Back to airport codes and naming, this is a neat article with lots of history on many of the US names...
airport identifiers
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One of the world's largest airports, JFK, is also one of the very few that changed call letters. A change is rare because an identifier becomes so well known to airline staff that changes are not normally permitted. Interestingly the John F. Kennedy airport's former code also came from the name of the field — IDL for Idlewild airport (itself named for the Idlewild golf course whose land became JFK). If you knew that Fort Myers used to be called SouthWest Florida Regional, the RSW moniker starts to make sense. A code used by American Airlines but never seen by the traveling public is GSW. Pilots spend months at GSW, but no planes land or take-off there. The mystery is solved when you discover that Americans' Flight Academy, with its many simulators and classrooms, is in Ft. Worth on the former site of the Greater SouthWest Airport. A airport that has worked hard to change its given code is Sioux City's Sioux Gateway Airport—SUX. Mayor Craig Berenstein described the SUX code as an "embarrassment". City leaders petitioned the FAA to change the code in 1998 and again in 2002. At one point the FAA offered the city five alternatives—GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY—but airport trustees didn't like any of them enough to change. In 2007 the airport made the best of their sucky cipher and started promoting the airport with the slogan "FLY SUX."
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I've always wondered who the federal bureaucrat was that decided to use such an illogical naming method for Canadian airports. I'm sure he/she thought it made sense at the time.