I’ve often wondered how towns develop their very unique slogans for their town. Some like Mooresville, NC’s “Race City USA” with their 49 NASCAR race teams are easy to figure out. Some are more difficult.
Florence, KY’s is “Florence Y’all”. It’s not really a southern town, so how did they develop Y’all? I found out today when I had lunch with Gary Turner who grew up there.
Gary told me, “In the early 70s Florence lured a new mall to locate right along I75. The city built infrastructure out to the site and built a big water tower out there. They put Florence Mall on the water tower.”
Evidently, the city put up infrastructure faster than the developers could build the mall. People were exiting the interstate to go to the mall. Some were angry when they couldn’t find the yet-to-be built mall. The city was getting lots of complaints.
Rather than repainting the entire tower, which would have been rather expensive, Mayor Hop Ewing had another idea. He had the painters replace the M in Mall with a Y. TV’s Real People Show did a feature on the change and Florence suddenly had a new slogan that they use to this day.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment