Name the New Sweeper to Honor Salemite Herbert Hoover!

The City's running a fun contest to name the new narrow and electric street sweeper, especially useful for bike lanes and other constrained spaces.

via FB

An obvious joke that multiple people have made is on the vacuum cleaner brand.

But of course it can point also to Salemite and former President Herbert Hoover.

What better way to honor his time in Salem?!

Before he presided over the disaster of the Depression, as Secretary of Commerce he prompted new traffic laws and zoning laws, a real development in our autoism, which we are finally starting to unwind now. The street sweeper is a real detail in support of the transportation and zoning changes in our current process of reform.

Even before his time as Secretary of Commerce, Hoover was known for practical things like the European Relief and Rehabilitation Administration right after World War I. His management of food relief saved people's lives.

Before that, he was a mining engineer, all about digging and scooping and clearing.

"Hoover's boyhood days in Salem," April 3rd, 1920

And in Salem he was aloof and not broadly liked. Equally, he did not seem to like Salem.

Naming the street sweeper after him alludes to the full ambivalence and ambiguity of his career, genuinely useful, but also with a lot of crap, and only much later after his time in Salem attracting a kind of local parasocial affection by his celebrity and political prominence.

• See previous notes on Hoover here.
  

Do it, City of Salem!