How much do you love your town? Enough to buy vacant buildings and create businesses and hire young people to run them?

Columbia has at least one of these people who deserves our applause. Ben Arnold, on one of his visits home, saw Columbia at its worst after the shopping center had enticed most of the retail business off the square and before any of the current businesses had come to fill the vacant buildings.

He remembers feeling that the town looked like 'a lovely girl in tattered clothing'. He said he also remembered how important the county seat had been to his family when he was young.

"Having a people-filled town epicenter is part of the education process for young people," he says, reflecting on why he moved back. "My father only had a fifth grade education, but he had extraordinary ethics and values. He taught us that if you start a job, you finish it. On our family farm in Egypt, my brother Carl and I had to go out and make things happen. That's a great way to learn about the creative process."

As a result of that visit, he moved his wife, children, and his business from sunny California to Columbia, Kentucky in the summer of 1992 and his contributions to the square have been making news here ever since.