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Establishing FW's Image: Gloria Lends a Hand

By Gloria Diaz

Check out Gloria's Blog — Edge of Gloria!

Fort Wayne Reader

2005-08-22

Fort Wayne used to be known as the “City of Churches,” but not anymore. St.
Mary’s doesn’t tower over downtown quite the way it used to, and they tore
St. Paul’s down. A local blogger thinks the city needs a new nickname. So I
propose some new images/slogans for the city, keeping in tune with reality:

City of Friendly Fatsos
People go on and on about how friendly this town, but frankly, I don’t see it. But there are plenty of hefty people, starting with the woman I see in the mirror every morning. So why not capitalize on both aspects? I even have a design for the city’s new flag: a cartoon fat guy in an IU t-shirt, with his belly hanging over his shorts, clutching a pork tenderloin sandwich in on hand, a beer in the other. He could be standing tall over three converging wavy blue lines, depicting our rivers (come to think of it, brown squiggly lines are more accurate) and declaring: Fort Wayne! The only thing bigger than our butts are our tenderloins! Yeah, it sounds obscene, but I don’t care.

City of Restaurants
Just leafing through the restaurant pages in the local phone book showed there are probably 400 restaurants in this town. I didn’t bother looking under “pizza,” but I’ll bet if you include those and the convenience stores, you have well over 600 places to buy ready-to-eat food, excluding the grocery stores.

City of Strip clubs
For as conservative, “family friendly” and morally upright as this town pretends to be, we have a lot of strip clubs within a couple miles of each other. I believe there are at least three on Coliseum Boulevard alone, and for the men too cowardly to step into one of them, there’s always Hooters. With Glenbrook within spitting distance, how can you go wrong? Shopping, strippers and savings galore! Not to mention, shakes, steaks, quesadillas and tons of other unhealthy food offerings.

City of Retail
Stores, stores and more stores. And let’s not forget the half-empty strip malls, either.

And here’s some slogans sure to put us on the map:
“We’ve got two newspapers, yes we do, we’ve got two newspapers, how ‘bout you!?

“Fat and dumb ain’t all that bad.”

“Screw You, Men’s Health!”

“Our streets are crappy, but we’re pretty happy.”

Yeah, I know no one will take these suggestions seriously, but maybe someone should. The next time we end up at the top of some magazine’s “most stupid” or “fattest city” list, why not have a little fun with it? Turn it into a tourist industry. Can’t you see Adam Sandler doing some movie about a guy getting into the witness protection program and ending up in Fort Wayne? People would come here just to see where the film was shot. And someone, somewhere, needs to make some t-shirts that say, “My friend (aunt, uncle, brother, sister, etc.) went to the dumbest, fattest city in America and all I got was this lousy XXL t-shirt.”

Hey, it could happen.