Email
PrintMore about swagger
The March 1978 cover.
The spark for our story on swagger didn’t happen during a meeting or a hallway conversation. It came when WCBE’s underwriting director Jim Coe asked a question during a Columbus Metropolitan Club forum.
The
I joked that we didn’t have a cover for an upcoming issue and gave Coe a deadline to turn in a story. But later it hit me that he was on to something. Our survey results clearly showed people were concerned that Columbus should start to feel better about itself. And Mayor Mike Coleman had adopted the word “swagger” in his campaign to pump people up about the city’s accomplishments.
Surely we could have fun with the idea of swagger in a town without much of it. Perhaps it could be a self-help guide. Or a look at who actually has swagger in this city. Or take a playful poke at why we’re modest to a fault.
But the story couldn’t be a straight piece of news writing. It required a different touch—more like a reported essay, and the writing itself needed some swagger.
So I called Jeff Long. We’ve had a long history together, dating to his days as a staff writer for Columbus Monthly and, after his departure, as a freelance writer. He’s also a columnist for our sister publication, The Other Paper. If nothing else, Jeff knows how to take a point of view on a story.
We talked through the idea, but I think neither one of us knew for sure where we’d end up. To me, it felt like pushing in all our chips during a poker game. Either we would hit big or go bust.
I hope you agree with me that Jeff nailed the sucker.
As noted in Jeff’s piece, the idea of Columbus suffering from a lack of confidence isn’t exactly news. In fact, Columbus Monthly tackled the topic in March 1978, with a cover story—“Columbus’s inferiority complex: Are we as weak as we think we are?” (It’s a classic cover, by the way: three muscle men flanking a scrawny guy representing Columbus.)
As the magazine wrote: “Complain, complain, complain . . . that’s all you hear. Badmouthing Columbus seems to be the pastime of the day. True, we don’t have one single thing to be famous for. But there are a lot of areas where we’re not as bad as we’d like to think.”
After listing a bunch of opinions about why the city is dull (too white-collar, too homogenous, too reserved), the story then examined how Columbus rated in 12 categories. The rankings reminded me why, after growing up here and then graduating from Ohio State in 1982, I left with no intention of returning (but I did, which is another story).
It received only one “good”—Intangibles (“Living here is easy.”). And just Recreation and Government scored as above average. Everything else was mediocre or worse.
Yet, the story noted: “Those people who talk grandly—and perhaps rightly—of Columbus being a great city in 10 or 15 years have made everybody miserable—the city wants it now. Columbus in 1978 might best be defined as a good, solid average city . . . populated by malcontents with aspirations toward superstar city status.”
Here’s a toast to the malcontents—then and now.
