It Max a Difference

Max McGee

Max McGee

Baltimore recently welcomed a new anchor/reporter to Channel 13. Max McGee is his name, and chances are, he is not related to Max McGee, a football player for the Green Bay Packers in their glory days of the 1960s.

The first thing one learns about sharing a name with a famous person is that all the jokers who crack wise about it always think they are the first to do so.  I happen to share the name of men who were, in no particular order, a World War II general, a Black Panther gunned down by Chicago police in 1969, and a major league baseball pitcher. All of the men who called me "General" when I was but a wise guy in short pants got the biggest kick out of that, just as I did when I would listen to a ball game and hear that I was warming up for the Mets, Cubs, or Indians. And no one ever saw fit to conflate me with an urban revolutionary.

Of course, fewer and fewer people these days remember any of the three men whose name I still sign on legal documents. That's the thing about time passages; some things stand still and some don't. We went to the graduation exercises when a friend of ours became a county police officer, and in the class was another graduate whose name was a homophone for that of a fairly well known rock star. (I won't mention his name, but it rhymes with "Bindsey Luckingham.") 

At any rate, when I asked our friend if the other cop had been teased for having a famous name, he was genuinely surprised to hear about it. That '70s star was not known to '00s people at all.

Albert Brooks, the comedian, was given the name Albert Einstein at birth. His father, Harry Einstein, was a comedian as well, performing under the name "Parkyakarkus," which is funnier than sticking your son with the name of a doggone genius.  Imagine Albert's teachers and classmates teasing him in school. Please, parents, think before naming your children!

If your surname is Knight, don't have your son go around as "Jed I. Knight."  And no matter how much they like "Catcher In The Rye," the Butts family just cannot have a son named Holden.