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The other night a commercial break appeared on the tube, and I was treated to the usual spectacle of a potent four-wheel-drive vehicle chewing up the countryside -- splashing grandly as it forded a creek, creating an inspiring rooster-tail of dust as it sped along an unpaved back road, wallowing proudly through mud that would swallow a lesser vehicle.
The ad was for some terrain-destroyer called a Dodge
Durango,
and it made me wonder why Durango is now so
trendy that it, like glamorous Aspen some years ago, gets
adopted by a Big Three automaker. So I called a friend
there.
Beats me why you'd name a sport-utility vehicle
'Durango',
he said. An $1,800 mountain bike ridden
by a trustfunder is a lot more 'Durango.'
Besides, the last good Dodge truck was the D-100.
What's with these modern wimp trucks -- air-conditioning,
automatic transmissions, power steering, smooth
suspensions? Hell, anybody could drive one. We're going
to have to find a new way to express our masculinity. How
about a Dodge Machismo, with a four-speed crashbox you have
to double-clutch, pre-cracked windshield, a leaky heater
core and an AM radio that doesn't work?
I do know why there's no truck named Salida,
he
continued. In most of the Western Hemisphere, Salida
means 'exit,' and who'd want to drive an Exit?
He had a point, but I had another question. Does the
city of Durango collect royalties or anything -- maybe free
Durangos for police cars -- for the use of its
name?
He laughed. Not that I've heard. Those big
companies just use our communities without paying us
anything. Maybe we should trademark these trendy Western
names, so that we'd get something out of it.
That seems sensible. The Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations of Dakota Sioux in South Dakota are among the poorest locales in the United States -- and they might not be if they collected a fee for every Dodge Dakota pickup that left the factory.
The Cherokee in Oklahoma would probably welcome royalties from all those Jeeps sold to soccer moms, and the good people of Wyoming's university town would be pleased if they collected for every Laramie trim package sold on a Dodge pickup.
The littoral residents along the California-Nevada border should be enriched with every Tahoe that emerges from General Motors, and we taxpayers who got taken for a ride by Silverado Savings & Loan should be reimbursed with every GM Silverado package.
Not only auto companies use our names. Some cable
channel that we don't get (when you live in rural TCI
territory, there are a lot of cable channels you don't get)
has a program called Southpark,
but the South Park
of Colorado receives not a nickel for its name. Nor did
Chaffee County ever collect anything from the Shavano
Institute, even though the think tank took the name of one
of our dozen 14,000-foot peaks -- and the Southern Utes
should have been paid, too, since Shavano was Ouray's war
chief.
There appears to be no hope of collecting from these outfits for using our names, so perhaps we should reverse the process, and do what sports arenas do -- sell the naming rights.
I don't know that it does much good -- my Coors
consumption patterns changed not a whit after the Rockies
began playing in Coors Field, and when I needed network
cards for computers, I was so impressed by 3Com Park at
Candlestick Point
in San Francisco that I bought cheap
generic products, rather than genuine 3Com cards.
Companies have been willing to work with towns as well
as stadiums in this regard. Colorado's Fraser (known as
the Icebox of the Nation
until International Falls,
Minn., purchased the epithet) was once offered all manner
of inducements by an antifreeze company to change its name
to Xerex.
Fraser refused, but in 1950, a network radio producer
named Ralph Edwards came up with a publicity stunt -- he'd
stage a national live broadcast from any town that changed
its name to his program's: Truth or
Consequences.
Hot Springs, New Mexico, took him up on it. Edwards
still comes every year and puts on a show, according to a
friendly fellow named Jagger
at the Sierra County
Chamber of Commerce. It's a big three-day festival on
the first weekend in May, and you're all welcome,
he
said.
Jagger said that as far as he knew, no money changed
hands when the town changed names 48 years ago, but it
must have helped his show, since it went on to television
and ran there for years, and I know that it really put this
tiny town, one that hardly anybody knew about, on the
map.
So maybe that's the way to win at this name game -- instead of getting annoyed when they take our names without paying, be willing to change names for anybody who's willing to make a deal.
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