The traffic sign, one of those temporary and reprogrammable electronic jobs with dot-matrix characters, flashed an understated message that was decades overdue.

NC 74 Exit Left … 1 Mile

The nomenclature is somewhat nonsensical, of course. NC 74 looks to be a placeholder, a temporary designation meant for mapmakers, engineers, road builders and those who use GPS navigation.

To ordinary motorists headed south on U.S. 52 from points north – holiday travelers, say, finishing the last of some 1,700 miles in eight days over six states – the newly opened sliver of road in Rural Hall leads to … the Beltway.

Not NC 74. Not Interstate 74, which it will become at some point in the still distant future. Not even the cumbersome “Eastern Leg of the Northern Beltway.”

To locals, it’ll be the Beltway, a milestone – some might still call it a millstone – in local highway construction.

And for the first time since the ring road was first proposed for Forsyth County in the 1990s, it’s a functional highway for motorists who’d rather avoid downtown Winston-Salem (and near daily traffic jams and crashes on U.S. 52) to get to Greensboro, Raleigh or elsewhere to the east.

Free at last. Free at last.

“We have been working toward this day for awhile now, and we are so close,” DOT assistant resident engineer Nick Librandi told a colleague before the Thanksgiving marathon.

The connection to N.C. 74 at Rural Hall is temporary, of course, as anyone with eyes can tell you.

The entire massive interchange remains a work in progress. Only God, DOT engineers and construction contractors know when it’ll open. Other lane shifts and traffic configurations will feature in coming months.

“It’ll be changing constantly, so people need to be aware and slow down as they go through there,” said Pat Ivey, the division engineer for the N.C. Department of Transportation in Forsyth County. “The project (the interchange) still has a year’s worth of work before people see the final configuration.”

And the connection, for now, will take some getting used to. From the north, the exit to NC 74 shoots left, an exit to Rural Hall-Bethania breaks right and those wanting to take their chances by continuing south on U.S. 52 stay in the main lanes.

But hey, as the pros say, a win is a win.

And taking any traffic off U.S. 52 onto a functioning highway around Winston-Salem is a win.

The $1.7 billion Northern Beltway literally took decades to get to a point where even a portion was usable for long-haul drivers.

Sections opened between Salem Parkway (forever Business 40 to some old-timers) were useful to locals who wanted to get to University Parkway or travel between Kernersville and Walkertown.

The rest, including the Western Leg, will come eventually even though the state in its infinite wisdom keeps handing Winston-Salem – the entire Triad, really – the very short end of the road construction stick.

Recall that the state officials earlier this year downgraded Beltway’s priority for funding under the State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) and decided that the only part of western leg that will get any money for construction in the next ten years is a stretch between U.S. 52 and Reynolda Road.

Which, if the past is indeed prologue, means that residents in western Forsyth County – and motorists coming west on I-40 – likely will be waiting another 20 years before they, too, can zip around downtown Winston-Salem.

“This was a blow to us,” Ivey said at the time. “It is very disappointing, but not surprising due to the cost estimates, and we don’t have the funding to cover our needs.”

Still, for a weary driver with a numb backside, seeing more than a few holiday travelers cut across the Beltway from Rural Hall was … delightful.

A win is a win. And we’ll take them any way they come.

Workers organize for better pay

GREENSBORO – Seeing photos of scores of Guilford County Schools nutrition workers flying picket-line signs after calling out of work Monday to protest abysmal pay rates was in a word jarring.

That sort of thing, at least in a right-to-work state which grew a 20th-century textile industry on the back of companies fleeing unions up north, just isn’t done.

And yet there the nutrition workers stood, waving signs and generally behaving like people fed-up with trickle-down economics, in front of the school administration offices in Eugene Street.

Just what in the name of Cesar Chavez, Eugene Debs and Jimmy Hoffa (OK, bad example) is going on? In North Carolina?

“We work just as hard as anybody else, if not harder,” Tawana Dockery, a nutrition assistant at Florence Elementary School, told a colleague at The News & Record. “Everything is going up except our pay.”

Instead of calling the workers scabs or digging heels in for a prolonged labor situation, Superintendent Whitney Oakley released a plan late Monday that called for school nutrition assistants to earn 4 percent more than last year – a slight bump to the 2.3 percent raise put in place previously that raised starting pay to $15.86 per hour

The plan also called for most school nutrition managers to make 7 percent more than last year. Starting pay for managers would be $18.60 per hour.

As of late Monday, while a beginning, the plan seemed to be a nonstarter. Workers, particularly the lower-paid assistants, indicated the call-out might continue.

Some 66 of the district’s 124 schools reported some impact on meal service. Oakley said that she deployed some 200 central office staff to schools to cover the shortage.

“We can’t do that sustainably,” she said. “We need our school nutrition workers.”

Mmm-hmm. Two things about that.

First, as some who might have thumbed through long rosters of assistant and area superintendents employed by large school districts might say, serving food to hungry kids might be the highest, best use for bloated public-school administrations.

And secondly, those concerned about children whose only reliable meals come via schools have a point.

But school nutrition workers need to be able to feed their families, too.