SOAP LAKE NAME CHANGE

Reader disagrees with proposal

It is totally inappropriate to change the names of Soap Lake when every city in the world is trying to generate publicly, economic development and tourist money for economic and survival reasons. Changing the names of an established community is extremely counter productive. Seattle becomes Si'ahl? What happened to Seattle? I am a known advocate of Native American issues, but do we change all the Anglo names to pay tribute to the past?

Soap Lake, the lake and town, in the last hundred plus years, created major attraction to itself because of the Soap Lake Healing Waters. During the last 10 years, the names of Soap Lake and the Soap Lake Healing Waters have received world wide publicity, reaching an estimated 2 billion people, because of the publicity of the Soap Lake Giant Lava Lamp. It continues to this day, with recent articles in the Seattle Times, American Airlines Magazine and elsewhere.

Estimated value of this free world wide publicity is $200 million dollars, which included publicity by CNN, TV shows, hundreds of radio interviews, magazines and front page newspaper articles in every state of the union and every country of the world.

The BBC, who was here in Soap Lake and broadcast the story of Soap Lake Healing Waters and the lamp world wide to 241,000,000 people, four different times!

Knowing this piece of information, does anyone seriously believe that changing the name of the lake and starting over with an essentially unknown name make any economic sense?

The answer is no it doesn't! Not changing the name has everything to do with the world wide knowledge of the names and the survival and future of the community.

Keep the name of Soap Lake (the Lake and Town) Soap Lake!

Brent Blake

Soap Lake