Names

We've now run out of a lot of things. I can't remember the last time I saw a styptic pencil, those little chalky things that they used to sell you to stanch little shaving nicks. 

Not Stevie Nicks.

Cool prizes in Cracker Jack boxes, video rental stores, Wonderful Waterful ring toss games, free maps at gas stations, Tila Tequila, Burger Chef hamburger joints, pistachio nuts dyed red, and people forcing you to look at slides of their vacations on a screen in the rumpus room...all are things we don't see anymore.

And now, it's names that we have run out of. 

"Woodward and Bernstein" used to mean one pair of guys - Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who got to the bottom of the Watergate story, as told in the book and movie "All The President's Men."  

Now, out in California, a guy named Sam Woodward is under arrest, charged with killing his former classmate Blaze Bernstein. The story is sad and seamy, truth be told, but the coupling of the names caught my attention, like the time in baseball that Jimmy Gobble was pitching to Coco Crisp.

Baltimoreans will remember the name Ricky Gates as that of the Conrail engineer who served four years in prison for being the marijuana-smoking, football-watching fool at the controls of a train that crashed in eastern Baltimore County in 1987, taking fourteen lives.  I also remember him for the time in the basement of the courthouse that I threw open a hallway door to escape work for my 30-minute lunch hour, sending Gates and his attorney skittling the hall like tenpins as they walked the tunnel toward his sentencing hearing.

Now, Rick Gates is the given name of Richard W. Gates III, the political consultant and lobbyist who has pled guilty to conspiracy against the United States and making false statements.

You hear his name a lot these days.

I fondly recall seeing the mailbox near us belonging to a family called "The Simpsons."  Every time I drove past their house, it seemed they had a new mailbox, because (I suppose) a bunch of ten-year-old smart Alex in the neighborhood kept stealing them.


And, as the bearer myself of a famous name, I am used to the conmparisons to the Army General, the former big league pitcher, and the Black Panther leader with whom I share a moniker.

As only the ballplayer and I are still around, out of the four of us, we can just keep our secret.