Oklahoma may not be the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan place on the planet, but at least I live in an area called The Village, which sounds a little bit arty. It could be worse. I could live in one of the following real places in Oklahoma:
Cement
Beaver
Wheeless
Felt
Alfalfa
Elk City
Granite
Big Cabin
Commerce
Velma (unaccountably, Shaggy and Scooby don't seem to exist)
Tom
Swink
Slaughterville
Scraper
Pumpkin Center
North Pole
Blue
Hogshooter
Oil Center
Frogville
Sulphur
Other place names, as well as being slightly odd, conjure up more positive, even romantic associations. Imagine the hope which Fort Supply must have instilled in the hardy frontiersman in the 19th century. Other names indicate a spirit of optimism (Friendship, Okay) or wild idealism (Eldorado). White Eagle and Lone Wolf refer, no doubt, to the Native American heritage. Gene Autry is just bizarre.
I like 'The Village', however. All it is really is a little parcel of semi-suburban Oklahoma City, about 10 miles north of the city centre, which has a measure of civic independence. The Village has its own City Hall, police and fire departments, services and utilities. My address, correctly, is The Village, Oklahoma: I don't technically live in Oklahoma City. Apparently, The Village takes its name from 'The Village Store', which was a local meeting place in the 1940s when this area was mostly just farms and open country.
You can read about it here. This history reads like it was written a few years ago by someone old enough to remember when The Village was planned and built, and who now has too much time on their hands. After all, there's only so much you can read about what was said in town meetings in 1953, or the history of the sewerage system. But despite the rather weighty and purple prose, parts of it are interesting, and it gives you a sense of how this area has developed over time. The funny thing is that when it talks about the 1940s and 50s, it sounds like an age ago, but it's not really. Many people I meet every day will remember that time perfectly well. In the UK, that era really doesn't seem like a long time ago, perhaps because so much of what we see around us today was already firmly in place by that time. Here, the scale and speed of recent development is such that this area is no doubt completely unrecognisable compared to that time.
In America people talk about 'The State of...' and 'The City of...' when they want to refer to a political or civic entity. In the UK, we talk about county councils, city councils and borough councils. So, I live in Oklahoma, but the governmental level of the state is known officially as 'The State of Oklahoma'. States are divided into counties, which in turn are divided into cities. The term 'city' here does not carry the same inferences as it does in the UK: for one thing, it doesn't have to be very big (a city can have just a few hundred people living in it). The Village is technically a city, which means that at the official level, it is The City of The Village. Bizarre.
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3 comments:
Fantastic! Paul just informed me (in song) that Gene Autry was known as The Singing Cowboy way back when - believe it or not, one of his hits was 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' and his horse was Champion the Wonder Horse! You learn something every day... Check out the Gene Autry Wikipedia page for more info!
I had vaguely heard the name and thought he was someone like that - though I certainly didn't know he was responsible for Rudolph. I just think it's bizarre that there's a town named after him - unless, of course, he was named after the town. Though frankly I find that improbable, not least as it would raise the question as to how the town Gene Autry got it's name in the first place. At any rate, according to Wikipedia, he doesn't seem to have been born there, or even in Oklahoma.
Obviously the Oklahomans were so proud of their adopted star that they named the town after him... If you hang around long enough, we might end up with McBirnie, OK. How does that sound?!
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