What's in a name? Plenty, if it turns out to be your lot in life.
Once upon a time, the Butchers, the Bakers and the Tailors took on names that advertised their professions. Today, business ought to be brisk for a hairdresser named Barbara Trimmer, for a chef named Susan Spicer - and for her younger brother, Tom Spicer, a specialty-herb broker. Life should be a song for Daniel Harp, who teaches music.
"Consciously or unconsciously, they've got the essence of branding," says Alan Brew, a corporate-name consultant.
But no. Talk to some of the aptly named - people like Judge Aaron Ment, Connecticut's chief court administrator, or Bob Crooks, a used-car salesman in Illinois - and you discover that being saddled with a vocationally appropriate or, in Mr. Crooks's case, a slyly judgmental name isn't necessarily a blessing.
Benjamin Franklin is a professor of early American literature at the University of South Carolina and the fifth of a long line of Ben Franklins. He braces himself whenever he meets someone for the first time. People have asked everything from "Where are your granny glasses?" to "Shouldn't you be out flying your kite?" and "Had any shocking experiences lately?'
"Everyone thinks he or she is so cute," Franklin says. "I know I should be understanding, but I can sense it coming, and I get kind of defensive."
i Franklin's least favorite comment? "Has anyone told you that you have a famous name?" He has a stock reply: "No, you're the first."
C. Martin Lawyer III, a legal-aid attorney in Tampa, Fla., tries to deflect the inevitable question before clients can even ask it: "My name is Martin Lawyer. Yes, I am an attorney. And, yes, Lawyer is my real name."
Even with that as prologue, some clients still don't get it. One called his office demanding to speak to her attorney. When the secretary asked the attorney's name, the annoyed woman responded: "I don't know. He won't tell me his real name. He makes me call him Mr. Lawyer."
Chris Roach, an inspector in Sterling, Va., with Terminix, the pest-control company, recalls the time a customer accused him of lying about his name. She said he "better be on the level" and bring identification or he would be greeted by a vicious dog and a shotgun.
But for Roach, too, the main occupational hazard is lame humor.
"People are always asking if I'm bringing the problem, not solving the problem," he says. "I say if you have to deal with a roach my size, you need a net."
When Bonnie Glass-Coffin, a Utah anthropologist, needed a parking pass at a garage, her name put the security guard in stitches. And when she made a reservation at a bed and breakfast, a weird notation was typed on the confirmation. Next to her name, in parentheses, someone had typed, "Shades of Eva Peron."
"Sometimes I wonder if people don't take me seriously enough," says Glass-Coffin, whose maiden name is Glass and whose husband's name is Coffin.
R. Bruce Money, a former banker and now a business professor at the University of South Carolina, says his first name is actually Richard, but he doesn't use it because people might start calling him Rich Money. After he was admitted to Harvard Business School, some of his classmates actually believed that he had changed his name to Money to get in. Not true. At least once a week, someone makes a wisecrack about his name.
"Everyone asks me how to spell it," he says. "And I ask, well how do you spell money? It's money as in bread, dough, that stuff in your wallet!"
Is it tempting to just legally change a troublesome name?
No way, sniffs John M. Hamburger, who says his family name predates the sandwich. But it is his fate to be president of a restaurant consulting and publishing firm in Roseville, Minn., and though he can trace his lineage back several generations to Germany, some people still break into nervous giggles when he makes business calls on restaurant companies.
Though he figures peoples' reactions to his name are their problem, not his, he still has had to endure being called "Hamburglar" or "Cheeseburger," but he has learned to turn the tables. When someone observes, "I bet you got a lot of jokes about your name as a kid," Hamburger responds, deadpan: "No, why would I?"
"In the old days, I used to get red," he says. "But now I kind of make them feel uncomfortable for bringing it up."
Are people with unusual monikers drawn to professions that suit their names? Lewis P. Lipsitt, a child psychologist and Brown University professor whose hobby is collecting names that fit, says he believes something is at work subconsciously. Beginning in childhood, having an unusual last name "could easily become a repeated reminder of an interest area that, by golly, could eventually become yours," Lipsitt says.
Neal Goldsmith, a New York City psychologist, goes one step further. He speculates that people with job-related names may "either grow into or grow in opposition" to their names. "A man named Crook would be more likely than others to become either a cop or a criminal, and a person named Hamburger would be more likely to become either a burger-joint-owner or a vegetarian," Goldsmith says.
But over and over again, people say their careers are just a coincidence. Reeve Askew, a chiropractor, Larry Bone, an orthopedic surgeon, and Shawn Buckless, a university fundraiser, all agree that their names didn't influence what they chose to do for a living.
Hamburger, the restaurant consultant, says that when he started out, he had a choice between working for a computer company and a restaurant company. "I chose the restaurant because it paid more," he says.
Roach, the inspector, says the name-job connection might seem fishy, but it's just a fluke. Still, both his mother and his brother also work for Terminix. "Destiny," he says, "works in strange ways."