Laura Lee Gulledge: Hello. My name is Laura Lee Gulledge. The first question I get asked is if Laura Lee is one word or two words, and it's two, my first and middle name. Lee is a middle name that my mom has, my grandma has. It's a family name. It's a tradition in the South, because we're from North Carolina, to go by your first and middle name because we like to, I don't know, make names complicated. No, we're just traditional.

My last name, Gulledge, I think of it as gull like a bird and edge like the edge of a cliff, Gulledge. It originally is an English name, because my dad's side of the family, and my mom's too actually, both came from England in the mid 1600s. The story goes that there were three Gulledge siblings who were shipped over as indentured servants in 1653. They were kids. They were like I think between 10 and 15, so we're assuming that the parents had died so no one could support them, so they were sent off to America. That's the story with my name.