YORK -- There was only one woman in York driving a green Cadillac as long as a battleship, packing a pistol, a boxer dog perched in the back seat.

Most anniversaries are parties. This anniversary today, of wrongs never fully righted, has no streamers. No cake. No songs. No celebration.

Almost 48 years have passed since a mob of white men beat up two civil rights demonstrators at Rock Hill’s Greyhound bus station. Called “Freedom Riders,” one white man and one black man protesting segregated transportation tried to both go into a waiting room that on May 9,1961, was for “whites” only.

YORK -- The thuds heard in York on Thursday started with footfalls in the cold dark. Runners, neighbors, two guys thumping and huffing for more than 6 miles. One black and one white, and it sure made no difference to either one of them.

LANCASTER -- Maybe here's what Gov. Mark Sanford really wants to do: Stop the poor from dreaming.

SHARON -- A lot of people, of all colors and certainly blacks, want to go to Barack Obama's inauguration Jan. 20. Included in that hope were more than 30 from St. John Baptist Church in the small western York County town of Sharon.

So Timmy the Tree looks over at his lifelong nemesis, Tommy the Tree with the pink "X" painted on his bark and says, "Hope you like being plywood. Shouldn't have made fun of my pimply bark when we were kids."

Mike Englert was a teen on those rough city streets of Rochester, N.Y., when a cop yanked him right off the pavement into the back of a squad car. The cop told Englert he was going to jail.

On the first business day of 2009, the Employment Security Commission office in Rock Hill was open. Friday broke with a line out to the parking lot, just like the line each day the place has been open since before Thanksgiving.

FORT MILL -- Somebody had to work Christmas Day at Hardee's, right there at the top of Main Street in Fort Mill. Actually, five somebodies.