Mark and I played ball together through junior high and high school. He went on to have a distinguished career serving his country. He retired about three years ago and he and his wife moved to Italy. I am not sure why they moved to Italy. Maybe his wife is from there? But Mark is of Italian descent and very proud of it, so I wasn’t really surprised.

          Ed and I also played ball together. (small school, all the boys were active in some sport) He also had a career in the military. When he retired, about a year before Mark retired, he was living in Hawaii with his wife. He had made good contacts there and when he took off his Marine uniform on a Friday he put on civilian clothes on Monday and went back to work making a lot more than he had as a gunnery sergeant. He was in Ohio a few years ago visiting his folks and we got together and had a nice hour or so visiting.

          Dave W was a nut all through school. He was the guy who was going to make waves. He even got kicked out of school for a year and had to attend a private school. Today he would be diagnosed with ADD and be put on medication, but I think he was just a nut. Certainly not stupid. His inventive ways of getting in trouble proved that. But he was weird. If it had been a bigger town he would have been a hippie. Even with that, he would have been a weird hippie. Always enjoyed hanging with Dave W just because there was always a show involved. Dave W settled down after school and put together a life to be proud of.

          Dave O was just the opposite of Dave W. Studious, serious minded, respectful of authority. Smartest guy in school. Totally dedicated, eyes on the prize kind of a young man. The guy who always wore shirts with button down collars, tucked into slacks. Somehow it made sense that Dave O and Dave W were best friends. They were both distance runners in track but did not do cross country, preferring football in the Fall. The three of us would walk into a Burger King and people would look. Dave W always look like he was going to explode into weirdness at any moment, Dave O looked like he was going to sit down and start writing equations on a table and I always looked like I had just got down off a tractor. Dave O was a college professor and eventually became the vice president of that college.

          There are others I could talk about, but that is enough for the moment. To look back at it now makes me smile. Our school was small, it was poor, it even shut down for a few months because it lacked the money to continue. (Ohio funds their schools differently than most states) And yet, graduates from that school always seemed to make a mark for good in the world. Maybe it had to do with good parenting or some such. Anyway, back to the point of this blog.

          These four guys were pretty much like four guys at any point of our country’s history. I could walk the halls of a high school now and find their equivalents. The same is true for almost anyone of my friends back then, except for one thing. They all had nicknames.

When did nicknames end? When I was in school, it seemed everyone had a nickname. It was part of the culture. (In case you are wondering, I had a nickname for a while as a little kid because the newspaper hacked my name in a story of a Little League game, but the nickname didn’t last. After we had been out of school for a few years Dave O came to visit us in Florida. One night we were catching up on people and we were naturally using nicknames. I asked Dave why I never had a nickname. He said I was like everyone’s Dad and you don’t give your Dad a nickname. What a rip.) Nicknames have been a part of culture for all time. But not now, so much. I have wondered why and I think I know. Nicknames are no longer politically correct. They will take a child’s individuality away.

Or something like that. To subconsciously get around that, parents often give names that are unusual to begin with. Where a nickname used to be an identifier, now it is often the strangeness of the name given by the parent. Frankly, I miss nicknames.

Do you know that in the old “Leave it to Beaver” TV show, Wally had a friend named Clarence Rutherford? His nickname was Lumpy. That would not fly on TV now. It would ruin the actor’s psyche. He would be damaged forever. But, the actor involved, Frank Bank, did what a lot of kids did when their childhood acting ended. He went on and lived a normal life away from acting. In his case, he became a well known financial advisor and made millions. The nickname didn’t seem to bother him, in spite of what the experts would say today.

A few years back while I was at the funeral home in Ohio, one of the ladies in the office called me and asked if I was on the premises. As it happened, I was on the premises. She said there was someone to see me. This happened a lot. Someone usually had hit a rough spot in dealing with their grief, so they would come to the funeral home. I went over to the offices and walked in. Rising from a table was none other than Ed from high school. I was stunned. I knew he was in Hawaii. I don’t think I had seen him in 40 years. “WOLFIE!” I yelped, and we hugged. “Wolfie” was a play on his last name and on the manner in which played football. If Mark walked into my office right now, I would call out without thinking “Hey Dago!” He is Italian, after all. Some of you are cringing, but it was his nickname and he wore it proudly. Dave O was “Nip” to everyone because he had vaguely Asian features. Dave W was “Monk” because, when he was younger, he somewhat resembled a monkey. He was always the first to introduce himself to a new kid and always introduced himself as Monk.

Oh no! Wolfie isn’t bad, but those others are just derogatory! Well, they weren’t meant that way. We all hung out and we all would have done anything for the other. They were nicknames. We also had Bear and Chopper and Pumper and Rhino. They either derived from their real names or something about them. The names just came. The kid that didn’t have a nickname was the different one, and there was usually a reason for it. Something like being the stable one who seemed like everyone’s Dad. Man, I would have loved to have had a cool nickname.

But no more. We are so afraid of offending. I think we lose something.

Oh, but they are derogatory! We are Christians and we should know better! Really?

‘Simon’ is a perfectly good name. Jesus changed Simon’s name to ‘Peter.’ The Greek word is ‘petros’ and means a small stone. To call a person Peter was like calling someone Rocky now. Usually a nickname more about strength than brains. It was to remind Peter of his head strong attitude. ‘Saul’ was a revered and proud name among the Jews. Jesus changed the New Testament Saul’s name to ‘Paul,’ which means little man. It was to remind Paul of his arrogant days. Jesus called John and James the ‘sons of Thunder.’ There has been a lot of speculation as to what that meant. Were they bold and load in their speaking? No, not really. Was their father known as Thunder? We don’t really know. My favorite idea is that the Thunder was their mother, who was very outspoken and was also, probably, Jesus’ aunt. Nicknames were used throughout the Bible. A child would be given a name at birth that was taken straight from the language, usually meaning something that the parents wanted their child to be. Often, when they were around 12, they could chose a name, again taken from the language and expressing what they wanted to be. And almost everyone had a nickname, once again taken from the language and expressing how others saw that person.

The night before my wedding, Keeker took me to a restaurant. There we met up with Cuts and Wolfie and Nip and Monk and Schleets and Kouz and Pumper and Rhino and Metzer and Marvino and a few others and we had a meal together. Dago would have been there, too, but he was involved in a summer project at the U.S. Naval Academy. Funny, most of those guys did college, some did military as well. A couple have died. Most of the others are retired. But none of them suffered because of their nicknames.

Political correctness strikes again. Where will all this silliness end?