Thinking about Names Lately

Part of it has to do with my age, I admit. In the time before cable television brought a wider variety of viewing options to after school kids, the broadcast stations would rely on local programming (mainly a bleacher full of kids hosted by a regional personality, my favorite being "Cousin" Cliff Holman in Birmingham, Alabama) and then syndicated situation comedies past being re-run on prime time. A number of Southern people my age watched so many episodes of The Andy Griffith Show (the best ones, of course, the black-and-white episodes with Don Knotts) that we had a full curriculum of how to be neighborly well before Sesame Street hit the air. The sitcom Gomer Pyle, USMC, spun off from Griffith and offered the cautionary tale of what can happen to a naive but well-intentioned Southern boy out of his element. So many of us who yearn to be Atticus often find ourselves Gomer from time to time.

Gomer Pyle's DI is Vince Carter, played by Frank Sutton as a perfect comedic foil to Jim Nabors, whose tall, lanky affability contrasts so well with Sutton's compact, gruff toughness. That name, "Vince Carter," has stuck with me all these years, and whenever I hear a sportscast about Phoenix Suns player Vince Carter, I wonder if his mother watched Gomer Pyle too, and if as a result the name "Vince" just seemed to her to fit well with "Carter." Of course, maybe she was just an old-school Packers fan.

This issue of naming has been on my mind a bit lately for two reasons. Younger members of our English faculty have had children in the past year or so, and it has been fascinating to hear how they have made decisions to name their children, either to honor family members or to associate them with particular values or to create a cultural marker--all legitimate, reasoned decisions behind naming. I have, I admit, more than a little curiosity about how authors name children, so when a poet friend became a new father in just the past few weeks, I was ready for a story and was not disappointed. (Well, to be frank, a mutual friend suggested naming the child "Odin," but that would have been selfish fun at the kid's expense had the new parents agreed on that name.)

But the other reason I have been considering names lately is the "same name" syndrome. In my department at ETSU, we now have three faculty members who share names with internationally known performers. One of them is older than his famous namesake, and he had established himself professionally before the entertainer broke into national consciousness. A second, a bit younger than a famous guitarist, for a time had a hyphenated last name that distinguished him from the other person. The third, still in the beginning of his professional academic career, has made his middle name his familiar name to avoid association with his famous namesake. Each of these men has acknowledged the "same name" and has made, in my view, good decisions about keeping their names their own.