It’s hard to believe that it has been 17 complete years that we have published The Capital City Hues and we enter our 18^th year with this March 20, 2023 edition. Mother Jackie Wright was our first cover story on March 22, 2006 and I will be eternally grateful to her for doing so. While I had registered the name The Capital City Hues with the Secretary of State’s office on January 6, 2006, it wasn’t until I was visiting my son Andrew in China during the Chinese New Year that I made up my mind to do it.

And in less than two months, I set everything up, from the printer to distribution sites to the paper’s look and layout to the columnists to the initial advertisers. Looking back, I don’t know how I had the energy. While we started out as a sole-proprietor back in January, by the beginning of June, I had sold 60 percent of the paper to friends and acquaintances so that we would become a multicultural newspaper. As I prefer to say, we were African American, Latino, Asian American and Euro-American owned, written and ready. We inked the deal in Michelle Behnke’s law office that day whom we hired to do our articles of incorporation and other business documents. It was LaMarr Billups, Sheryl Billups, Frances Huntley-Cooper, Al Cooper, Greg and Gwen Jones, Ty and Enid Glenn, Juan José López, Heidi Pascual and myself. Eight of us are still financial partners 17 years later. Talk about stability.--READ MORE