I guess my childhood was kind of typical for the 1960\u2019s, business world. Dad was moving up the \u201ccorporate ladder\u201d in the television industry. He started out as a salesman for TV station WLW-T in Cincinnati owned by Crosley Broadcasting. Then he jumped to a \u201csyndication\u201d company called the Ziv Corporation. Ziv made television shows in the 1950\u2019s and early 60\u2019s, and Dad\u2019s job was to go to individual TV stations and sell those shows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You need to be an \u201colder Boomer\u201d to remember, but they were well known at the time. There were shows like, The Cisco Kid<\/em>, Highway Patrol<\/em> (with Broderick Crawford, growling \u201c10-4\u201d into the microphone), Ripcord<\/em>, The Everglades<\/em>, and my favorite Sea Hunt<\/em> (with Lloyd Bridges). Dad almost drowned signing a big contract for Sea Hunt<\/em> at the bottom of a swimming pool. It takes more than just a thirty second scuba lesson to get comfortable, I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be closer to his sales \u201cterritory\u201d, we moved from Cincinnati (and Mom\u2019s favorite house on Belsaw Place) to Bloomfield Village, a suburb of Detroit. But this was also the era when the big networks, NBC, ABC, and CBS began to make their own shows. With two or three TV stations in a town, there was only so much on-air time, and network contracts required them to show their prime time lineup. So even though Dad was a \u201csuper salesman\u201d, it was tough to make the deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dad left Ziv to go back to Crosley and became sales manager at WLW-D in Dayton. We moved back to the Belsaw house in Cincinnati for a couple of years, but the grind of the hundred-mile daily commute was tough. And then, Dad became the Station Manager, and we moved to Kettering, a suburb south of Dayton. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kettering in those days, was working class. General Motors had a Delco plant, and Frigidaire had a huge assembly plant on the \u201cother side\u201d of the South Dixie Highway. So I went from a suburban Detroit school, to an urban Cincinnati school, to a very white, working class Kettering school. One of the things I learned in all those changes, was the importance of a name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my fourth grade classmates in Southdale Elementary School, was a kid named RT. As we progressed through fifth and sixth grades and onto Van Buren Junior High, it became a school \u201ctradition\u201d as teachers tried to figure out what to call RT. You see, his parents were straight from the mountains of Kentucky. They came to Dayton for the jobs, and RT himself had a very \u201cmountain\u201d accent. New teachers were required to parse both the enigma of a student with a first name of two initials, and the echoes of the Kentucky \u201ccriks and hollars\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First days were fun, if you weren\u2019t the teacher or RT. Teachers would call the roll, working down to the RT\u2019s name. Then it was a long pause, and they\u2019d call his last name. He\u2019d answer \u201cHe-ear\u201d. \u201cWhat\u2019s your first name?\u201d. He\u2019d answer \u201cArrr-Teee!\u201d. Inevitably the teacher would say, \u201cWhat\u2019s the RT stand for?\u201d. And RT would get a little louder, like he was talking to someone hard of hearing: \u201cARRR-TEEEE\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This could go on for minutes. An exasperated teacher tried to tease out the meaning of RT. And the poor kid was unwilling to explain that his parents gave him a two-lettered first name. Of course, being his classmate, we enjoyed the teacher\u2019s discomfort, even though it was at RT\u2019s expense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, RT and I hung out together with friends in his neighborhood. That finally came to an end when they decided the way to prove friendship was to \u201cbrand\u201d ourselves on the shoulder with a red hot hand warmer. I decided that, while I liked RT, the price of being branded for life was too high. (I\u2019m sure the TV show Branded<\/em>, on NBC with Chuck Connors, was popular back then).<\/p>\n\n\n\n RT\u2019s name identified him, his culture, his background. It was a whole statement of \u201chim\u201d, even at ten years old. But as the “teacher culture\u201d of the time tried to deal with it, they wanted to \u201cstandardize\u201d RT into something they were familiar with: Robert, or Richard, or Ralph. But RT would have none of it \u2013 he was \u201cARRR-TEE\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kettering did manage to change my name. My mother always used the formal \u201cMartin\u201d (in a British accent \u2013 \u201cMaahr-tin\u201d) but the Scoutmaster of Troop 229 found that too burdensome. So I became \u201cMarty\u201d at the Scout meetings, and that stuck, ultimately for life. Today, if someone calls me \u201cMartin\u201d (even better, with a formal English accent) I think I\u2019m in trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of that is a long way to go to talk about what the state of Ohio is now requiring<\/u><\/strong> teachers to do. In my years in education (1978-2017), I\u2019d call a kid whatever they wanted me to. After all, it was their name, expressing their personhood. Shouldn\u2019t they be able to decide how the rest of the world, and their teachers, see them, and speak of them? The state of Ohio now says a loud \u201cNO\u201d to that. You are addressed by your birth name, no matter what. That William James has been called \u201cBJ\u201d for his whole life, or that little Bobby has grown into Roberta, doesn\u2019t matter. It\u2019s the LAW: like Chuck Connors and RT’s buddies, you are \u201cBranded<\/em>\u201d for life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And like those teachers of the 60\u2019s, the state is determined to push \u201cround peg\u201d kids through a \u201csquare hole\u201d. Everyone is required to meet the State standard of culture, or gender, or life. If that doesn\u2019t sound like a violation of the First Amendment, the freedom of expression not to be \u201cabridged\u201d by the government (represented by the teacher, employed by the state), I don\u2019t really know what is.<\/p>\n\n\n\nKettering<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Branded<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
My Name, Your Name, Their Name<\/h3>\n\n\n\n