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[ 14-04-2003 ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goodden.html
Our name keeps us defining ourselves
By Herman Goodden - London Free Press
April 14, 2003
Civicly speaking, what's in a name?
At intermission at a choral concert last month, I was approached by a London businessperson and patron of the arts who prefers to keep a low profile in the media. A thoughtful man who's always worth talking to for the ideas he passes around like a freely proffered bag of popcorn, this time one of those ideas lodged itself in the back of my mind like a half-exploded kernel wedged between two molars, providing hours of half conscious diversion as I poke at it from different angles, trying to work it loose.
What he said was a more eloquent version of something I've been hearing all my life, but never seriously considered before. I paraphrase, but it went like this: "I think it's time London changed its name. The real London is across the ocean, was established a long time ago, and we're never going to be able to own that name like they do. It's like adding "Junior" to a family name that's been passed on. Maybe we needed it at first, to get us started as part of a tradition that was vitally important to us during the pioneer period. But that was 200 years ago. This town will never come into its own as long as it's saddled with a name that - for anyone living outside Middlesex County - will always signify somewhere else."
Many Londoners will remember an episode of All in the Family from the early '70s, where Archie Bunker almost lost his job for too quickly reading an address form and shipping an expensive parcel overseas instead of to the Forest City. About to rupture himself with indignation at how the gods had deviously conspired to trick him, Archie reaped the biggest laugh of the show by staring heavenward and asking, "Who ever heard of London, Ontario?"
When the communities of Galt, Hespeller and Preston came together on New Year's Day, 1973, and collectively redubbed themselves Cambridge, they engaged in a kind of historical annihilation. Did they even think of consulting Londoners first to see if there were any downsides to living under another city's well established name? Three years earlier, the cities of Fort William and Port Arthur had put away their colonial training wheels and boldly christened their amalgamated city with a beautiful new name redolent of nowhere else on Earth --Thunder Bay.
I'm not denying that Cambridge is a charming and beautiful city and I trust by now my credentials as a lifelong Londoner who loves this place are established. I would also concede that, 210 years into London's existence, it's probably too late to consider changing anything so primary as our name. So I'm not talking civic treason here. I'm talking about identity and how a community takes ownership of its own destiny.
That was just the sort of soul work London artist Greg Curnoe (1936-92) playfully, brilliantly and (some of us would say) heroically grappled with all his life. Attending the opening this week of the magnificent Curnoe retrospective at Museum London, I asked Zoe Curnoe, Greg's youngest child (now 31) if her dad ever had a problem with London's name, ever saw it as something to throw off.
"Never," she laughed. "I think he actually thought the name London was funny. I think he actually liked it, that London was London. For him, that would've just been part of Canada's whole dilemma; that no matter what we do, we're always going to be dwarfed, either by England or the States. So we just have to find our own path and keep plugging away. Living in Vancouver, I'll mention I'm going to London and people say, 'You're going to England? How nice for you.' Nobody ever thinks of London, Ontario. I always have to remember to say it, to qualify it as London, Ontario. And maybe that just builds a little more strength of character in all of us. It reminds us that we constantly have to make our point, or else people are going to go ahead and assume something else about us."
Herman Goodden is a London freelance writer. His column appears in Monday's and Thursday's Opinion pages. It no longer appears in Sunday's A&E section. He can be e-mailed at herman.goodden@sympatico.ca. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com
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