.

Medicaid expansion, he said, is allowing more uninsured or under-insured residents access to health care. The number of new enrollees is about half a million, approaching the prediction of about 600,000 in North Carolina.

“We’re lagging a bit in Vance County,” he said, but health care professionals at MPH as well as Granville Vance Public Health and others are always looking for new enrollees.

With rising costs and the constant demand to find qualified health care employees, Beard said the Medicaid expansion “has given us a lifeline that we desperately needed.”

Beard said he and his colleagues knew hospitals were headed down a path to a health care provider shortage, but the COVID-19 pandemic hastened that process. Without adequate staff, some small hospitals simply couldn’t afford to keep the doors open, which only brings more challenges to the rural areas they serve.

“Services are going away that are vital,” he said. One of those is maternal services. It’s critical that expectant moms be within, say, an hour of a hospital that provides those services, for the safety of the mom and the child.

When he spoke at the April 23 “state of health care” forum sponsored by the Henderson-Vance County Chamber of Commerce, Beard said top on people’s minds was the mental health crisis that is so often in the news.

He looks forward to the Emergency Department’s Safe Space project that has received funding and said it will transform how patients in crisis can be managed when they come through the Emergency Department.

Mental health issues are multi-dimensional and under-resourced, Beard said, noting that psychological issues are often entangled in social issues and substance abuse, which exacerbate the problem.

“We’ve got to be more deliberate in how we invest in that,” he said. Public-private partnerships like MPH behavioral health services in Louisburg is something that Beard said he is quite proud of.

Whether through collaboration or providing quality health care by Duke physicians and others, Maria Parham is poised to keep patients across the region it serves top of mind when it comes to community care.

It must be a mutually supportive relationship, however, Beard said. When you seek care, seek local care first.

“It’s more important than ever,” he said, that “when people have good available local health care, that they choose it – the alternative is that health care goes away if it’s not supported locally.”

“We’re working every day to get better every day. That comes with a mutually supportive relationship with our community.”

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Perry Memorial Library

The Local Skinny! Events At Perry Library

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Make plans now to take part in the Summer Reading Program kickoff at Perry Memorial Library – summer sounds far away, but it’ll be here before you know it! And Melody Peters and others at the library are ready to help readers young and not-so young find time to dive into a good book.

The reading program, “Adventure Begins at Your Library,” kicks off Tuesday, June 18 from 4 to 6pm. and there’s something for all ages, Peters said on Tuesday’s The Local Skinny!

There will be reading logs available to help readers keep track and earn badges and prizes for different levels of achievement throughout the summer, Peters said. But it’s not just for how many pages you can read, she added. “’We’ve gotten really creative…to keep everyone engaged over the summer and avoid the Summer Slide.”

Added bonus to the kickoff event: The first 200 people to show up get a Pelican Snoball free!

If recent program successes are any indication, the summer program will be another one “for the books” – pun intended.

The most popular program from last year involved some visitors from the Vance County Animal Shelter and Peters said she’s happy to report that some furry friends will return to the library on Tuesday, June 25 for a special program.

In advance of this visit, the library has placed a donation bin to collect items for the shelter animals. Food, toys, bedding, kitty litter – whatever you’d like to bring, the shelter will appreciate, Peters said. “We hope we can hand them what we’ve collected that day,” she said.

Another successful event was the tea party and book sale, which  drew 60 people to the library – on a Sunday, Peters said. “Everybody was blown away,” she said. The Friends of the Library sold some books, too. Peters said she plans to make this an annual event, thanks to the positive response.

She’s heard from some library patrons that sometimes it’s just too tough to get to programs during the week, so the library is going to roll out a Family Story Time in the summer for those families who go in many different directions in the course of a normal weekday.

She’s planning to have one in June and one in July on a Sunday at 3:30 p.m. – that way, it will be after church and lunch and before dinner and getting ready for the work week again.

“We’re trying it out and we’ll see how it goes,” Peters said.

Visit https://www.perrylibrary.org/ to learn about the different programs and activities offered at the library.

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Life Safety Aspect Results in City Shutting Down Hotel

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City, county and state leaders determined Monday that power to Hotel 121 on Parham Road will be cut no later than 4 p.m. Tuesday in response to various public health and structural safety issues, displacing 40 families including 70 children and 58 adults, which has set off a groundswell of support for both short-term needs and sheltering as well as efforts to overcome what will be a months-long housing issue.

The Henderson City Council held a special called meeting Monday at 10 a.m., and before going into closed session, it became clear that issues with the hotel facility including zoning violations, lack of extended stay permits and code violations had left the City of Henderson feeling it had few options but to step in.

At the time of the 10 a.m. meeting, Mayor Melissa Elliott said the families were packing what they could and that multiple levels of government, including Vance County in particular, were working to open a shelter in the gym at what is known as the former “Eaton Johnson Middle School.”

City Manager Terrell Blackmon said, “The way we are mobilizing by getting them out of a bad health and safety situation was our first priority.”

Elliott said, “You know we are a resilient community that’s working together and that’s what’s happening right now.”

Councilperson Lamont Noel asked about how the families are taking this, and the mayor said, “The families are in crisis.” Elliott said she appeared before some of the residents to let them know the city didn’t want to kick them out but wanted them to be safe. She said she went to let people know the board, or council, cared about them.

The mayor said 80 percent of the folks moving have jobs but can’t get ahead because they are paying rent on a daily basis. “They are paying $2,000 a month,” she said, “to stay in a hotel.”

The county, the schools, a group of local pastors, Franklin-Granville-Vance Partnership for Children, the Granville Vance Public Health Department and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services are helping to secure the short-term shelter, long-term housing, funding sources for rent assistance as well as food, cloths, transportation and solutions for basic needs as a lot of the families’ possessions have has been exposed to black mold and bed bugs.

The city was able to dig in and get more involved after an awning at the facility fell April 22. That event set off a series of meetings, conversations and more that, as soon as the next day on April 23, had the city exploring its options. But, when people from the city showed up Friday, May 3 with emergency housing applications and more, that’s when the residents – many of them long term rather than nightly guests – found out for the first time the location was being closed down. The owners of the property nor their management had told the residents about the closing, some of whom have been residing there more than a year, according to the mayor and other council members and staff at the special called meeting.

Elliott talked about what happened earlier Monday morning with the assistant manager of the hotel. She said, “They have called in an electrical person. They came out yesterday. And they will have an engineer there tomorrow. His plea still is of course ‘don’t turn the power off because it’s going to be hard for them to do the work.’

“Although this place is egregious to say the least, he did allow the people to stay another day so we can get this shelter ready. And I also told him we want them to have business in our community, but we want them to do it the right way.

“You don’t even have to go in a room to see the damage because a lot of the cracked concrete, the walkways, the stairs, and if you walk past the windows, the rooms are full of furniture, some of them are full of black mold, you can see the bed bugs. You don’t even have to go in a room,” Elliott said.

She questioned how county inspectors had not seen this.  She said, “This stuff is visual … a lot of it is outside.”

By piggybacking off the Henderson Fire Department, Code Compliance Director Corey Willams said, and by using the “life safety aspect of things,” Fire Chief Tim Twisdale told WIZS by phone, the city can cut the power. By cutting the power, it requires the owner to have to go back and have more complete inspections, pull permits for electrical and other renovations, and it just generally, according to Police Chief Marcus Barrow, puts the facility back to square one.

Williams spoke of code and zoning issues. He described to the council a process that would be gone through and which later could be brought back to the council for a final decision.

Twisdale said the structural stability of things “is what has us the most concerned,” when speaking with WIZS News.

Even while the city’s special meeting continued in closed session, WIZS reached out to Lisa Harrison, Granville Vance Public Health Director. She said, “On a response call with state and local resources at the moment. Heartened by community and state level responses. (The) Environmental Health team has been out a number of times. We are helping Mayor Elliot who is coordinating re-housing efforts for families.”

“Pest control challenges and mold is a common issue in local facilities,” Harrison said.

Vance County Manager Renee Perry said, “We are coordinating efforts with the city, county, and state partners to provide shelter at the old Eaton Johnson Middle School gym. (The) County’s role is to provide emergency management solutions per NCGS 166A.”

“We are seeking mutual aid from other counties to provide other resources such as portable showers, blankets, cots, etcetera,” Perry said.

The children impacted will be able to continue to go to school.

Legal issues could follow, according to Blackmon.

Councilperson Geraldine Champion said, “If that particular place is doing this … How many other hotels may be doing the exact thing without a permit?”

Councilperson Michael Venable said, “There had to be some negligence somewhere too on these inspections. How did that building get to that place … it didn’t happen overnight.”

Williams said he understood county inspectors had been limited to inspecting the rooms used daily as hotel rooms. He said the rest of the rooms had been blocked out for long-term stays and those had not been looked at.

Wreck on I-85, Driver Ejected, Car Rolls Over Multiple Times

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From the Henderson Police Department:

On Thursday around 12:25 a.m., a motor vehicle collision involving a 2020 Dodge Charger and a 2011 Ford SUV occurred on I-85 South near the 214 mile maker. Both vehicles were traveling south on I-85 when a Dodge Charger collided with the rear of a Ford SUV.

The collision caused the Ford SUV to leave the roadway to the right until coming to rest in the wood line. The driver was ejected from the vehicle.

The Charger rolled over numerous times before coming to rest in the roadway.

The driver of the Ford SUV sustained injuries and was taken to an area hospital for treatment.

The driver of the Dodge, Kassidy Edwards, 20, of Henderson was arrested and charged with Driving While Impaired, Reckless Driving, and Felony Serious Injury by Vehicle. She received a secured bond of $4,000 and was released after posting bond.

The North Carolina State Highway Patrol is assisting with the investigation.

— from a press release

New Vance County Location for 2024 Second Primary Early Voting Site

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Deputy Director Shelly Wood and Vance County Elections Director Haley Rawles informed WIZS News Monday that due to the need of an emergency shelter locally, “Beginning Tuesday, May 7, 2024, the early voting site for the 2024 second primary will be moving from the Eaton Johnson Youth Services Building.

“The new (voting) location for this second primary will be in the building to the right of (the) Department of Social Services in room #D102.”

They indicated voters are not to enter the social services building as there will be signs directing them to the entrance for voting.

“Hours will continue as 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. through Friday, May 10, 2024, and 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Saturday, May 11, 2024.”

TownTalk: Cicadas Emerge

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Some parts of the country are bracing for a fairly rare occurrence – a trifecta of sorts, as it pertains to cicadas. Most folks around here, however, will experience only a couple of types of those giant insects who are emerging from their dormant states for their brief foray above ground.

According to Vance County Agricultural Extension Technician Wayne Rowland, Vance County may see some of the 13-year brood – they’re called periodical cicadas — along with the annual cicadas. “This year is a monumental year,” Rowland told WIZS’s Bill Harris on Monday’s TownTalk. The last time the two broods emerged was about 200 years ago.

How to tell the difference? The 13-year cicadas have orange eyes, but the annual cicadas a bigger than their 13- and 17-year brood relatives, Rowland explained.

Known for their loud thrum or hum, cicadas pose little to no problems for humans or animals. “They don’t sting,” Rowland said, but curious dogs and cats who sample the insects may wish they hadn’t eaten so many.

“If your dog eats a few of them, don’t be concerned – they’re not poisonous,” he said.

“You might see them again, but they’re not detrimental to humans or pets,” Rowland added.

Just like the recent solar eclipse, North Carolina is not in the sweet spot to witness the emergence of the two different periodical broods. Rowland said the 17-year brood will mainly be seen in Illinois and points North.

Locally, the 13-year brood will emerge west and north, he added.

We can always count on seeing the annual cicadas, but this year, there may be more swarming and humming in the air – and crunching under footsteps along sidewalks and on lawns.

Females lay their eggs in the bark of trees, which is a small nuisance for mature trees. It could, however, create more of a problem for young, recently planted trees. Consider putting some insect netting over these trees, spray them down with water to deter cicadas from landing on them or spray with liquid Sevin.

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VCS Honors Students In Top 10 Percent Of Class Of 2024; Graduation Ceremonies Set For May 24, June 14

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It’s getting real now for the Class of 2024 in Vance County Schools – the district honored seniors in the top 10 percent of their class earlier this week and the first two graduation ceremonies will take place in just a few weeks from today. Families and friends with graduating high school seniors at one of four upcoming commencement exercises, however, need to know that they must have tickets to attend in person, according to school officials.

The school district is planning to livestream each graduation, so everyone has an opportunity to view the ceremonies, even if they aren’t there in person.

Vance County High School and Vance County Early College graduations take place on Friday, May 24; Vance Virtual Village Academy and Advance Academy graduations take place on June 14, according to information from Aarika Sandlin, chief officer of Communication & Innovative Support.

Vance County High School: Friday, May 24 at 9 a.m. –  VCHS stadium

Early College: Friday, May 24 at 6 p.m. – VGCC Civic Center

Advance Academy: Friday, June 14, at 3 p.m. – Center for Innovation

Vance Virtual Academy: Friday, June 14 at 6 p.m. – Center for Innovation

Visit www.vcs.k12.nc.us to learn more.

VCS honored students in the Top 10 Percent of their graduation classes Wednesday evening at the Atrium on the campus of the Center for Innovation. The Vance County High School Chorus, under the direction of Dr. Korwind Stokes, performed for the event.

The following students were honored for their hard work and achievement:

Vance County High School 

  • Carlos Lopez-Bolanos
  • Timmy Dang
  • Thuy Phuong Nguyen
  • Tommy Dang
  • Andy Ramirez Villeda
  • Sarah Nicole Baldwin
  • Aaliyah Michelle Burt
  • Sherlyn Lindary Rubi Panjoj Quinillo
  • Victoria Samone Williams
  • Kia’Shanti A’Shaye Hargrove
  • Deresha Lenice Bowen-Goodwin
  • Amani Sadae Small
  • Logan Wade Tharpe
  • Chrystyn Ahnayhia Woolridge
  • Tony Bolanos-Armas
  • Jessica Rodriguez Hernandez
  • Alyisha La’Dashye Henderson
  • Rene De Jesus Valencia Antonio
  • Elijah Bryan Fernandez Cueva
  • Aileen Marie Hinojosa
  • Savion Dashawn Yarborough

Advance Academy 

  • Alfred Jameel Solomon

Vance County Early College 

  • Elizabeth Angelinna Lopez Gonzalez
  • Sami Salah Mohsen Hauter
  • Josafat Hernandez-Arellanos
  • Justin Clark Hernandez

Vance Virtual Village Academy 

  • Justice Kiana Jones
  • Derrick Lamont Foster
  • Shane Bristol Sawyer