Writer's Block: Shops Gone By

[jayfurr]

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Ray's Kingburger.

It was a very small fast food chain in North Carolina and western Virginia when I was a kid in the early 1970s. There was a location in Blacksburg right next to the Radford Brothers supermarket (this was before we had chain supermarkets in town), back when there was no Burger King or McDonald's or Baskin Robbins downtown. Despite the size of Virginia Tech, we just didn't have chains or malls in those days. Everything was local.

So my idea of the ur-fast-food-restaurant was Ray's Kingburger. It had a blue logo with a big swooping lower-case 'y' in the word 'Ray' (if I recall correctly, and this was decades ago so I may be completely misremembering) and it had some sort of tie-in with Richard Petty. Petty, who after all, was nicknamed "The King" on the NASCAR circuit, especially back in those days.

We rarely went there to eat but since we shopped at the grocery next door it was always there serving as a reminder of what a fast-food restaurant looked like. It did things like char-grilled burgers, hot dogs, etcetera. Pretty standard food, but to a six-year-old, it was all So Exciting(tm).

They closed sometime in the 1970s and the chain itself was gone by the early 1980s. The only Google link I can find about them whatsoever is this page:

http://www.agilitynut.com/eateries/nc.html

Ah, Ray's. We hardly knew ye.

Comments

[sandyinstep.livejournal.com]

For me, it's Petite Sophisticate. While it still has a web presence, the brick and mortar stores are closed, and I hate buying petite clothes online when I don't have an easy way to return them.

For short woman, PS was fabulous. A whole store devoted to just our size. There had been one other, Pinstripe Petites, that was bought out by the Casual Corner Group (owners of PS) but for about 5 years or so there was only PS. Every suit I bought for work, back when we needed suits for the office, was bought from this store. They carried everything, from jeans to dresses, office to very casual, even athletic wear and pjs.

They weren't under the mistaken impression that petites were just women with short legs--our whole bodies are proportioned differently. And they didn't make the mistake of thinking that short women wanted to look like little frou-frou women. They were ground-breakers.

Now all department stores have a petite dept. and most specialty chains do as well, but it was so nice to NOT have a limited selection of clothes to pick from, but rather a whole store full of clothes for women just like me. Now I have to be happy with Ann Taylor & J. Jill & Land's End. No more one-stop shopping for me. *sigh*

Good memory!

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I remember Ray's as well. There was one where I grew up in Central Virginia. By the time I arrived at Virginia Tech in the mid 1980's the Ray's at that location had closed and Radford Brothers had bought the land and used the building for storage.

The place is nothing but a parking lot now.

I know the place well because my fraternity house abutted the Radford Brothers property.