Woman’s saguaro, sunrise, mountain blending wins Great Mesa Flag Contest

We have a winner. Mesa resident Mary Jean Crider triumphed in the Great Mesa Flag Contest, a public competition intended to help Arizona’s third-largest city adopt a flag for the first time in its 127-year history.

View top four winners.

View all the final designs

Crider’s image of a saguaro, a sunrise and a flat-topped mesa emerged as the clear winner among 24 designs submitted by Tribune readers.

Overall, retirees to elementary school students mailed 1,357 ballots during a threeweek voting period in December and January.

The results were unfurled for the Mesa City Council and the top four flag designers themselves Monday. Since the contest was run strictly as a bootleg production, the council was under no obligation to actually adopt the winning design. But, Crider’s blue-andyellow design has widespread public support.

It won 2,733 points in a weighted scoring system that awarded five points for each first-place vote, three points for each second-place vote and one point for each third-place vote. The winning flag whipped up more than twice as many points as the next finisher.

"I just tried to think of what symbolized this area and I thought the mesa and the sun. And I had to have a palm tree or a cactus or something in there," said Crider, a retired elementary school teacher. Her design also features a stylized letter "M," a detail that was completely unintentional, she said.

In all, four designs drew more than 1,000 points.

Art store design consultant Shirley DeLaet placed second with 1,180 points for a golden sunrise over a mesa.

Retired aerospace design engineer Wayne E. Jones followed with 1,153 points for a white sunburst over a threetiered mesa.

Junior high school student Rebekah Matthews took fourth with 1,105 points for a yellow saguaro and sunburst in a circular design.

People cast ballots from Mesa, Apache Junction, Cave Creek, Chandler, Florence, Fountain Hills, Gilbert, Globe, Gold Canyon, Higley, Maricopa, Peoria, Phoenix, Prescott, Sun City West, Sun Lakes, Queen Creek, Scottsdale, Sells, Tempe and Seattle, yes, Seattle, Wash.

The scores were tabulated two ways — the total popular score, and the Mesa-residentsonly popular score. A nationwide panel of flag experts with the North American Vexillological Association conducted a separate survey and based their results on a 10-point scale.

"Any score above 6.8 would place the flag in the top 20 in the United States," said Ted Kaye, author of the guidebook, "Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag."

The contest was launched in response to a previous survey headed by Kaye, a resident of Portland, Ore.

The vexillologists ranked the municipal flags of the country’s 150 largest cities in the fall. Mesa’s entry waved in at 146th place.

As it turned out, Mesa’s "flag" actually was a banner that’s used at job fairs. The city doesn’t have a flag.

So on Nov. 3, the Tribune, working with the vexillologists, created the contest and asked readers to submit flag ideas. The response was tremendous. Amateur flag designers submitted 131 ideas.

The vexillologists selected 24 final designs and public voting followed.

All of the Final Four finishers drew from their impressions of the city for their designs.

Crider, 68, used to be one of Arizona’s legions of winter residents. Eight years ago, she and her husband morphed into full-time residents.

They lived in Mesa for a while, then moved to Prescott, but Mesa always felt like home. "We really enjoyed Mesa a lot more and we were not spending any time in Prescott, so we decided to move here," Crider said. She created four strong designs cut from colored paper with X-acto knife precision. "I just cut them out and pasted them on," Crider said.

DeLaet, 58, moved to Mesa from Piqua, Ohio, three years ago.

Her design, which she calls, "Sunny Mesa," was inspired by the Arizona sunrise.

"The early morning sun is what really gets me, and I can just visualize it every morning stretching out over Mesa," DeLaet said. "When I see it, I know it’s just going to be another great day. Can you tell I love it here?"

Jones, 77, said he had a little extra incentive to design a flag. He’s a fourth-generation Mesa resident and a greatgrandson of Daniel Webster Jones, the Mormon missionary who led eight families from Utah to Arizona in 1877. The pioneers settled in the present-day Lehi area. Their encampment became Mesa in 1878.

"My wife said, ‘You’re a designer. Go ahead and design a flag,’ " Jones said. "She just pretty much insisted I do it."

At 14, Matthews is the youngest of the Final Four flag designers. The Mesa Junior High School student is not yet sure what career she will pursue, but she enjoys art and wants to learn more about opportunities in the art and design fields.

"I do a lot of art. I paint, I draw, I do just about everything that has to do with art," she said.

Matthews also enjoys reading, writing, playing the flute and guitar, and getting involved with basketball and football.

Finally, a sincere word of thanks to everyone who submitted designs and cast ballots.

Thanks even to the voters who submitted dozens of identical coffee-stained photocopied ballots for a design by Chandler resident Tammy Fox, which, incidentally, would look terrific as the logo of a Canadian minor-league hockey team.