Bremen, Indiana – “A good town”

My wife and I had the pleasure of visiting my cousin and her family in NW Indiana last week. We took several day trips, including one to Amish country in and around Shipshewana. Loved seeing all the horse-and-buggy ensembles (with electric signal lights) travelling up and down the poop-covered shoulders of all the roads. Very cool.

In driving back to my cousin’s place near Cedar Lake, we passed through a town called Bremen, whose motto (as per the sign at the town entrance) is “A good town”. At first, I hoped they didn’t take up a whole Council meeting to come up with that one or, worse yet, pay a consultant thousands of dollars for that result.

But then I thought, why take up public time, effort, and money, only to decide on some slightly revised version of the thousands of town mottos already out there, such as “We live it” (East Hants, NS) or “A nice place to live” (Wasko, CA)?

Or my very own “A great place to be!” which I came up with in a stroke of creative artistic brilliance when I was Mayor of the Village of Bawlf, AB in 2001?

Nope, I thought. Why go down some trite, silly road when you can just be straightforward like Bremen and simply declare that their corner of the world is “a good town,” which I’m sure it is.

Brilliant in its brevity.