When I was a teen, the place in Florida where NASA sent up manned rockets was known as “Cape Kennedy.” On November 28, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson renamed the NASA facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida, after President Kennedy, who had been assassinated six days earlier. Port Canaveral and the City of Cape Canaveral chose to keep their original names.
\nSometime in the past decade or so, I realized that the media were once again referring to that piece of land as “Cape Canaveral.” I wondered what had happened to cause the name to be changed.<\/p>\n
When I was a teen, the place in Florida where NASA sent up manned rockets was known as “Cape Kennedy.” On November 28, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson renamed the NASA facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida, after President Kennedy, who had … Continue reading
\nI did a little surfing to see if I could find out why (and how) the name had been changed, and found this site.<\/a>
\nIt seems that the people of Florida were not happy to have the Cape renamed. They waged a campaign for ten years to get Congress to change it back to Cape Canaveral, but their efforts were unsuccessful. I can only assume that the members of Congress felt it would be politically dangerous to have their names linked with a bill to remove the Kennedy name.
\nIn 1973, Florida governor Reuben Askew signed a Florida statute requiring that Cape Kennedy be referred to as Cape Canaveral on all State of Florida official documents. The U.S. Board of Geographic Names agreed to recognize the name change on October 9, 1973, at the national level. The John F. Kennedy Space Center, managed by NASA, retained it’s name.
\nIt must have taken years for the renaming to take effect. I realized that I was hearing it in news reports a decade ago, which would have been twenty years after it became Cape Canaveral again.
\nSo, that’s my “Now you know” for the day. Now, I wonder why the good people of Florida objected to the name change. If it had been “Cape Bush” would they have objected?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"