The Pecan Park Eagle

What’s in a name? We all know and react to what it is. It’s the power of imagery, that’s what.

Sometimes it’s simply the actions of certain individuals that brands their names forever with a certain character regard in the ears of all others that is strong enough to drown out anything else about them that may have also been true. Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold are the clearest examples that occur to me. Their names are each the personification of “traitor.” Along the same line, Houdini is the name we liberally assign to all kinds of legal and social “escape artists,” and even to squiggly, squirming running backs who avoid getting tackled in seemingly inescapable situations on the playing field of American football.

Hollywood has been re-imaging actors and actresses forever with names that seem to better characterize the flow of their leading men and lady roles. Archibald Leach became Cary Grant; Frederick Austerlitz became Fred Astaire; and Virginia McMath became Ginger Rogers. And those changes worked out pretty well. Can you imagine Archibald Leach “getting the girl” at the end of his movies? How about recalling the great dance numbers of Austerlitz and McMath?”

Sometimes there really is a sort of bent logic in the changing of identities for performers. Names are a thing that either to or against the prejudices of their audiences. According to singer Tony Bennett, whose still going strong in his late 80’s, Bob Hope changed his name for him prior to a television appearance with the iconic American comedian (who himself was originally a Brit named Leslie Townes) back in the late 40’s or early 50’s because he felt that the mass audience might have more trouble with his birth name of Anthony Dominick Benedetto. The story doesn’t reveal if Hope thought the “trouble” might have been with memory or ethnic prejudice, but we know there was a time in which the anglicized name was preferred in Hollywood to names of Italian, Jewish, German, or other Eastern European cultures. Just check out this one site of Hollywood name changers and judge for yourself:

http://www.fiftiesweb.com/dead/real-names-1.htm

Thanks to the wonderful baseball biographer of Connie Mack that is Norman Macht, I only recently learned that one unidentified, but well-known general news writer of the early 20th century sometimes also covered sports, but under a tongue-in-cheek pen name. What a name he chose too. He wrote sports as “Jim Nasium.”

Baseball names breathe deeply from the nicknames we assign to players from the deepest points of the baseball community culture.  George Herman Ruth had to be re-born as “Babe Ruth.” He was everything that was new and exciting about the new power game. Tyrus Cobb, on the other hand, only needed to shorten his first name to “Ty“, sharpen his spikes to a razor clear “V”, and to start running those bases like the wild man that his grin and glare  always said he was.

My favorite baseball identity names, in no particular order, are these: Tomato Face Cullop, Satchel Paige, Yogi Berra, No-Neck Williams, Pee Wee Reese, Goose Gossage, Double Duty Radcliffe, Home Run Baker, Dizzy Dean, Rube Waddell, Ducky Medwick, Catfish Hunter, and Cool Papa Bell.

Let’s close on a really good one: Happy Weekend, everybody!

Tags: names as character identity

This entry was posted on March 2, 2013 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.