Sorry, posts about my Iowa hometown come in bunches, partly because they prompt exchanges with a couple of correspondents from my hometown who read Scatterplot. Anyway, my hometown is having a contest for a new slogan. The current one is “A Rose on the Prairie,” and a correspondent e-mailed thinking I might be able to come up with something.
Problem is, the e-mail arrived as I was listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” Any other possibilities for the slogan contest are now crowded out by the image of me driving into a small Iowa town and seeing its “WELCOME TO WHATEVERVILLE” sign with the slogan beneath: “Leave Tonight Or Live And Die This Way.”
(Not that this slogan would apply to my hometown. But the next town over, the one whose current slogan is “The Golden Buckle on the Corn Belt”–absolutely.)
Unrelated: Ezra Zuckerman had an interesting comment on the tenure and public sociology thread that never made it into the “recent comments” sidebar because it was hung up by WordPress’s unpredictable spam filter, so I’ll call attention to it this way.
6 Comments
My home town is known as The City of Trees, but even the the town admits that it’s a moniker that’s no longer really applicable. Think of the future, Jeremy!
“Not affiliated with Charlie”
“Hometown of Jeremy Freese”
or
“No longer just a big hole”?
after our experiences of living in Iowa, i have a couple of suggestions:
1. WHATEVERVILLE - Corn for everyone!
2. WHATEVERVILLE - Not a good idea to move here straight from NYC.
3. WHATEVERVILLE - A Great Place to Stay Inside and Play Mario Karts!
“Our library has a computer!”
Your hometown has a slogan? Every time you talk about it I can’t help but think that rural Iowa seems very different from rural Wisconsin. On the other hand it may just be because I didn’t really grow up in (or near) a town of any real size and went to school in a district that was pretty much completely rural (the 4 little towns within the district probably have a joint population of 800 at most). Still, I don’t think either of the towns I lived between (Richland Center and Reedsburg) had slogans. If they did, they weren’t good enough that I knew about them.
Meanwhile, while trying to determine if Richland Center has a slogan I have discovered that the tavern about 3 miles from where I grew up is for sale. Now that’s going to give me some new fodder for my weird “going back home” dreams.
my favourite town slogan is from Biggar, Saskatchewan, just down the highway from hometown of Saskatoon. We’d always drive there to play hockey at brutally early times.
as you would drive into town you would be greeted with a slightly worn, not very fancy sign that declared:
“New York is big, but this is Biggar.”