Your name has been your name for as long as you’ve known you. At least that’s the case for most of us.between the ages of four and seven months, the neurons involved in name recognition kicked in, and you learned to recognize your own name. And so you learned theMORE HERE

HAMPTON, Virginia – What do Betty White and Lena Horne have in common? I will answer the question, but please let me tell you a story first. At the entrance to the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel between Hampton and Norfolk was a motel called Strawberry Banks. Though it was aMORE HERE

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on Goodyear, and what it plans to do with its Model Room. It will eventually move headquarters, and it doesn’t know what to do with it. Already, the World of Rubber has closed, and there are fewer visitors. Bruce Weindruch, of the HistoryMORE HERE

TOLEDO – In a box of fabric, we found a little label for a dress store called Lamson Brothers. Every town used to have a Lamson Brothers, a stylish local department store that not only sold national labels, but stitched a few of its own labels into wholesale garments toMORE HERE

The employment picture is a fright, no matter how nicely the people at Bureau of Labor Statistics spin it. In the last year, my adopted home state of Florida lost nearly one million jobs, and we won’t get them back for years, even if the recession fades. The question IMORE HERE

Westport, Conn – The New England Consulting Group has made Debra Schumacher managing associate. Schumacher has held positions of increasing responsibility at Quaker Oats and SC Johnson, managing brands like Gatorade, Edge, Ziploc, Windex and Glade. She was also a consultant to Daymon Worldwide, focused principally on store brands/private labels.MORE HERE

There appears to be no logic to what happens to brands when airlines merge. In the airline world, if the company is bigger, it keeps its name, and the smaller company name disappears. There can be a discussion, but the answer is always the same. The United-Continental merger appears toMORE HERE

The drug Vinol often appears in old pictures. But what was Vinol? It was a drug for anemia and general weakness. It was part of the companies Chester Kent and also Drug Inc. Vinol had exclusive relationships with retailers; hence the large signs in places like New York. Main ingredientsMORE HERE

Elizabethville, Penn. – Carriage brands that might have been around during, say, the time of Little House on the Prairie would be gone. Perhaps most are, but one wagon brand is still around. It’s the company Swab Wagon Co., makers of fire and rescue trucks, pumpers and animal transports. SwabMORE HERE