Illinois newspaper editor Warren Watson was born in November of 1950 in Dover, New Hampshire.
His parents, Claire and Charles, were expecting to have a single child “to be named William if a boy. Family history is silent on what a girl would have been named.”
About 15 minutes after the baby (boy) was born, however, Claire gave birth to an unexpected second baby (another boy).
I was born a surprise twin — something that was a fact of life before the ’40s and ’50s. Parents also were surprised at the gender of their babies back then.
Claire, who now had two boys to name, thought it would be unfair to give William — “the traditional family name for a Watson male, going back at least four generations in England and Scotland” — to one son, but not the other.
So “she dug out a baby name book, purchased earlier at the Rexall drug store downtown,” and turned to the page with the entry for William. In the same column, she noticed Warren and Wayne — the names she ultimately chose for her twin sons. (She bestowed the names “in alphabetical order, of course.”)
Source: Watson, Warren. “Life as an alphabetical-order twin.” Telegraph [Alton, Illinois] 29 Aug. 2015.
[Latest update: Nov. 2024]