The Times from Munster, Indiana • 61

FORUM The Times OA SUNDAY. APRIL 13. 1997 Oasis or nightmare? Neon jungle rises from valley Interstate a blessing and curse for rural town 1 ko no i' 4i vj Ilk It tH I I-. Ml. Ml i IJH I I rtv Trucks and cars race along the main drag central Pennsylvania town are a refuge for of v--- v- mr Quite a few of Breezewood's residents helped build the pike, and those being days when the road still.symbolized adventure people reacted with excitement.

And what better way for a small town to be part of this road to the future than having an interchange? "It was seen as access to the great highways to go somewhere. They'd say, "Oh, we're going to be connected to the world says Jonathan Johnson, who studies small communities for the Center for Rural Pennsylvania. Charles Swartzwelder, a native of surrounding East Providence Township, remembers the days of turnpike-building when "my grandfather owned just about all the area that Breezewood sits in." "When the turnpike went through, the Gateway was the first one and then there was a Sunset Hill Motel built in the area," says Swartzwelder, a township supervisor. "And it just kept growing." Growth was gradual until the late 1950s, when the Interstate Highway System brought 1-70 up from Washington and ran it into the turnpike, which was brought into the fold and christened Interstate 76. It intersected with the turnpike at Breezewood, making the remote area a major East Coast interchange, and the businesses started sprouting.

At first, locals say, there was an even mix between locally owned operations and chains. But as the traffic increased, the chains took notice. At last count, 37 restaurants, gas stations, truck stops and motels sit on the quarter-mile stretch of commerce. Seventy-five percent of East Providence Township's tax base comes from the businesses in Breezewood. About 1,000 people are employed in the commercial district; the population is virtually zero maybe a couple of mo-, tel operators who live on their property.

Now, precious little is left from the pre-turnpike era. John Nyeum's steam tannery is a motel, the four-room school-house is McDonald's, the broom factory has yielded to an overpass and Old Forbes Road, well, that's the turnpike itself. Over a hill on the western edge, there are, still, a smattering of houses, a beauty shop, a post office and a bank maybe 100 residents. "People were very excited because it would promote economic development," Johnson says. "But the interstate's been both a blessing and a curse for rural communities.

You get more development, but it's not always the development you really want." Growth and gridlock Today, corporations have more reason than ever to do business in Breezewood. According to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, some 2,609,492 cars got off at Breezewood's exit 12 in 1995, and 2,585,589 cars entered the pike there. Compare that to the next interchange, Fort Littleton, which in almost every respect is the same as Breezewood except that it does not intersect with 1-70. There, in 1995, just 241,494 cars exited and 251,635 got on. Another reason accounts for the vast difference one that makes Breezewood even more singular.

No one seems quite sure why, but when 1-70 was built, the only way to connect from it to the turnpike was to go right down Breezewood's main drag, which technically is actually a section of 70. No cloverleaf interchange. No direct way from one highway to the other except through this small town. As Breezewood grew, then, so did the traffic snarl. "It has been virtually a blockade between Pittsburgh and our nearest East Coast neighbors," says Ann McHoes, a Pittsburgh technical writer.

"To require everyone going south to west or west to south to travel through three blocks of red lights and change BY TED ANTHONY AP National Writer BREEZEWOOD, Pa. Her family buried Mary Elizabeth Colledge on a quiet, rural hillside, a resting place they had every reason to believe would be tranquil forevermore. Sure, the new highway was coming through, but what harm could that do? It was limited access, after all. If they only knew. Fifty-seven years after her death, the small churchyard that holds her remains overlooks a bustling miniature metropolis.

Her body lies 50 yards from the back of a Quality Inn, at the edge of an unusual, vaguely unsettling place: Breeze-wood, the self-described "Town of Motels," a late 20th-century thicket of commercialism that exists for a single purpose the passing motorist. From. a pristine valley in the Laurel Highlands it rises, beckoning drivers and assaulting eyes a glowing, multicolored jungle of neon and its bastard child, back-lit plastic. Exxon. McDonald's.

Taco Bell. Texaco. Dunkin Donuts. Best Western. You can see its light 10 miles away on a clear night, an Emerald City to the Pennsylvania Turnpike's Yellow Brick Road.

The granddaddy of countless islands of commerce at highway exits across America, it is presented at one of the East Coast's major crossroads as a refuge for truckers, a rest stop for drivers, a place to fill up the tank, to go to the bathroom, to eat, to sleep. "This is a town that owes everything to the highway its entire existence," says Art Helton, owner of the All American 76 Truck Stop, which sits on a bluff in view of the access ramps for the turnpike and Interstate 70. "They call it an oasis, which is probably true," he says. "But I'm not sure what kind of an oasis it is." No one would argue its incredible convenience. But some important questions lurk below that truism: Is Breezewood a community? A town? Is it even a place? Do Breezewood and its progeny represent an entirely new kind of locale that our national obsession with the car and the road has created? Is its existence a good thing or a bad thing? The answers depend on whom you ask.

Shaped by interstates Since humans began settling on coasts and beside navigable rivers, the byways of transportation have created and defined new communities. In America, colonial "post roads," trying to put mail along civilization's pathways, put civilization along the mail's pathways as well. The 19th century's railroads cut through wilderness and deposited towns along their tracks. The 20th century's version, of course, is the automobile. But the Interstate Highway System, launched in Eisenhower's 1950s, has created a unique hybrid.

Interstates wind through myriad nowheres, and the exits built for them often become happenstance islands of food, phone, gas and lodging. Some are the product of one commercial mind, like the Mexican-motif "South of the Border" complex off Interstate 95 on South Carolina's northern edge, or Wall Drug's sprawling store in South Dakota. Others sprout on edges of towns, connecting communities with highways on their outskirts. Most are simply haphazard: two or three gas stations, an Arby's, a 7-Eleven, maybe a Motel 6. In rural areas, they sit at the edge of exit ramps and go on for maybe 500 yards before tapering off into remoteness.

Few, though, are as extreme as this particular well-lit pocket. Breezewood was a typical rural Pennsylvania town when, in 1940, the turnpike really the nation's first superhighway -was built between Carlisle in the center of the state and Irwin in the west. tllil Breezewood, on a Sunday evening. The highway travelers. Amy Sancetta Associated Press landscape that, whether it be in Pennsylvania, Iowa or California, looks as if it "could be anywhere.

Who ever got a memorable wedge of pie at a Burger King, anyway? Consider: The Breezewood Taco Bell has a chili cheese burrito. It's a perfectly good chili cheese burrito. But it's the same chili cheese burrito you get 80 miles east in Harrisburg or 400 miles west in Ann Arbor, Mich. And it's served in a place with the same purple, dusty, rose-teal decor, too. The spread of standardization worries the holdouts in places like the Post House Cafeteria, one of a handful of non-chain restaurants remaining in Breezewood.

There, the busiest times come on the lobster shift, when Greyhound redeyes heading west from New York, Philadelphia and Washington unload sleepy passengers for 20 minutes of bathroom breaks, tuna-salad sandwiches and plastic containers of Jell-0 and pudding. When the buses pull out, the place is desolate once again. And the waitresses say the daytime isn't much better. "You have kids traveling on the buses, and kids only want fast food," says Mary Conrath, ringing up purchases for weary passengers from the Detroit-bound Greyhound at 2:57 a.m. The future holds little promise.

Sheetz, a convenience store that makes other suicides 4 -K "11 4 4. am fci. i 1 1" mm Truckstop chaplain Bruce Maxwell, right, writes down the mailing address of trucker Gary Nicholson after speaking with him at the All-American 76 Truck Stop in Breezewood, Pa. For the past five years, Maxwell has offered an understanding ear to truckers, travelers, and workers who find themselves at Breezewood's two largest truckstops. KfC I Amy Sancetta Assocuted Press truckstops, hotels, and restaurants of the sandwiches to order, is coming in, as is Perkins, a family-restaurant chain.

There's word that another national pizza franchise is opening, too. 1 The quirky, individualistic stops; along the roadsides of the 1930s and '40s existed largely because they represented the quirks and creativity of individuals. Now, real estate by highway exits' costs so much that those who would be; individualistic can't afford the space. John Crawford runs a roadside gift shop that used to be part of a museum of stuffed animals shot in the first half of the century by his great-grandfather. This place has individuality: wild animal T-shirts, postcards of Amish Country (even though this isn't), magnets and patches and shot glasses from all 50 states, even the odd zebra or elk head protruding from the wall.

But today, the shop struggles and the museum animals gather dust in storage. The parking lot is empty, Burger King's is full, and the 30-year-old Crawford is stoic. "I think this place just kept up with the times," he says. "People today want everything the same. They just feel more comfortable that way." 'Creature of the highway' The men and women buried in Mount Zion Lutheran Church before 1940 could never have dreamed of what has transpired.

They settled this land, then rested silently on the hill while it evolved into a place where the highway isn't just a part of life but life itself And all over the country are little Breezewoods. It used to be that, in communities; everything melded together. People on main streets lived above stores. Gas sta: tions were a few doors down from pharmacies. Now, everything has a parking lot.

Newer communities are sectional-ized, parsed commerce in one place, work in another, homes in yet another. And Breezewood: It's as if someone excised a dollop of suburban sprawl and plunked it down in the middle of nowhere another product of the Interstate Highway System, builder of some communities, destroyer of others. "Breezewood is a creature of the highway, by the highway, for the highway," says James Howard Kunstler, a vocal critid of highway development and author of "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Fall of America's Man-Made Landscape." "And as long as the highway is the ruling institution in our world," he saysj "then Breezewood will reign." go unnoticed Lord. She wasn't going to take a spaceship or anything like that, but the pain was going to stop. "She was 32, married to a wonderful man and they had two young kids, ages 10 and 12," Godfrey continued.

"It was so hard on everybody." It is hard, Wentz said, whether the suicide happened last week or 10 years ago. "You never learn to get over it, never learn how to live with what hap; pened." I While Heaven's Gate members committed the most public of suicides, many families cling fiercely to their privacy. "Some people never want anyone to know there has been a suicide in their family," Wentz said. "There is shame and stigma attached, and we are not in the business of exploiting our members' grief in any way. "But Heaven's Gate has been on great display.

It's sad. But that's the way the world works, and there's nothing we can do about that." lanes and gas stations and chain restaurants," she says, "is just not right." Many advocate a direct interchange. Businesses understandably oppose that, and they have a backer in Robert Jube-lirer, a powerful state senator who many say has blocked all attempts to bypass Breezewood. In 1991, the state Department of Transportation widened the road in Breezewood, reducing the gridlock somewhat and freeing the sheriff's deputies who directed traffic there for years. But the basic problem remains.

And because of that, many Pennsylvania motorists, asked about Breezewood, say the same thing as a man from the Pittsburgh suburbs filling up his tank at Exxon the day after Thanksgiving, the area's busiest day of the year. "A community?" he said. "This isn't a community. It's a transportation annoyance." The catch? He, like all the others, was using it. Commercialism part 2 The cookie cutters "Never," American road essayist Sue Hubbell once wrote, "order pie within one mile of an interstate highway." The implication is clear and the sentiment widespread.

Many feel interstates breed the dull sameness of corporate standardization a patchwork retail Spotlight focuses on Heaven's Gate, while 'There have been months where 39 people took their own lives in this county, but nobody talks about those Candace Milow, assistant program manager for Crisis Team, 24-hour suicide and crisis prevention hotline BY MARK SAUER Copley News Service SAN DIEGO, As TV copters hovered, newspaper scribes scrambled and the medical examiner convened news conferences in Rancho Santa Fe, seven desperate souls quietly sought their final peace away from the media glare. "GSW," shorthand for gunshot wound, was scribbled next to five of their names in the coroner's daily log; another had jumped from the Coronado Bay Bridge. And next to the other victim's name was this notation: "Inhaled exhaust fumes." "My wife was very sick with Parkinson's disease," her husband explained. "This has been a very difficult week for me. But that thing up in Rancho Santa Fe? It was ridiculous, far as I'm concerned.

"What those people did had no more connection to my wife and me than a lightning flash in New Mexico has to do with thunder in China" I I the circle and the man next to me said his son had ched in a motorcycle accident," she said. "I felt very sorry for him. "But when I told how I'd lost my daughter, he turned to me and said, "She must be in hell I cried out and fled the room. A woman who'd lost her husband to suicide followed me out and we decided to form our own group." Survivors of Suicide now has eight chapters in San Diego County, including a new one aimed at grieving teen-agers. More than 1,300 people get the group's quarterly newsletter.

At recent meetings, Godfrey said, people struggled to find parallels between their experiences and the discovery in Rancho Santa Fe. "The fact that these people took their lives so willingly and that they were looking forward to peace, in a way that's similar to letters left behind for many of our families," she said. "My daughter said she was finally going to fincrpeace with the "That thing," of course, was the strange departure from this life staged by 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult, whose videotaped bon voyage was characterized by joyous anticipation -hardly the stuff of typical suicide notes. A suicide is reported just about every day in San Diego County; 350 people killed themselves here in 1996. And like the seven local suicides coinciding with the Heaven's Gate spectacle, nearly all such souls pass on generally unnoticed.

"There have been months where 39 people took their own lives in this county, but nobody talks about those individuals," said Candace Milow, assistant program manager for Crisis Team, the county's 24-hour suicide and crisis prevention hotline. Those choosing to end their own misery create a world of it for loved ones left behind. And as images of purple-shrouded bodies in bunks played endlessly on TV and front pages, anguish burned our loss is not the same as what we're seeing with all the hoopla surrounding the Rancho Santa Fe event," she said. "We had people quite bothered at a meeting that these suicides are seen as ridiculous and that so many people appear to take them lightly. "It is strange, there is no getting around that.

But these 39 people had relatives and friends, people who cared about them, even if they hadn't seen them for 20 years," she continued. "Our hearts are with the survivors in the families of these people." Dorothy Godfrey said that among the ways that people meet their ends, suicide is unique. "When I lost my daughter, I went to a grief group at an Episcopal church. We ent around anew in the hearts of the many thousands of San Diego "suicide survivors." "We were all shocked to see the bodies of all those people. It brings everything back," said Dorothy Godfrey, 82, who 15 years ago founded the support group Survivors of Suicide following her daughter's suicide five years earlier.

"We've talked about it a lot; my phone has not stopped ringing." The spotlight focused on the exodus of Heaven's Gate members overshadowed what survivors of suicide victims must deal with daily, said Marie Wentz, a longtime "grief facilitator" whose son took his own life 11 years ago. "This is hard to express, but.