Editorials

What do you call the multi-lane, north-south thoroughfare that serves as Calhoun County's main transportation artery? A tree-lined beauty? An overcrowded mess? A road best avoided?

Just don't call it Quin-tard. It's Quin-taaarrd. So says Samuel Noble's eldest granddaughter.

While digging around recently for information on Anniston's 125th anniversary, Star reporters came across cassette tapes stored at the Public Library of Anniston-Calhoun County. On the tapes are irreplaceable nuggets of oral history — recordings of longtime county residents telling of their towns and many of our long-departed generations.

One of the recordings captures the voice of Elizabeth Dabes Roberts. Her mother was Kate Quintard Noble Roberts, whose father is immortalized with his own downtown Anniston statue. Speaking in the spring of 1970, Elizabeth Roberts can be heard explaining how so many residents mispronounce the name of our county's largest and most widely used road.

"Everyone calls it Quin-tard," the 82-year-old Roberts says in her serene, Southern enunciation, "but it's Quin-taarrd. The accent is on the second syllable."

There's no reason not to trust Roberts' expertise. One can only assume that she knew how the Episcopalian Bishop C.T. Quintard of Tennessee — a Noble friend for whose family the road is named — pronounced his own surname.

So Quin-taarrd it is, though it may take some time getting used to it.