I Just Can't Get Away From It

Heraldry, I mean.  It's everywhere I go, every place I look.

No, really!

I was back at work earlier this week after a week's "vacation."  At lunch time, I went into the break room to grab a bite before heading back to my desk.  And there, right on the counter, between the coffee maker and the sink, you'll never guess what I found.

That's right, some more heraldry.

This is a mug with the arms of Ursuline Academy on it, just sitting out there as bold as brass (well, okay, plastic, but still ...)  My guess at a blazon would be: Argent a cross and on a chief gules seven mullets in a representation of the constellation Ursa Major argent.

I had to go on-line (where the above image comes from) to look them up, since all of my children are beyond the ages for which I might be looking for schools for them.  "Ursuline Academy of Dallas is an independent Catholic college preparatory school for young women in grades 9-12."  And, I'm guessing, on of the attorneys at the law firm I work for has a daughter, or daughters, who attend there.  Hence my stumbling across heraldry while simply having lunch.

I know I've said it before, but it continues to be proven to me time and again: "You can find heraldry everywhere!"

In Honor of International Heraldry Day Tomorrow

International Heraldry Day is tomorrow, June 10, 2015, and in honor of the occasion, I thought I would repost a number of the coats of arms (and arms-like logos) that I have found in and about Dallas, Texas over the years.  So here for your viewing pleasure (or in some cases, "pleasure") are the following:

A Tale of Two Bridges

One of the phrases that I occasionally hear or read in the newspaper here in Dallas, Texas, is the desire of the municipality to be a "world-class city."  And I've never really found a good definition for what the speaker or writer means by that phrase.  I get the impression that they think it means that Dallas should somehow be on the same level as cities like London or Paris or even New York.  But it seems that becoming a "world-class city" always seems to involve spending huge sums of money on projects that are "artistic" without necessarily doing much more than "prettifying" the area.  And so we come to the first of two bridges, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge over the Trinity River which runs along one side of downtown Dallas.

It is very pretty.  It's modern.  It's very artistic.  It cost a lot of money.  And yet ....

It doesn't really connect to anything.  You can get to it on the east end off of the Interstate highway I-35, but the west end of it feeds down into an ordinary street.  It doesn't connect with the east-west Interstate highway; you can get to I-30 directly from I-35 about half a mile south of the exit for the Bridge.

Then there's this other bridge, in the town of Sandwich in the county of Kent, England.  Sandwich truly was a "world-class" city; it was one of the Cinque Ports in southeastern England, and thus was one of the  major ports through which materials and goods and whatnot (for example, the elephant given to King Henry III in 1255 from the French king) traveled on their way into and out of the kingdom.

In the town of Sandwich, there is a bridge over the River Stour which, like the Trinity River in Dallas, runs alongside the city.

This bridge isn't so large as the one in Dallas, and presumably it cost nowhere near as much to build, but it actually does go somewhere; it used to be the main bridge into and out of the city.  It also used to be a toll bridge, but you can cross it for free these days.

And the bridge in Sandwich has something else that the one in Dallas lacks (well, besides a long history): a coat of arms of the city.

Blazoned as Per pale Gules and Azure three demi-Lions passant guardant in pale Or conjoined with as many sterns of demi-Ships Argent, this is a great rendering (dated 1892-3) in cast iron of the arms of Sandwich.

Maybe something like this is what Dallas needs to turn itself into a "world-class city;" a small but useful bridge with a nice display of heraldry on it, instead of a hip, modern, bridge to nowhere.

Found Heraldry on My Birthday

You know how I keep saying that "you can find heraldry everywhere"?  Well, we proved it once again when we went out on my most recent birthday.  (No, I'm not going to tell you which birthday it was, nor am I going to tell you the date.  Let's just say it was this fall, and it's more years than I care to think back over.  At least I'm not like some in my family, who annually celebrate the nth anniversary of their 29th birthday.  So let it go, okay?

Anyway, to get back to the topic at hand:

We had gone to the Dallas Chocolate Festival (oh, yeah, it was totally worth it!), and having gone through and visited with and sampled the wares of all of the chocolatiers and gaining several pounds just from the smell of chocolate filling the room, we had a little time afterwards to wander about the neighborhood and see what we could see.

And, since you can "find heraldry everywhere," we, oh yeah, found some heraldry.

This is the arm-like logo of the Addison, Texas Police Department.  (Though it was styled the "Dallas Chocolate Festival," it was actually held in Addison, a suburb on the north side of Dallas.)  I find it interesting because they include as a part of their logo the seal, and de facto coat of arms, of the State of Texas (a white star on a blue field within a wreath of live oak and laurel proper).

Down the street and around the next corner is a British-style pub, which uses for its sign the crest from the Royal Arms of the United Kingdom.

Neither one may be the best use of heraldry, but, by golly, they are certainly attempts at using heraldry in the way that heraldry was designed to be used: identification.

And we found it just by having a little time and walking down the street to see what we could see.

I Thought I Recognized That Shield!

Working at a law firm as I do, occasionally I'll see some correspondence or an envelope from another law firm which uses an heraldic-like device as a logo.  Recently, a letter came over my desk with the following:

It's okay as a design, I suppose, though it's not really heraldry.  And the motto on the scroll is, I suppose, a decent one for a law firm: "Truth overcomes all things."  Though Fairbairn's Crests gives the Latin for this motto, borne by the de Courcy, Eaton, Goodchild, and Laffan families, as Vincit omnia veritas, slightly different from the version here.  But vicit is "conquers" (also according to Fairbairn), so that part may be okay, too.  (But what do I know?  Putting on my best Dr. McCoy voice: "Dammit, Jim, I'm a herald, not a Latinist!")

Anyway, what really struck me about this logo was that the design of the shield and motto scroll looked familiar to me somehow.  So I pondered on it a little, and thought that I remembered where I'd seen it before.  I then dug through some of my photographs and depictions of heraldry from over the years and, sure enough, found what I had remembered.

This design is used frequently in the heraldic unit insignia of the United States Air Force.  Witness the following sampling of examples:

I don't know if the founder of the Loya Law Firm was ever in the Air Force, or whether the resemblance of his logo is a deliberate modeling of the design of much USAF heraldry, but I think you can see here why it just seemed "familiar" to me, somehow.  It's really a fairly distinctive shield and scroll shape combination.

And Even More Found Heraldry

The coat of arms or logo presented here was seen on the back of an SUV while making my daily commute to work on the freeways of urban Dallas, Texas.

The picture is not as clear as I would like, but that's what you get for trying to take a photograph in moving traffic with a cell phone.  Still, it was sufficiently clear that I could later look up the Club Deportivo Guadalajara on-line, and find these much clearer, and color, versions.

The coat of arms at the top is, of course, the arms of the City of Guadalajara, Mexico, granted to it by the Emperor Charles V in 1539.  A rendition of these arms can be found on the website Heraldry of the World at http://www.ngw.nl/int/mex/g/guadalaj.htm

Proof once again that "you can find heraldry everywhere," even if you look no further than the front windscreen of your car.

As I Have Said Many Times Before ...

... you can find heraldry (or at least stuff that is trying to look like heraldry) everywhere!

In this case, I found it at work.  Specifically, on a three-ring binder from a client's staff handbook. I found the following:

Shelton School located in Dallas, Texas, serves over 800 students with learning problems such as dyslexia, or who have difficulty with reading comprehension, math, written expression, and attention. The school provides specific instruction/remediation for students from three years of age through the 12th grade.

When I went to check out their website, though, I found that they have apparently changed (I suspect the term used would be "updated") their arms-like logo to the above image.  In some ways, it's an improvement, in that it is slightly less cluttered and thus more quickly identifiable.  (I'm not at all sure how the field would be blazoned, though; per bend sinister azure and azure?  No, that can't be right.  As heraldry, it still needs work.)

Still, though, to me this example helps to point out one of the differences between having real heraldry, a coat of arms, and having a logo (even if it is "arms-like").  Heraldry can be pretty timeless; sure, artistic interpretations will vary, depending on the artist drawing the arms, and I think that is a good thing.  That makes it possible to "update" or "modernize" the arms without the need to send off to yet another graphic design firm and pay them a bunch of money to redesign the logo.  Want your coat of arms to look more modern?  Find an artist who can draw them in a more modern style, and you're good to go, and at a tiny percentage of the price.  (Yes, good heraldic artists cost money, but have you seen what graphic design firms charge for a new logo?  You're talking some very big bucks there!)

Heraldry in the Air

I don't know why I hadn't seen these before.  I mean, Southwest Airlines is based here in Dallas, Texas.  And they've always had a bit of "flair" in how they run their business and how they decorate their aircraft.  And I'd seen a couple of these uniquely painted planes before: the one (well, apparently, there's actually three of them) painted to look like Shamu, the orca, or killer whale; and the one painted as the Texas flag.  But the other day, I ran across some photos of some other Southwest planes, of a more heraldic nature.

While the airline seems to be sticking with the motif of state flags (of some of the states which they service), the flags of some states here in the United States can be heraldic.  For example,

the State of Maryland, whose flag is the arms of the Calverts, Lords Baltimore, who founded the then colony.  (The state seal also features the Calvert arms, which consist of the quartered arms of Calvert, Paly or and sable, a bend counterchange, and Crossland, Quarterly argent and gules, a cross bottony counterchanged.)

Another plane has the flag of the State of New Mexico, with a red stylized sun symbol, also looking (and acting) heraldic.

They also have Arizona, Florida, California, Nevada, and Illinois in addition to the others already noted above.  Information about Florida and the rest of their "Specialty Fleet" can be found on-line at: http://www.southwest.com/html/cs/landing/floridaOne.html

So if you find yourself near an airport serviced by Southwest Airlines, you might keep an eye out for one of these aircraft.  You could be rewarded by seeing some flying heraldry!

Heraldry in the Streets

Another coat of arms that can be found on the Titche-Goettinger Building, of which building I spoke on this blog recently, in downtown Dallas is the arms of Spain, or at least, the quartered arms of Castile and León.

Overall, I find the design interesting, in that it can be taken as a comparatively simple shield (of Castile and León) on one of those florid shield shapes where parts of the edges are formed into rolls, a style popular in the 16th Century, which is placed on a shield shaped like a chamfron (horse head armor) popular in Italy in the 16th Century, itself placed on another one of those florid “scroll-ly” shields.  (The styles are dated according to the chart of shield shapes in Ottfried Neubecker’s Heraldry: Sources, Symbols and Meaning.)

Why Spain, on the streets of Dallas?  Well, because, of course, what is now Texas was originally claimed by Spain, before it was claimed by France, and later by Mexico, prior to becoming an independent republic.

Heraldry in the Streets

I was driving home from work the other day and saw a “coat of arms” style logo in the back window of the car in front of me.  Not having my camera with me (I generally don’t take it to work with me, which sometimes costs me a photo opportunity, but there you go) and saw the shield logo of USA Swimming.

When I got home, I looked them up on the internet, and found a (smaller) version of their logo on-line.

I find the logo interesting because it’s both based, albeit loosely, on the arms of the United States (Paly of thirteen argent and gules, a chief azure) but is also done so that the lower half of the shield looks like the lanes marked out in a competition swimming pool with the engrailed line of division just below the fess line representing waves of water.

As heraldry, I don’t think it’s the best design, but as a logo I actually think it’s pretty effective.

So near ...

... and yet so far.

That is to say, renditions of heraldry or other insignia that come close to, but fall just short of, being accurate depictions of what they are supposed to represent.

In the particular instance I am thinking of, the front of the Titche-Geottinger Building in downtown Dallas, Texas, has an amazing - and large - display on the facade facing Main Street.  (The building was originally a large, local department store.  It now houses apartments, retail space, and the Universities Center at Dallas.)

As you can see, the design consists of a shield divided per pale with nine things that look to me like oak leaves on the dexter side, and a large "TG" in pale on the sinister side, the field surmounted by a chief with a standing balance and, I believe, a ship under sail over the words "Founded 1902 Dallas", the whole surmounted by the Lone Star of Texas and an oak leaf spray.

The part that I wanted to draw your attention to, however, is the six flags flanking the shield.  These represent, mostly very well, the six flags that have flown over Texas in the course of its history.  We have, at bottom left, France; bottom right, Spain (well, the arms of the combined kingdoms of Castine and Leon); center left, the Confederate States of America's "Stars and Bars"; at center right, Mexico; at top right, the Republic of Texas (which is also the flag of the State of Texas today); and then on the upper left, ... well, no, that's not the flag of the United States of America.  It's a plain "flag" on which is placed the bald eagle from the Great Seal of the United States, holding olive branches in its dexter talon and a sheaf of arrows in its left, on its breast a shield of the arms of the United States.

So, five actual flags, and one "mash-up" that has never been used as a flag in the nation's history.

As I said, so near, and yet so far.

Heraldry In and Around Dallas, Texas (circa 1998)

For the final installment of this “blast from the past” heraldry, we have two arms-like logos.

The first is the logo of the Assembly of God, a pentecostal and evangelical church.  Not only is the shield metal on metal (argent charge on an or field, and an or chief on an or field), but it’s pretty much unblazonable.  The AG is clearly the initials of the Assembly of God, and the chevron couped inverted is an open book, the Bible.  I keep trying to figure out what the thing underlining the A and G is supposed to represent, and have been unable to figure it out.  I keep thinking that it ought to be obvious, and attempt to work in a shape with the crossbar of the A and G and the descender of the G, but without success so far.

Finally, we have the shield-shaped logo of the Collin County Community College District, a round-bottomed shield with a detached chief.  (Or is it, really?  Could be a chief divided per fess?)

Since this photo was taken in 1998 the district has been rebranded, and is known now as Collin College, with the various campuses being a more integrated part of the organization.

Heraldry In and Around Dallas, Texas (circa 1998)

Today’s heraldic offerings from way back in 1998 are of a couple of companies which don’t seem to have lasted into 2012.

The first is the logo of Windsor Management Company.  I suppose if I had to blazon it, it would be: Quarterly: 1st, Vert two bendlets sinister sable; 2nd, Murrey [it's not really gules] four fleurs-de-lis argent (I’m not at all sure how to blazon the arrangement; it’s very odd); 3rd, Murrey seven fleurs-de-lis 1, 2, 1, 2, and 1 argent; 4th, Sable two bendlets vert.  I have no idea if the white and black edging should be considered a bordure or merely artistic frou-frou (to use a “technical heraldic term”).

The other is an achievement of arms-like logo used by Ted Prohaska Auto Painting and Collision Works.

The shield has a sinister arm in armor embowed; I’m not sure what the hand is supposed to be holding.  The shield is supported by two wolf-like lions standing on a “gas bracket” style compartment.  The helm, well, what can I say about the helm?  It’s hard to tell if it’s a knight’s helm (affronty with the visor up) or a royal helm (affronty with a barred grill).  It’s also difficult to tell if the thing on top of the helm is a cap of maintenance or a royal crown.  Whichever it is, it's being improperly used here.

Heraldry In and Around Dallas, Texas (circa 1998)

Today’s “blast from the past” heraldry from that collection of photos I was taking back in 1998 is the arms-like logo of the Olmsted-Kirk Paper Company, or O-K Paper for short.

I ran across this logo plastered all over the sides and front of one of their trucks sitting by the side of some railroad tracks in an industrial section of north Dallas.

At the time, they were also using this sturdy fellow, bearing their shield and protecting the letters that its customers were, it expected, sending through the mail.  (The idea of an envelope being a “coat of mail” is really a pretty good pun.  Or a pretty bad one, depending upon your point of view.)

While the company has changed its logo a bit since 1998, you can see that they have not modified it a whole lot; here’s the one they are using today.

Heraldry In and Around Dallas, Texas (circa 1998)

Having done beverage heraldry in the previous post, I thought I’d do some food heraldry in this one.

These are the arms of La Tasca Española, a Tex-Mex and Spanish cuisine restaurant north of downtown Dallas.  Their coat of arms logo even looks Spanish, doesn't it?  (Despite being painted on the squarer French-style shield.)

Surprisingly enough, given how much turnover there is in restaurants in the area, La Tasca Española is still open for business today, so if you ever get a hankin’ (as we say down here) for some decent Tex-Mex cuisine, now you know where to find it.

And to help you get there, here’s the logo of the Phillips 66 brand of gasoline.  (Or petrol, for my British friends.)  Gules the numbers 66 and on a chief argent the word Phillips sable.

The Phillips Petroleum Company was founded in 1917 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and is now a part of the ConocoPhillips Company.  (Not unlike how Dallas-based Mobil Oil Corporation is now a part of ExxonMobil.  If this keeps up, some day there will be only one gasoline company in the world, but it’ll have a really, really long name!)  In 1927, the company was testing a new formulation of gasoline in a car on U.S. Highway 66.  (Yes, the "Route 66" of song.)  The car was doing 66 miles per hour (106 km/h).  So they decided to name the new fuel Phillips 66 and placed the name on the same shield shape as those marking U.S. highways.  And we’ve been stuck with that name ever since.

Heraldry In and Around Dallas, Texas (circa 1998)

Today’s heraldic offerings from coats of arms or arms-like logos seen in and about Dallas, Texas back in 1998 are three companies which dealt in alcohol in one form or another.

The first is the Routh Street Brewery, a micro-brewery located north of downtown Dallas.  The design of the logo is nice and simple, though the purist in me thinks that not only is the scroll overlying the shield unnecessary, but that they didn’t even need to put their initials on the shield.  Still, given the lack of knowledge of heraldry of the folks who would be their target market, I can understand why they included those elements.  The brewery is, alas, no longer brewing, and even their website has been closed down.

The next is a national brand, Falstaff beer, produced by the Falstaff Brewing Company of St.. Louis, Missouri.  I saw this sign for Falstaff (Per bend or and sable, on a bend sinister argent the word Falstaff gules) in a bar somewhere on the east end of downtown Dallas.  The company ceased production in 2005.

Finally, we move out onto the international scene, with the achievement of arms-style logo (Gules the letter S argent, the oval shield supported by two horses standing on the motto scroll (Integrity, Craftsmanship, Tradition) with mantling (but not a helm) and the crest of a demi-horse erect) of the Seagram Company.  With their headquarters in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Seagram was at one time the largest distiller of alcoholic beverages in the world.  Seagram went defunct in 2000 and was broken up and all of its assets sold off.  (One of its bigger buildings is now condominium apartments.)

Heraldry In and Around Dallas, Texas (circa 1998)

This next item is a photograph of a piece of memorabilia relating to a company that went out of business well before I was researching and photographing for my presentation in 1998.

Braniff International was a Dallas-based airline from 1930-1982, with two successor companies using the name from 1983-1990 and 1991-1992.  At one time it was a leader among airlines, painting its planes in bright colors and using fashion designers to design uniforms for its flight attendants, but it wasn’t able to survive the government’s deregulation of the airline industry.

There are, of course, no tinctures marked on the piece, and I doubt that we can assume that the second quarter is hatched for azure (blue) and the third quarter for gules (red), but it makes for an interesting quasi-heraldic design with the jet airliner and globe in the first and fourth quarters.