Cake, exercise seek to be US states’ icons

State symbols include everything from sports to songs, desserts to dogs, rocks to fish

WASHINGTON: What do dog mushing, white marble, the Tilt-a-Whirl amusement ride and a layer cake have in common?

All are or have been nominated to be some of the varied symbols of US states, which include everything from sports to songs, desserts to dogs, rocks to fossils. In snowy Alaska and the sun-drenched Hawaiian Islands, the state sports are — fairly predictably — dog mushing and surfing, respectively.

Lawmakers in Vermont, said to be the first state to allow snowboarders onto its pistes, are debating whether to make snowboarding their state’s official sport.

In Maryland, the state sport is far less predictable: it’s jousting.

“It’s not the combat jousting that was done in medieval times; it’s ring jousting, which was very popular with the Calverts, the first deeded governors and comptrollers of the Maryland area,” Jules Smith of the Maryland Renaissance Festival said.

Maryland lawmakers recently set the ball rolling on becoming one of an expanding number of states with official desserts.

In Massachusetts, it’s Boston Creme pie; in Florida, Key Lime pie; and in South Dakota, it is “Kuchen”, a tribute to German-origin settlers.

Maryland state lawmaker Page Elmore has sponsored a bill that would make the official state afters the 10-layer, calorie-rich Smith Island cake, believed to have been derived from tortes brought to the United States by British soldiers fighting in the 1812 war.

“Making the Smith Island cake the state dessert would be an economic development tool for bakeries on the lower eastern shore and for the ladies on Smith Island who have been making this cake for generations,” Elmore said.

“This would give the people of Smith Island, where the crab and oyster industries are kind of depleted because of the health of the Chesapeake Bay, the means to supplement their income,” Elmore added. If a state has such a calorie-laden official dessert, it will also need an official exercise, Elmore and other Maryland lawmakers have said.

State Senator Verna Jones was the lead sponsor of a bill that proposes making Maryland the first of the 50 states to have an official exercise: walking. Not everyone thinks legislators should spend time debating what the next state symbol should be. The previous governor of Maryland vetoed a bill in 2003 that proposed walking as the official state exercise, in part because it was “not unique to Maryland,” Elmore said.

And an irate constituent said in a letter sent to Jones that the moves to get the state exercise bill back on its feet was “typical liberal feel-good nonsense,” said Evelyn Eldredge, a legislative assistant to the Maryland senator. Backers of the symbol bills counter that declaring something a state icon costs little and brings huge benefits. “The impetus for the walking bill is the rising rate of obesity in Maryland and the fact that walking is something that more people can do than can do other forms of exercise,” Eldredge said.