November 11, 2009, 12:00 am New York TimesBy PATRICK WITTY
Ulysses Grant has been called "Useless" and "Grunt" too many times to find it funny.
His story is accompanied by a riff on "Hail to the Chief," by Paul Dillon.
Ulysses Grant, 63, is a retired postal worker. Named after his father, he lives alone in an apartment on the Hudson River in Ossining, N.Y., next door to Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Sharing the name of the 18th president hasn't been easy, he said, as an alumnus of 12 anger management classes. His pride in the name has grown over the years. However, he added, "When somebody says a joke about Ulysses Grant or ‘Do you know who's buried in Grant's tomb,' I just fly off the handle."
Mr. Grant's pose mirrors the body language of General Grant in a photograph made soon after Lincoln's assassination. That picture, taken by photographer Frederick Gutekunst in 1865, pays homage to the Jacques-Louis David painting, "Napoleon in his Study."
In the coming weeks, The Times will present portraits of those who share presidential names.
After he came to America from Korea more than three decades ago, Jang Do wanted what many immigrants have always wanted: to fit in. So he decided to Americanize his name.
But at age 11, still fuzzy on the vernacular, he took an interesting tack.
First he turned "Jang" into "John." Then, he talked his family into adding an "e" to their last name. He was concerned, he said, about razzing and wanted to make sure it would be pronounced like the "do" in "tae kwon do" and not the "do" in "hairdo."
He has been John Doe ever since.
Airport security grills him every time he flies. "I have to sit in the office," he said. "Every time." Landlords and election inspectors view him quizzically, and prospective dates need more than a little assurance that he's not hiding a dark past.
"I say my name is John Doe and they say, ‘No, what's your real name?' and I pull out my ID," he said.
Now a 40-year-old software programmer with a degree from Carnegie Mellon, he lives and is registered to vote on the Upper West Side, after short stints living in the San Francisco Bay area and abroad. He said the man who holds the lease to his apartment was first "incredulous about my name.'' But references were checked, and the wire with the deposit arrived, at which point, he said, the landlord called back and said: "I guess you're real. Welcome to New York.''
Mr. Doe is hardly the first person to contend with such issues. The name is a centuries-old legacy of the English legal system where John Doe was often used as a stand-in for the real name of a witness who sought to protect his identity.
But there are plenty of the genuine articles around. John Doe of Alpharetta, Ga., who died in 2006, was a loan officer who reported that medical personnel kept popping in on him when he was hospitalized, expecting to find a publicity-shy celebrity in his room.
New York State also has had its share of John Does. New York City's Department of Records shows one John Doe of Brooklyn, who married Frances P. Worth in 1885. Ancestry.com lists a World War I draft card for another New Yorker named John Doe on Avenue B.
Voter registration records show seven John Does currently on the rolls in New York State in addition to Mr. Doe, who is a Democrat.
For each John Doe, of course, dating poses its own challenges, what with the propensity for people these days to Google their suitors.
"I date mostly Korean women, so I explain it's a rare Korean last name,'' Mr. Doe said, noting that "Do" in Korean is derived from the word for "path."
But will his eventual bride in America be happy to endure the snickering when they check in to their honeymoon suite as "Mr. and Mrs. John Doe''?
"That's the biggest joke, that I have to marry a Jane Doe,'' he said, "Can you imagine our signing in at a hotel as John and Jane Doe? ‘Yeah, buddy.' ''
His parents avoided that problem, embracing the names James and Gloria Doe when they became citizens. As did his younger brother Kwang, who selected Anthony as his new name, paying homage to a famous Roman. "Something to do with Mark Antony," John Doe explained.
He says he has no regrets about his own choice. But he acknowledges he sometimes likes to break the mold by using his middle initial, H., for Hyun, "to give myself a little character.''
By NICHOLAS KULISH Published: New York Times May 5, 2009
BERLIN - Germany is renowned for fighting inflation, but the battle extends beyond money and into the realm of names. In a split decision on Tuesday, the German Constitutional Court upheld a ban on married people combining already-hyphenated names, forbidding last names of three parts or more.
It was not the first time the court was forced to weigh in on the subject of names, which are regulated start to finish, fore to family, here in Germany. This time, it was a Munich couple who decided to challenge the constitutionality of a 1993 rule limiting the names of married people to a single hyphen and two last names.
Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim, a Munich dentist, wanted to take the last name of her husband, Hans Peter Kunz-Hallstein, to become Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein. The case brought Germany's minister of justice before the court in Karlsruhe for oral arguments in February to defend the ban on what the Germans call "chain names."
By a vote of five to three, the court refused to budge, ruling that ballooning names "would quickly lose the effectiveness of their identifying purpose," and declined to overturn the law on the grounds that it infringed on personal expression.
In a telephone interview, the couple's lawyer, Rudiger Zuck, said his clients had no comment on the ruling, but added, with what sounded distinctly like a note of resignation, "The Germans are old-fashioned."
Germany takes a highly regimented approach to naming. Children's names must be approved by local authorities, and there is a reference work, the International Handbook of Forenames, to guide them. Jurgen Udolph, a University of Leipzig professor and head of the information center there that provides certificates of approval for names that have not yet made the official list, said that "the state has a responsibility to protect people from idiotic forenames."
That responsibility is often tested in court. In 2003, an appellate court ruled that a boy could not be named "Anderson," because it was a last name in Germany. And the Constitutional Court ruled in 2004 to limit the number of forenames a child could have, capping at five the number a mother could give her son, to whom she had tried to bequeath the 12-part "Chenekwahow Tecumseh Migiskau Kioma Ernesto Inti Prithibi Pathar Chajara Majim Henriko Alessandro," to protect the child.
Germany's economy minister found professional success despite bearing the lengthy name Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, a name as aristocratic as it is long. Although, when he was appointed to the job, a practical joker sneaked the name "Wilhelm" into his Wikipedia entry for good measure, an error that promptly spread to numerous media reports, including one on the front page of Bild, the country's largest newspaper.
Lawyers for B. Madoff of Manhattan were in federal court on Thursday asking a panel of judges to spring him from jail while he awaits sentencing for his crimes. The judges did not rule right away. But B. Madoff of Manhattan hopes that they say no.
There is no contradiction here.
B. Madoff with the lawyers is, as you may have guessed, Bernard L. Madoff, the Ponzi schemer. The other B. Madoff produces commercials and documentaries. He is listed in the Manhattan phone book as B. Jeffrey Madoff. The B stands for Ben.
This B. Madoff is no relation to the master swindler. He pronounces his name differently. His is MAD-off. The other guy is MADE-off, a pronunciation that has led to obvious one-liners too numerous to count.
For months, B. Jeffrey Madoff has received phone calls, dozens and dozens of them, from people who saw the listing for him in the Manhattan directory, figured that he might be the infamous Bernard and decided to tell him off. The calls, Mr. Madoff said, have come "at all hours of the day and night," generally from "people who were either upset or unhinged or both."
"I got a package at my office, which I returned to the post office because it was addressed to Bernard Madoff, with no return address and a label that looked like a kidnap note," he said. He never opened it. What were the odds on it being something good?
With Bernard Madoff behind bars since he pleaded guilty last week to running a vast swindle, the angry calls have been less frequent. Let the man stay in jail, Ben Madoff said. To him, it is a matter of justice.
But it is also likely that if Bernard were allowed to go back to his East Side penthouse, the crank callers might return in droves. Rationality is not a guiding force with some of those people. The other day, Ben Madoff's phone rang at 4:30 in the morning. "I'd hope that if you're angry enough at him to want place a call," he said, "you might follow the news closely enough to realize that he's at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, not on the Upper West Side."
"A surprising number of callers are wounded victims who were just at a loss," he said. "I feel for them." But others are "hateful." They include some who have used the scandal as "a camouflaged opportunity" to spew anti-Semitic venom, he said.
Last week, he took a call from a woman in Illinois. "She said, ‘Are you Bernard Madoff?' " Ben Madoff said. "I said: ‘No, I'm not. You have the wrong number.' And she said, ‘Are you a Jew, too?' " He hung up.
These are probably not the best of times for anyone named Madoff, even those who do not share a first initial with the crook. Most Madoffs whom we contacted in and around the city were reluctant to talk, or did not respond to messages left for them. One woman had a friend call us back to make sure that she would not be mentioned.
It has to be a burden to bear a name that has become so thoroughly reviled. But Charles Ponzi could assure the various Madoffs that time lives up to its reputation as a healer.
Mr. Ponzi, 65, is a retired businessman living in Watervliet, N.Y., near Albany. He has the same name as, but is not related to, the con man, who died in 1949. When he was younger, Mr. Ponzi said by phone, people often asked if he was connected to the swindler. "Then it went into a lull," he said. "Until this idiot."
That would be Bernard Madoff.
Not that the association with infamy has been all bad for Ben Madoff. Three weeks ago, he wrote about the name confusion for The Huffington Post. That article produced dozens of reader comments, and led to an invitation to submit more articles on other subjects. "It's imposed a writing discipline that I never really imposed on myself before," he said. That's a plus.
ON the negative side, he could live without law firm ads - like one running under the headline "Madoff Ponzi Victim?" - that pop up when you do a Google search for his company, Madoff Productions. And though he is 60 and could not be mistaken in any way for the 70-year-old Bernard Madoff, he is skittish enough to have asked not to be photographed. Similarly, he rejected a TV network's request for an on-camera interview.
Above all, he cannot abide by suggestions made to him that he change his name.
"He's not going to take my name away," this B. Madoff said of the other. "That would just add to the things he's stolen. I would not let him get away with that."
Ulysses Grant has been called "Useless" and "Grunt" too many times to find it funny.