Jeff Truman - Hello, My Name Is...: A Guide to Naming Your Baby

The Harvard Common Press
535 Albany Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02118
www.harvardcommonpress.com Text copyright 2005 by Jeff Bradley, Truman Bradley, and Walker Bradley
Illustrations copyright 2005 by Jill Weber All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in China Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bradley, Jeff.
Hello, my name is : a guide to naming your baby / by Jeff, Truman, and Walker Bradley.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-55832-279-5 (hc : acid-free paper) ISBN 1-55832-280-9 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. I. I.

Bradley, Truman, 1981- II. Bradley, Walker, 1985- III. Title.
CS2377.B69 2005
929.4'4'03dc22
2005002159 ISBN-13: 978-1-55832-280-6
ISBN-10: 1-55832-280-9 Special bulk-order discounts are available on this and other Harvard Common Press books. Companies and organizations may purchase books for premiums or resale, or may arrange a custom edition, by contacting the Marketing Director at the address above. 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 BOOK DESIGN & ILLUSTRATIONS BY JILL WEBER Author photograph by Marta Turnbull To Marta

A great team put together Hello, My Name Is.... Truman Bradley and Walker Bradley researched and compiled the list of names that makes up the bulk of this book. Almost every page demonstrates their diligence and attention to detail.

Few fathers these days have an opportunity to work on any significant project with their sons, much less a book, and I will never forget those weeks in which all three of us toiled together during a Colorado summer. Linda Ziedrich capably edited Hello, My Name Is..., the third book on which we have worked together. She is that rare person, a professional with high standards who challenges me and improves my prose, yet remains a good friend. Bruce Shaw, publisher of The Harvard Common Press, signed me to my first book contract when the Press overlooked the town common of Harvard, Massachusetts. His faith in me launched my publishing career, and his support has sustained me through three books. I am grateful as well to the many people who told me the stories of their names or their children's names, and to the organizations and individuals who allowed me to reprint other stories.

Special thanks go to Cari and Wes Clark for sharing their wonderful collection of Utah names. Jeff Bradley

On May 1, 1898, during the Spanish-American War, Admiral George Dewey commanded a U.S. fleet that steamed into Manila harbor in the Philippines and destroyed the Spanish fleet. When word reached this country, he instantly became a national hero. Four months after this triumph, a baby was born in Kingsport, Tennessee. The father had his heart set on a boy, and planned to name him Dewey Manila in honor of the admiral and his victory.

The child turned out to be a little girl, but the parents named her Dewey Manila anyway. This girl with the unusual name grew up to become my great-aunt, and Aunt Dewey became my introduction to the world of interesting personal names. My mother wanted to name me George Ernest Bradley III, but my father, George Ernest Bradley, Jr., would have none of it. Although known to family and friends as Son, he had suffered confusion with his father, George Ernest Bradley, Sr., and wanted my name to be something else.Jeffrey, I am informed by reliable sources, came from the son of a Washington, D.C., cab driver, and my parents picked up Vincent while visiting Hungry Mother State Park in Virginia. And so I became Jeffrey Vincent Bradley. I now go by Jeff. I attended rural East Tennessee schools with kids who had all manner of unusual given names, revealed to one and all in the yearbook during our senior year of high school.

Some of the boys' first and middle names were William Otto, Vivert Aaron, Rush Floyd, and Gale Omar. The girls' names included Cheryl Ruthita, Mary Alyce, Neda Jane, Eufaula Carole, and Rena Rebecca. Then there were the Anns. Like their counterparts today, parents of children starting school in the fifties found that many of their precious darlings shared names with classmates. In my senior class, we had Patty Ann, Elizabeth Ann, Marsha Ann, Linda Ann, Barbara Ann, Teresa Ann, Cynthia Ann, Shirley Ann, Judy Ann, Patricia Ann, and Mozella Ann. I didn't have to wait till the end of my senior year to learn some of these middle names, because Southerners have a tradition of calling people by both of their given names. I have a cousin whom we always called Martha Ann, and at school I addressed John Paul, Mary Alyce, and Jenny Sue by their two names. My high school teachers had first names that I wish we could have used to their faces: Prezzle, Fern, Laurena, Ermalie, and Pietro.

Lunch was served by Estelle, Naomi, Pearl, and Minerva. After school and in the summers, I worked at my family's construction company, which employed men named Royal, Fate, Shirley, and Jehovah. I went off to college and later became a reporter, writing about the blind Baptist gospel disk jockey J. Bazzel Mull and interviewing Judge Sue K. Hicks, the real-life inspiration for Johnny Cash's hit song "A Boy Named Sue." You can't come from a background like that and not have an interest in names. A fellow East Tennessean, the late Richard Marius, hired me to teach writing at Harvard, and this led me into a world of student names, some of which I now see in articles in the New York Times. After eight years in the classroom, I landed a job in Harvard's fundraising office, where I wrote about donors and well-preserved class chairmen from as far back as the class of 1910. I once put out an annual report listing the more than twenty-seven thousand names of people who had made gifts in the past year to the Harvard College Fund.

Many of those old boys had wonderfully WASPy first names: Bancroft, Hamilton, Gardner, Hallowell, Malcolm, Francis, Whitfield, Bertram, Morris, and Wolcott. Every now and then I would encounter one of them wandering around the office, in a navy-blue blazer, white Oxford-cloth shirt, and striped tie-a special Brooks Brothers one if the man had put his name on a check to Harvard for more than ten thousand dollars. When my wife became pregnant for the first time, she and I bought several baby-name books. They were mind-numbing tomes with all the charm of a telephone directory. Like many parents-to-be, we wanted our baby to have a name that was distinctive but not weird. We had chosen not to know until birth whether our child was a boy or a girl. We picked out Truman for a boy's name and Lydia for a girl's.

The first names were the easy part. My wife, Marta, had kept her maiden name, Turnbull, and we had long discussions over which last name to give our child. Marta wanted to hyphenate our names, which would come out as either Bradley-Turnbull or Turnbull-Bradley. Our child would actually have four names instead of three. I objected. Both combinations made me imagine a royal-family fop who sat around eating cucumber sandwiches at the Henley Royal Regatta. "That's their problem," replied the love of my life. "That's their problem," replied the love of my life.

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