Is This a Great Country or What?
by Noel Preston

   Susan and I are just back from a weekend trip to Chattanooga, and we stayed at the world famous Choo-Choo. It was fabulous! There's something exciting and mysterious about old trains, and the Chattanooga railway terminal is just gorgeous. It won First Prize at an architectural competition in Paris while it was being built, and for a long time it was the highest freestanding domed building in North America. The terminal is magnificent, with a huge open lobby beneath that splendid dome, heavy wooden doors with shiny brass handles, black wrought iron railings around the rail yard to keep the taxis and horse-drawn carriages from getting too close to the tracks, and row upon row of railroad tracks leading up to the terminal platform. Between the tracks stand hundreds of ivory-colored iron columns supporting long, dark green tiled roofs next to the train cars. At night, gas-lit torches light the platforms curving away into the darkness. Some of the tracks have been torn up and replaced by formal rose gardens with fountains and bronze statues.
   The passenger waiting room has been converted into a spacious, high-ceilinged restaurant with curved arches outlined by hundreds of lights, but the real stars are the old railway cars, some painted dark green and others maroon. The Choo-Choo has about forty of them, with each one having two bedroom suites. There's also a silver dining car, a yellow diner for pizza and ice cream, and one of the old Cincinnati-Chattanooga line's original green and black steam locomotives, with a tremendous fire-engine-red wooden cow-catcher on the front.
   Susan thought the Choo-Choo looked like Disneyworld without the cartoon characters, and it does. It also looks like Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen because of the Victorian architecture, graceful arches around the ceilings and doorways, and the use of incandescent light bulbs rather than fluorescent or neon lighting. And because of all the children! Susan and I must have been the only ones there without any. Every table at every meal had at least two, and it was a happy, noisy, young crowd. The average age was probably 26, and I would guess the median age to be about 10. There were lots of babes in arms, backpacks, chest packs, and infant seats (as well as in the swimming pool, which is why we chose not to go in the water). There were enough goofy young teenaged boys to supply five or six bar mitzvahs, and almost as many young, sometimes shy, sometimes giggly teenaged girls. Was it because we were at the Holiday Inn Choo-Choo instead of a Hilton or Marriott? I don't think so. Downtown Chattanooga seemed full of young families too. Maybe it was because of the Aquarium, or the riverboat cruises, or the IMAX Theater, or the Chattanooga Ducks, those water-going vehicles that drive straight from dry land into the Tennessee River.
   The other thing I noticed about Chattanooga was the tremendous number of tremendous people. I have never seen so many enormously fat people at the same time ever! Not just stout, or hefty, or chubby, or large-boned, but morbidly obese. Some of these folks looked like the Michelin tire man, with rolls of fat joggling underneath their t-shirts. Jerry Seinfeld's friend George must have been thinking about Chattanooga when he invented the Man-Bra, but it wasn't just men, and it wasn't just women, and it wasn't just teenagers. The only age group spared by the Fat Fairy seemed to be children younger than 8 years old, and there were lots of pre-teens who looked as if they might be several sizes larger by this time next year. There was also a surprising number of young men and women with tattoos and multiple body-piercings, but these seemed unrelated as to whether or not they were overweight.
   All in all, Chattanooga seemed to be a happy, gentle, and wholesome sort of place. It goes well with the turn-of-the-century Gilded Age America it is trying to replicate. And if Joe Sixpak and the wife and kids were at the all-you-can-eat buffets at the Choo-Choo and the Southern Belle Riverboat Cruise, they weren't at the Jazz Junction, a fabulous after-dark spot only a half-block from the Choo-Choo that serves chocolate martinis, marvelous desserts and has a full bar and an astoundingly great three-piece band. We sat an arm's length from the vocalist, and at the next table were three smart-looking couples. The women were slender young things wearing slinky black dresses and the men looked as if they could spell Mississippi. The band plays jazz and blues, does great improvisations, and they play until 3 AM.
   So where else could you sleep in a railway car, take a riverboat cruise, see a huge aquarium, ride an electric trolley, walk across a river on the world's longest pedestrian bridge, go to a jazz nightclub, see a young and thriving America where everyone talks like Dolly Parton, and be back in Atlanta in less than two hours?
E. Pluribus Unum. Is this a great country or what?

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E. Noel Preston, M.D. is a pediatrician in solo practice in Peachtree Corners. 6063 Peachtree Parkway, Suite 202-A, Norcross. (770) 448-1553.

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