Staff Photo by Randall Higgins
People gather in Johnston Park in downtown Cleveland every day. It is also the scene of Evening Shades, a free outdoor concert each Friday evening in May for the past 16 years.WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST?Do you have an idea for a nickname for Cleveland? If so, share it with us here or at facebook.com/timesfreepress.
CLEVELAND, Tenn. — The official contest deadline has passed, and about 2,000 suggested nicknames for Cleveland came in over the past few weeks.
A panel of judges selected by Mayor Tom Rowland met briefly Friday to decide how to go about selecting one, or some, nicknames and perhaps turning them over to the City Council to pick one.
“What we want is a slogan that creates conversation,” Rowland told his screening committee. “We want someone who has never been to Cleveland to say, ‘That sounds interesting.'”
Rowland suggested the nickname contest at a recent council meeting and offered a $1,000 prize for the chosen one. He noted then that Athens is the Friendly City, Oak Ridge is the Atomic City and Dalton, Ga., is the Carpet Capital.
“We are looking for something that can go in a small space, a license plate or a letterhead,” he said.
Cleveland already is a Tree City USA and a Flag City USA, but those are designations, one from the National Arbor Day Foundation and the other from the Kiwanis Club, and can apply to other towns, too.
A Cleveland/Bradley Chamber of Commerce intern put the long list of suggestions into spreadsheet form. The list was handed to the committee Friday for the first time.
Melissa Woody, the chamber’s convention and tourism vice president, said the committee members will take the big list home and winnow it down to their personal top 10. They will e-mail those back and the intern will make another, shorter list.
“Worst-case scenario, we will have up to 80 [contenders] next time,” Woody said. But allowing for duplication, it likely will be less than that, she said.
Committee members will pick their top five from the second list. Then they will meet again, in November, to pick the one they all agree on, or to put a few on a short list and pass it along to the council.
This is not the first time Cleveland officials have asked members of the public to name something. In the 1970s, when sculptor Peter Toth finished his homage to the Cherokee Indians here, the public named it “The Cherokee Chieftain.”