Name Coincidences

The name of Sheldon Grossbart
appeared in the papers in connection with the tragic death of Brenda
Emerson, 16, whose body was found outside a hospital. He is her uncle
and he identified her at the morgue.

By a fantastic coincidence
a long short story appearing simultaneously in the March 14 New Yorker
— Philip Roth’s "Defender of the Faith" — has a character also named
Sheldon Grossbart. He is a young soldier at Camp Crowder, Mo., locale of the story, which is pure fiction, written months ago.

Obviously there is no connection but this is the kind of thing that makes writers run screaming into the night.

A WRITER I know once reached around for a name for an offensive character in a novel. He settled on Sloat,
which is close to shoat, after looking it up in the directory to make
sure no one in the small town in which he lived had that name. The week
the book came out a man named Sloat was elected to the school board. Things were nervous for a while but nothing happened.

Another
writer recalled the time he wrote a fiction story about a mental
patient in an Army hospital. When it was printed he received a
complaining letter from a mental patient in an Army hospital with the
same name and rank.

There’s an inclination to wonder about
thought transference and extrasensory perception when these things
happen but most writers attribute them to coincidence, however weird.

SPRING SONG —
This is to report that thus far I have killed five poems about the
glorious singing of mockingbirds but wishing they wouldn’t start at
dawn when people are trying to sleep. I’m for the birds.

THE FLATTERED

–ROBERTA MORGAN

WHEN HE visited his doctor the other day, Harry Lang, the writer, found him chortling about a previous patient.

The doc, treating him for a chronic ailment, had remarked cheerfully, "You know, I can’t make you young again."

"Who wants to be young?" the patient had retorted. "Just keep me old."

AS EVERYONE
knows, a motorist runs the risk of having his driver’s license revoked
if he is convicted of more than four moving violations in a year.

Well,
a lady named Merilyn was stopped for jaywalking and she didn’t think a
ticket was justified and said so. As the officer nonchalantly wrote it,
she said angrily, "What if I keep getting these — will they revoke my
right to walk?"

His awed expression was almost worth the ticket.

IN HIS closing argument to the jury, Dist. Atty. Roy Gustafson
said of Elizabeth Duncan, "She has committed many crimes she was never
charged with. They include adultery, solicitation for prostitution,
perjury, aiding and abetting sex perversion, incest, soliciting an
abortion, defrauding a landlord, obtaining money by false pretenses,
extortion, soliciting mayhem, kidnapping, conspiracy, bribery, forgery,
grand theft, bigamy and issuing fictitious checks."

To which an L.A. lady named Elizabeth comments, "Well, nobody’s perfect!"

MISCELLANY — The
South Olive Street set is sad. A familiar figure, known as The
Hunchback of Bunker Hill because of his right-angle stance, was hit by
a car … A mail pitch to potential subscribers puts it this way:
"Harper’s is entertaining, challenging and informative — and it weighs
just enough to make for comfortable reading in bed." … BettyBuras nominates for oblivion this TV cliche: "Do you really mean it?" "I was never more serious in my life."