Baby name story: Egedah

buses

In 1938, a woman identified as Mrs. Aaron Stricker gave birth to a baby girl while riding an Egged bus to the Beilinsohn Hospital near Tel Aviv.

She and her husband decided to name the baby Egedah (or Eggedah) in honor of the bus line.

The Egged Transportation Company, in turn, presented the baby girl with a free lifetime bus pass.

The name of the company, egged, is Hebrew for “union.”

Sources:

Baby name story: Berlinda

Lancaster bombers during World War II (1944).
Lancaster bombers during WWII

In January of 1944, a Lancaster bomber carrying seven men went down in the “black, merciless North Sea” about 70 miles off the coast of Britain.

The plane, returning from a raid on Berlin, had run “into a bad flak area…their aircraft being repeatedly hit and the navigation instruments damaged.” (Flak refers to fire from an anti-aircraft gun.)

The men — representing England, Ireland, Canada and Australia — managed to salvage the plane’s emergency lifeboat, but even that was damaged:

The rubber dinghy began filling with water through the flak punctures, so the castaways took turns plunging their arms into the freezing water and sealing the holes with their fingers. Spray soon sopped their clothing, through which an icy wind cut like knives.

The men were adrift for 15 hours before being rescued.

Soon after, “one of them, a Londoner, discovered that his wife had given birth to a daughter about the same time that they were bombing Berlin, upon which they named the child Berlinda.”

Source: “Rescued from North Sea.” Advertiser [Adelaide, South Australia] 3 Feb. 1944: 6.

Image by RAF from Wikipedia

Baby name story: Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios

An ancient statue likely depicting the twins Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios.
Ancient statue of Cleopatra’s twins

In 40 B.C., Cleopatra VII (ruler of Egypt) and Mark Antony (co-ruler of the Roman Republic) welcomed fraternal twins, a boy and a girl.

The twins were named Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios — selene and helios being the Ancient Greek words for “moon” and “sun,” respectively — though their second names may not have been bestowed until they were around three, when they met their father for the first time (and he officially recognized them as his own).

Her surname (“the Moon”) — and that of her twin brother Alexander Helios (“the Sun”) — represents prophetic and allegorical concepts of the era in which she was born as well as her parents’ ambitious plans to create a new world order.

Both Cleopatra and Mark Antony committed suicide in 30 B.C. We don’t know what became of Alexander Helios after that, but Cleopatra Selene married Juba II of Mauretania and thereby became the queen of Mauretania until her death (circa 5 B.C.) — which, ironically, may have occurred right around the time of a lunar eclipse.

Sources:

  • Lorenzi, Rossella. “Faces of Cleopatra and Antony’s Twin Babies Revealed.” Live Science 21 Apr. 2012.
  • Roller, Duane W. “Cleopatra Selene.” Dictionary of African Biography, Vol. 2, ed. by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 104-105.
  • Roller, Duane W. Cleopatra: A Biography. NY: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • Roller, Duane W. Cleopatra’s Daughter: And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era. NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Unusual real names: North Western, Safety First

Back in the early 1970s, two uniquely named men — North Western and Safety First — both lived in the same retirement village in Seal Beach, California.

North Western explained that Western was his family name and his parents named him North after another old family name.

He said he had some problems explaining the name when he used to commute in the Chicago area aboard the Northwestern Railroad.

According to various records, North Western was born in Winnipeg in 1901, had a son also named North Western in Chicago in 1931, and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1938.

Safety First, whose family name was First, was actually given the name on his birth certificate by his parents, who liked the idea of safety.

First, 77, said he had problems over the years, such as the time he was cited before a Los Angeles judge for a defective windshield. Upon giving his name the jurist snapped, “I want your name, not your traffic slogan.”

According to the Social Security Death Index, Safety M. First was born in Pennsylvania in 1894.

(A like-named cardiologist in Tulsa, Oklahoma — Dr. Safety R. First — was born in 1920 and appeared on Robert Q. Lewis’ TV program “The Name’s the Same” in 1954.)

Sources: