By Pam Hersh Special Writer
“Waaaaaaaaaaa — what’s with Wawa? This can’t be happening. I will pay anything to get a cup of coffee,” said one of the big, unshaven guys standing in front of the Wawa at 6 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 18.
As I was jogging by the Wawa convenience store at 140 University Place, by the Dinky station, I heard the wail of distress from this man — a “Joe the Plumber” type — staring at the Wawa door sign saying “Closed indefinitely,” reportedly because of a pipe problem.
The sight of big, burly construction workers looking as vulnerable as my grand babe looks when she has lost her blankie was very unsettling to me. These workers who operate the heavy machinery all over Princeton University’s campus need to be happy and well caffeinated.
Fortunately, for the sake of Princeton’s building projects, “indefinitely” turned out to be “briefly,” because the next time I passed Wawa that day, the doors were open and coffee and hoagies were flowing. The incident was so short- lived that it never got a mention in any media outlet. The Wawa wail was silenced for the time being.
Often a media star, the Princeton Wawa, whose name is related not to a mournful wail, but to the Native American word meaning Canadian goose, opened in 1974. It became my infant daughter’s favorite “treat” stop after her visits to the pediatrician. I had thought she coined the nickname “‘Wa,” even though Princeton University students take credit for it.
Over the past 35 years, the store has generated many newspaper articles, particularly when Wawa closed for an entire month during renovation, and when the Nude Olympians used “the ‘Wa” as one of its performance stages.
I was witness to a naked body invasion at Wawa — the year before the Nude Olympics activities were banned from campus.
Other articles reported on the fact that “the ‘Wa” has served as a first-date scene for the students, as well as for some New York City commuters. The most recent “‘Wa” stories have focused on the relocation of the Wawa, which would happen if the university creates its arts neighborhood in the vicinity of McCarter Theater and the train station.
No matter how the area is renovated, the elimination of “the ‘Wa” seems to be off the table totally.
If “the ‘Wa” had gone offline for any period of time last week, the news about the interruption in service would have grabbed the spotlight from Princeton University economist Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who gave an address titled “On the Lighter Side of the U.S. Supreme Court …,” in which she described everything from hand-shaking traditions to birthday parties.
I could not help wondering if either Professor Krugman or Justice Ginsburg ever ate a Wawa and whether either one of them had opined about its impact on the moral underpinnings of the middle classes or the global economy.
Justice Ginsburg commented that her family had banned her from the kitchen. Her husband, Martin Ginsburg, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, is a master chef, who often bakes the cakes for the birthday celebrations of the justices and is the preferred cook in the family, she reported.
This tidbit, in addition to erasing decades of guilt that I have felt about my own failings as a cook, led me to the conclusion that Justice Ginsburg, a renowned women’s rights advocate, would look favorably upon Wawa as filling an important function in today’s fast- paced, major-multitasking world of working women raising children.
And Professor Krugman might see “the ‘Wa” as a vital center of economic activity – a bright spot in this fiscal meltdown we are facing today.
Addressing his theories on economic geography at the press conference about his Nobel Prize award, Professor Krugman said, “What is it about the East Coast of the United States that makes 60 million people want to live in this dense metropolitan strip? The answer is it’s not something about the coastline — each of those 60 million people wants to be here because the other 60 million people are here.”
In fact, how does “the ‘Wa” fit into this theory? Based in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, and employing 16,000 “associates,” one has to wonder whether those 60 million people would remain in this part of the country without “the ‘Wa.”
Perhaps we all should follow Joe the Plumber’s lead — and put our money into Wawa.
A longtime resident of Princeton, Pam Hersh is vice president for government and community affairs with Princeton HealthCare System. She is a former managing editor of The Princeton Packet

