![]() OK, OK, the rhyme is cute, the choice of verbs is wrong, the slogan is outdated. "Is buys meant? Uses? Enjoys? But not takes, surely. It survives criticism like that of writer Paul Fussell, who called the slogan "an idiomatic disaster" and used it to illustrate America's culture of hucksterism in his 1991 book, "BAD." it survives the inevitable snide jokes about how Trenton is no longer making anything and the world is no longer taking from it. The sign has survived war, depression and energy crisis. Longer than a football field and made of glowing neon, the sign is like a welcome mat for everyone who gets to Trenton by crossing the river - and an electric monument to civic boosterism. Slightly changed, it's a phrase that still rings generations later: So proud, in fact, that in 1911, they proclaimed their knack for industry with a sign hung from the trusses of the lower Delaware River bridge. It even made the world's largest bathtub and shipped it to Washington so the president, William Howard Taft, could soak his 350-pound body. It made pottery and rubber and wall plaster and cars and farm tools and mattresses and watches and bricks and linoleum an cigars. Trenton in 1911 made the the steel rope used to hold up the world's longest suspension bridges and the anvils used to forge the nation's iron. The first thing any one has to understand about Trenton's most famous slogan is that it originated at a time when the city really did make things.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |