The Poster at the PIG The hunt for a long-forgotten advertisement celebrates the joy of friendship by MATTHEW BUSCH
R
aleigh was a smaller place when I was a kid. My best friend Jon Anderson and I grew up in Five Points, with the freedom to explore on our bikes. We blazed through the streets and left our signatures in the wet concrete of freshly paved sidewalks. We could get away with just about anything. Our parents trusted us — and they trusted the town, too. But even with the power to go wherever we wanted, we somehow always found ourselves at the Piggly Wiggly. Back in those days, the entrance to the grocery store had a “magic” black rubber mat that would trigger the automatic door to spring open and ding, testing the manager’s patience with every chime. The checkout clerk’s name was Pete, an old man with a red nose, tinted glasses, and grey combover. He’d stand in the
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corner of the store, by the kiosk that hid the safe, resting his chin on a broom. He never smiled, perpetually carrying a look of non-amusement — perhaps thinking about how to deal with us kids. Then there was Richard Walker, the kindest employee at the store. Richard knew almost every customer, including how they preferred their groceries bagged and when they celebrated their birthdays. He was so famous that The News & Observer called him “the Bigwig at the Pigwig” in a spotlight on his 20 years of service as the store was closing. I distinctly remember Richard taking groceries to the car for the elderly woman with blue hair who taught music down the street. Just inside the front door, to the left, were freezer bins with sliding glass tops, chock-full of ice cream. And above those bins was a poster of an advertisement
with a captivating, old-fashioned photo of our Piggly Wiggly. It had an ominous blue sky and a pool of yellow light that fell from a streetlamp onto the brickwork and wet pavement, giving you the sense that a fall storm had just passed. I would stop and stare at that poster, incredulous that it featured the very store I was standing in. Fast-forward about 25 years. Jon and I are still best friends and still in Raleigh. About two years ago, we sat down for a meal at NOFO @ The Pig, decades after the space had been sold and butchered into a low-budget mini mart, stripped from its classic Piggly Wiggly aesthetics. In those years, I stopped going — I couldn’t handle seeing the space like that. But then Jean Martin came along with her NOFO concept. Her vision of renovating the space reincorporated many of the things we had loved about
Courtesy of The State Archives of the North Carolina, N&O Collection (HISTORICAL IMAGES); Matthew Busch (CURRENT PHOTO)
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