But don’t doubt it.

He is — with the cracked Liberty Bell.

Especially now that hardy souls have braved the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire (did either get as much snow as North Carolina?)and put next summer’s big GOP show firmly on the road to the City of Brotherly Love.

That’s where the Republicans will nominate their first presidential candidate in the new century during the hot and humid dog days from July 31 to Aug. 3.

And what better symbol for Philadelphia to use to promote the GOP convention and their own history-rich town than that wonderful, venerated, old, cracked bell?

It’s a dead ringer for the city, the Philadelphia Inquirer deadpans, and it’s recognized all over the country.

And in Philadelphia that bell is already everywhere — on taxicabs, T-shirts, shot glasses, baseball caps, tote bags, phone books. You name it and you’ve got it.

But everywhere got bigger after the RevGroup, a graphic design firm where the 1983 West Rowan High School graduate is now senior design associate, won the right to create the logo for Philadelphia 2000.

Philadelphia 2000 is a non-partisan committee of business and civic leaders formed to woo Republicans or Democrats to make their own history in the birthplace of the United States.

They got the Republicans, but they weren’t through. Now they’re doing what they can to make all the bells ring for the convention and their city before, during and after the fireworks.

So of course they needed a logo.

The criteria?

It had to be red, white and blue.

It had to include the words Philadelphia and 2000 — and the bell.

It had to be dramatic enough to wave on a street banner and simple enough to grace a business card.

And RevGroup — which means Richard and company — did all that and more.

They put a white bell on a blue background with a bold red crack that looks a little more like a lighting bolt than a crack.

Of course.

A bolt of lightning symbolizes a spark of light and imagination and connects (no matter how subliminal the connection is)the bell and Philadelphia to Ben Franklin and kites and electricity and your first history book.

Instead of a clapper, they used a star. Why?

Because a star symbolizes the future — and refers to the flag and the country and birth, the birth of democracy.

And Richard, son of the Rev. and Mrs. James Cress of Salisbury, is no stranger to imagination which is behind it all.

He doesn’t remember when he wasn’t creating his own comic strips.

“I always imagined I could be the next Charles Schultz,” he says. Cress headed that way early, drawing, drawing all the time, winning prizes with a fictitious Dry Gulch, S.D., he designed and built in the eighth grade. He won sculpture awards at Governor’s School when he was at West Rowan and studied oils and watercolors at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center and learned about artists like Picasso and Van Gogh and Matisse.

And by the time he got to college ...

“Ihad no idea what graphic design was,” he says. “Even though I’d been doing things leading in that direction,” even though he never considered a career as a painter or showing his work in a gallery, even though he didn’t remember a time when he wasn’t drawing and painting.

But he wasn’t thinking comics books either.

He was thinking about Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., because of its art program. When he graduated from West Rowan High he figured the program would help him find his place in the art world.

And it did.

Its art curriculum exposed students to so many kinds of visual media — to film and video, to photography and illustration. And to graphic design.

“I was interested in all of it,” he says. “I wanted to take a little of everything. Maybe I’d go into animation, or do illustrations, but then I really got interested in graphic design because it was an area where you could work with all those areas, too — and with other artists and photographers. And I could do some of it myself.”

A graphic designer has to have an awareness, at least, of all those fields, so for an artist who wants to have it all, what could be better?

He’s happy with what he does every day. He’s had enough work recognized, locally and nationally, to know he made the right decision. And the projects he works on now in Philadelphia — the Philadelphia Orchestra, the city of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Convention Center — are satisfying in a very personal way.

“Wherever you go, you see things you’ve been involved in.”

For a year after college, he stayed in Richmond designing a book of trails for the National Park Service. Then he went to Washington for a graphic design job in ’88 — and moved to Philadelphia in 1993 when his wife-to-be, Polly McKenna, returned to graduate school at the University of the Arts. There he met Alina Wheeler, president of RevGroup.

“We immediately hit it off,” he says, and he joined her six-person staff as senior design associate.

RevGroup — the “rev” plays on the French word for dream and the English word for acceleration — specializes in identity. That means it helps businesses and organizations define who they are and what they do.

“We work ... to accelerate their vision and their success,” Richard says, and has done that for some of the biggies, like IBM, Dun and Bradstreet, Campbell Soup — and Philadelphia 2000.

“When you think of a logo for a company, you think of AT&T or Nike. They look so simple. They seem to be done very quickly.”

But that’s not the way it happens.

“Before we even start sketching and designing what the logo will look like,” Richard says, a graphic designer studies and analyzes what the company does, prints, produces — and how it wants to be perceived by the public.

With Philadelphia 2000 that was a long process.

“The city is not only trying to put on and promote the Republican convention but also the city itself,” he says. “It’s been in a real revival during the last six or seven years” with proposals for a new convention center, new performing art centers, new theater. “It wants to be a major northern city.”

And that kind of work is not what Richard Cress knew anything about when he was growing up in Rowan County.

“I’m not doing cartoons now,” he says, a hint of wistfulness in his voice. Sometimes he wishes he were. “There’s a real joy to sketching and drawing cartoons.” And dream about them turning into movies and ...

But then he laughs.

“That’s like wishing you could be a rock star. That happens to a very small number.”

He still draws a lot and uses pictures and words to communicate a message, “but the final product doesn’t look like a drawing, so it’s hard for people to connect it to your hand.”

But it is connected to his hand.

And his brain and his heart and all the people he works with and the past and the future.

Philadelphia 2000’s cracked Liberty Bell is already on letterheads, business cards and media kits. And by the time the GOP convention delegates arrive in the city next summer, it will probably be ringing its message of welcome on banners all over the city.