A Place For Us

09/06/2026

08/28/2026

Jayne Mansfield finished her second show of the night at Gus Stevens Supper Club in Biloxi, Mississippi, a little after midnight on June 29, 1967. She was 34, and she was due in New Orleans that morning for a television interview.

She rode in a 1966 Buick Electra with her boyfriend and attorney Sam Brody and driver Ronald Harrison. Behind them, asleep, were 3 of her 5 children: Miklós, 8, Zoltán, 6, and Mariska, 3.

At some point on the drive, Mansfield moved from the back seat to the front to argue with Brody.

Around 2 a.m. on Highway 90, west of the Rigolets Bridge, the Buick came over a stretch of road where a machine was pumping out thick white fog to k*ll mosquitoes.

A tractor-trailer was slowing ahead of it. Harrison almost certainly never saw it. The Buick went under the trailer and the roof was sheared off. All 3 adults in the front seat d*ed instantly.

The children in the back survived. The crash led federal regulators to require underride guards on the backs of large trucks, still known as Mansfield bars.

Rescuers took the 2 boys but left the scene without Mariska. Zoltán woke up, realized his sister was not with them and asked where she was.

The group turned back. She had been thrown under the passenger seat with a head injury. Her stepmother later said thank God Zolie woke up.

Mariska Hargitay has no memory of her mother.

She was raised by her father, Mickey Hargitay, and has now played Detective Olivia Benson on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" since 1999, the longest-running character in American primetime drama.

In 2025 she directed a documentary about her mother, "My Mom Jayne."

Making it, she learned two things she had not known: that she had been left behind at the crash site, and that Mickey Hargitay was not her biological father.

08/19/2026

Our next Classic Movie Club feature is the 1989 classic "STEL MAGNOLIAS"!

Join us Tuesday, September 1st! Doors open at noon, the fun starts at 1:00 pm with backstory trivia, prizes, and then this amazing film! Best of all - its FREE!!!

Bring your besties and be ready to laugh, cry, and enjoy the day at the MI-DE-GA Classic Movie Club!!

08/17/2026

New item at A Place For Us…Paint Kits! Super cute, everything needed for a fun craft! Some are plasters, includes paint & sealer! Prices vary…most are $2-$5 each. SOME options are pictured below, we have a lot more!

08/15/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/187V84aWrP/

What an inspiration and just all around beautiful human! We are reading this now in our Book Club. I do have a couple of copies left at my store that are available or you can order directly from Lisa! Either way, read it. It's worth the time!

Need a good fast read of miracle after miracle? I believe you’ll be encouraged! Get yours today! We are a non-profit so you might consider buying a few copies to give to your friends and family? I have 36 years clean and sober…but it was a journey. Read all about it.
LisaDaggs.net/social

08/03/2026

You have laughed at this song. Maybe out loud, maybe just to yourself.

"With Arms Wide Open." The most mocked #1 hit in rock history. Here is what almost nobody laughing ever knew: Creed gave the money away.

Tallahassee, 1994. Scott Stapp and Mark Tremonti, two former classmates from an Orlando prep school, reconnected at Florida State and started holding band auditions in a friend's house. They recorded their first album for $6,000 in their producer's home studio. No label wanted it. So they invented one - "Blue Collar Records" - and walked into Tallahassee record stores as fake distributors, convincing shops to stock an album signed to a label that did not exist.

It worked. Human Clay sold over 11 million copies in America - Diamond certified, the same shelf as Abbey Road and Nevermind. In November 2000, "With Arms Wide Open" hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band's only song ever to do it. Stapp had written it after learning he was about to become a father. He says his son Jagger's heartbeat, recorded in the womb, is mixed into the song itself.

Then Creed did something almost no band at that altitude does. They gave their #1 away. In October 2000 the single's proceeds went into a children's foundation, plus one dollar from every ticket on the Human Clay tour. More than one million dollars reached over 85 organizations - including the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida and the Second Harvest food bank in Orlando.

America's answer was ridicule. Critics crowned Creed the most hated band in the world. Radio played the song; the culture played the joke. The band tore apart in 2004.

Ten years later, on November 26, 2014, Stapp posted a 15-minute video titled "Public Statement #1." His accounts were frozen. His wife had filed for divorce days earlier. He had spent weeks sleeping in his truck.

"I had no money, not even for gas or food. I went two days without eating."

The man who sang the world's most famous song about welcoming a child was sleeping alone in a parking lot.

What followed was slower than a comeback. A bipolar diagnosis in 2015. Treatment. Sobriety, guarded one morning at a time. "Drinking, at this point in my life, is not an option," Stapp says now. He keeps reminders on his phone and reads them all day.

Tremonti was fighting his own battle in Orlando. His daughter Stella was born March 9, 2021, with Down syndrome. "They immediately sit you down and they talk about if you're going to keep the child or not," he said, "and we're like, it's not even a question. This is our child." Stella survived open-heart surgery at nine months old. Her father, a Grammy-winning metal guitarist, responded by recording 14 Frank Sinatra standards with members of Sinatra's own band - and sending every dollar, over one million so far, to the National Down Syndrome Society.

They mocked the song. They never saw the children it fed.

Every Floridian who was alive in 1999 has a memory soldered to that song - a graduation, a wedding party, a dorm room, a car radio with the windows down on I-4.

In October 2023, AdventHealth opened the SMILE with Stella Tremonti Down Syndrome Clinic in Orlando - the first program in the entire Southeast to care for people with Down syndrome from before birth through adulthood. It welcomed over 200 patients in its first six months. It is there right now.

Then, April 2024. A cruise ship called the Norwegian Pearl. Creed's first show in twelve years, sold out almost instantly, then a 40-city tour behind it. Stapp walked onstage sober - and a grandfather. Jagger, the baby the song was written for, has a son of his own now. "I have a beautiful, beautiful grandson."

The jokes have mostly gone quiet. America has quietly decided the band was good all along.

But Creed never actually changed. The band from Tallahassee just kept doing what the song said. Some bands spend 25 years chasing respect. Creed spent them keeping a promise to children. The arms were open the whole time.

08/02/2026

Happy 6th Anniversary to our sweet little store, A Place For Us! Thank you to those who support us! Carson Kelly & I appreciate you SO much! ❤️

08/01/2026

❤️

November 13, 1918. Hershey, Pennsylvania. Milton Hershey was 61 years old, sitting in the town that carried his name, surrounded by the factory, the bank, the park, the streetlights he had built. He signed a stack of transfer papers. Then he went back to work and said nothing.

The road there had been brutal. He failed in business four times before caramel, then chocolate, finally worked. He married Catherine "Kitty" Sweeney, and they could not have children. Then Kitty fell ill with a wasting disease, and on March 25, 1915, she died. He carried her photograph with him for the rest of his life.

But before she died, the two of them had already decided what the fortune was for. In 1909 they signed a Deed of Trust creating a school for orphan boys, promising each child would be fed, clothed, and "fitly lodged." Asked why, Hershey answered flatly: "It was Kitty's idea." After she was gone, there was nothing left to hold back.

So in 1918 he placed the bulk of his fortune, his Hershey Chocolate Company stock, into a perpetual trust for the school. Then he kept it secret for five years. When the Depression struck, he refused to let his town starve. "We have about 600 construction workers in this town," he reportedly said. "If I don't provide work for them, I'll have to feed them." His Great Building Campaign raised the Hotel Hershey, the Hershey Theatre, the arena, and the stadium. Payroll disguised as architecture.

In 1923 a New York Times reporter exposed the gift, valuing it at $60 million. Charity experts called the fortune wasted on orphans. Hershey ignored them. He kept working for the school and its students until his death on October 13, 1945, having explained himself only once: "I have no heirs. That is, no children. So I decided to make the orphan boys of the United States my heirs."

The heirs multiplied. The school expanded in the 1960s and 70s to admit girls, racial minorities, and children of impoverished families, and has now produced more than 12,000 graduates. Its trust, funded largely by its controlling interest in The Hershey Company, is worth roughly $16 billion. It is the wealthiest private school in America.

Today, more than a century after that quiet November signature, Milton Hershey School houses and educates over 2,000 children from low-income families, completely free. Housing, meals, medical care, clothing, everything. And this Thanksgiving the story finally reaches theaters: "Hershey," starring Finn Wittrock and Alexandra Daddario, opens in November 2026, telling how Milton and Kitty decided their fortune belonged to other people's children.

Every chocolate bar still pays for a child's bed. He kept the secret. The secret kept them.

07/24/2026

I still have 4 signed copies of “Sins of Men” by Kim Wallace-Staines available at A Place For Us! Come get a copy! $20 each

07/23/2026

We have winners!!!!!
1. Kim Gordon
2. Debbie McClain
3. Bethany Self
4. Macy Frady
5. Tracy Clardy

Ladies, I will be at my store until 5 today, tomorrow 9-3. I’ll contact each winner in order so you can choose gift.

TEACHERS … Carson & I have some drawings for Back to School!!! Please comment with your favorite thing about our store & your favorite part of being a teacher. Each participant will be entered in our drawings. 5 Prizes are pictured here.