Alabama: Harper Lee. She wrote only one novel, but what a novel - ““To Kill a Mockingbird.’’ Alaska: Secretary of State William H. Seward, who bought it for two cents an acre. Arizona: Carl Hayden, sheriff in Arizona Territory, then U.S. senator for 41 years (1927-1969), father of the maker of modern Arizona, the Central Arizona Project. Arkansas: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart. California: Forget the movie ““Chinatown’’; honor the man - William Mulholland - who brought water to Southern California. Colorado: From the only state into which no river flows, comes the life-giver of the West, the Colorado River. Connecticut: Samuel Colt, whose product also helped settle the West.
Delaware: John Dickinson, one of those talented pamphleteers who kindled the Revolution, and later a luminary of the Constitutional Convention. The District of Columbia: American royalty - Duke Ellington. Florida: The Florida panther, endangered emblem of America’s original wildness. Georgia: Flannery O’Connor, Milledgeville’s gift to American fiction. Hawaii: The U.S.S. Arizona, lest we forget. Idaho: Perhaps it is time to forgive and remember a son of Hailey, unlikely birthplace of a pioneer of literary modernism, Ezra Pound. Illinois: Born in Germany, John Peter Altgeld exemplified moral equilibrium under pressure as governor in the 1890s, in the era of the Pullman strike and the Haymarket riots. Indiana: Eugene V. Debs Was a pioneer of generous-spirited radicalism and labor’s rights. Iowa: A man whose reputation does not do justice to his merits - the engineer, humanitarian and president from West Branch, Herbert Hoover. Kansas: Phog Allen built KU’s basketball greatness as coach for 39 seasons. Kentucky: One of the greatest statesmen never to be president, Henry Clay (see Washington, below).
Louisiana: Louis Armstrong, a Founding Father of American music. Maine: Margaret Chase Smith, who helped rescue anti- communism from Joe McCarthy. Maryland: Democracy needs the leavening raucousness of an H. L. Mencken. Massachusetts: As president he had a hard act to follow (Washington) and to precede (Jefferson), but John Adams was among the wisest of the Founders. Michigan: A pair, each indispensable - Henry Ford and Walter Reuther. Minnesota: In 1926 a poet expressed her era’s yearning for magic - ““Everything today has been heavy and brown. Bring me a Unicorn to ride about the town.’’ In 1927, in 33 hours between Long Island and Paris, Charles Lindbergh electrified his era. Later, he married that poet, Anne Morrow. Mississippi: William Faulkner has had ample honors; Eudora Welty, a writer’s writer, has not. Missouri: Huck lighting out for the territories and away from the boneheads who today want to censor him. Montana: Norman MacLean, whose ““A River Runs Through It’’ is a hymn to the state. Nebraska: O Willa Cather of Red Cloud, who did justice to those who pioneered the prairies.
Nevada: Bugsy Siegel or Wayne Newton. Just kidding. Seriously, Frank T. Crowe, who supervised the building of Hoover Dam. New Hampshire: Robert (““I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down’’) Frost, who knew that ““happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.’’ New Jersey: Great poets can find the stuff of poetry anywhere. William Carlos Williams found it in Paterson. New Mexico: An American original, whose canvases are as stunning as this state - Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Let’s not let facts discombobulate the charming myth of Cooperstown’s Abner Doubleday, who had nothing to do with inventing baseball. North Carolina: Wilmington’s Michael Jordan. North Dakota: Lewis and Clark, who passed through what became Bismarck. Ohio: Folks there disliked Sherwood Anderson’s fictional Winesburg, but it became a literary landmark.
Oklahoma: Jim Thorpe, one of America’s first sports superstars. Oregon: The symbol of Beaverton’s Nike corporation is everywhere else, so the ““swoosh’’ might as well be on the quarter. Pennsylvania: Joe Paterno, Penn State’s football coach, has proven that ““student athlete’’ is not necessarily an oxymoron. Rhode Island: Turbulent Anne Hutchinson was expelled from Puritan Massachusetts - a good sign - and became Founding Mother of the smallest state. South Carolina: Gen. James Longstreet’s shilly-shallying around Gettysburg helped preserve the Union, whose coinage he can now adorn. South Dakota: Mount Rushmore, an agreeable example of American excess.
Tennessee: James Polk, who brought the nation to the Pacific, is perhaps the president with the highest ratio of real importance to historical reputation. Texas: Nolan Ryan - 5,714 K’s - played baseball like a gunslinger. Utah: Brigham Young, whose westward trek still takes one’s breath away, was a Moses who made it all the way to his promised land. Vermont: Born on the Fourth of July, 1872, in Plymouth Notch, the 30th president presided over a 45 percent increase in America’s ice cream production. How many presidents deserve as much of the nation’s gratitude as Calvin Coolidge does? Virginia: Stonewall Jackson, who, had he not been killed at Chancellorsville, would have been at Gettysburg and . . . (see South Carolina, above). Washington: Sen. Henry M. ““Scoop’’ Jackson (see Kentucky, above). West Virginia: Sen. Robert Byrd should be his state’s choice for the quarter because his rapacity in Washington accounts for torrents of money that have flowed into the state. Wisconsin: Frank Lloyd Wright, whose genius had a Midwestern tang. Wyoming: Out where women shared the harshness of frontier life, women’s suffrage came early, and so did the first elected woman to be inaugurated as a governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross (Jan. 5, 1925).
If you do not like this list, make your own. The only requirement is that it contain something Washington would consider frivolous and inappropriate.
