SEAL THE DEAL WITH A DESIGN THAT SAYS . . . ROANOKE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 14, 1993                   TAG: 9302140009
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
SEAL THE DEAL WITH A DESIGN THAT SAYS . . . ROANOKE
Ed's note: Snap on the chin straps, youngsters: It's contest time again.
Before you go criticizing me for being a critical Yankee who just blew into town to flail at everything you hold sacred, I want you to know that this was a local hero's idea.
It was, in fact, 18 years ago Thursday that political upstart and then-vice mayor of Roanoke Noel Taylor first suggested that the city needed a new official seal.
"Our present seal is not representative of the tremendous development and progress that we are making today," Taylor wrote in a letter to Mayor Roy L. Webber.
Chill out, we're getting to the contest.
Taylor looked at the city seal and he saw a blindfolded woman in a business suit sitting in the foreground. Behind her, a steam locomotive chugged past, hauling a train of freight cars. Oil slicks clotted a marsh. And thick black smoke spewed from three towering smokestacks.
If this city really looked like the seal says we do, the Environmental Protection Agency would have shut us down long ago.
It was a great seal for its time, and Roanoke Mayor Joel Cutchin approved it on Jan. 11, 1909. Designed by the Maryland Lithographing Co. of Baltimore, the seal pictured Roanoke as so many turn-of the-century cities wanted to be depicted: The brawny center of filthy, polluting, rapacious heavy industry, but a place where justice was dispensed fairly.
Love Canal with a judicial system.
For the past 84 years, one month and three days, the seal has adorned flags, stationery and the bullet-riddled doors of police squad cars.
By 1975, Taylor noted that the seal had outlived its usefulness. The Roanoke Fine Arts Commission was asked to tap the city's creativity to come up with a new design. The city paid Associated Advertising $1,000 to design a new seal.
For 18 months, the city gridlocked. Dozens of proposals were submitted, ridiculed and tossed on the scrap heap.
City Council sent a few city seals back for revisions. Artists fumed. Schoolkids contributed. Citizens quarreled.
The seal was never changed.
In the increasingly global market in which Roanoke is fast becoming a bit player, image is the very cornerstone of success.
Roanoke cannot prosper if its city seal sends a message to neutral parties: Hi, we're Roanoke. We're just like Cleveland, only much smaller and a whole lot dirtier.
Finally, the contest.
We need to design a new city seal that will project a more truthful image of our city. Not a logo, mind you. Logos we've got out the crankshaft already. We need a seal. Seals are round so they can fit on bullet-pocked police cruiser doors.
Your seal's design should reveal something about Roanoke, make some statement about the place that you think needs to be made.
Draw it up, big enough so that judges won't have to squint. Send it to me at P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, Va. 24010.
Submit your entry before March 1. Winners selected by expert judges will get valuable prizes and possibly an offer for movie rights.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB