So We Call Them as We See Them, Sort Of
(News item) CHICAGO, Dec. 30 — Wilbur Geoffrey Gaffney, associate professor of English from the University of Nebraska, today revealed the results of a 10-year study on the significance of names.
His conclusions: You are what your name has made you. Your career is determined by your character and your character is determined, perhaps unalterably, by the name under which you grew to adulthood . . .
Now some of you think the professor is a bit of a kook to make that claim. I don’t. For a long time I’ve had the feeling that a person’s given name is a clear indication of his personality and his occupational possibilities.




Again this year there’s an unmistakable though unorganized trend toward calling everything off between Christmas and New Year’s Day and letting the week drift itself out, which it does anyway.









By the end of 1938, Weldon sensed that he was a marked man and that death was not far off. He could have stayed out of Los Angeles and maybe he would have lived–at least for a while. But he evidently decided to face whoever it was that killed him in what The Times called the “perfect murder case” — a case that was never solved.





Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and 
