![](https://www.weirduniverse.net/images/2015/1973amc01.jpg)
Warren Times-Mirror and Observer - Jan 15, 1973
ARMY ORIGINALITY — To boost morale, the Army Materiel Command recently held a contest to name its new national headquarters. More than 524 names were suggested, and the AMC's official Contest Committee to Name the New Building solemnly studied the offerings. At last, Maj. Gen. Charles T. Horner, the AMC chief of staff, announced with pride: "The name of the new AMC building is the AMC BUILDING." The lucky winner, Francis Sikorski, received $100 in appropriated monies for his shrewd suggestion.
![](https://www.weirduniverse.net/images/2015/1973amc02.jpg)
The AMC Building - 5001 Eisenhower Ave. via Flickr.
I first encountered the story of how the AMC Building got its name in Chuck's 1989
News of the Weird![](http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=weirduniver00-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0452263115)
book. Later, I also noticed it in National Lampoon's
True Facts. So because I'm amusing myself over at
about.com by telling the story of some classic weird news stories in more depth, I recently decided to try to find out if there were any more details to the AMC story. For instance, what other names were submitted in the contest? Were all the other entries so bad that the committee decided it had to choose the most obvious name possible? Or was this really just "army originality" at work.
But after a lot of digging, I've come up empty.
The story of the name-choosing contest is mentioned in the
Army Materiel Command's own official history (pdf), published in 2013. So I contacted the AMC and asked them if they knew of any more details to the story. Their pr rep contacted the historians, who returned the answer that, no, that's all there is to the story. No other details survive. So we'll never know exactly why the "AMC Building" was the winning entry in the "Name the new AMC Building" contest.
But I can report that the AMC Building no longer houses the headquarters of the AMC. The AMC moved out of the Eisenhower Ave. building in 2002, relocating its headquarters first to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and later to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, where it currently can be found.
Category: Military | Odd Names | 1970s