Forest Ranger Hat for a Rolling Stones Sideman
ATLANTA — In an age of creative marketing and rapid-fire social media, some government agencies are struggling to promote themselves.
“This means every bit as much to me as that Grammy did a couple of weeks ago,” Mr. Leavell said Monday in Atlanta.
Take the United States Forest Service, the bigger but less well-known cousin of the National Park Service.
A couple of years ago, it tried to make Smokey Bear, 68, a hipster with a new tagline: Get your Smokey on. They even gave him a Twitter account.
And now the agency has made a Rolling Stones piano man an honorary forest ranger.
At a ceremony here on Monday, Chuck Leavell, a keyboardist for the Rolling Stones and the Allman Brothers Band and also a Georgia tree farmer, accepted the ranger hat. “This means every bit as much to me as that Grammy did a couple of weeks ago,” he said in an interview before taking the stage with Smokey and Tom Tidwell, chief of the Forest Service. [...] Continue Reading…
Photo courtesy of T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times, Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company.