re: #144 Decatur Deb

My wife’s family has family deep in the Kentucky countryside. One strange naming convention is to give children initials only as a name. She had an uncle “R.P.” That wasn’t short for anything. When he went to the Army, he was recorded as “R(only) P(only” Stevens. It took about three bureaucratic seconds for him to become “Ronly Ponly”.

heh.
Same thing happened to my father-in-law.
His birth cert shows him as J.W.
When he joined the service, he had to have a “real name”. So he chose “John William”, and became John forever after.