Call me anything

I worked with a guy who found his own given name not colorful enough, so he started asking people to call him "Tater."

The only other person I knew by that nickname was the illustrious country singer "Little" Jimmy Dickens, so memorable for his 1949 hit "Take An Old Cold Tater And Wait," a paean to the dining arrangements at his boyhood home in Bolt, WV. Clearly, Little Jim earned the right to be called Tater, since, many a night, that's all he got for supper. But that right does not convey to just anyone who happens to be looking for the identity boost that a colorful moniker might bring.

Speaking of which - Jim Hunter, a baseball pitcher from out of Hertford, NC, did not need a snappy nickname to proclaim his greatness. He could just flat-out pitch, as they used to say. He signed with the then-Kansas City Athletics at 19, and after a couple of outings in the Florida Instructional League, he needed no further instruction, and went right to the major leagues, where we went on to play on five World Champion teams on the A's (by then calling Oakland home) and the Yankees, a professional team from New York City.

When Charles O. Finley signed Hunter to the A's, the wily owner said the young man needed to have a flashy nickname, so Finley said, "Let's call him 'Catfish,' and let's say that as a young man he wandered off and when his frantic parents finally found him, he was trailing a string of fresh-caught catfish behind him, and that's where he got the name."

All good for the publicity, but none of it had even a germ of truth, and Jim Hunter, most tragically dead at 54 from diabetic complications and Lou Gehrig's Disease, didn't need anything but his good right arm to make himself famous.

Fun fact: Jim was scouted for the A's by an old big-leaguer named Clyde Kluttz, a perfect example if there ever was of a man with a built-in nickname.

On the other hand...a man named Wilmer Mizell was a fairly successful left-handed pitcher (90 wins, 88 losses) for the Cardinals, Pirates, and Mets back in the olden days.  After he retired, he served three terms in the US Congress, representing North Carolina's 5th District. But he was much better known by the nickname he acquired while playing amateur baseball as a teen, in the town of Vinegar Bend, Alabama. 

So, my advice is, don't try to hang a nickname on yourself or anyone else. It rarely works. Like when I was four and asked my parents to start calling me "Tito." Not for Tito Puente or Tito Francona of music and baseball, respectively, but for Marshal Josip Broz Tito, President of Yugoslavia, the first national leader who was as interested in knowing what time it was as I was.