The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 69

SchoolWatch E3 Tuesday, May 9, 1995 Domestic side cf guys In an excerpt from "Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys," the humorist explains the difference between women's and guys' concepts of "clean," and why guys have laundry phobia. See article on Page E7. yiiii The Atlanta Journal The Atlanta Constitution i i i i Movie directory E4-5 I TV coverage E2- rsrj Comics Relationships Staff writer Jennifer Hill says her Aunt Faye never let her feel like a motherless child. Moms needn't be born to the role Jm litnnfvti' sfcollsY Eld; 111! 0 (102551 irwM altoindl marten 3ksti3 JJ2K.iSli'-T the perimeter at 25 years By Jim Auchmutey STAFF WRITER mm -Sit -te WW" call it the Perimeter, which is kind of quaint when you think about it. A perimeter is the outer limit of something.

It has been many rush 1 969: Gov. Lester Maddox insists on. riding on the hood of the lead car at the -vi dedication of 1-285 and almost falls off." 1 982: Braves pitcher Pascual Perez m'iS gets lost, circling the Perimeter twice and missing the game he was to start. 1985: Police nab the "Phantom Ms.a Wrecker," accused of towing abandoned cars off 1-285 and selling them for scrap. 1 984: Rubberneckers slow rush-hour traffic to gawk at a nude woman jogging.

1992: Truck carrying chicken gizzards WE LOVE TO When I was a little girl, my younger sister and I were often the object of pity on Mother's Day. In a sea of red carnations that flowed across the pews of our church, the white-hued flowers pinned to our shoulders floated like isolated buoys. While we were by no means the only ones wearing the white flowers, we were often among the youngest. A red carnation meant your mother was alive. And white, of course, meant she was not.

Ironically, if the people giving the well-meaning glances had really looked, they would have discerned there was nothing pitiful about us. As Mother's Day draws near, I am reminded again that it is the individual who makes the relation- ship, not the title. Readers respond to Not everyone who a Relationships column a mother by obout cowboy boots birth is suited for and a bond between it And there are brothers E2 many who step into the role and fulfill it with distinction, laboring in every aspect of motherhood except the actual birth. I know from experience. My own mother died the summer I turned 6 years old.

My sister was 1. We were raised by my aunt, my mother's oldest sister. Now, some 30-odd years later, she symbolizes for me what motherhood is all about. My aunt was only in her mid-30s when my mother died. Her life lay ahead unfettered.

But she never hesitated in her decision to raise my sister and me. In doing so, she was following in the footsteps of her mother, who had 12 children, but raised 16. In truth, I can't remember a time when my "mother," who is really my Aunt Faye, was not a part of my life. She was there caring for us all as my mother wasted away from hepatitis, eventually dying, that long, hot Philadelphia summer. And she was there when first grade and other new situations seemed overwhelming, gently pushing but providing a steady lean-to in every emotional storm.

It was her sharp eyes that discerned the hitch in my carriage that led to discovery I had a curved spine. And it was her fingers, needle-toughened by years of factory piecework, that grasped mine when I regained consciousness after corrective surgery. And she was there for all the important ceremonies in my life. Never an openly demonstrative person, my mother nevertheless had all the qualities of the fiercest lioness. She claimed our love by protecting, comforting, pushing, chiding and disciplining us through all of childhood's winding roads.

As I've gotten older I've come to understand and appreciate the personal sacrifice she made to raise us, though I'm sure she would never vieW it that way. I can remember a school counselor solemnly telling me she never would have guessed my mother was my aunt And that, of course, was exactly as my mother wanted. I now hav two children of my own. Every day I learn anew what it means to be a mother and about the trust imparted by that small hand in mine. Each Mother's Day, I pore through the racks of sentiments trying to find the perfect one that tells my mother, despite those long ago, misplaced stares, that I always knew I was not motherless.

"EHJE overturns, causing dangerously slick dr- ving conditions and commuter nausea. of space," says Emory University his torian Dana White. "We dont talk about city and suburbs in Atlanta any- fl more. We talk about inside the Perim- eter and outside the Perimeter." 5 The Public Service Commission recognized the distinction when it based Atlanta's new area code bound- lanes on the Perimeter. It's a dividing line others have recognized for years.

One of the first things real estate agents I ask newcomers to Atlanta is whether they want to live inside or outside the Pprimptpr innips nr mitif thf nlrl 3 belly button question. v. The matter is fraught with stereotyping. To put it crudely, innies look out and see white Republicans passing anti-gay resolutions; outies look in and see crime, smugness and Democratic racial politics if they look in at all. Among Georgia interstates, only the Downtown Connector qarries more traffic than the top-end Perimeter from 1-75 to 1-85.

While the width has been doubled since 1969, volume has quadrupled in places. Except for some access road expansion, DOT says it can widen the road further. It seems metro Atlanta is stuck with a 40-inch belly in a 30-inch btltwayij But it's not just traffic that makes the Perimeter difficult; it's the nature of the traffic. Because it's a bypass, I- I 285 is more likely to carry out-of-towners who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of its 45 interchanges. And because big rigs are restricted from going inside 1-285 unless they have busi-fness there, trucks make up a higher I proportion of Perimeter traffic.

Then there's the speed. Last year I Georgia Tech students with speed guns staked out a spot near Peachtree-Dun-woody Road and found that of 200 motorists, 199 were busting 55 mph. "People get on that loop and act like 285 is the speed limit" says State Patrol spokesman Bill Wilson. I The Perimeter is more than a vehicular vortex. It has become as much a part of Atlanta's urban geography as the Chattahoochee River or Stone Mountain.

Almost 38 million square feet of office space has sprung up along the top-end Perimeter and beyond more man twice the amount downtown. What's less quantifiable is the way we've tnade the Perimeter a social and cultural demarcation. there. Through it all arcs the Perimeter, eight to 10 lanes of superslab glistening with the metallic shells of frustrated tailpipe suckers. "They must have thrown voodoo dust in the asphalt when they built this road," Capt'n Herb said, as we skimmed above another day's coagulation.

"I mean, I have seen everything down there." He's watched sailboats come unhitched and sail into the median, people threaten to commit suicide by jumping from overpasses, a gas tanker explode and halt traffic for hours. Emory and his counterpart at WGST, Keith Kalland, do their best to make Perimeter rush hours seem like a shared adventure. They come up with cute phrases like Kalland's signature "Stick a fork in it; it's done" first muttered over a hogtied Perimeter. And the way they talk about the interchanges, you'd think you were on a roller coaster. There's the Cobb Clo-verleaf (the junction with north 1-75), the Scream Machine (1-20, near Six Flags), the Fruit Loop (south 1-75, near the Farmers Market) and, above all, Spaghetti Junction (north 1-85).

That awesome interchange was known as Malfunction Junction until the state rebuilt it and named it after Tom Moreland, the former transportation commissioner. The DOT much prefers that designation. "Spaghetti Junction makes it sound too random," says spokesman Jerry Stargel, who assures us that the highway planners hours since Atlanta's perimeter was the outer limit of anything except, perhaps, patience. We cruise it, we crawl it, we curse it Sometimes we make assumptions about people depending on which side of it they call home. We certainly don't enjoy it, yet we couldn't live without it.

It has become our Main Street So spare a moment, Atlanta, for the road we love to hate. The Perimeter that awful oval, that commuter commotion, that whirligig for 18-wheelers is 25 years old. More or less. To be truthful, the Perimeter is actually 25V2 years old. No one noticed the anniversary last October not the state Department of Transportation, not the radio traffic flyboys, not the newspaper.

The road has become such a part of the cityscape, we wouldn't think of celebrating it any more than we would a sewer trunk line. The attitude was quite different on Oct. 15, 1969, when state officials dedicated the 62-mile loop that had taken 1 1 years to construct The story was frontpage news. Gov. Lester Maddox, heading a motorcade of dignitaries, climbed aboard the hood of the lead car as it blasted through a cardboard barrier marking the last link on the west side.

The procession then swept east to another ceremony in DeKalb County, producing (what else?) a traffic jam. That fall more than a few civic-minded Atlantans took Sunday drives around the Perimeter. My family was one of them. Five of us piled into the Chevy station wagon and circled the whole hula hoop. There were two lanes in each direction with a grassy median in most places.

Traffic was so light my father could have used cruise control. By the time we got to Smyrna, I was snoozing. "I remember walking the route at Lawrenceville Highway," recalls Tony Dowd, a retired DOT engineer who designed part of 1-285 through DeKalb County. "There was a big farm with cows grazing, and these doves came rising out of a field like a dark cloud." I tried to imagine that LL Bean tableau as I drove the entire Perimeter again recently. The only bird I shotted was the one an irritated mbtorist flashed me near Bolton Road The Blue Ridge Parkway it isn't The prospect was better from 400 feet, where I joined WSB traffic reporter Herb Emory us home, Cap'n for afternoon rush hour.

From the skycopter, you can plainly see all the things 1-285 and Atlanta's passion for automobiles have wrought: a yellow-orange haze on the horizon, sprawling malls in every direction, the miniature skylines of satellite cities popping through the trees herend i Dee-Ellen Cook has seen the divide from both sides in 24 years as a North- -side Realty broker. She moved fronu Atlanta to Gwinnett in the 70s and members how excited her neighbors were when a Denny's opened on Jim-' my Carter Boulevard. Back then, she says, "People inside the Perimeter thought that the only people who lived outside the Perime-; ter were rednecks and Yankees who didn't know any better." Perceptions have softened since then, Cook believes, if only because the outer precincts have grown so much more urbanized. Metro Atlanta's population has almost doubled since 1-285 opened, and the majority of it now lives outside the Perimeter, not inside. There's one man who has special In this column, the staff of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes about the relationships in their lives.

If you relate to one of these columns, please share your thoughts with the writer. P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta, Ga. 30302. knew where every noodle was going.

"The Perimeter changed our sense FUN FACTS reason to be amazed by all this. Harnt- Why a Perimeter? Planners first called it the Circumferential Highway. "I don't remember who charged it to Perimeter," says retired DOT engineer Roscoe Tate, "but I do remember a meeting where I said it was a damn sight better than calling it the Circumcision." Go back, Jack, do it again: The Perimeter wasn't a decade old when the state started widening it in 1 978. The project took 1 1 years and $355 million. Six Flags Over AsphaSt: Spaghetti Junction (1-285 and 85 North) cost $06 million to rebuild In the '80s, just $4 million less tl ian the entire original Perimeter.

Engineers from around the world study the interchange and Its 90-foot-tall sky ramps. Otis Redding, maybe: A DOT board member in 1990 proposed renaming the Perimeter for South African leader Nelson Mandela. No one seconded the motion. Stick a fork in it: The busiest point on the Perimeter (other than junctions with other Interstates) is between Chamblee-Dunwoody Road and Peachtree Industr ial Boulevard, with average daily traffic of 232,000 vehicles. Less than half that volume uses parts of the southeastern quadrant.

Lochner, a Chicago traffic consultant never foresaw Atlanta growing rings like a redwood when he was hired by the city in 1945. The Lochner Plan be: came the blueprint for Atlanta's ex-' pressway system, but it didnt included loop. Lochner figured the metro popuV, lation might reach 750,000 by 1970 ij half of what it turned out to be. "We had no idea," says Lochnejf! now 89. "I have a home in Hilton Head and come through Atlanta all the traffic, the speed, the vitality it's simply flabbergasting.

I dare anyf Is one to draw a perimeter around Atlaifin'M' ta that will hold." AY 1984 family photo Frederica (Faye) Webb (right), who raised Jennifer Hill (left), holds Hill's son Elliott dtfring a 1986 visit. II.