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Photo: Debbie Watts The Spur by Kurt Rheinheimer In the city's centennial year Peelsboro turned a hundred and sixteen years old. It had taken its name, as a cluster of ten or twelve houses, soon after the Civil War, sitting alone almost a mile from what now was the center of a city of more than 150,000. Because of its age, location and racial make-up, Peelsboro had been mentioned in every respect for urban renewal money ever made by the city, but what had been accomplished amounted to very little. In 1965 about half the streets were re-paved and given new green signs. In 72 they tore up some of the '65 curbs and put down new ones with flattenedout spots for wheelchairs. And in '77 they took out some trees in the park after there was a rape and a fatal heroin overdose in the same area in a six month period. But by now the ring of city around Peelsboro had become a rope around its neck. To the south were twelve parallel lines of Norfolk and Western track, carrying coal from the southwestern corner of the state through the city and on to the coal ports. To the east was the wide white band of Interstate spur into town, sitting so high above the part of Peelsboro it 71 had destroyed—twenty years before—that it sent all-day shadows down onto what remained , as if to ensure the continued rotting of that which had been there first. To the north were the tall brick projects, built in the Kennedy and Johnson years and in steady decline ever since. Big-city graffiti now covered the walls and traffic signs, and big, dead General Motors cars of the same vintage as the buildings littered the lots. And to the west were thirty or thirty-five blocks of nearly uninterrupted poverty, neglect and decay—the rest of the city's all-black neighborhoods, laid out in a narrow strip between the tracks and the broad east-west boulevards which paralleled the tracks about twenty blocks to the north. Peelsboro sat trapped in a cold dark corner of these urban growths, without the muscle to do anything except be mildly aware of its own shriveling. It was into this neighborhood that Edward Teller carefully aimed a two-year old spaceship of a city bus. For the first several months after he had been given one of the new buses he had felt entirely foolish—the contrast between the huge, black-windowed bus and the rotted neighborhood of his birth had been almost too much for him. The fact that the new bus had turned out to be unreliable and almost laughable in relation to frequency of repair only added to the irony, as Teller saw it. As he started on his run he was wary, as always, of any sign of a widening of the crack the bus carried in its engine cradle. His was the only bus not yet repaired. The other five had made the trip east and back. He was told that his was the last scheduled to go because he was the most experienced driver they had, and would handle any problem that might come up. Claymont told him he'd feel the crack before it was there, and Teller smiled in spite of himself. The day was a Friday in mid-December— the last day of the Peelsboro-West End Plaza run. Federal budget cuts had hit CitiBus—it had always been called the Metropolitan Transit Company until the name was changed in 1978, apparently as a condition of receiving yet another federal bailout—and so there had been a complete reorganization of the routes and schedules, to take effect on Monday . Many people, Edward Teller among them, had argued that the buses ought to run on the same routes at least through Christmas , but the response had been that the calendar and fiscal years were both about to end, and things would be cleaner if the books were closed on the old routes at that time. Teller had seen the new routes, and he knew that the replacement for Peelsboro...

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