Yet Another Baby Named for a Soccer Team

soccer-ballIn 1965, Peter and Pat O’Sullivan of Staffordshire, England, welcomed a baby girl.

Peter, who called himself a “fanatical Liverpool fan,” took it upon himself to give her the following name: Paula St. John Lawrence Lawler Byrne Strong Yeats Stevenson Callaghan Hunt Milne Smith Thompson Shankley Bennett Paisley O’Sullivan. Those 15 middle names honored 15 members of the Liverpool Football Club: 12 players, 1 team manager, 1 coach, and 1 trainer.

Pat said this: “The first I knew about it was when I saw the birth certificate, and I don’t mind saying I was furious. It’s a real shock to learn your baby’s been named after a whole football team.”

Finally, here are two earlier posts about English babies named after soccer teams: the Leeds United team in 1992 and the Burnley team in 2011. And I bet there are others out there…

Sources:


Celebrity Baby Name – Emet Kuli

After her son Emet Kuli Loeb Hershkovitz was born in 2012, singer/songwriter Lisa Loeb wrote a blog post about his birth and included a few details about his name:

We chose the name Emet because it’s a Hebrew word meaning “truth” that also sounds like a Southern name […] That way my husband’s family from Israel, my family from Texas, and other folks we see on a regular basis can pronounce the name in their own way, but correctly!

Kuli is Roey’s grandfather’s name — actually a nickname — the name he was known by for most of his life. Since he was a very fast soccer player, everyone called him “Kuli” a shortened version of the Hungarian word “kulimász” meaning cart grease, used to make wheels on carts faster.

I love the unique story behind Kuli. Though I am curious to how the Israeli (?) grandfather came to have a nickname that was based on a Hungarian word.

Lisa and husband Roey Hershkovitz also have a daughter named Lyla Rose, born in 2009.

Source: Lisa Loeb’s Blog: Meet My Son Emet

Baby Named for Judge Who Granted Divorce

In 1928, the Aberdeen Journal mentioned a London woman who had been granted a separation from her husband by London Magistrate Basil B. Watson.

She was apparently very pleased about the decision, because when she later gave birth to a baby boy, she named him “Basil Watson Ratcliffe.”

(I checked the records — a Basil Watson Ratcliffe was indeed born in London in 1927.)

Source: What’s in a Name? Choosing a Name for a Baby

Twins Named for Paul and Lloyd Waner

paul waner, lloyd waner
Paul and Lloyd Waner in 1940

From the 1920s to the 1940s, brothers Paul Glee Waner (1903-1965) and Lloyd James Waner (1906-1982) played major league baseball, primarily for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Many Pirates fans of the era named their kids after either Paul or Lloyd, and some named their kids after both Paul and Lloyd. In January of 1940, for instance, Jack and Dorothy Munyon of Pittsburgh named their son Paul Lloyd Munyon. A couple of years earlier, a St. Louis mother named her twin boys Paul Glee Kraatz and Lloyd James Kraatz. (From the article: “The Waners have had baseball teams, cats, dogs, chickens, pigs, hogs, race horses and now even twins named after them.”)

Where did Paul Glee Waner get his gleeful-sounding middle name? One source claimed he was born Paul John Waner, but his middle name was changed at the age of six after he received a shotgun from his curiously named Uncle Glee.

[Here’s another set of twins named for famous people of the ’30s.]

Sources:

Image: © AP

Babies Named for the Wind…

the association, 1967, album

In January of 1940, The McMillan family of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, welcomed a baby girl “[a]t the height of a windstorm.”

Naming the child was easy. The McMillans called her Wendie Dae.

Had this scene occurred in the late ’60s instead of the early ’40s, I wonder if the McMillans would have gone for “Windy” instead of “Wendie.”

Why? Because in mid-1967, a song called “Windy” — about a woman named Windy — was the #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks straight.

Who’s tripping down the streets of the city
Smiling at everybody she sees?
Who’s reaching out to capture a moment?
Everyone knows it’s Windy

The usage of the baby name Windy doubled that year. Windy was boosted into the top 1,000 for the first time, and it saw peak popularity in 1975, ranking 553rd that year.

Wendy also got a boost from the song “Windy,” though it didn’t need any help: the name Wendy was in the top 100 from the ’50s to the ’80s, reaching as high as 28th in 1970.

Which name do you prefer, Windy or Wendy? (Or Wendie?)

Source: “Daughter Born in Windstorm Is Christened Wendie Dae.” Morning Avalanche [Lubbock, Texas] 18 Jan. 1940: 6.