It’s an “All-America City.” It’s been discussed here (or UBRF) before.
Q) Why is the award called the “All-America City Award?” Why not All-American?
AAC) The All-America City Award program originated when a reporter from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Jean James) asked the National Municipal League (now known as the National Civic League) leaders, “if we know enough about high school football players that we can pick an All-America team each year, why can’t we do the same for cities?” The Star Tribune at that time was published by Cowles publishing, who also published Look magazine. Look incidentally picked the All-America football team. NML leaders decided it was a good idea - and modeled the original Award after the All-America football program, even going so far as to call the winners a “team” and picking 11 winners.A serendipitous feature of calling the award All-America and not All-American, that was explicitly recognized by the originators of the award (and continues to this date), is that AAC does not recognize the most patriotic, or most cosmetically “American” cities (you know, everyone has a flag on display, our gardens all have red, white, and blue flowers) but honors substance: citizen involvement leading to community improvement.
The Award’s founders felt that citizens working together represented what America stood for much more that merely planting a victory garden. As Charles Edison, the NML president at the time AAC was initiated, stated, “If we don’t make democracy work where neighbors share concrete problems and can talk about them over their own back fences, we’re certainly not going to keep it alive in Washington or make it work on a world scale. Only as a responsible member of a local community which handles its own problems creditably can the individual learn the lessons and develop the civic competence needed to make him a safe member of the larger world community.”
And as far as the snow? Someone else pointed it out… it’s only January. We’ve got at least 2 more months of snow. This is actually pretty common, as far as I recall. In fact, I think this thread could have been from last year. The same thing seems to happen every year, for every season. One bad day of Fall hits, we assume summer is over, but then we get a really warm week. One big snow storm hits and then we get a dry period followed by warmer air and rain. People get all antsy / excited and think that’s all we’ll see from Jack Frost. Not so fast, folks. I’m sure we’ll have huge piles of snow to shovel in the next week or 2. In fact, weather.com says it’ll be snowing today, tomorrow, and Sunday.