A recent message from Don Colton reminiscing about the “old days” resurrected the subject of nicknames and the perception we all have that this practice was especially prevalent in Bridgeville seventy years ago. To quote Don, “Of all the different places I have lived, Bridgeville stands out for seemingly having a huge penchant for nicknames. Why do you think this is?”
The first question of course is whether or not this was unique to Bridgeville or to that specific time period. Like many other octogenarians I scan the obituary notices (also known as “the Irish sports pages” by my Hibernian friends) each morning, hoping to get through them without finding the name of anyone I know (or my own!). It is not unusual to see nicknames mentioned there, perhaps four or five a day. Today yielded “Giggles” and “Chief”. I can’t detect any correlation between them and hometown, age, or ethnic background.
Based on the large number of folks with the same perception as Don, I am inclined to agree that this practice was indeed unusually popular in Bridgeville in those days. The Facebook page entitled “You know you’re from Bridgeville when …” contains numerous posts associated with local nicknames. My favorite is from its Administrator, Josh Watson, “… the cops call you by your nickname instead of your real name!”
Don’s message included seventeen examples that he remembered and suggested this phenomenon as a subject for one of my columns. I responded by sending him a copy of the list of Bridgeville nicknames compiled by Don Toney and his clique of Baldwin Street alumni a few years ago. It tabulates nearly 250 nicknames, including a number of duplicates – Moose Fagan, Moose Sam, and Moose Vosel, for example. How did they forget Moose Jones?
Don Colton’s list included Buzzy Fryer, Bumpy Petrick, Johann Maier, and Boone Rankin as candidates to be added to the Toney list. Rankin is a questionable addition; his full name was Paul Boone Rankin. We will leave that decision up to the official Nickname Tabulation Committee.
The practice does not seem to be limited to our era – the 1940s. John “Speedo” Capozzoli and Aldo “Buff” Donelli were Bridgeville High School football stars in the mid-1920s. I wonder though how prevalent it is today; it would be easy to convince me it peaked seventy years ago.
We are assuming that “Bob” for Robert, “Bill” for William, “Don” for Donald, etc., do not qualify as this type of nickname. Dale DeBlander reported that his mother deplored that practice and carefully selected names for her sons that had no such automatic alternatives. Her good intentions were thwarted when her youngest son, Wayne, was promptly christened “Pete” by his contemporaries.
The closest I came to having a real nickname was “Strap”. It evolved from John to Jack, Jack to Jock, Jock to Jockstrap, and finally Jockstrap to Strap. It never caught on, probably because the athletic connotation didn’t fit me at all.
Some of the nicknames were so embedded that the person’s real name was nearly forgotten; for example, Skip (Louis) Colussy, Tiny (Clyde) Carson, or Cutter (Frank) Cortazzo. My personal favorite on the Toney list is “Coal Shanty” – it’s hard to imagine how Frank Calabro acquired that sobriquet.
At any rate it does appear appropriate for us to formally revisit the topic and submit additions to Don Toney’s list. My contributions, from the Class of 1949, are “Jake” (Don) Schullek and “Crunch” Wilbur Oelschlager.