Free The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels Page B

the exception that proves this point.) Air Jordans and Shaqs exist only because the athletes are famous. Conversely (so to speak), the real man named Chuck Taylor only exists in American memory because his shoes are famous.
    In that sense then, he is both: a real person, and a marketing phantom.
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    Here is a peculiar identity trait: the fear that you have no identity at all. Places in the American Midwest seem to carry this as a genetic presumption. In fact, most places referred to as Midwestern shy away from the term, afraid such a broad, amorphous definition will counteract its purpose, leading to a misinterpretation, a stereotype, or an insult. We are so used to being misunderstood that we react preemptively. Our personalities are delicate and complex. My city is particularly stricken—a place known for most of the twentieth century as the Rubber Capital of the World was stunningly, completely stripped of that identity by virtue of a swift and profound industrial collapse. We were something, we were Known, like Firestone, and then, in a few years, we found ourselves with no idea of who we were or what was to become of us. As a result, we have tended toward a pathological compulsion to seize homegrown cultural coattails. To associate ourselves with something that would help us to explain ourselves to the wider world. To call out collectively like the Whos down in Whoville, “We are here! We are here!”
    Therefore, part of the local neurosis is a habit of identifying celebrities (no matter how minor) with ties (no matter how tenuous) to Akron, and at every opportunity making mention of this. Hugh Downs lived in Akron briefly as an infant, yet we claim him as a native son. Here’s a conversation I’ve heard too many times to dismiss.
    â€œOh, I see Hugh Downs is coming back for another season on 20 / 20 .”
    â€œHe’s from Akron, you know. . . .”
    I’ve observed this in other places too, the way people from Buffalo will perk up when someone mentions Frank Lloyd Wright and impulsively interject, “He’s from Buffalo.”
    Liberace is from Milwaukee. Mario Andretti is from Allentown. Bob Eubanks is from Flint. You have no idea how important this is.
    Pittsburgh, Lord. Andy Warhol famously hated the place, his hometown. But Andy Warhol became famous and Pittsburgh dutifully named a bridge after him and built his museum.
    Is Akron the birthplace of the Chuck Taylor? Hell yes. Let me tell you how.
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    Chuck Taylor is not from Akron, but his basketball career would be irrelevant were it not for Akron, and his basketball career (a surprisingly brief one) was what led to everything else. Taylor played one season—1920–21—for a team called the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, a thick-thighed young man in striped socks and a tight tank top emblazoned with a stylized F. This was an industrial-league professional basketball team that, not surprisingly, was named after an automobile tire. The Firestone product from which the team took its name was itself a stroke of marketing genius. In the early era of the tire industry, competition among the American manufacturers, all based in Akron, was fierce. So in 1908, company founder Harvey S. Firestone, in a meeting with his design engineers, came up with the idea for a new tread pattern, one that would use raised lettering as the actual tread. As the story goes, he reached for a scrap of paper on his desk and, writing in a diagonal descent, showed them the pattern:
    FIRESTONE
    NON
    SKID
    An elegant solution: the words described their function, the function derived from the words.
    From this signature product came the name of the company basketball team. The Non-Skids thrived in the years between the two World Wars. In 1939, the team (along with its Goodyear counterpart, the Wingfoots) became a charter member of the National Basketball League, which a dozen years later would merge into the