The Courier-News from Bridgewater, New Jersey • Page 7

A7 Ann Landers A8 Television listings A9 Senior Corner A8 THE COURIER-NEWSMonday, March 19, 1984 a. '1 "Oili 1 yMiI II aajy 1 In Cambridge, Ohio, where one of the famous "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco" signs graces a wall, Route 22 becomes Main Street. Route 22: Highway or Main Street, it's a taste of America In eastern Ohio, Route 22 is a quiet farm road. Here, it was laid around a barn just east of the town of Piedmont. t.Ou i i along the Susquehanna River to cut through Blue Mountain, the first of the foothills to the Appalachian Mountains.

A few miles upstream, it crosses the river and turns west, hugging the Juniata River in search of a flat course. This is where the eastern megalopolis ends and priorities shift noticeably. Things that assume more importance as you move up into the hills west of Harrisburg: High school sports. County libraries. Four-wheel drive.

Stovewood. Country-western music. Hunting. Volunteer fire departments. Church.

Things that lose importance: Television. Jazz. Zoning. Professional sports. Restaurants.

Ethnicity. Wine. The road turns southwest at Lewistown, edging away from the river to run for about 20 miles along a shoulder of Jack's Mountain. At Mount Union, it turns northwest again, cutting through an impressive gorge carved by the Juniata. River and road squeeze together beneath rockfields as Continued on Page A8 Between Cambridge, Ohio, and Zanesville, Ohio, Route 22 joins with Route 40, the old National Road that Congress authorized in 1811 as a path through the Appalachian Mountains.

The marker (right) is 200 miles west of the road's original eastern end, Cumberland, 70 miles west of Wheeling, W.Va., and four miles east of Zanesville. Courier-News photos and story by Paul Overberg steel have lost clout to abstractions like a market share or a byte. In Central Jersey and near Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, Route 22 crosses hot suburban rings where people and computers are shaping information into money at a ferocious rate. But out in between the towns, where Route 22 spends most of its time, the Northeast's strength emerges even more clearly. There is good soil and weather.

There are good schools and roads. There is plenty of water. Little crime. Pretty towns. Nice folks.

It's America the way immigrants and politicians see it in their dreams. A trip all the way out Route 22 takes you two full days. In some sections, the highway has been rerouted over interstate roads, but in most places, it's still the same two lanes that were first mapped in the 1920s. For the New Jersey chauvinist, going west shows reassuringly that there is simply no equal to Route 22 in New Jersey. Most towns of any size have a Strip, and sometimes a Strip will just appear, unattached to anything but a ramp to an interstate highway.

But nowhere else is there 30 miles of discount dinettes, cut-rate clothes, fast food, diner food, auto dealers, boat dealers, garden dealers, theaters, bowling alleys, billboards, driveways to the left and to the right, U-turns, the concrete barrier wall and all of it "laced together with an unbelievable spiderweb of high tension wires, phone wires, wire wires and miles of neon tubing," as humorist Jean Shepherd wrote in his essay, "Marcel Proust Meets the New Jersey Tailgater and Survives." That all ends with Somerville. A few miles west of Clinton, somewhere in Union or Bethlehem townships, Pennsylvania starts. It shows in different sets of franchise chains, different architecture and the way that people use the land. East and north of Hunterdon County, the little open land that's left is guarded, prized and nurtured. To the west, people are less self-conscious in such matters.

Taking in Pennsylvania by interstate highway is monotonous. Anyone heading east knows the pain of having just one state to go, but one state that's 400 miles of soft curves, hills, farms and more hills. Route 22 stays interesting by going around the hills instead of decapitating them. Merging with 1-78, it's an expressway from Bethlehem almost to Harrisburg as it runs along the northern edge of the Lebanon Valley. To the south lies rich land and spreading suburbs.

Just to the north, over the ridge of Blue Mountain, lies the Lehigh Valley, where anthracite coal and steel no longer spell prosperity. Then, at Harrisburg, Route 22 turns north Two roads diverged in a wood and I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Road Not Taken," Robert Frost, 1916. In the endless suburb of Central Jersey, Route 22 is the tie that binds. In its jughandles and its crossover lanes, the stockbroker and stockboy are one.

Like the neighbor they hate, they know it too well. They can tell you exactly when to come down out of the fast lane to hit an exit. Or where you must tailgate to discourage the crossover crowd. Where the tire-stud ruts pound worst. Which traffic lights, shining double-red, give you a few more seconds to blaze through.

But where does Route 22 end? Even among truck drivers, certainty disappears. True students of the road know that to the east, it fades into a splendid spaghetti pile near Newark International Airport. But to the west? Some say it ends at Clinton, where Interstate 78, its well-behaved neighbor from the north, takes over. No, it returns near Phillipsburg, others say. It dies for good just beyond the Easton serpentine.

Some even say it goes all the way to Fogelsville, where the 1-78 signs reappear. Tell them they're all wrong. For the record, Route 22 runs from its interchange with routes 1, 9 and 21 in Newark to the corner of Ninth Street and Central Avenue, right by City Hall, in Cincinnati, Ohio. It stretches 651 miles. In between, it's everything from interstate highway to village main street.

It cuts through the Appalachian Trail, state forests and the grittiest cities in industrial America. Because of that variety, a trip along Route 22 is a good time to think about the rot and the promise that make up the Northeast. In his 1981 book "The Nine Nations of North America," Joel Garreau calls this landscape the continent's Foundry, and he wonders how it will fare as the rest of North America matures. "Enormous quantities of time, sweat and money have been invested in making this region what it is, and the Foundry's future will be determined by the extent to which North Americans decide they should, or will, walk away from that," he wrote. In Newark and Phillipsburg, the view from Route 22 shows you that's exactly what's happening.

But new office parks in Bridgewater and near Pittsburgh, or prosperous farm centers like Lancaster, Ohio, show the Northeast is full of life. Like Route 22 itself, the Northeast's economy has bypassed some places. Objects like coal and i I 1 i if A I 4 if Li i' nwm, W1, In Weirton, W.Va., Route 22 splits the plant of Weirton Steel, the town's only industry. The plant's specialty, steel used to make food cans, lies in coils behind the fence. Media event overshadowed other teens' accomplishments agj A Cose Look Bill Earls Courier- News Columnist It was sort of fun to watch, but also a journalistic version of Gresham's Law silly news drives out good that made some of us wish we worked in a more honorable profession say selling Bibles to recent widows.

Or going house to house with a drum of used motor oil, offering to resurface driveways at bargain prices. Which is not to blame either party in the recent Shootout at Bound Brook High School. It's easy to understand teen-agers vearing white gloves to honor or imitate Michael Jackson, who did more for moon walking than Neil Armstrong, whoever he was. And it's hard not to sympathize with the school's administration, which, having survived Elvis and Beatles, knows how fads snowball and who, if they allowed funny gloves, probably feared that half the football team would show up in dresses next week telling everyone they were Boy George, Boy Harry, Boy Mike and Boy Ed. Plug in free speech, self-expression and kids will be kids on one side; school is for study and the rights of the majority on the other; and it might have made a good Henry of Plainfield is unknown to Channel 7.

A student at Wardlaw, she has 228 hours in as a volunteer. While the media folk talked to the white glovers, Tim Coyne was wearing real gloves at Kupper Airport in Manville. Coyne, from South Plainfield, works as a line boy, refueling planes, towing them into position and tying them down to pay for his flying lessons he soloed in the fall. High school students Joe Hrubec of Metuchen and Dave Roman of Franklin will probably solo this month, too as soon as they reach their 16th birthdays. Don't count on Channel 5 to be there.

While anything to do with Michael Jack-Son is appreciated by assignment editors, reading isn't as interesting. No appearances on the 11 o'clock news for Bridgewater-Raritan West students Scott Nicol, Paul Rawicz or Gary Silverstein; or Amy Toro of Bridgewater-Raritan East or Pamela Hundley of Somerville High. They all work as pages at the Somerset County Library, putting in 11 or so hours a week evenings and Saturdays for the most part shelving books and period icals, getting materials for people who need them and working the desk. No cameras at Bridgewater-Raritan West High School either, where 90 kids donated blood at the school's annual blood drive; where over a dozen teen-agers give up study hall every day to work with the special ed students; and where a talent show this week will raise money to fight leukemia. In Bound Brook itself, the cameras and the press missed the work of Scout Troop 43.

About 44 kids, plus another 15 boys and girls in the affiliated Explorer Post, are busy collecting food and clothing for StarFish. One of the scouts in the troop is Bradley Berkowitz, who heads the Youth Fellowship at United Methodist Church and has worked with them on campaigns to end world hunger. David Follis, an Eagle Scout and also a deacon in the Congregational Church, works on the tape ministry program. He helps record services each Sunday and brings tapes and players to shut-ins so that they don't lose touch with the church. Tom Brokaw missed that.

family squabble, something people at a class reunion would preface with a "Remember What happened, instead, was that TV cameras and newscasters like Gloria Ro-jas and Reggie Harris showed up, drawn not to the event as much as each other and what began as something local wound up on New York's Channel 2. And, because it was on Channel 2, was also on Channel 5. And because Jackson is big this week TIME'S cover and all Bound Brook made the 11 o'clock news. Tom Brokaw mentioned it on the national news. The military's newspaper "Stars and Stripes" had it and so did the BBC.

This meant, since the TV news folk were so busy covering Kids for Gloves, and, as they have a gift for, over-inflating the importance of whatever they cover, that a number of other people about the same age were ignored. Elaine Brennan, for instance, a student at Plainfield High, was never interviewed by Reggie Harris or Channel 5. But since April 1982, she's put in 1,307 hours as a volunteer at Muhlenberg Hospital, working the information desk, the adult day care center, and acting as a courier. Tara Blackford, a student at South Plainfeld High, volunteers in the emergency room and admitting office and works as a courier. She has 756 hours since April '82.

Cathy Monales and Nancy Seladones, both of Piscataway High, also volunteer at Muhlenberg. Cathy has transported patients and done lab runs; Nancy has fed people who can't feed themselves. Cathy has 528 hours, Nancy 446. Gloria Rojas doesn't know who they are. And Vicki.