Mine has a double meaning. One is obvious. I've lived in or in the area around Plano, Tx since 1964. My parents were both life long Tulsans, but dad took a job with a company bought by Lone Star Gas with offices in downtown Dallas. Plano now has over 200,000 people, but when we moved there, the sign on Central Expressway said: "Entering Plano, population 3600." (and change) That was based on the 1960 census. By 1964 there were likely around 7500.
Plano won their first state title my freshman year, 1965, and the second two years later. We won the '67 AA championship, the same day that Jack Mildren's Abilene Cooper Cougars were getting upset by Austin Reagan in the AAAA large school class, 20-19, in Fort Worth. It was Jack's (and Jon Harrison's) senior year. When I first got to OU, met Jack, and told him that I thought that my Wildcats could have played with or beaten Cooper, he was amused. (I was mistaken) We were pretty good, but not that good. He started calling me Plano because I talked about my high school football team so much, the nickname stuck. Hardly anyone in the football program, knew my real name. Maybe seven or eight. But everybody knew who Plano was from my freshman year. I was proud of that.
But the spelling comes from my dad. When we first move to Plano he and a friend who'd moved to Dallas from Tulsa, the year before us had a mixed bowling team with my mother and the other guy's wife, and they called it the Plain-O's which dad told me several years later, meant Plain Okies. So though I've lived in Texas for now 51 years, I am still have a lot of Okie in my roots. There is a humility about Oklahomans that is part of my nature. And I'm proud of that.
And besides Port Lavaca and several others had pretty much wrapped up any variation of Plano that I could find. Plaino was available. So yes, I do know how to spell my home town.
