Section B · Page 6
The University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, June 30, 1999
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Southern-fried fare is down-home good
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Wrapped in yellowed aluminum siding, Bea's Restaurant sits near a rundown apartment house in a neighborhood Chattanooga's urban renewal has yet to touch.
The Associated Press
The parking lot is a patchwork of buckled asphalt. The roof is so low it looks like no one inside could stand up straight.
Meat-and-three is shorthand for an entree and side dishes, explained John Egerton, the Nashville author of "Southern Food."
Bea's is a "meat-and-three" restaurant with roots in the region's farms and factories. It's a place where food is battered, buttered and creamed, and macaroni and cheese is labeled a vegetable.
"You don't get low-fat this and low-salt that," said Nick Proffitt, 29, a tire salesman. "This is Southern cooking, and that's what's great about it."
But within the walls, customers say, is Southern-fried heaven.
For $7.50, customers can eat all they want from a menu of one meat dish and three vegetable dishes. In this culinary world, the terms "meat" and "vegetable" are loosely translated. Fish qualifies as meat, and Jell-O passes as a vegetable.
"Its the friendiness," said Nita Howell, a part-time bookkeeper. "You meet complete strangers in a country atmosphere." That being certain Beg's popularity.
Restaurants like Bea's began at the turn of the century, when factory work began
True to the meat-and-three style, Bea's is scoured clean but not fancy. The dining room is a showcase of shades of brown, from the wall paneling to the floors. The maitre d' wears sneakers. One corner has a wood plaque honoring "Granny," a longtime waitress.
The waiting line for the 160-seat dining room often snakes out the door and into the parking lot. About 400 pounds of chicken are served at a typical lunch and up to 800 pounds on Sundays after church.
It was really a kind of replication of what they would have gotten had they been at home — meat and gravy, potatoes and beans — the things that come out of the garden," Egerton says.
"I think it's a cult thing," said Lew Cisto, 52, musical theater director at the McCallie School, an all-books Christian school in Chattanooga. "It's a great environment. The food is always good. It's always hot."
That helps explain Bea's popularity
James "Windy" Adams, 68, a Lookout Valley barber, and his 73-year-old brother first ate at Bea's when their uncle took them there as children.
"I believe it was a dollar then, but it's still worth it." Adams said.
Historical Helena, Montana
drawing people off the farm, Egerton said.
Old mining town captures style of old, spirit of new
The Associated Press
HELENA, Mont. — The most revealing view of Montana's capital city is from the general admission seats at Kendrick Legion Field on a Thursday evening in summer, during the fourth inning
You may think you have slipped into the pages of a late 1950s Saturday Evening Post.
Past the right-field fence, a group of kids watches the game from atop the monkey bars in Memorial Park, where the Capital City Band is performing its weekly free concert for picnickers on the grass.
Beyond the center-field fence is the sheer rise of Mount Helena, towering over the city's downtown district.
Rising above the left-field fence are the twin. gold crosses of the 230-foot spires on the Cathedral of St. Helena.
And beyond third base rises the Capitol dome.
Helena (pronounced HEL'-in-nah) came to life overnight as a gold-rush boom town in 1864 and retains an Old West flavor that is now mixed with the politics, commerce, arts, culture and sports of any modern city. But the city wears its mining history proudly.
Main Street in the downtown business district takes its name - Last Chance Gulch - from the four prospectors who discovered gold there in 1864. The "Four Georgians" supposedly decided the valley was their last chance. If they didn't hit gold here, they would go home, their grubstake exhausted. Instead, they hit big and started one of the West's big gold rushes.
"Color" reportedly still washes up on Last Chance Gulch after a hard rain, and Norwest Bank on the Gulch has a spectacular display of gold—nuggets, dust, wire, leaf and coins.
Rocky Mountains between Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.
The capital lies midway on the east face of the
Hunting and fishing are nearby in all directions from Helena. Holter and Hauser dams form major lakes on the Missouri River near the city, and the river itself is trophy trout water. Wild game thrives in the Helena National Forest.
The forest lies against the edge of the city, so wild animals are common sights in town. They include an occasional moose or black bear, but most common are deer, which maud gardens and sometimes complicate traffic or airport landings.
It's a city of neighborhoods that demand strolling, from the stately mansion district on the west, where the gold-rush millionaires built their homes, to the funky Fifth Ward on the northeast and the upscale, downtown walking mall on Last Chance Gulch.
At the south end of the Gulch is Reeder's Alley, a restored miner's village with specialty shops, a restaurant and a restored and furnished miner's cabin.
Famous residents include historian and author Stephen Ambrose and designer-clothing magnate Liz Claiborne, who has a ranch north of town.
Fort Harrison, on the edge of town, was the World War II birthplace of the U.S. Canadian Special Services Force, which was immortalized in the war movie The Devil's Brigade.
The Old Trapper Taxi has only six cars but offers 24-hour service.
Airport parking is $2 a day, $10 a week, and it's on the honor system. The airport (14 flights a day by Delta, Big Sky and Sky West airlines) turns out the lights at midnight.
Tickets to the Helena Brewers' baseball games are $4.75 for general admission, $7 for box seats. It's rookie-league ball, and the young players, many of whom live with Helena families for the season, are still flattered when kids ask for their autographs.
The governor's home telephone number is listed in the book. And he answers.
African travel offers history, danger, beauty
The Associated Press
THABA BOSIU, Lesotho — For the adventurous, the stark mountains of this southern African kingdom offer a fascinating, no-frills look at history, a dark tale of 19th-century cannibalism and a king's forgiveness.
An agreement to hold new elections has quelled the unrest. Maseru's airport functions. Some modern tourist hotels in Maseru escaped damage in the intervention and are open.
Although the situation appears to have stabilized, the U.S. State Department warns travelers that the potential for disorder and random violence remains.
Lesotho, a Belgium-sized country of 2 million within South Africa's borders, was off most tourism itineraries even before South African troops crossed the border last year to quell an army mutiny and strikes that had paralyzed the capital, Maseru.
The place to visit is not Maseru — an unremarkable capital whose business district was heavily damaged in rioting during the intervention — but Thaba Bosiu. This mountain fortress lies just 10 miles east of Maseru and was once the stronghold of cannibals.
In 1824, King Moshoeshoe (moh-SHWE-SHWE), seeking a natural redoubt to protect his Basotho people, led them to the 350-foot-high flat-topped mountain whose summit is ringed by cliffs. Springs on the mountain would enable the Basotho to survive long sieges.
As the vanguard of Moshoeshoe's group approached the mountain, cannibals attacked, killing some of the trekkers and dragging their corpses to caves.
By the time Moshoeshoe's main force arrived at the caves, the cannibals already had body parts boiling in cooking pots. Some of Moshoeshoe's wives — he eventually had more than 40 — were among the cannibals' victims.
Moshoeshoe's warriors overwhelmed and captured the outnumbered cannibals. They brought the captives to the king and demanded their execution.
"The king responded that he must respect his wives' graves, which were the cannibals' bodies," recounts tour guide Patrick Rafutho. "He also told the cannibals that if they stopped eating people, they could join the Basotho."
The cannibals did so.
Arriving at the fortress-like mountain after dusk, Moshoesoe dubbed it Thaba Bosiu, or Mountain of the Night.
Today, Thaba Bosiu is a national monument.
On a recent visit with a reporter and a photographer, the tour guide Rafuto stopped to catch his breath, then clambered up a hill a mile from Thaba Bosiu.
He stood on an 18-foot-wideledge overlooking round, thatch-roofed huts at the base of the hill. On the ledge were remnants of the cannibals' caves. The ceilings are still charred from ancient cooking fires.
Notches scar a rock ledge on the summit. The ledge overlooks emerald valleys that turn golden brown in the dry season. The notches were made over the decades as Moshoeshoe's warriors sharpened their snears while on the lookout for enemies below.
Moshoeshoe and the kings who succeeded him are buried on the summit. The last to be interred was King Moshoehose II, who died in a 1996 car crash. His son, King Lettsie III, is Lesotho's current ruler and sometimes climbs to Thaba Bosiu's summit to pray to his ancestors.
Ruined stone houses stand sentinel on the summit, the wind whistling through gaps in the crumbling piles of rocks. No one lives on the mountain now.
Adorning nearby rocks are other paintings of spearcarrying hunters and their prey, made by cavemen thousands of years ago.
"You can't tell all this is here—the cliff dwellings, the paintings, the history," Rafutho remarks, shaking his head in wonder. "From a distance, it just looks like some mountains and rocks."
After hiking down from the heights, Rafutho gazes up at the cannibal caves and toward the rocks with the caveman paintings. Thaba Bosiu looms in the distance in the evening light.
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