Noah Adams

In the 1980s, the two-time U.S. poet laureate moved to Hawaii and began working to restore the rainforest. According to one contemporary, that's when he "morphed into a poet of praise."

Midway University in Kentucky trains students in equine management, and the campus is surrounded by barns and paddocks.

The Larkspur Press in Kentucky is two years behind schedule, with no plans to catch up. Printer Gray Zeitz sets each letter of the book by hand and then prints on a press from the early 1900s.

At the Air Force museum in Dayton, technicians and volunteers are working to restore a unique piece of history. The B-17 bomber Memphis Belle is being carefully returned to its wartime appearance.

There are more than 2 million single parents enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities. Some schools, like Wilson College in Pennsylvania, have figured out what it takes to help them succeed.

If you'd like to escape the presidential election, take your banjo or fiddle to this week's Appalachian String Band Music Festival, known as "Clifftop," in West Virginia.

With names like Hickory King and Boone County White, heirloom corn finds new popularity. A Kentucky hilltop farmer makes it into corn chips, and a distillery has picked its first historical variety.

The Boeing 707 that carried assassinated President John F. Kennedy's body from Dallas to Washington, D.C., is center stage in a new $40 million hangar at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.

Students come from all over the world to study petroleum engineering in southern Ohio and Marietta College. In the past nearly every graduate had a good job. Not any more.

An artisanal salt producer is processing brine from ancient ocean deposits below West Virginia's mountains. The company, J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works, ships to top chefs who value the salt's minerality.

Alvin C. York was a highly decorated veteran of World War I. After the war, he raised money to start a high school near his home in rural Tennessee. York's legacy lives on in the school's students.

Distillers must age bourbon in new white oak barrels that are charred inside. But the barrel supply is running low, and new, small craft distillers are having trouble getting any barrels at all.

Here's what might have sounded like a pretty shaky business plan for a neighborhood pizza cafe: "We'll only be open one day a week. Won't do any advertising. No prices on the menus. We'll serve mostly what we grow in the garden – and no pepperoni. And we'll look on ...

The classic Italian Silca pump, a favorite of bicycle racers since 1917, has been redesigned and is now made in Indianapolis. Last year Joshua Poertner bought the company from the founder's grandson.

Most newspapers today are delivered by adults in cars, not kids on bikes. But in Carroll, young people who want to make some money on a paper route are growing up in the right place.

Writer Julia Keller, who grew up in the state, says she surprised herself when she set her novels there. But riverbanks, convenience stores and abandoned coal mines make for perfect crime scenes.

Toasting the Kentucky Derby with a shot of prized Pappy Van Winkle bourbon will cost you. Last fall, 222 bottles were stolen straight from the distillery, and the police still don't know who did it.

In another installment of the Spring Break series, Noah Adams visits the Serpent Mound in southern Ohio. It's not a burial site; it's a massive, grass-covered snake effigy, created a millennium ago.

In early January, West Virginia's Elk River was contaminated by a chemical spill near Charleston. NPR's Noah Adams returns to the Elk nearly two months later to follow the course of the river.