What’s In a Name?

By Jim Hagarty
2004

What’s in a name? A career, if you’re one of the lucky ones

This column is dedicated to Jack Hammer, the power-tool salesmen about whom I have written before, the man with the perfect name for his job. Someone whose destiny was pounded out the day his parents named him.

And to all the others in the world who have it so easy, l say, well done. For you needn’t fret over career choices. Just follow your moniker; it will show you the way.

I cite, as my first piece of evidence, Your Honour, the person of Bonnie Beaver, president of the American Veterinary Association. I can’t imagine her in any other capacity. Ditto Jen Cutting. Surely she was accepted into hairdressing school based solely on her surname, and now is a successful coiffeur.

Chris Moneymaker, the accountant, won the 2003 World Series of Poker, and what else would you have expected him to do?

If I was president of 3M Canada, and chances are good that I may someday be hired for that position, I would rush out and hire Penny Wise to be my business manager, which the company has done. I’m not a huge believer in luck, but how could a person with that name mismanage any denomination or amount of money?

Of course, there are the simple ones, such as former Blue Jays slugger Cecil Fielder. Or the laughably easy, John Tory, the new leader of the Tory party in Ontario. He showed a lot of Grit in running for the leadership, but the result was a Never Doubted Probability (NDP).

Those of us old enough to remember the little incendiary device known as the “match stick” which, with a bit of scratching and thrusting against a rough surface would burst into flame – for the disposable lighter generation a concept surely too difficult to imagine – will remember a certain name associated with those matches and that is why it does not surprise us surprise us that Mike Eddy would be named president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs.

And who couldn’t know that the Ontario caucus of the Conservative Party of Canada would choose Gary Goodyear to comment on recent meetings the party held with auto industry representatives to hammer out a party policy in that area?

And just as Alison Fryer didn’t really have much choice but to open The Cookbook Store, Kevin Sites had to become an NBC videographer to travel the world and show the people back home all the you know what he was seeing.

I think Zak Firestone is the right person to be sending out press releases for the Fire Safety Days a battery company holds each year. And when I send my son out with the Boy Scouts to learn all about living in the wild, I want nobody else but Terry Wilder looking after him.

And in what has to be the crop circles of surnames, this item appeared in newspapers this summer, surely emitting some sort of signal that aliens really have arrived. In August, Rev. James Profit, a Jesuit priest in Guelph, opposed plans by Wal-Mart to build a store near a Jesuit retreat centre. OMB panelists Bob Boxma, a Toronto lawyer, and John Aker, a former Oshawa and Durham Region councillor, listened to arguments from lawyers representing Wal-Mart and the city on one side, and the Jesuit Centre and a citizens’ group on the other all about the arrival of a big-box store next to the Jesuit Centre and how this would bring about the paving over of acres and acres of prime farmland. In a battle of wits between Boxma and Aker, l wouldn’t know on whom to bet.

Maybe I should ask that gambler Chris Moneymaker. He’d know.

Author: Jim Hagarty

I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.