Green Bay Slow To Name Street For McCarthy — That McCarthy Aug 4th 2013, 21:33
But nearly three years after the Packers' most recent Super Bowl triumph, things are still holding back the creation of a street named after the team's third championship-winning coach, Mike McCarthy. And one of them is the legacy of that other famous McCarthy from Wisconsin.
As Bob McGinn, the sublime Packers beat writer for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, noted in a story this week, so prickly is the situation that Packers President Mark Murphy recently asked the leaders of Green Bay and its close suburbs to postpone action on McCarthy's street until after this season.
In Green Bay, nothing distracts from the Packers' winning football games — which this writer, as a Packers shareholder, surely appreciates.
Part of the holdup in honoring McCarthy in the same way as his Super Bowl-winning predecessors is that residents and businesses along a couple of streets that have been eyed for the honor, Ridge Road and Ashland Ashland Avenue, are resisting the expense that would come with having to change their address on official materials — even if the new one allowed them to bask in the reflected glory of the coach.
"This has nothing to do with Mr. McCarthy or how much he's loved or how well he's doing as a coach," Mike Aubinger, village president of Ashwaubenon, one of the suburbs through which Ashland Avenue runs, told McGinn. "It has more to do with people being inconvenienced by name changes where they have to change all their legal documents and bank accounts and stationery."
There is another thing: the vestigial association of the "McCarthy" name with one who arguably remains a more important and well known historical figure than the current Packers coach. Joe McCarthy, a U.S. Senator from nearby Appleton, Wis., became an infamously overzealous communist-hunter during the Fifties, spawning the highly negative term "McCarthyism" — and still causing a lot of embarrassment for Wisconsinites.
As an antidote to that problem, one local official suggested that any new street be named Mike McCarthy Avenue, not just McCarthy Avenue.
But for now, both the Packers and government officials seem content to kick this particular can down the road until after this season. They're hoping that by early 2014, McCarthy will have notched his second Super Bowl win — and then they'll have to name a street for him pronto no matter what the obstacles.
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