"Employers don’t necessarily look at a high school diploma and see achievement," says Paul Grasso, executive director of the North Country Investment Board. "One of the biggest home builders in the area interviews people by asking them to cut a board 7 1/16 inches in length. They say, 'if they can’t, we don’t hire them.'"
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It all started with a tag - a tag on a grandson’s bear that bore the name of a foreign country. This began the evolution of the Vermont Teddy Bear Company.

In 1981, John Sortino wanted to bring the teddy bear tradition back to America. By 1983, Sortino was selling his bears on the streets of Burlington. In four days, he sold his first bear. It took nearly a year to sell 200.
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Like most college students, Mason Ames is tired. For five days a week, the 21-year-old New Hampshire native wakes up at 6:30 a.m. By roughly 8:00 a.m., he is closing the door of his Montreal apartment, bound for his first class. Practices last six to seven hours a day “at least,” and he then cracks open the books for his two to three-hour long night classes. Exhausted, he is typically out of class at around 8:30 p.m. and in bed by midnight, only to begin the process all over again the next day. However, Ames differs from the majority of college students in one key way: he is an aspiring circus performer.
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He is dressed in a jumpsuit with elaborate embroideries, and sings in his shows, “Hunka, hunka burning love.” Who is he? 29-year-old Joe Ramsey.

A young truck driver named Elvis Aaron Presley, from Memphis, Tennessee, became a rock star in the 1950s. “It's just a coincidence,” Ramsey says about his being a truck driver, which is the real Presley's former occupation. Fifty years after Presley, Ramsey of Saratoga Springs, New York, is aiming to be a star known to the world for singing Presley's tunes and wearing a lavish jumpsuit in front of the audience.
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