Here’s a look at some of our favorite and most-read feature stories of 2023.

HIGH SCHOOL FRIENDS START TREE SERVICE

High-school buddies Avery Smith and Ryan Madigan still love to climb trees.

It’s turned into a tree-cutting service.

Times Observer file photo For the last 29 years, Russell native Corey MacQueen has been around the sport of dirt track racing.

The former Warren Area High School wrestling teammates started working summers together for Mike Lindell’s Tree Service, and branched out on their own even before both had graduated college.

This business plan we’re talking about probably began one day when Avery and Ryan were cutting firewood along Park Avenue in Warren. A passerby stopped and asked if they could look at a tree-cutting job at his property.

“I guess we could take a look,” said Avery. At that time, “we knew how to run a saw,” he said. “It was an adrenaline rush.”

In a little over a year, A&R Woodpecker Service, owned by Smith and Madigan, has now done tree-service jobs for over 100 different people.

“I really love seeing a happy customer at the end of the job,” said Madigan.

“And showing off up in the tree,” added Smith. “It tends to draw a crowd.”

CHASING A DREAM

When the average person chases a dream for 40 years, at some point they realize that the reality is: it’s just a dream.

But for Russell native Corey MacQueen he never gave up on his dream.

“I remember when I was a small boy, my grandparents had a place near Marion Center and I would hear the roar of the cars and dreamed of going,” MacQueen said recently about his early memories. “My Pap took me to my first race when I was 7 or 8 years old for my birthday, and that’s all it took, I was hooked.”

When he turned 18, he got on Jeff Hoffman’s crew and ever since that summer he has wanted to race his own car.

“Ever since that first year of racing in 1994, my life has been tied to racing in some form or another,” MacQueen said. “I originally got my CDL thinking it would be easier to get on a NASCAR crew.”

For the last 29 years, MacQueen has stayed around the sport of dirt track racing in some capacity.

MacQueen has actually been close to racing his own car before this summer.

“I’ve been close before, this is actually the fifth race car I’ve bought to race but I’ve sold off every one of them before turning a lap myself because life’s circumstances and the proverbial curveball that life has thrown at me, I’ve just not been able to put it all together,” he said. “This time was close too, I almost decided not to do it again … but my wife Wendy kept pushing me to race.”

His goals for this season aren’t complicated.

“The first goal, which has already been achieved, was just to have fun. This is all just too much work to not have fun doing it,” he said. “Secondly, I’d like to improve my skills as a driver and learn as much as I can so I still have a car and an engine to race again next year; that’s really all I need for this year.”

SERVICE ON A SUB

A 2021 Youngsville graduate and Pittsfield native has entered the U.S. Navy’s submarine service.

Nathynn Rougeux joined the Navy a year ago and now serves as a fire control technician aboard the USS South Dakota.

“My grandpa was in the Coast Guard, so I decided I wanted to try and carry on his legacy,” Rougeux said. “I also wanted to do something not a lot of people can say they’ve done. That’s why I chose the submarine service.”

According to the Navy, the USS South Dakota is a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine “designed for a broad spectrum of open-ocean and littoral (near the shore) missions.” It was commissioned in 2019.

The Navy calls its role “strategic deterrence.”

“The Navy contributes to national defense by protecting our territories and keeping our waterways safe,” Rougeux said. “Serving in the Navy makes my family proud and my country proud. It feels good to know that I’m making them proud.”

And he’s grateful to the people that have made this path possible for him.

“I’m grateful to my parents and to all the commands that have brought me up to the point where I am,” he said. “My parents taught me that procrastination is a killer and how to have a good work ethic. I know when I’m at work, I need to work and when I’m off work, to enjoy it.”

LIFE-SAVING TRANSPLANT

Christi Carson has overcome the longest of odds, the slimmest of chances, the remotest of possibilities.

She’s a case study in the power of modern medicine to the human body.

Despite an indebtedness to the countless nurses and doctors who saved her life leading up to a successful heart transplant this spring, the Warren County native admits she struggles at times adjusting to a world outside the operating rooms and hospital beds to which she’s become so accustomed.

“I had this unreal expectation that once I got a heart, I would be fixed and I would be brand new and be able to step back into the life that I had,” Carson told The Post-Journal. “And in reality, that’s not the case at all. This is something that I’m going to have to deal with for the rest of my life.”

To be sure, she’s grateful to be alive — to be with her daughters, her doting husband and a family that’s been by her side through one setback after another.

Carson also is eternally grateful to the donor who provided her a new lease on life.

She knows very little about the person whose heart she received. “They said it was somebody young, and they said it was a sudden death,” she said.

“I’m grateful but I’m also struggling, you know,” she said. “The two can exist together.”

Carson was well into her pregnancy when she first suspected something was amiss. She began experiencing shortness of breath, a symptom that came to a head following a 12-hour shift as an emergency room nurse at UPMC Chautauqua. An echocardiogram — a procedure in which sound waves are used to create pictures of the heart — found that her heart was not pumping enough blood.

In an instant, Carson went from nurse to patient. The diagnosis: peripartum cardiomyopathy — the weakening of the heart muscle that leads to heart failure.

“The doctor sat us down to have a conversation and said, ‘Look, the chances of us finding you a heart are one in a million.'”

She was told to go home and spend time with her newborn twins. Due to her daughters being premature, and with her ongoing medical problems, Carson did not meet them for the first two months of their lives.

“There is nothing to describe that feeling of total heartbreak, just a sense of hopelessness,” she said of her condition. “I felt the need to prepare for my death. So I wrote my girls letters, just in case, for them to read when they were older and wanted them to know me.”

In March, Carson was informed a heart had been found. The news came two days before her husband’s birthday.

“Her surgeon said he had never seen a more perfect match,” her stepfather, Mark Woody, told The Post-Journal at the time.

BEER CHEESE SUCCESS

Mandy Sandagata was surprised the first time she found out that her recipe for beer cheese pizza had been chosen as one of 13 finalists.

So now she is just as amazed to learn that Wicked Warren’s Beer Cheese Pizza made it to the final round of two in the JTM Beer Cheese Throwdown.

She went to Chicago with an invite to participate in the finals at the National Restaurant Show May 19-23.

“I am really overwhelmed. I’m super excited. It’s an honor (to be chosen). Hopefully this will bring a little more of (a) spotlight onto Warren and our community. This way it benefits the whole community,” Sandagata said.

Sandagata is the kitchen manager at Wicked Warren’s. She started at the brewery in June 2022.