Wahoo: Home Office of the Late Show

Wahoo, Nebraska, a county-seat farm town of roughly forty-eight hundred people equidistant between Omaha and Lincoln, holds a peculiar distinction in American television history. In February of nineteen ninety-six, David Letterman designated Wahoo the official home of the Top Ten List on The Late Show with CBS, after a local resident wrote in to suggest that a town with such a name deserved the honor. Letterman agreed, and Wahoo held the designation longer than any of the ten or so other cities that preceded it across seventeen years of late-night broadcasting.

Residents sold more than three thousand commemorative T-shirts, and fans arrived from Europe to photograph the sign. The town never tried to be anything other than what it was: a small Nebraska city with an unusually useful name.