2. New Mexico known as Hot Springs and Truth Or Consequences
Originally known as Hot Springs, this oddly named town gained some notoriety in 1950 when Ralph Edwards, the host of the well-known American radio program Truth or Consequences, announced that the show’s tenth-anniversary edition would be broadcast from the town that changed its name to match the show’s.
The funny thing is that the results of the elections were positive, and on April 1, 1950, it was announced publicly that the town would be called Truth or Consequences. Of course, many people took it as a joke because of the timing.
For the following fifty years, Edwards would come to the town for a celebration honoring the renaming that took place the first weekend in May and continues to this day.
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New Bedford, Massachusetts, once the ‘Whaling Capitol of the World’, & now the leading port of the nascent US Offshore Wind Energy, was once known as ‘Bedford’ until it was learned that Massachusetts already had a city/town known as Bedford in the upper part of the state.