You may not have heard of DISH, Texas, but you can visit it, starting this week. It's part of a trend, which some find distressing, of small towns letting themselves be renamed in return for money or other considerations:
In an age of pervasive advertising that many people try to ignore, such stunts are a good way to grab the public's attention, said Mark Hughes, chief executive of Buzzmarketing and the former Half.com executive who devised the Oregon deal.
"Word of mouth is the most powerful form of communication and marketing out there," Hughes said in a telephone interview from Santa, Idaho, where he's leading the effort to rename that town Secretsanta.com, after a gift-exchange Web site.
No new ground is being broken here. Practically every building in the country more than two stories tall is named after a business. Lots of big hospitals have the "so and so" wing named after a benefactor, and it would be hard to find a university without a building named after somebody's deep-pockets relative or ancestor. The Indianapolis Colts will be leaving the "RCA Dome" for a new stadium that, for now, is set to be called the Indiana Stadium; anybody think that name will stick once companies start throwing the money around? Even here in Fort Wayne, there was an attempt once to give the art museum a ton of money if it could be rechristened the "Name of the benefactor Fort Wayne Museum of Art," but the plan was scuttled by a well-known and influential patron of the arts who was on the board (but, as they say, that's a whole other story).
Maybe Indiana should try to get in on this cash bonanza. We could have Cummins, Ind. (formerly known as Columbus), GM, Ind. (formerly known as Fort Wayne, which just missed out on being International Harvester, Ind.), Delphi, Ind. (formerly known as Kokomo; probably not too much money would change hands there, however), and, of course, Eli Lilly, Ind. (once the state capital known as Indianapolis). Now that I think about it, Leo is a nice name, but I'm not that attached to it. For the right price, I'd consider becoming Folgers Morris.
You could, of course, just start your own town and call it whatever you want to.
