Dick Tracy And The McHenry County Seal

July 31st, 2008 at 5:29 pm · DrHGuy · Fascinations, Local · No Comments

The Official Heck Of A Guy Entry In The McHenry County Seal Design Contest - If It Weren’t For A Couple Of Silly Rules¹

In yesterday’s post, McHenry County Seal Wars - Return Of The Heck Of A Guy, I boasted that, during an interview with the Northwest Herald,

I had the vision of the perfect McHenry County Seal design. Not only is
the design itself precisely on the mark, but it also clashes with the
requirements set forth in the contest regulations.

Of course, Mohammed Ali has pointed out (as have many others), “It ain’t bragging if it’s true.”

Now you, gentle reader, have the opportunity to evaluate if my declaration that I’ve stumbled onto, to paraphrase Dr. Pangloss, the best of all possible McHenry County Seals is bravado or fact.²

The McHenry County Dick Tracy Seal

Slick, eh?

Nonetheless, let’s take a step back to look at the McHenry County - Dick Tracy relationship.

Just In Case You Don’t Know Dick

Today, Dick Tracy is more icon than the heroic detective starring in comics, radio, films, TV (live action and cartoon), board and video games, and books. The description of Dick Tracy in Wikipedia is a serviceable and representative take on that character:

Dick Tracy is a long-running comic strip featuring a popular and familiar character in American pop culture. Dick Tracy is a hard-hitting, fast-shooting, and supremely intelligent police detective who has matched wits with a variety of often grotesquely ugly villains. Created by cartoonist Chester Gould in 1931, the strip made its debut appearance on October 4, 1931, distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Gould wrote and drew the strip until 1977.

This post is not, however, an exposition of Dick Tracy exploits; the fact that I don’t have to explain what Dick Tracy represents is, in fact, part of my argument.

More about that in a moment.

Dick Tracy, Chester Gould, And McHenry County

Chester Gould

The Dick Tracy-McHenry County connection lies in the chosen home of Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy, in Woodstock, County of McHenry, State of Illinois.

The following is excerpted from the Chester Gould - Dick Tracy Museum Web Site:

It is not widely known, but most of Chester Gould’s work was actually done 60 miles northwest of the Tribune Tower in his Bull Valley studio, near the rural community of Woodstock, Illinois. …

In 1935, while driving home from a Wisconsin vacation, Gould and his family happened to pass through the tiny farming community of Woodstock and an area just east of town known as Bull Valley. Bull Valley is a stunning area filled with wooded rolling hills and breathtaking vistas. It remains that way today. Chester Gould fell in love with the area and soon purchased an abandoned farm house on 60 acres. The following year, after painstakingly restoring the old farm house, Gould, his wife Edna and daughter Jean, moved to the country.

Beginning in 1936 Gould made the trek from his farm into the big city on a regular basis. Sometimes by train, but most often by car. It is almost inconceivable that any person, in 1936, would commute that distance. No expressways were in existence and in the winter the single lane highways were treacherous. In fact, most of the close in suburbs were bucolic at the time, and towns as close as Des Plaines, Glenview and Arlington Heights, only a few miles from the Chicago city limits, were still surrounded by farms. Woodstock was on the other side of the earth!

Nonetheless, Chester Gould preferred the country small town life and the 60 mile drive was a price he was more than willing to pay. Having grown up in Pawnee, Oklahoma, Gould loved the Woodstock’s rural setting and down to earth people. He was to spend his entire career living and working on that beautiful parcel of land.

In Woodstock, Chester Gould was a good neighbor as well as a celebrity. Many of his comic characters were based on local citizens. “Tiny” the long time Woodstock police chief, is one example. In warm weather, Gould could often be found setting in the beautiful Woodstock Square with his sketch pad in hand. Gould family members were generous contributors to the Woodstock community. Over the years Chester Gould served on the hospital board, invested in local real estate, contributed his drawings to worthy causes and became a beloved figure.

With Dick Tracy’s link to the County, his visage is as legitimate a choice as Lincoln is for seemingly every third governmental and commercial emblem in the State of Illinois.

Why The McHenry County Dick Tracy Seal Is The Best Solution

If the McHenry County Board’s primary goal is, as its members have stated, to replace the current “uninspiring,” “unimaginative,” and “boring” County Seal that is “neither unique to McHenry County nor readily identifiable” with a more desirable version that is, one would infer, inspiring, imaginative, unique to McHenry County, readily identifiable, and not boring,³ there is no need to even consider designs such as those proposed in January.

Baldly put, such designs are, unless one has the ESP-level sensitivity required to recognize that squarish graphic on the left side of the two proposals, the one that looks like adjacent Ethernet and USB sockets, as (I think) the County Administration Building, just two more examples of the hundreds of imminently forgettable permutations of similar if not identical generic emblems that comprise the typical county seal.

Heck, given the amount of graphic art crammed into most county seals (many counties sport seals filled with, believe it or not, much more of what we county seal critics like to call “crapola” than these examples), designs that are immediately recognizable, let alone distinctive, are rarities.

Now, scroll up to take another look at The McHenry County Dick Tracy Seal near the top of this post.

Pretty darn easy to recognize, right? So it’s identifiable. And, it’s certainly unique to McHenry County and just as certainly not boring. I would even hold that its use on a county seal is imaginative - although admittedly the bar for an “imaginative” county seal is set relatively low. I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional citizen casting his or her eyes on the county seal found the stalwart Tracy inspiring.

Now, turn your gaze upon those two proposed designs or the current McHenry County Seal or any other county seal you like. Compare, contrast, consider, discuss.⁴ Which seal do you remember, which grabs your attention, which design is hot, which is not?

Plus, given the news coverage that accompanied the discovery that the McHenry County Seal was boring,⁵ the decision to place Dick Tracy on the McHenry County Seal would seem a sure hit with the press. With a little PR push, a Board member or two might even garner an invitation to chat with Letterman or Leno. In any case, it would appear a good bet that the image would soon become distinctive and readily identified with the County.

Moreover, my subjective assessment is that Dick Tracy is a good fit for McHenry County. Tracy is square-jawed, determined, confident of his own motivation, steadfast in his course of action, extraordinarily competent in his chosen field, loyal to his friends, fearless, upright, forward-looking, and, despite his inborn talent as a babe magnet, faithful to Tess. That set of qualities certainly describes, with a gender-specific change or two, everyone residing within the boundaries of McHenry County - as far as I know.

OK, Dick Tracy could be a tad moralistic. And, yes, he occasionally played fast and loose with the notion of a defendant’s rights. Yes, he maybe once in a while shot first and, well, he didn’t really ask any questions later, he just shot first sometimes.

But, and here’s the point, it’s Dick Tracy the Icon that is featured on the seal, not Dick Tracy the role model. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt apparently had an extramarital fling or two. Do we look for someone to replace them on our currency? It’s as simple as the Good Guy (Dick Tracy) Vs Evil (Pruneface et al). I’m suggesting we put the Good Guy on the County Seal.

The Rules

Some stickler for the rules is sure to point out that the Design Contest regulations include this restriction: “The work must be original, and contain no clip art or other copyrighted material.”

I have two (printable) responses:

Perhaps it’s because of rules like this that the County hasn’t been able to find an acceptable design yet.
Does the County want a great seal design or does the County want to follow arbitrary rules? Michelangelo was known to occasionally disregard the edicts of his patrons, the de’ Medici to good effect. I’m willing to emulate that model in micro-miniature.

Besides, I don’t think Dick Tracy would let that kind of bureaucratic hurdle slow him down if he were in hot pursuit of his goal.

Given that the State of Illinois Tourism folks were able to obtain permission to use Tracy in their posters, it hardly seems outrageous to suppose that it might be possible to garner the right to use Dick as the image on the McHenry County Seal.

In fact, commemorating Dick Tracy as a local icon might be karmic compensation for the recent closure of the Chester Gould - Dick Tracy Museum in Woodstock.

Oh, the rules also include “The new McHenry County seal should reflect the rich history and symbolize the character of the County.” I’ve spoken to the “character of the County” issue earlier, but if the “rich history” point is especially important, I’ve prepared a design to cover that.

Alternative Visions

If the right to bear arms folks are interested, Tracy lends himself to that point of view.

And The Final Reason To Put Dick Tracy On The McHenry County Seal? He Looks Good In A Fedora

Previous McHenry County Seal Posts

_____________________

This post is the culmination of several posts on the proposed McHenry County Seal; see section preceding footnotes headed “Previous McHenry County Seal Posts”↩
For the record, unlike Mr Ali and the legion of others who feel they must choose between bragging and telling the truth, I find myself capable of executing both actions simultaneously. This footnote, in fact, is itself an example of those cooccurring processes and, indeed, this entire post, from my perspective, is another case of what I’ve come to think of as “nonfiction braggadocio.”↩
Admittedly, I’m not certain why the County Seal can’t be, for example, “boring but functional” or “bland but distinguished.” I’m just trying to work with the Board’s own premises.↩
It would be rude to point out - except in a modest footnote, not unlike this one - that it also blows away the proposed McHenry designs shown above, the seals used by neighboring counties, and, well, just about any county seal anywhere.↩
See McHenry County Seal Makeover Makes The News ↩

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