Truck Stop on Road to Being City

--The owner of the self-proclaimed “greatest truck stop around” can now also boast the title of newest city in Texas--Carl’s Corner--after his neighbors, tenants and workers voted overwhelmingly to incorporate. But the 49-9 vote was not without its bad news for Carl Cornelius, owner of Carl’s Corner truck stop. “I didn’t know nine people would vote against me. I thought it would only be three,” he said after the polls closed and his employees prepared a celebration for the new town. The business, situated about five miles north of Hillsboro on Interstate 35 East between Dallas and Austin, drew statewide attention when Cornelius built a truckers’ paradise, including a 24-hour restaurant, two saunas, swimming pool and a park area with a pond. A truckers’ drive-in theater is in the works, designed so drivers won’t have to leave their rigs for the show. About 220 people live in the 1,280-acre area that will be incorporated. The 58 who went to the polls at the truck stop make up about 75% of the registered voters.

--Alice Walker, a sharecropper’s daughter whose novel “The Color Purple” won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, returned to her hometown of Eatonton, Ga. (pop. 2,749) for the local premiere of the movie made from the book. When she was a child in this central Georgia farming community, Walker and other blacks were relegated to balcony seats at the town’s only theater, the Pex. But, on Saturday, limousines ferried her relatives to the Pex and residents literally rolled out the red carpet for her at the theater entrance. Eatonton is the home of another Southern writer--Joel Chandler Harris, author of the “Uncle Remus” tales.

--Students at Atlanta’s predominantly black Morehouse College packed the chapel to see comedian Bill Cosby receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Cosby, star of NBC-TV’s “The Cosby Show,” told the students that he frequently is asked to address young audiences because he is considered to be a “positive image.” “If you want to see a positive image, it’s in your house,” he told the students. “It’s standing there washing your underwear. If you want to see a positive image, it’s cooking dinner and has a job to go to in the morning.”

--Linda Franklin was $7,000 richer because an anonymous hen with an odd affinity for astronomy laid a Halley’s comet look-alike egg. Franklin said she found the egg, which has a comet-like mark on its shell, on a farm near Studley, England. Legend has it that some hens lay eggs with such marks when Halley’s comet comes around every 75 years, and a British egg company offered a prize if one was found this time. Franklin, 36, said she would buy a car.