CLEARWATER, FL — Mayor Frank Hibbard was driving home from church one Sunday when he saw a sign of the times that deeply offended him — so he made it go away.The sign in question advertised a Hooters restaurant and was visible to motorists driving westward on the Gult-to-Bay Boulevard near the restaurant. While that may well be enough to be deemed unacceptable to some, what particularly bothered Hibbard was the sign’s double entendre, “Liquor in Clearwater, Poke in Vegas.”
At first Hibbard didn’t get the joke, but once he did, he didn’t laugh.
“The first time I read it,” he explained to the St. Petersburg Times, “it went over my head. And then I got it. I thought, ‘that’s not good.”
Having absorbed to full impact of the sign’s meaning, Hibbard called Hooters co-founder Ed Droste. The phone call resulted in a new sign, reading “Liquor in Clearwater, Casino in Vegas.”
Although Hibbard believes that the sign slipped over the line of decency and past the gray area into obscenity, the city attorney disagreed, opining that the billboard violated no city ordinances and was fine the way it was.
A similar sign in Tampa, along I-275, remains unchanged.
