For 12 years Lehrer has provided the people of Orange County with library materials, information and guidance, always with professional poise and good humor, and often under trying circumstances.

Before he took on the Carrboro Branch Library position, he drove the Orange County Bookmobile. Many residents first came to know him at that time.

Lehrer is moving to Asheville. We wish him well up there; they're getting a good one.


ROSES to the Chapel Hill Wine Company and A Southern Season.

Competitors in the business world as distributors of wine, they are collaborating this year on Corks for Kids, the wonderful project begun and run by Todd Wielar, owner of the Chapel Hill Wine Company.

Corks for Kids is a wine-themed benefit event that raises money for the best of causes, the North Carolina Children's Hospital.

The main event is a two-day wine dinner and tasting event that happens Sept. 12 and 13 at the Acme restaurant in Carrboro, Bin 54 and the Friday Center in Chapel Hill. All proceeds go to the children's hospital.

But you don't have to wait until then to help out. Next Tuesday, Sept. 9, A Southern Season in University Mall will donate 5 percent of the day's store and Weathervane restaurant sales to Corks for Kids.

This is the first time that A Southern Season has joined the Chapel Hill Wine Company on the Corks for Kids effort.

Wielar launched Corks for Kids after the doctors and staff of the hospital saved his wife Amy and daughter Lily when life-threatening complications arose during delivery.

Wielar has made the Children's Hospital his cause ever since. This year he's hoping to raise $100,000 for the hospital. You can find out more, by the way, by visiting www.corksforkidsnc.com.


ROSES to the university students and other volunteers who recently packaged 1 million meals in a single day to help alleviate hunger in desperate parts of the world.

The University Million Meals event, organized by Stop Hunger Now, was hosted at three universities: UNC, N.C. State and East Carolina.

Volunteers and students from those universities -- as well as others including Duke, N.C. Central, Peace College, Meredith College and Saint Augustine's -- worked side by side on Aug. 23 to prepare an astounding 1,010,374 meals. Each meal included rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables and a flavored vitamin mix. They were to be sent to crisis-stricken areas of El Salvador, Haiti and India.

The meal packaging event shattered last year's record of some 300,000 meals packaged in a one-day event.

As Stop Hunger Now president Ray Buchanan said, the University Million Meals project was a striking demonstration of what can be achieved when people set their minds to a goal and work together to achieve it.