Ventura Gives Up Its Name Without a Fight
Those Minnesotans!
You let one big, bad, bald, bombastic Minnesota wrestler call himself Ventura and pretty soon you’ve got a few thousand of them saying: “Yah, that’s one darned good name, that Ventura, you betcha.”
Ventura: You’ve met The Body. Now meet The Burg.
You’ll find it on the outskirts of St. Cloud, about an hour northwest of the Twin Cities. As of early May, the unincorporated townships of St. Augusta and Luxembourg will join forces as the incorporated city of--need I spell it out?--Ventura.
Some 2,800 Venturans-to-be live in the 30 square miles of the new Ventura. A few church steeples break up the landscape of rolling dairy farms. There’s not a Main Street, exactly, but there is a gas station-minimart-pizza place-tanning salon, all rolled into one, all serving Venturans in beautiful downtown Ventura.
Now I would have thought that Ventura--the one in California--would have gotten up off its beach chair and issued a protest before an administrative law judge in Minnesota approved the name change on Friday.
But did the laid-back Californians demand a little something from the Ventura wannabe? Did they send their lawyers to court? Did they mount a campaign to protect the good name of Ventura from Minnesotans who seem to have an inordinate fondness for it?
Gosh, hon, they really didn’t.
Whatever happened to the perennial blather during City Council campaigns about “running the city like a business”? Do you think Company X would let Company Y lift its name without getting a big-bucks law firm to shoot off a threat against Y’s partners, and their children, and their children’s children?
In business, names are jealously guarded. Just try using the word “realtor” in print instead of Realtor, as a national real estate group has trademarked it. Forget to capitalize that R, and you’ll get a poison-pen letter faster than you can say “cease-and-desist.”
(This prompted an editor I know to issue a stern ultimatum: “Use Realtor only when one of them is indicted. Otherwise, it’s ‘real estate agent’. Got it?”)
OK, so you can’t trademark a city’s name. If that were possible, then Venturas across the country--like the Ventura Motel, in Ludington, Mich., and Robin Ventura, of the New York Mets, to name but two--would be in big trouble.
But surely a substantial city of nearly 100,000--like Ventura, Calif.--can squeeze enough from a puny upstart like Ventura, Minn., to fill a pothole or two. In fact, if Ventura is such an attractive name, the city--the California version of it--should consider franchising it to less glamorous-sounding places like Uncertain, Texas . . . or Conshohocken, Pa. . . . or Boring, Ore.
Alas, such moneymakers have eluded the city’s leaders.
“Maybe we should have charged for the name,” Ventura Mayor Sandy Smith said ruefully. “Maybe they could have sent us a lake or something.”
On the other hand, he noted, brightening up, the California city’s formal name is San Buenaventura, “so they only got half of it.”
That’s enough for folks in the soon-to-be-former St. Augusta.
For them, the name change was a strategy that paid off. It drew attention to their fight against neighboring St. Cloud, which wanted to annex the life out of St. Augusta and Luxembourg. The judge on Friday approved not just the change to Ventura, but the incorporation that would allow the hamlets to fend off most of St. Cloud’s advances.
“They still took a bunch of our land and 400 or 500 people, and that smarts a little bit,” said Ollie Mondloch, chairman of St. Augusta’s town board. “But looking backward is only going to create more animosity.”
Mondloch said some residents aren’t crazy about naming anything--no less their new town--after Gov. Ventura, but most are enthusiastic. After all, the governor--the former James Janos--thought “Ventura” sounded distinctive enough to use as a nom de ring way back when.
As for The Body himself, “he’s delighted, he’s tickled” about the new town’s tribute to him, said his spokesman, Paul Moore. “He’s even a little humbled.”
Oh yah, you betcha.
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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
