It was as though we'd all jumped right off the pages of a Damon Runyon story. Because it seemed like everyone around us had a nickmname back then in Catasauqua. From my earliest memory, friends and neighbors were sporting other identities. It was easy enough to hang a "y" on the end of someone's name to give it that G W Bush twang, but we went for bigger stuff. Our sophistication ran to monikers like Bear, Doc, Twiggy (for his ultra thinness), Ham and Eggs (big eater), Lumpy (from the character in Leave It To Beaver?), Jinx, Cookie, and Pooch. There was Jimmy Boy, not just Jimmy, who drowned in the Lehigh River behind his home. He had a brother called Puck, who took a bullet in the stomach. Both bad boys who died of bad kharma. I can't remembr what we called David D., but I do know it was the same nickname his father, a former boxer, had. And then there was Tips, named for his uncle Tips, not for his uncle Skinny. Tips a raconteur of sorts, would never introduce himself by his baptismal name Jerome, or even by the alternate, Jerry.
Even a good number of grown-ups went by other names: Woody and Whitey were owners of grocery stores across the street from one another. Scoby was an itinerant grocer, selling stuff right out of his truck. That was the only name we knew for him. He didn't seem to have a real name at all. On our block, several of the men took on regal sobriquets, including Duke, Governor, and Mayor. There was someone called Dutch, and there was Gyp the jeweler. My dad was hardly ever addressed by anything other than Iggie, short for Ignatius, which I believe he had changed from Ignatz long before. He called my uncle Ed Shpundy. I don't know what that meant.
It was alright for the old people to have their try at it, but us kids were in another league altogether. Two were called Soupy, one because it was a play on his last name of Soupon, the other just for the heck of it. In fact, many names were just for the heck of it, more imaginative than based in reality. Soupy had brothers , Mousy and Buckwheat. I know they weren't baptised that way. A lot of times, you could see where the names came from. Wally was Wowie, Tom was Yom, and Ernie was Scern. That's right, Scern. Woodsy was a play on his real name of Forest. My brother-in-law Larry was the first to come up with that one, and it was quickly adopted by us kids. A rare occurence of solidarity with a grown up when we accepted Larry's entry in the name game. Even when Scern's mom began calling her son Hot Lips, it didn't stick with us kids. Parents weren't usually allowed.
Having two nicknames, neither of them laudatory, could not have done wonders for Scern's, um Ernie's, self esteem. It may have been the faint beginnings of his slow downward slide to the point in high school , all bulked up from weight lifting, he clobbered a Marine over the head with a two-by-four in a barnyard scuffle, killing him. It must have been a year of court appearances until the matter was laid to rest. I didn't follow the trial. My good grade school friend who claimed to enjoy Milk Bone dog biscuits and protected me from bullies fell off the path.
Curiously, I can't recall any nicknames bestowed on girls or women. To paraphrase James Brown, it was a man's world back then, but not all for the better.
As for me, for quite a while I was just Huffy, a kind of shortened form of my last name, Hoffman. In later years I'd acquired other tags, Wolfman and Dustin, but those were other times and other places. Names are curious. It is said that our ability and propensity for naming is one of the attributes that separates humans from animals. In Catasauqua, naming was instinctual. We didn't stop to think of the bullying factor or that it might be anti-Semetic or anti-anything. The darker side, I'm afraid, was commonly glossed over.
