Tuesday, October 4
Utopia's motto
Do you know the town motto of Utopia, Colorado? Believe it or not, it's this: "Utopia: The edge of nowhere." Oddly coincidental, if you ask me, considering.
It happened back in 1974. Swept into office with the Nixon Watergate scandal undoing the old guard Republican city council, three young newcomer hippies were elected to Utopia's city council on a platform of new ideas. The following summer, with the two remaining old timers on summer vacation, the kids proposed and passed at an August council meeting the new town motto as a joke.
Unsurprisingly, it triggered a wave of media interest in the town, and then some locals made money selling t-shirts and the Chamber embraced it and then it was forgotten. It was never rescinded, and to this day it's still the town's motto, proudly carved into wood signs on two of the town's four boundaries.
