RALEIGH - WALL TO WAL-MART
Raleigh, North Carolina. Raleigh Planning Commission expects to approve Super Wal-Mart. The 210,000 square foot Wal-Mart Supercenter will be just east of Triangle Town Center. It will be on 27 acres between Triangle Town Boulevard, I-540 and Old Wake Forest Road/Fox Road. It will be the 18th Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart, Wal-oh well, in the Triangle.
A Raleigh News & Observer columnist Dennis Rogers and his wife are doing their version of Charles Kuralt by reporting from the road on their trip west on Route 66. A lof of us “old timers” have traveled Route 66 when it was the Route 66 of Nat Cole’s song - and well before. I feel certain that there are many other well traveled ”drives” that are deeply etched in the minds of their travelers as well. Some have route numbers and some don’t. In most cases it doesn’t matter since it was the reason for the trips that counted. There is one from Decatur, Illinois to Chicago that my wife and I traveled many times when we were first married. It remains fresh in our minds to this day. The trips needed to be, and were, carefully planned. We would go to work dressed up and when we got off pile into our limousine (a Volkswagen we called Fritz) and drive furiously to the Lyric Theatre in Chicago to catch the opening curtain of whatever opera we were going to see. Most of the time we just made it. If you are late and the opera is Aida you can forget Celesta Aida. An evening at the Lyric had all the glitz and glamour you could possibly ask for and I had the good fortune to escort the loveliest lady of them all.
I can tell you that Fritz was a lot faster than VW’s were supposed to be capable of. All things considered, we were very fortunate never to have gotten a speeding ticket. The 150 miles between Decatur and Chicago, mostly two lane roads at that time, made for more adventure and narrow escapes than sanity called for. The trips from Chicago back to Decatur were at a more leisurely pace. However, they offered only one place you could get something to eat late at night or in the early morning hours. It was a truck stop that should not be thought of in same terms as the huge, brightly lighted, you can get anything you need affairs found all along today’s super highways. No, no. This was a Truck Stop! A diesel smell, gear grinding, dimly lit, clang and bang, tired and sleepy, get some gas and keep going truck stop where you could get a cup of coffee that would eat the enamel off of your teeth and pie that left a lump in your gut for a week. We loved it then and we love it now (or at least the memory of it).
Yes, we did see Callas and Gobbi do Tosca. You Callas lovers aren’t going to love me anymore. My name for her is marble mouth. It has always seemed to be that she practiced what Demosthenes taught when she sang and that was NOT the time to do it. None-the-less Callas and Gobbi provided an evening never to be forgotten. Oh, Gobbi didn’t have the huge warm voice of Leonard Warren but his rough and craggy voice made for a great Scarpia and an equally fine Iago. Let me hear from you.
John Fish (919) 696-3474 Email: Marvmax@mindspring.com Website: www.JohnFish.com
