Baby name story: Tex

Saxophone player Tex Beneke (1914-2000)
Tex Beneke (in 1947)

Tex Vertmann was born in Estonia in the mid-1970s. The very American-sounding first name “Tex” is unusual in Estonia — how did he come to have it?

Vertmann said his parents used to spend the best moments of their life together at the cinema, watching all kinds of foreign movies that had either been left behind by the Germans or bought by the Soviet Union from the U.S.

Estonia was part of the USSR from 1940 to 1991, and for several years during WWII it was occupied by Nazi Germany.

Among these were the Italian film “Return to Sorrento” and “Waterloo Bridge” […] But Vertmann’s parents just adored “Sun Valley Serenade,” in which the famous Glenn Miller conducted his orchestra.

These films were released in 1945, 1940, and 1941, respectively.

The name of one of Miller’s band players, the tenor-sax, was Tex Beneke. Vertmann remembered [his] parents also liked the Miller song “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” which begins with the line “Hello Tex!” That’s how Vertmann got his very original name in the times of “deep socialism.”

The movie Sun Valley Serenade, which starred Sonja Henie, includes a sequence in which Texas-born Gordon Lee “Tex” Beneke both sings and whistles “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” The lyrics begin: Hi there Tex, whatchu say?

Americans of the early 1940s (but not the 1970s!) would have agreed with the Vertmanns about the song: a whopping 1.2 million copies of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” were sold by early 1942.

In recognition of this accomplishment, Miller’s record label presented him with a framed, gold-plated copy of the single — the very first gold record. This paved the way for RIAA-issued gold records in the late 1950s.

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Baby born on Virgin flight, named Virginia

airplane

British airline Virgin Atlantic was founded in 1984, but it wasn’t until March of 2004 that a baby was born on a Virgin flight.

She was born a month early to mother Abimbola Eduwa, who was traveling from Lagos to London. Abimbola went into labor an hour after takeoff, and the baby was born a mere ten minutes later — while the plane was soaring 30,000 feet above the Sahara desert.

The baby girl was named Virginia, after the airline. (As Abimbola’s husband Chris explained, “They said I should call her Virginia, I think we will. We usually pray for a name but Virginia is fine.”)

British billionaire Richard Branson, one of the founders of the airline, offered Virginia free flights until the age of 21. He also cheekily noted, “We have waited 20 years for our first Virgin birth.”

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Image: Adapted from Air Canada Boeing 777-333ER by MarcusObal under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Baby name story: Konti

Actress Lenore Konti Bushman (sitting beside John Wayne) in the movie "Red River Range" (1938).
Lenore Konti Bushman in “Red River Range“

Hungarian sculptor Isidore Konti immigrated to the United States in the early 1890s. He became known for creating large-scale sculptures for international expositions, such as the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

Konti had a “fatherly interest in the welfare of the young artists around him,” and,

…in 1908 and 1909, he hired a destitute young actor, Francis X. Bushman, to model and assist around the studio, later encouraging “Bushie” to travel with a performing company. Konti regularly sent Bushman’s young wife and children money to live on, as he did Bushman himself. Early in 1909, the Bushmans named their new baby daughter “Konti.”

Francis X. Bushman — who was named after the Catholic saint Francis Xavier — went on to become one of the biggest silent film stars of the 1910s. He was billed as “the Handsomest Man in the World” and known for his physique. (He was a Bernarr Macfadden follower.)

He and his wife Josephine had five children — Ralph, Josephine, Virginia, Lenore, and Bruce — and Lenore’s middle name was indeed Konti.

Lenore went on to appear in a handful of films during the 1920s and ’30s. (In the image above, she’s sitting beside John Wayne.)

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P.S. Exposition-related baby names we’ve talked about include Eulalia, Louisiana Purchase, and Louis Francis.

Name change: Bob Miller to Ben Lexcen

Winged keel of the Australia II racing yacht, winner of the 1983 America's Cup
Winged keel of the Australia II

In 1936, Robert “Bob” Miller was born in the Australian outback — “in bone-dry Boggabri, a long day’s voyage from the sea.”

So it’s intriguing that, in his teens, Miller developed an interest in sailboat design. He went on to become a professional marine architect.

In the early 1960s, Bob Miller and his friend Craig Whitworth founded a boat-building and sail-making company called Miller & Whitworth in Sydney.

Miller continued doing his own design work on the side, though. Most notably, he began collaborating with Australian millionaire Alan Bond on a series of racing yachts in the late 1960s.

The most famous of these yachts was the Australia II, which, in 1983, became the first non-American yacht to win the America’s Cup. This was the cup that Thomas Lipton had failed to win 5 times in a row, from 1899 to 1930, and that Bond and Miller themselves had also failed to win 3 times previously, from 1974 to 1980.

Except…by 1983, Bob Miller wasn’t “Bob Miller” anymore. He was Ben Lexcen.

Why the name change?

Because, in the mid-1970s, Miller and Whitworth had had a falling-out:

Miller left the firm, but found he could not take his name with him. “I had had a great design business, a fantastic business, and I lost all that,” says Lexcen. “They were advertising everywhere, and all my mail was going to them. I tried to get the post office to change it. Noooo. I just had to do something, so I changed my name. Lexcen was one of my wife’s family names from way back. I had a friend who had a computer check it against the mailing lists of the Reader’s Digest and American Express to see if there was anybody with that name, and there wasn’t, at least not in Australia.” And Ben? “I wanted the same number of letters.”

But that’s not the only version of the name-change story.

In another variation, when the time came Lexcen borrowed a word from the project he was working on at the moment — Lexan hatch covers — and added it to the name of his recently deceased dog, Benjie.

Specifics aside, Ben Lexcen (formerly Bob Miller) and the other members of the Australia II team became national heroes following their historical victory. In fact, a baby born in Melbourne around the time of the win was named Charles Australia II John Bertrand Ben Lexcen.

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Image: Adapted from Winged Keel of Americas Cup Yacht Australia II by Ken Hodge under CC BY 2.0.