Do You Know How This City Got Its Name?

My father had a routine.

Not a routine he would have admitted to having. Not a performance. Not anything polished or rehearsed in the formal sense.

Just a few jokes, stored and ready, each attached to a particular town.

They lived in the car.

That was their stage.

Whenever we passed the right green-and-white sign at the edge of a city limit, something in him would activate. His hands would be on the wheel. The road would be unspooling ahead of us. Helen and I would be in the back seat, or maybe older and riding up front, and my mother would already know what was coming.

Then my father would begin.

“Do you know how this city got its name?”

It did not matter that we knew.

It did not matter that he had told us before.

It did not matter that the answer had become family liturgy by repetition.

The question was required.

It was the doorknob to the joke.

And because we loved him, or because we were trapped in the car with him, or both, we let him open it.

De Pere was first in my mind.

The story, according to my father, involved French fur traders paddling along the Fox River. At some point they decided to step out of the boat, misjudged the depth, and sank straight down into the water.

Just before disappearing beneath the surface, one of them shouted:

“Deep here!”

And that, he said, was how De Pere got its name.

I believed this longer than I should have.

That may be the true mark of a good dad joke: it is dumb enough to be funny, but close enough to plausibility that a child lets it live for a while as fact.

Only much later did I learn that De Pere comes from des pères — “of the fathers” — named for the Jesuit priests connected to the old mission there.

My father studied French in college.

He had French books in his room. He sang scraps of French songs. He spoke French well enough in Montreal to talk his way out of a ticket. He almost certainly knew the real etymology.

Which makes the joke better.

It was not ignorance.

It was mischief.

The groaner sat right next to the truth, separated by a tiny shift in sound. A father’s pun placed over a scholar’s knowledge like a fake mustache.

The dad joke and the French student, riding together in the same car.

Sheboygan had its own.

This one he framed as an old Native American tale — the vague way old jokes sometimes borrow a frame they have not earned.

A mother had ten boys.

She was pregnant again and hoping, finally, for a daughter.

After the birth, the doctor turned to her and said:

“Nope.”

Pause.

“She-boy-again.”

The delivery mattered.

He never rushed it.

The Nope landed first, plain and final, and only then came the punchline in the doctor’s imagined voice. It was terrible. It was perfect. I groaned every time.

But I also waited for it every time.

That is the contract children make with fathers.

We groan so they will keep doing it.

Algoma may have been the shortest.

A boy was sent to the store for groceries.

He did not want to go.

He stalled, complained, dragged his feet.

Finally his mother told him to get moving.

“I’ll go, Ma.”

That was it.

Three syllables.

Almost not even a joke.

Barely more than a verbal shrug.

And yet it stayed.

I did not know then that Algoma would one day become my town. That I would buy my first house there. That I would raise my own son there. That the sign my father used as a trigger for a groaner would become a sign I passed a thousand times on my way home.

That changes the joke now.

It has weight it was never meant to carry.

“I’ll go, Ma” was once just a pun from the passenger seat.

Now it is tied to an address, a life, a child, a return.

There were probably others.

Towns I have forgotten.

Jokes that did not survive.

Maybe they were less durable. Maybe they belonged to roads we drove less often. Maybe memory only kept the three that mattered most.

But the structure is what I remember best.

The approach to the sign.

The slight gathering in my father.

The question.

“Do you know how this city got its name?”

The answer already coming whether anyone asked for it or not.

He was a quiet man, but not humorless.

That distinction matters.

His humor was not loud. He did not dominate rooms with stories. He was not the man holding court at a party, building up a crowd and chasing laughs. He was more private than that, more economical.

He kept small bits ready, like coins in a coat pocket.

A line for a town.

A chorus for a moment.

A pun for a road sign.

And when the right occasion arrived, he brought it out.

That was part of his timing.

The same instinct that made him sing one line of a song at exactly the right moment made him tell the same city-name joke at exactly the right mile marker.

A child learns geography first through repetition, and my father added punchlines to the map.

I doubt he thought of it that way.

He was not trying to make a folklore of northeastern Wisconsin.

He was just being Dad.

The towns around us became gently renamed in his voice.

Not historically.

Not accurately.

But affectionately.

There was the official map, the one printed on paper or folded in the glove compartment.

And then there was his map.

A father’s map.

The jokes were groan-worthy, yes.

But groan-worthy things can still be beloved.

Maybe especially when they come from someone who does not perform often.

A loud man’s joke disappears into noise.

A quiet man’s joke leaves a mark.

And these did.

Whenever I pass one of those city signs, the question still appears.

Not always in words.

Sometimes only as an impulse, a little flicker of memory as the green-and-white letters come into view.

De Pere.

Sheboygan.

Algoma.

My father is not in the driver’s seat anymore.

But the road still knows where to find him.

“Do you know how this city got its name?”

And every time, I answer him in my head.