Now that the Home of the Golden Arches has been brought into the 2024 American Presidential Election with the Democrat candidate proudly touting her experience at one of Ray Koch's hamburger palaces as a poor working girl.
This was matched by the slim trim Republican candidate on Sunday, Oct. 20, demonstrating his expertise putting French fries in a brown paper bag and handing them to customers in the drive thru window at one of the battleground states.
This duel of poor political folks of course leads to a Lewis Grizzard (LG) article pertaining to Ronald McDonald’s efforts to put one of his franchises in the northwest Georgia community of Helen.
In LG’s fifteenth (15th) bestseller “You Can’t Put No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll” (1991- Villard Books) he wrote on the roadblocks that King Koch had in adding the Bavarian Alps Burger prototype to the Beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.
In an article “When ‘Big Mac’ Ran into a Stop Sign,” the Pride of Moreland addressed the topic:
A woman at the Illinois corporate headquarters of McDonald's said the company has now served 75 billion hamburgers.
Some quick arithmetic tells me that is about three hundred hamburgers for every man, woman, and child in America and 2 million for Oprah Winfrey.
But McDonalds is not going to add to that number in Helen, Ga.
Helen is a little town in the north Georgia mountains with the Alpine theme.
Tourists flock to Helen and spend a lot of money there sightseeing and buying trinkets. I've heard Helen described as "quite quaint."
The town gambled on the Alpine theme in 1968. "Before that," said Cliff Hood of the Helen planning board, "Helen was a ghost town."
A ghost town with dusty streets, vacant saloons, and tumbling tumbleweeds might have brought in tourists, too, if it had a name like Dry Gulch, but whoever heard of a ghost town named after a girl?
McDonalds wanted a crack at some of Helen's tourists, and you know how McDonald's is. You can have mayonnaise only if they say you can have mayonnaise. Make way for the Golden Arches.
But the Helen planning board said McDonald's would have to live by its building and sign restrictions, which include no internally lit signs and only certain colors.
McDonald's at night looks like an airport. They could have put a few McDonald's in the neighborhood and saved the money they spent on lighting Wrigley Field in Chicago and simply used the glow Big Mac puts out.
According to Cliff Hood, McDonald's did agree to forget the golden arches and a lighted road sign. (There apparently was no discussion concerning whether Ronald McDonald would be out front waving cars in.)
And McDonald's agreed to add some additional wood trim. But McDonald's wouldn't budge on its big fluorescent lighted roof beams, which are also a violation of Helen building codes.
"A lot of people staked their life savings on the Alphe theme," said Cliff Hood, "and they didn't want to compromise it."
The end result was Helen refused McDonald's a building permit and told Ronald to go eat those silly shoes he wears.
Helen has a Wendy's because Wendy's agreed to conform to the Alpine motif.
But McDonald's wouldn't, and Helen stuck to its guns.
There ought to be more of that sort of thing. Cities and towns should say more often, "You want to put a building here? Fine, but it better not look like a space station."
There's nothing wrong with quaint. We like quaint. It's why we flock to Europe to take pictures of one another standing in front of a quaint little shop in a quaint little village.
You can't find a lot of quaint in this country anymore. We look like we've been designed by the Mad Architect.
There are hotels with revolving roofs, office buildings that look like they're about to take off for Mars, and 8 zillion sets of golden arches lighting up the midnight sky where quaint used to be.
I visited Helen once, and the word I used to describe it at the time wasn't quaint.
It was "tacky."
But I've changed my mind. "Tacky" is compromising yourself to accommodate an intruder.
"Quaint" is if he is a little guy telling a big guy won't play by rules, he can go jump in the deep fryer.”
(Who knows? The deciding vote in the race to the White House may be decided by the discussion on this timely topic.)
PS: Does the McDonalds-Helen scenario bear any resemblance to the local development controversy?
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If you have additional information about one of Mr. Summers' articles or have suggestions or ideas about a future Chattanooga area historical piece, please contact him at jsummers@summersfirm.com)
Jerry Summers