A New Flag for Utah? A New Brand, Along With the Familiar (Season 3, Ep. 13)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Dept. of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, senior public historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah, accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place. If you subscribe to this podcast, or if you're a first time listener, I hope you'll go back and listen to the dozens of prior episodes. Please also rate and review Speak Your Piece on iTunes, Google, and elsewhere.
If you have an idea or a proposed speaker for a future Speak Your Piece episode, please write us at askahistorian at utah.gov. That's askahistorian, all one word, at utah.gov. Today, we'll be talking to Ted Kaye, one of America's foremost vexiologists. Now, what's vexiology? What is a vexiologist? It's a flag expert, a person who understands the art of flag design, symbolism, its history, and the use of flags. Now, Ted has compiled a very popular pamphlet on flag design entitled Good Flag, Bad Flag, published in 2006
He has consulted on the adoption of new flags at every government level, city, state, and national.
Welcome, Ted.

**Ted Kaye** (1:44)
Glad to have you. Thanks so much for having me on.

**Brad Westwood** (1:47)
Ted has edited and occasionally translated many journals, newsletters, books, as well as over 2,000 articles on flags. From 1996 to 2012, he was the editor of The Raven, the journal of this organization. He has also researched and presented papers at national and international flag study conferences and has served on the committee which chose Salt Lake City's new flag in 2020, which we will be talking about during our time together today. He has been, for some years, the organizational secretary of the North American Vepseological Association. In earlier time, Kaye worked as a chief financial officer for a company called Wygant, an information and technology company, and was the development director for the Oregon Historical Society and the executive director of the Oregon Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission. Ted also served on the board of the World College West, a unique liberal arts college in Marion County, California where he received a bachelor degree some years earlier. Ted also has a master's degree in business from Stanford University.
Okay, regarding this subject, this new flag idea, the Utah Legislature, Governor Spencer Cox, Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, are exploring the ideas of a new flag for Utah. In this effort, as the governor has indicated over and over, he wants Utah to, quote, give every Utahan the opportunity to shape the principles and the symbols of a new flag. Earlier this year, in 2021, we produced a Speak Your Piece episode entitled Run It Up the Flagpole, Utah Considers a New State Flag. If you also want to listen to this episode, it's episode 7, season 3 The conversation include the two legislators who wrote the bill. To establish a commission to start this process. That was Senator Daniel McCay and Representative Stephen Handy. Also included in that other podcast episode was a local historian, a political historian, Ron Fox, who also joined us in that episode.
Well, now Ted, thank you for listening to that introduction.
The idea of a new flag for Utah is not a new idea, is it? Tell me when Utah really started, in earnest, to consider a new flag?

**Ted Kaye** (4:25)
I'm aware of an effort 20 years ago when the Salt Lake Tribune launched the idea.
That came on the heels of NAVA's state flag survey that showed NAVA's state flag was ranked poorly against other state flags. That's the North American Vexillological Association, nava.org, and you can find that survey on our website.

**Brad Westwood** (4:51)
We're going to include that on the show notes as well. Please, go ahead, Ted.

**Ted Kaye** (4:57)
Great. The Salt Lake Tribune held a competition that received over a thousand entries. The top 36 were offered for a public vote. Some were world-class designs.
However, without political support, the progress stopped. A report on that specific Salt Lake Tribune effort is on the flag design section of nava.org.

**Brad Westwood** (5:27)
Interesting.
So let me just say what got people thinking was this survey of all the different states. And I suspect, being a native Utahan, it didn't suit many people well that we ranked so low in this survey.

**Ted Kaye** (5:47)
Utah has a richly symbolic flag. It deserves an honored place in the state's history. My friend and colleague in Utah, John Harpigson, is past president of NAVA and perhaps the most knowledgeable about the current flag. A few years ago, he got the specifications updated to correct an error that had crept in. And he'll tell you the flag's important history in Utah.