Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apts
Classifieds
Shop
The Vera Bradley company doesn’t do anything second-class, and the latest evidence of this came with the company’s float pulling down the Director’s Trophy for Outstanding Artistic Merit in its first appearance in the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif., on New Year’s Day.
According to Tournament statistics, an estimated 40 million Americans watched the parade on national television, capturing the interest of more than 16.5 million households.
All of this positive global exposure (millions of people also viewed the parade on TV in at least 150 countries and territories) bodes well for the company’s home in northeast Indiana, which historically has been very modest about telling its success stories to a national audience.
For the estimated 1 million viewers who watched the parade in person, perhaps they should consider the fact that the Tournament itself was originally an effort to entice more Hoosiers and people from the Midwest to move to Pasadena, dubbed “the Indiana Colony” in 1874. Given the incredible economic challenges facing the Golden State today, these same Pasadena residents might be well served to take a look at what’s happening in their ancestral homeland of Indiana and consider a move back.
Never heard of the historic link between Indiana and Pasadena, which was nearly named “Hoosier” in the late 1880s? Consider this: In what might be thought of as a prototype of sorts for 2008, some 120 years ago in 1888 the region around Pasadena suffered a collapse in the local real estate industry. The city, founded by entrepreneurs from Indianapolis, cast about for an idea to prop up the economy of the region. The solution? A Pasadena academic declared in 1889: “Let us hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise.”
Local organizers thus put together an Olympic-style event in the middle of the mild California winter, complete with chariot races, track-and-field events and bronco-busting demonstrations. In a public relations coup, the organizers invited the editors of Indianapolis and Midwestern newspapers to serve as judges to secure widespread publicity. They called the event “The Tournament of Roses,” and it was an instant success.
Today, with an overcrowded region and an international reputation, there obviously exists no need to raise awareness of the former Indiana Colony’s attributes.
In fact, with California now locked in a $40 billion statewide budget crisis that the Washington Post calls “the worst in the state’s history,” perhaps the time has come for regional residents of the former Indiana Colony to actually consider a return to their ancestral roots.
As California legislators well know, the budget deficit faced by the Golden State is larger than the entire gross state products of at least five individual states (Vermont, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming).
Perhaps residents of the former Indiana Colony would do well to Google Indiana’s recent economic performance.
There they would find that CNBC named Indiana “the most improved state for business” and that Standard & Poor’s recently awarded the state its first ever triple-A bond rating. They would further find that Indiana is one of a small handful of states that finished its recent fiscal year with a billion-plus surplus rather than a deficit of titanic proportions. If they Googled “Indianapolis,” the place where Pasadena was dreamed up, they would find that it is home to BioCrossroads, a highly successful biotech association busily building new technology bridges with Southern California.
And if they wanted to take a look at Vera Bradley’s hometown of Fort Wayne in northeast Indiana, they might be surprised to find that wireless communication – the origin of cell phone technology – was invented and put into production here. They would also find a multibillion-dollar high-tech commercial defense industry, a state-of-the-art digital truck design facility at NaviStar, a growing medical device sector and a region that generally reflects an increasingly progressive state of Hoosier growth.
Finally, concerning Pasadena’s major football history (a football game was added to the Tournament some 15 years after it was first established), the region’s residents might want to consider that Indiana is now a real Super Bowl state, both with the Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts and the proud future host of Super Bowl XLVI.
Residents of the former Indiana Colony might consider a move back soon to their ancestral homeland for their own Hoosier economic comeback, for just when the national economy is blazing along in a full 2012 recovery, the eyes of the world will turn to where it all started for what once almost became “Hoosier, Calif.”
