Baby born to John Hancock Center residents, named Hancock

John Hancock Center, mid-construction (Aug. 1968)
John Hancock Center, mid-construction

Chicago’s John Hancock Center was constructed during the second half of the 1960s. When it was completed in 1969, it was the second-tallest building in the world.

According to the Chicago Tribune, a baby boy born in June of that year to residents of the new building was given the middle name Hancock.

Here’s the full article:

The newest infant resident of the Hancock building won’t have any trouble remembering where he lives when he gets older. He is Mark Hancock Thorne who was named yesterday by his parents Mark and Cindy Thorne, who moved into the building two months ago. Young Mr. Thorne was born Wednesday in Wesley Memorial Hospital.

The skyscraper was named for the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, which financed the project. The company, in turn, was named for U.S. Founding Father John Hancock.

Sources:

Image: Adapted from 19680817 09 Michigan Ave. @ Chestnut St. by David Wilson under CC BY 2.0.

Where did the baby name Mateel come from in 1927?

From the cover of the book "The Story of a Country Town" (1884) by E. W. Howe

In 1883, Kansas newspaper editor Edgar Watson “E. W.” Howe published his first novel, The Story of a Country Town, in his own newspaper, the Atchison Daily Globe.

Though the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the book as “the first realistic novel of Midwestern small-town life,” an early 20th-century review said that it wasn’t very realistic at all: “[T]he test of veracity fails in the unrelieved gloom of the story, which is bereft of all sunshine and joyousness, and even of all sense of relation to happier things.”

One of the novel’s characters was pretty-but-shallow Mateel Shepherd, the daughter of a Methodist minister (named Rev. Goode Shepherd, naturally).

E. W. Howe must have liked the name Mateel quite a bit, because the baby girl he welcomed with his wife Clara the same year was also named Mateel.

And readers must have liked it, too, because the number of U.S. babies named Mateel rose in the 1880s, and was at its highest from the 1890s to the 1910s, judging by the records I’ve seen.

But the rare name Mateel didn’t appear in the U.S. baby name data until 1927, and it only stuck around for a single year:

  • 1929: unlisted
  • 1928: unlisted
  • 1927: 6 baby girls named Mateel [debut]
  • 1926: unlisted
  • 1925: unlisted

Why?

Well, Howe’s daughter Mateel went on to become a writer like her father, and her career seems to have peaked with her debut novel, Rebellion, which won the Dodd, Mead & Co. and Pictorial Review “First Novel Prize” of $10,000 in 1927.*

American writer Mateel Howe Farnham (1883-1957)
Mateel Howe Farnham

What was Rebellion about? Essentially, “the difficulties of a daughter living with a depressed, authoritative and demanding father.” (Hm…)

Though both Edgar and Mateel publicly denied that the characters and conflict were inspired by real life, Edgar cut Mateel out of his will soon after the book was published. Here’s how Time put it:

Left. By Editor-Author Ed Howe, an estate valued at $200,000; in Atchison, Kans. To Society Editor Nellie Webb of his Globe, he left $1,500. To Niece Adelaide Howe he left $50,000. To Sons Eugene Alexander and James Pomeroy he left the remainder except for $1, which went to Daughter Mateel Howe Farnham who in 1927 won a $10,000 prize for Rebellion, a novel in which she satirized her father.

Old-timey drama aside, I’m still left wondering about the name Mateel. Did E. W. Howe create it for the character, or discover it somewhere? (I do see a couple of early Mateels in Louisiana. “Cloteal” was often used for Clotilde there, so I wonder if “Mateel” arose as a form of Matilde…?)

What are your thoughts on the name Mateel?

*The very same year, author Mazo de la Roche also won $10,000 in a novel-writing contest…

Sources:

Images: Adapted from the cover of The Story of a Country Town; clipping from the Lincoln Star (2 Aug. 1927)

Baby names in the news: Gloria, Google, Pink

Some recent and not-as-recent baby names from the news…

Balfour: A baby boy born in Orkney, Scotland, on June 15 was named Balfour because he was the first baby born in the new Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall. (Press and Journal)

Fani: A baby girl born in Bhubaneswar, India, on May 3 — in the midst of Cyclone Fani — was named Fani. (Outlook India)

Gloria: A baby girl born in St. Louis on June 12 — minutes before the start of Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, which was won by St. Louis — was named Vivian LeAnne Gloria Moore, second middle name in honor of the Blues’ season anthem, “Gloria.” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Google: A baby boy born in Indonesia in November of 2018 was given the single name Google because his father hoped he would be “useful” to people, as Google is. The father chose not to add a surname so that “the essence” of the name would not be diluted. (Mirror)

Hayes and Jersey: Twins born in Winnipeg to NHL player Dale Weise in April of 2019 were named Hayes (boy) and Jersey (girl). Hayes was named for country singer Hunter Hayes and Jersey was named for the state of New Jersey. (NHL.com)

Narendra Modi: A baby boy born in India on May 23 — the day Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was victorious in India’s general election — was named Narendra Modi. (Khaleej Times)

Pink: A baby girl born at a Pink concert in Liverpool on June 25 was named Dolly Pink. (EW)

Name change: Elda to Hedda

Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (1885-1966)
Hedda Hopper

Hedda Hopper was a gossip columnist who came to fame in the early 1940s (when she was in her 50s). But “Hedda Hopper” wasn’t her original name. It was Elda Furry.

She’d been a performer (both on stage and in the movies) as a young woman — long before she wrote for the newspapers. So it’s logical to assume that the name change happened around the time she embarked upon her showbiz career, right?

As it turns out, that wasn’t the case — she made the switch mid-career. Here’s the story:

Elda was working as a chorus girl for DeWolf Hopper’s theater company in the early 1910s…

[DeWolf Hopper] had had four marriages, and was five years older than Elda’s father, but was still a great charmer and anything but jaded. Hopper’s first four wives were named Ella, Ida, Edna and Nella, in that order, and Elda was a natural for the euphonious sequence. So, about a year after their first meeting, Hopper proposed on a train platform in Grand Central and that afternoon they were married in Wading River, N.J.

[…]

Elda shortly became aware of some rather piquant marital complications. Any man with five wives is likely to become confused and, when the wives have such similar names as the Hopper ladies, the situations becomes positively grotesque. Elda discovered that as often as not Hopper would whisper affectionately, “Dear Nella” (or Ella, Ida and Edna) instead of “Dear Elda.” The sensation of being continuously mistaken for someone else became irksome in time, and Elda forthwith visited a numerologist who recommended the name “Hedda.” From then on Hopper never got his lines crossed.

Her marriage to Hopper only lasted from 1913 until 1922, but she retained the name “Hedda Hopper” for the rest of her life.

It’s no coincidence that the usage of the baby name Hedda was highest during the 1940s. Records even reveal that one of the 1944 babies named Hedda was born into a Texas family with the surname Hopper.

Which name do you prefer, Elda or Hedda?

Source: Wickware, Francis Sill. “Hedda Hopper.” Life 20 Nov. 1944: 63-70.