On Names and Nicknames

To add to the mix, Baby Island can be viewed from Honeymoon Bay in the State of Washington, while in Iowa, the town of Fertile is adjacent to Manly, and then due north and east of Iceland, there’s ice-covered Greenland.

Here are some anomalies: Learned, Mississippi has no public schools. Ballplay, Alabama lacks a baseball diamond. Bottom, North Carolina sits at the top (northern) end of the state. Zigzag, Oregon lies on a perfectly straight stretch of road. The temperature in Cool, Texas once reached 115°F.

I annually hosted a pre-Super Bowl reunion with my Astoria gang that came to be defined by my family as the “animal” party. The group consists of Damon Runyon characters with nicknames like Willie the Buff, Louie the Lob, the Hawk, The Big Guy, Marty Cool, the Phantom, Jake the Weightlifter, Bobby the Rat, the Creeper, Superman, Steve the Greek, the Great One, Tony the Snake, the Scavenger, Zack the Animal, the Gaylord, etc. Even the girls had nicknames: Marie the Dancer, Betty the Booper, Mary Gloves, etc. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had a nickname. Mine was the Gaylord. How I came upon the name must be buried in my subconscious. I have no recollection of its baptismal founding, but many of my friends still (affectionately?) call me

“Gay” and / or “Lord.”

Earlier in my career, I would often make tough-to-get reservations using my last name – Theodorakis – prior to it being changed. I would also claim I was with the Greek Embassy. Believe it or not, it often helped.

The racetrack is also notorious for unique names and nicknames. The group I hung out with carried such monikers as: Johnny Stash (moustache), One Punch Vito, Nunzie, Frankie Budweiser, Stretch, Joe the Cutter, etc. I always thought Joe had been in a knife fight, but it turns out he worked as a cutter in the garment industry. Vito was never in a fight; however, he was notorious for making large bets on one horse, with the teller only punching out one ticket. Frankie as you might suppose, drove a Budweiser truck.

Now a lot can be done with names. I often pick up a phone and announce “this is Bruce Willis” or “this is Tom Sellick” or “this is Denzel Washington” or “this is Horatio” or “this is Felix.” Some people believe me initially. Many years ago, I called a colleague at the USEPA in RTP, NC. The secretary answered: “May I ask who is calling?”

“This is Dan Quayle for Charley Pratt.”

There was a long pause and I heard the phone drop with the secretary yelling hysterically: “It’s the vice-president!” Several years later, Charley’s secretary would announce with a wink

“The White House is on the phone.”

“What in hell do you want this time?” Charley asked. Believe it or not, it was the White House calling to invite Charley, the newly elected President of the International Air and Waste Management Association, to a dinner in Washington.,

So much for names…and nicknames.

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BY TOM MARGENAU

Regular readers of my column know that I try to avoid the use of Social Security jargon, abbreviations and acronyms as much as possible. That even goes as far as the name of the agency that runs the Social Security program. Although I must frequently do it, I just don’t like referring to the SSA (that stands for Social Security Administration) because most people have never heard of it. For example, everyone knows the FBI, or the IRS, or NASA. But if I hadn’t just told you that the SSA was the Social Security Administration, would you have known it?

On the other hand, there is one Social Security-related abbreviation that I think almost everyone knows: SSN, which of course stands for the Social Security number. And in today’s column, I’m going to give a little history about that ubiquitous number and the little paper card we all have that displays that number.

People sometimes ask me who got the first Social Security card. And they are also curious to know what the lowest Social Security number ever issued was -- and who got it. They usually assume that the person who got the first Social Security card and the person who got the lowest number are one and the same. But that’s not the case. The history of the SSN makes for an interesting story.

When Social Security numbers were first issued in 1936, the SSA did not yet have a network of field offices, so the agency contracted with the U.S. Postal Service to distribute and assign the first batch of Social Security numbers through its 45,000 local post offices around the country. Of these 45,000 post offices, 1,074 were also designated as “typing centers” where the cards themselves were prepared.

Because of that, the best that SSA historians can say with certainty is that the first SSN was issued sometime in mid-November 1936 from one of those 1,074 post offices to someone whose identity and SSN are unknown. Thousand of Social Security numbers and cards were probably issued on that day, so there is simply no way to tell who got the first one.

The SSA does know, however, who received the Social Security card with the lowest number. They tried to make a bit of a public relations fuss over it, but it didn’t work out as the agency’s flacks planned.

SSNs were grouped by the first three digits of the number (called the area number) and assigned geographically starting in the Northeast, moving down the Eastern Seaboard and then across the country to the West. Although instead of starting in Maine (the most northeasterly state), they gave “001” numbers to New Hampshire. That’s because the plan was to give card number 001-01-0001 to John G. Winant, who was a former governor of New Hampshire and was at the time the chairman of the Social Security Board (the forerunner of the Social Secu-