The St. Mary’s County Historical Society held a dinner meeting this past weekend with the focus on nicknames. They provided the following list of County folks with nicknames:
Pete Himmelheber and my buddy Pat Woodburn discussed how nicknames came to be so prevalent throughout the County and how they would often replace a person’s given name for the rest of their lives. All in all it was a great review of something that we all take for granted.
In his introduction of Pat, Pete noted that just about everybody in Ridge had a nickname. Pat then discussed a number of South County folks with unique nicknames such as Britches Carroll and Dictater Cullison. He told a story of someone asking him if he knew Cotton to which Pat replied “I know Cotton and both his brothers Buzzy and Tinkie.”
And speaking of Buzzy, all this talk of nicknames got me thinking about the many folks who have rolled thru the Store and have had a nickname. With assistance from Kim Wiley, we came up with the following list of Buzzy Nicknames. (As Pete and Pat did with their above list, we’ll call this Draft 1 because I’m sure there are more names to be added to it.)
Let me know of any others you can think of that should be added to the Buzzy list. As Pete said, just about everybody in Ridge has a nickname and that’s particularly the case with all our Buzzy folks. For example, some others that I can think of who should be on the Buzzy list include Tippy, Bird and Shorty but I need to do some more research on their “real” names. (Note also, that I purposely omitted those folks with “initial nicknames” such as P.J., L.P., J.W., G.B. etc. because there are so many of those.)
Now, as for whether or not we should add Horsecock to the Buzzy list of nicknames and identify who that is, well, that’s a discussion for another day.
P.S. The Historical Society is a great organization to be part of. Their quarterly newsletter is very well done, their dues are very reasonable and they don’t really bug you to do anything other than show up at their dinner meetings. Like I said – a great organization! Click here for info on how to join.
Although Sue was his given name and not his nickname in this tune, Johnny’s take here is still the all time best “name song” ever:
