Editor’s note: This is part of a series on residents taking unusual paths through life.
SUBLIGNA, Ga. – Sheri Stroop pointed at the abandoned shop across the street as she eased her minivan toward the end of East Armuchee Road.
Every week, on her way to church, she saw the same features. Dead grass. Paint chipped off the front door. Wood siding pried loose.
But this morning, screwed into the building’s right side, Stroop noticed a black sign.
“BABE’S BiKiNi WAXiNG,” it said in red letters, a heart atop each “i.”
“It looks,” Stroop told her children, “like something out of a B horror film.”
Behind the building, Max Cordle considered the sign from his front porch. It doesn’t take much to stir talk around here, a valley of farms between Taylor Ridge and Johns Mountain. There are only two types of businesses: Archie’s Mart and Koch Foods.
A man from out of town bought the building last fall. Cordle, 81, doesn’t think much of the sign. The building’s new owner is probably joking. Cordle doesn’t know where the closest competition sits, but there simply aren’t enough customers to support a bikini wax business here. (There are 433 voters registered at the Subligna precinct.)
In the 1950s, the building housed a small grocery store and gas station. There was another store across the street. And yet another one about a hundred feet to the right, where Archie’s Food Mart now sits. There was a post office, too.
“Subligna was a big community back then,” Cordle said.
When the store closed, a church briefly congregated there. Later, the volunteer fire department practiced extinguishing flames in a corner of the building.
Outside Archie’s, Stacey Holden broke from repairing a tank and stared at the sign. “Seriously?” he asked.
“No!” a woman shouted as she filled her van. “No! It’s not real!”
“There’s no bikini wax, not over there,” the store manager said later. “He just did it as a joke. What do you want? Why do you want to know? Do you have a problem with it? What problem do you have with it?”
Further down East Armuchee Road, Jerry White wasn’t sure what to think. When the man from out of town bought the building, neighbors gossiped about its future. White, 77, whose grandfather Jefferson Davis White moved here from Virginia as a child after the Civil War, hoped for pizza.
Waymond “Babe” Tudor, center, talks to a unidentified local man about the property he recently acquired in an auction on West Subligna Road.He believes Subligna can one day develop into a small town, with a droplet of commerce. A simple, sit-down restaurant would be nice.
“Oh boy,” he said, when he looked at the sign. “Somebody’s making a bad mistake.”
Further down the road, Christopher Cooke said he supported the business, if that’s what the property owner wants. Any business is good business. And a waxing business? Maybe it serves an unknown need.
Cooke, 59, peeled his pink Carhartt T-shirt over his face to reveal weeds of black hair over an alabaster belly.
“More power to ’em,” he said. “I was born with half a coat of fur. When they open, I’d be their first customer. I wouldn’t go to a city to get a wax. But in my own community, in the privacy of this small town? Yeah. I’d try it.”
Cooke is out of luck. Cordle is correct, for now.
The building’s owner, Waymond “Babe” Tudor, is not a practitioner of the grooming arts. A drywall contractor in Alpharetta, Tudor is from the Subligna community. He said his grandfather was shot and killed here in 1920, during an argument across from his new property.
Tudor still visits Chattooga County once a week to see his cousins or his father-in-law in Trion. Last fall, he saw a sign from Dempsey Auction Company, advertising a sale of the property. He and about 20 others showed up, the majority of them neighbors looking for brief entertainment. Tudor won with a bid of $22,000.
Waymond “Babe” Tudor talks about the property he recently acquired in an auction on West Subligna Road. “Folks may not understand the sign I painted, but my (nickname)Babe has been with me all my life,” Tudor said.The audience asked him what he was going to do with the property. It’s about 1,300 square feet, with two rooms, concrete floors and a lattice divider wall. One neighbor suggested he open a gym. Another said a feed and seed. Another said a lawnmower repair business. Another recommended a strip club.
“I had more suggestions than you could shake a stick at,” he said. “Bar. Grill. A bunch of things. I’m open to anything.”
Tudor, 66, woke up one morning recently and thought about the bikini wax business down the street from his Alpharetta home. What an odd craft, he thought. He drove to Home Depot, bought a 30-by-60-inch hunk of wood and hung his handmade sign by lunchtime.
It’s a joke, he told a neighbor. It’s a joke, it’s a joke, it’s a joke.
“But,” he added, “if I had a customer, I’d damn sure do it.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Any man would like to have a bikini shop or a strip joint or whatever, unless you’re a preacher. Then, you probably do – but you won’t own up to it. I don’t care what people think about me. I just want them to think about me.”
Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.