Posted 1:05 PM by Gene

Now that the IGGLES have won the SUPER BORE let us reflect on how important that is. The first thing we'll hear about this is "civic pride." Civic pride allows professional sports owners to shake us upside down from the ankles every ten years for new stadiums. Well, if you want to talk civic pride, here's a very partial list of some of the institutions we used to be proud of, that vanished into corporate thin air or assumed other wan identities, that used to be as Philadelphian as the proverbial cheese steak or the IGGLES:

The Pennsylvania Railroad; the Reading Railroad; PHILCO; the Baldwin Locomotive Works; the American Locomotive Company; the Budd Company; Stetson hats; Botany 500 men's wear; After Six men's wear; Exide batteries; Atlantic Refining Co.; The Saturday Evening Post; TV Guide; John Wanamaker's; Strawbridge and Clothier's; American Bandstand; Breyer's ice cream; Whitman candies; Scott paper products; Hires' root beer; Good 'n' Plenty candy (not made here in ages)....

I could go on and on -- and I intend to add to this list over the next several weeks; but we've lost a lot more in civic pride than any band of NFL mercenaries could ever add. For proof you need look no further than the sixty percent of our city which is ghetto and the twenty percent which is industrial wasteland, never to be productively used again, except as car lots.

If I opened my blog up to comments I'd get as much praise as those musical Dilberts of BofA. I'm not knocking the IGGLES. Neither am I in their thrall.