My Name Is Legion

I was the fourth boy saint in my family. We lived in Chicago, where Catholics are the indigenous religious group. My parents named all their children after saints: Saint Patrick, Saint Michael, Saint Robert of Bellarmine, and me, Saint William. By the time we were three years old heaven was no longer an option, so we became Pat, Mike, Bob, and Bill.

Mine is a celebrity name. By luck of baptism, I have been associated with famous people my entire life. The first and most enduring connection has been with Billy Graham the evangelist, who became an internationally known figure when I was very young and remained so through my adulthood. While I was still a toddler, his immensely popular crusades landed him on the cover of Time magazine. (I’ve periodically used that cover as my profile photo in Facebook, hoping to get heaven back in the picture should God become one of my online friends.) And he stayed in the limelight for decades as a spiritual advisor to presidents.

My association with this Billy Graham is hard to get away from: When I’m first introduced to someone, there’s a 50-50 chance the person will say something like, “Oh, Reverend Billy Graham?...Billy Graham the preacher?” and ask me to bless them or invite them to a revival meeting, smiling like a colon, right-parenthesis emoticon.

Other people have become celebrities after changing their names to mine. I came across them in different ways. As an adolescent I and some of my friends became fans of championship wrestling. We’d watch matches on television together, debating if they were real or staged. We’d mimic the manic interviews with villains like Pretty Boy Bobby Heenan, Dr. Moto, and Mad Dog Vachon, acting nasty, brutish, and daft. We’d play act their signature moves, such as Black Jack Lanza’s devastating Oklahoma Stampede, executed by carrying the opponent completely across the ring over his head and slamming the guy down. One…two…three…he’s gone.

Near the end of my fascination with championship wrestling Superstar Billy Graham came to prominence. This golden-haired, steroid-rich humanoid was actually born Eldridge Wayne Coleman, a name that would have had his back pinned on the canvas every night. But as Superstar Billy Graham, he won several world wrestling championships and the adoration of hundreds of thousands of nutcases just like us. Consequently friends started to call me Superstar, a name not entirely inappropriate since I had reasonably good athletic skills. This nickname, albeit with a bit of self-promotion, stuck. To some of my friends I have been Billy Superstar Graham ever since, although today “Superstar” often is shortened to the somewhat less virile “Soup.”

 Then there was Bill Graham, the rock concert promoter, whose real name was Wolfgang Grajonca. A Jewish immigrant to the United States who fled Nazi Europe, he took the name Graham because it was close to Grajonca in the New York City phone book. Where “Bill” came from is unknown. Maybe the telephone people kept shouting it at his door. Until he died in a helicopter crash in 1991 I had never heard of this Bill Graham. But his death made the front page of newspapers, so he was certifiably famous. I was probably unaware of him because most rock music came along “after my time”—that is, after my deafness kicked in.  If he had been a karaoke promoter, I might have been a fan. To many baby boomers, however, he was quite well known, and some will say “Oh, the rock concert guy” when they hear my name.

Being associated with famous Bill/Billy Grahams becomes tiresome. But in the big picture I got lucky. For example, my famous name is associated with people who generally are regarded in a positive light, rather than someone evil like Adolf Hitler, John Gacy, or, especially, Steve Bartman. Plus, people tend to remember my name because of the celebrity connection and because it is relatively short and straightforward. That’s a heckuva lot better than having a long, uncommon name that is impossible to pronounce, much less remember. I mean, who’s going to remember a name like, say, Rodney Blagojevich. That’s a real loser. Life is good.