Palm Coast’s Richenbacker Drive Loses Its Aitch as the City Formally Abandons Spelling No One Respected

Among all the many divisive, bitter, sinister and apocalyptic issues to come before the Palm Coast City Council in the last few months, none could come close to being defined by those adjectives–no adjectives have been invented yet to define it–like the ninth item on last Tuesday’s agenda. Palm Coast Mayor David Alfin knew it. Anthony Garganese, the city attorney who leads his Orlando law firm’s masthead, knew it. Almost everyone in the audience, at least the few poor souls still remaining after yet another bacchanal of rancor in the first two and a half hours of the meeting, knew it.

It was nearing 10 p.m. when Alfin said: “We now move to the one that we’ve all been waiting for.”




“This is huge,” said Graganese, about whom almost noting is known in Palm Coast except for the pathological aversion to exaggeration he’s displayed since pinch-hitting in the last few weeks for the attorney who used to cover these meetings (Garganese’s law firm is on its farewell tour of City Council meetings after a 15-year association with the city, and will soon be replaced).

In the annals of Palm Coast history–which dates back to the pre-history of its 1960s scrubland–this was huge: Richenbacker Drive was losing its h. Not only that. The h was surrendering to the less aristocratic, more classless (as in upper, middle and lower class) k. No less than George Orwell had once said of society’s fall away from aristocracy that “probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.” But the loss was no less momentous for stunning the city into the kind of silence that could almost be mistaken as indifference.

So it went for Richenbacker Tuesday evening, the street whose h never got any respect since ITT and its alphabetical OCD platted it as such a few decades ago. Property owners never followed the h convention. The Post Office ignored it. Even the Flagler County Property Appraiser, that stickler for detail to the closest umlaut above leaves of grass, had nothing but contempt for it. Look it up. It’s always been Rickenbacker this and Rickenbacker that in property records. Even the street signs the city produces and hangs on poles say Rickenbacker, as if anything else would be heresy.




The only place that still bears the h is the one place few people know exist and even fewer ever look up: the plat book that records the name in Map Book 10, Pages 43 to 53.

But that entry might as well be like one of those apocryphal entries in the Secret Gospel of St. Marc. The specialist–the plat aficionado, the occasional abecedarian, Orwell’s ghost–might look it up to impress a date and get all googly-eyed at the old spelling. But to the Palm Coast city administration, it might as well be Chaucer.

No one is ever likely to know how the original Richenbacker got its name. Maybe it was one of those scribes in ITT’s Park Avenue high rise who, like Medieval monks, slipped every once in a while or intentionally dropped an inside joke to self. Bob Cuff, ITT’s general counsel in those days, and a former Palm Coast City Council member, said in a text that “the naming was all decided early in the platting process, I believe in NY,” following the same system ITT applied to its street names in Levittown, subdivisions’ origin story on Long Island (where there is neither a Rickenbacker nor a Richenbacker, .

Whatever the case may be, Richenbacker won’t do anymore. The American language isn’t the most vibrant in the world because it lets itself be manacled by tone-deaf spelling that defies habit. It goes where users go, and users are demanding that Richenbacker be Rickenbacker. This, Garganese said, “is to conform with current practice.”




“I’m just hoping that there are no Richenbackers is in the audience that will take offense to a name change,” Alfin said. There were none. While history records quite a few Rickenbackers, including the guitar manufacturer–occasionally misspelled by nostalgics as Richenbacker–or the ace pilot and Boy Scouts hero Eddie Rickenbacker (whose autobiography is occasionally misplatted by bookstores as Richenbacker), an assiduous 30-second search through the catacombs of Google produced no hits. Not one. And there was this final insult, or final crowning for Rickenbacker: Google Maps itself has declared it to be Rickenbacker, not Richenbacker. It is doubtful that Alfin would want to take on Google even if he wanted to.

The change will not affect anybody’s address. As for search engines–Alfin did ask–the change will only bring the street name in line with the engines’ decrees. The council’s approach was necessarily formal. Surprisingly, even current Florida state law, in the habit of micromanaging the language, is silent on such a change except for requiring a “business impact estimate.” The city found no catastrophic impacts, other than the unmentioned demise of Orwell’s aiches. The letter will not have its own tree at Heroes Park.

The City Council approved the name change with unanimity. The h went down fighting. Like its own Waterloo firing its last fricative consonance, the next item on the agenda was Item H.