Cruising Slappey: From Putt-Putt to the bowling alley … 100 times a night

Editor’s Note: Second in a series of stories looking at the past and present of some of the storied sections of Albany.

ALBANY – Like a large number of her peers in Dougherty County and even some from surrounding communities, Angela Tedder would hop in her decked-out ‘78 Grand Prix, the one with the premier sound system, and cruise Albany’s Slappey Boulevard on Friday and Saturday nights, usually with her running buddy, Joy Robison.

Ray Miller, who was a classmate of Angela’s at Monroe High School, although they didn’t meet at school, was usually doing the same thing with his friend Jeff Thornhill, first in his 1970 Ford Falcon and later in his ‘79 Camaro.

“Crusing, that was our social media,” Angela said of those late-’80s, early-’90s weekends. “It was our way of hanging out with our friends and meeting new people. We’d cruise from Putt-Putt to Teg’s Bowling Alley – up and down – all night.

“We’d pull off into parking lots to talk, or we’d stop at McDonald’s, Krystal, Hardee’s to get something to eat. That’s what we did for fun.”

Much like the classic 1973 movie “American Graffiti,” teens, and even a few young adults, from Angela and Ray’s era turned Albany’s main drag into their car-crazy playground, carrying on a tradition that started in the ‘50s and continued until the late-’90s.

Kids cruised up and down Slappey – “from Putt-Putt to the bowling alley and back, a hundred or so times a night,” one noted – their radios blasting the songs of the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, putting their wheels on display to get the attention of fellow cruisers.

“It was like watching a car show,” said Tedder, who would become Angela Miller when she and Ray got married six months after they met. “People had their cars fixed up, and they were usually loud.”

“The trucks had lowered rear-ends, cars were jacked up, everyone had nice tires and rims,” Ray pipes in. “The mufflers were loud, and there were some of the wildest paint jobs you can imagine.”

“It was like the original ‘Pimp My Ride,’” Angie adds.

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I drove my brother’s convertible Volkswagen that you could see through the floorboard from the backseat. We had to strap the door shut. We would put $1 worth of gas in it and drive up and down Slappey to meet boys. I remember Shoney’s drive-up was popular. Anita Garcia 

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Albany’s cruising craze predated “American Graffiti” by a couple of decades. No one really knows how it got started, but everyone agrees that one of the drivers that generated interest in Slappey as a gathering place was the opening of the Arctic Bear, a glorified ice cream/hot dog stand opened by the Brothers Johnston, Clarence and Norton, in 1950 at the corner of Slappey and Oglethorpe Boulevard.

With its iconic “licky bear” sign – a giant neon polar bear that “licked” an ice cream cone –  the Arctic Bear became a landmark in the community, pleasing kids of all ages until it eventually closed in 1995.

But by the time kids started cruising Slappey, there were other establishments that drew their attention, eating establishments like Burger Chef, Baskin Robbins, Mama Jean’s, the Silver Dollar Diner, Denny’s, Sno-Biz, Casa Tapatia, Villa Gargano, Starways Hotdogs, the Olympic Flame, Mae’s Oyster Bar, Shoney’s … just a few of the hundreds listed by former cruisers in response to a Facebook request.

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The late ‘60s, it was cool to circle a burger joint’s parking lot. We decided to circle Shoney’s parking lot 50 times. After the 20th trip around, the manager came out and stopped us to ask what we were doing. We explained, and he smiled and gave us free sodas. Rodney Rouse

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Angela and Ray have a special place in their hearts for the cruising of their day. They actually met at the Krystal restaurant on Slappey.

“We were both riding with friends, and we stopped at Krystal to get something to eat,” Angie said. “I met Ray, and he asked if I wanted to come ride with him. And we just connected.”

It didn’t take Ray long to determine he’d met the woman of his dreams.

“We started dating,” he said, “We were going somewhere, and Angie said she wanted to drive her car. She popped the hood to check the oil, and I was really impressed. She had cooked lasagna to take with us, and it was great. I said to myself, ‘A girl that knows cars who can cook. Hmmmm.’”

But Ray knew he’d found his perfect companion when, later in the ride he asked Angie a “test” question.

“I’d been out with a girl who, if she had to go to the bathroom, we’d have to drive back to town or to her house,” he said. “I asked Angie what she would do if she had to use the bathroom and we were out riding. She said, ‘I’d pee beside the car or in the woods.’ I knew this was my ideal woman.”

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Putt-Putt to the Quickie to Burger Chef to Arctic Bear. Repeat. Steve Thompson

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The stories that emerged from nights of cruising Slappey became legend. Ray Miller remembers looking out his window one evening and seeing “about halfway up a tire.” He got out of his car and was stunned to see a massive “purple flake hearse.”

“That thing was huge, and one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen,” Ray said. “It had lights on its sides and that paint job that looked like midnight. The guy opened it up to show us inside, and there were about 12 guys in the back. In the middle was a coffin that served as their beer cooler.”

There also was that time that Angie and Ray were among the cruisers who pulled into a grocery store parking lot and were stunned when a guy walked in front of their vehicles. He was bleeding profusely.

“I asked what had happened, and this guy said, ‘Some guy just shot me in the tail,’” Ray said.

The apparent results of a dispute over a girl – what else? – the cruisers stood around in amazement as an ambulance pulled up and the attendants, instead of taking the injured person right away to the hospital, spent a fair amount of time talking to those gathered, asking if they knew what had happened.

“Instead of hurrying to the hospital, they hung around the parking lot talking to everyone,” Angie said. “And, as it turned out, when they finally took that guy to the hospital, he died. He’d bled out while they were hanging around.”

There was also the time that Ray was stopped by an overexuberant police officer.

“He stopped me and said he was going to write me up for drag racing, even though we were doing only 35,” Ray said.  “He kept saying, ‘I know what you were fixing to do, driving right alongside that other car.”

Imagine the officer’s surprise, when the driver of the other car getting ready to “race” turned out to be an elderly lady for whom drag racing may have been the very last thing on her mind.

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When I first got my driver’s license in the early ‘70s, I had to drive my mother’s dark green Pontiac Bonneville station wagon my friends called ‘The Tank.’ I discovered that if you turned it off and then back on, a huge explosion would come out of the exhaust pipe. One night we were cruising Slappey in The Tank, and we passed this guy on a bicycle. I turned it off and on, and it scared this guy so bad he fell off his bike. Randy Merchant

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I have put tens of thousands of miles on that road in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Mike Brooks

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One of life’s certainties is that all good things must eventually come to an end. As the ‘90s moved toward the new millennium, the joy of cruising started to fade. Maybe it was the new electronics that held young folks’ attention, or maybe it was the fact that gas crept up past $2 and $3 a gallon.

Now, some 75 years after the opening of the Arctic Bear, cruising is pretty much a thing of the past, despite the fact that a recent survey shows that between 22,000 and 32,000 vehicles travel on Slappey every day. Many of the old familiar landmarks are closed. A whole block of prime real estate along the 100 block of South Slappey – including the former locations of Casa Tapatia, Knights Appliances, Restaurant Supply and the former Walgreens on the 200 block – all sit vacant.

About the only time there are cars backed up on Slappey now is when the drive-thru line at Hip-Hop Chicken backs up. It’s calmer now, but at the height of the COVID pandemic, cars would be backed up at the chicken restaurant for blocks.

“We still have times when we’ll have a long line,” Hip-Hop Manager Mazen Jassen said. “But during COVID, a lot of the restaurants around here closed. Word got out that we had good food, and people started lining up. Most of our business was built by word of mouth, and we still have most of those customers.

“We don’t have the long lines now because our customers can come inside and eat. We may have had 200 customers going through our drive-thru before, but now when we have 200 customers, 100 may be inside and 100 at the drive-thru.”

With gas prices now soaring even higher, it seems unlikely that the days of cruising Slappey will return anytime soon. But who knows: Maybe a couple of car enthusiasts will catch a rerun of “American Graffiti” on Turner Classics and decide they’ll take their rides for a spin … from Putt-Putt to the bowling alley or some other landmark.

Those of us with hotrod hearts can always dream.