The City of Five Seasons

In nineteen sixty-eight, the Cedar Rapids Chamber of Commerce assigned a publicity chairman named Bill Munsell the task of inventing a slogan that would attract new residents to the city. Munsell, working with an art director and a copywriter, returned with something unusual: not a slogan about the city's industries or its location or its civic record, but a philosophical proposition. Cedar Rapids, they proposed, was the City of Five Seasons.

The idea drew on a verse from Ecclesiastes, to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven, and extended it. The four seasons of the natural year were already spoken for: spring, summer, autumn, winter. The fifth season was the time to enjoy the other four.

The commute in Cedar Rapids was short, the pace more livable than the large cities pulling Iowa's young people away, and the argument was that this relative ease created something extra, a surplus of time, a season of living rather than rushing. The campaign produced a logo: a stylized tree with five sections, rendered in a clean mid-century graphic style that has held up surprisingly well. The slogan was printed on brochures and stamped on civic identity, and it stuck.

Cedar Rapids has been the City of Five Seasons ever since. It is the kind of municipal claim that sounds modest until you sit with it. The fifth season is not a place or an event.

It is an argument about how a city should treat the people who live in it, which may be the rarest thing any city can offer.