Lake Ontario has a new name.
This morning the President signed an executive order renaming it Lake America, part of an escalating trade dispute with Canada. One signature, and a 200-mile-long body of water that has been called the same thing since the 1600s is called something else instead.
Whatever you make of it — and people are making plenty of it — a Great Lake changing its name overnight is a genuinely strange thing to watch happen on a Thursday.
We pay attention to this sort of thing more than most. We build hats on the shore of Lake Erie, about forty minutes west of Cleveland. The Great Lakes are not an abstraction here; they are the weather, the horizon, and half the reason anyone moves to this stretch of Ohio. When one of the five gets renamed by executive order, that lands differently in Avon Lake than it does in most places.
So we made the Lake America hat. Same day.
That is what Hat Off the Press is. When something happens, we design the patch, print it, press it and put it up — usually inside a day, while the thing is still the thing everyone is talking about. No committee, no minimum order, no waiting on a supplier in another time zone.
There are four Lake America designs. A circular patch with a lighthouse on the rocks and a single star overhead. A brushed-metal shield with the lighthouse engraved into it. A carved wood-grain ribbon banner, for something a little quieter. And the whole lake die-cut to its own shoreline, fourteen coastal cities named across it. All four come on five Richardson 112 colourways plus a ponytail-opening cap in Dusty Rose.
AND.....WHY CAN'T LAKE ERIE BE LAKE AMERICA?????! WHAT DID LAKE ERIE DO WRONG??? CAN'T WE HAVE A COOL NEW NAME TOO?
Share:
Licensed America 250-Ohio Hats, Gifts and Collectibles.
Lake Superior's Aurora, Rendered in Steel and Carbon Fiber