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Writer's Block: Shops Gone By
Jan. 12th, 2009 12:47 pm[Error: unknown template qotd]
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.
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.
