It had been four years since Gwen Morgan last coached a drill team. After 35 years, she had retired from the coaching scene, focusing instead on her day job as a bus driver in Hartford. But when she got a call from Jackie Thornton, a high school student in Hartford who wanted her help assembling…

Bill Covitz spends his days inside an 18-degree warehouse freezer wielding a chainsaw. As an ice sculptor running his own Waterbury-based business, Ice Matters, with his wife, Jen, Covitz says working inside a freezer is crucial. “Other ice sculptors carve outside, in the shade. They can’t imagine carving in the freezer,” he says. “I can’t…

“I tell people, ‘When I die, I either want to be in bed, with all of my family around, saying farewell, or I want to lie down in the aisle and look up at the ceiling at Mortensen Hall at the Bushnell,’” said Alan Schwartz of Avon. “That, to me, is one of the most…

It’s Feb. 3, 1780, on the cusp of midnight. Outside, it’s snowing. The Mallorys, like most of the residents of Washington, Conn., are asleep in their bedroom. But 19-year-old Barnett Davenport, the family’s farmhand and boarder, is not. In one hand, he holds a swingle, a wooden instrument he uses each day on the Mallory…