A Tale of Three (or More) Roger Simons
When you have a name like Roger Simon, you don’t expect to share it with a lot of people. It’s not John Smith or Bill Jones, after all.
My parents — Ruth and Norman Simon — picked my name, which my mother later informed me she thought quite original, because my father was then serving as a flight surgeon in the Air Force. “Roger, over and out” — get it? I’m sure you do, but not quite with the repetitive glee of my fifth grade classmates during a stick ball game.
Anyway, I was born in New York Hospital on November 22, 1943 — JFK was assassinated on my twentieth birthday — but almost immediately transported to Stuttgart, Arkansas, where my father was stationed.
At about the same time, two other Roger Simons (at least) were being brought forth into this world, gainsaying my mother’s belief in the uniqueness of her progeny, or his name in any case.
But I lived in blissful ignorance — thinking I was humanity’s one and only Roger Simon — until the age of 13 when my parents uprooted me from my beloved Manhattan and moved to suburban Scarsdale, where I discovered another Roger Simon in my high school class. An old timer in the community where he had gone to grammar school, he was immensely more popular and better known than I.
Worse yet, he was interested in theatre, as was I, and in school politics, as was I. We both ended up running for school president against each other and losing. (A third guy, whose name I honestly don’t remember, won.)
Theatre was, however, considerably more important to both of us Roger Simons. It was our career path. The other Roger Simon — Roger Hendricks Simon, known as Roger H. — aimed for acting and directing and I — Roger Lichtenberg Simon, known as Roger L. — writing and, um, directing. It wasn’t a good augury for two high school boys, both with the same name, both to be interested in directing (the same play?). Thankfully we parted ways after high school, heading for different colleges.
I was again the only Roger Simon within view and soon enough I headed excitedly for graduate work at the Yale Drama School, as a playwriting major, when who pops up but Roger Hendricks Simon, as a directing major. Partly to get away from all this, I quickly began writing novels.
Meanwhile, off in faraway Chicago, yet another Roger Simon — this one with the temerity not to use a middle initial — was beginning a career in journalism and also writing books. Another writer Roger Simon, I thought. I needed that like the proverbial hole in the head.
Life was beginning to feel like the mirror scene from Duck Soup. (The three Grouchos, remember?) And I had yet to hear of Roger M. Simon — a Las Vegas ophthalmologist — and a second Roger L. Simon — an attorney in Denver specializing in motorcycle personal injury cases (I kid you not).
I thanked my lucky stars the latter two weren’t writers.
Life went on and I tried to put the writer Roger Simon out of my mind. At least he wasn’t writing fiction, as I was. Or movies. (By then I had made my way to Hollywood.) Still, his books often seemed to sell more than mine, the reprobate. On more than one occasion I would do book signings and people would come up with one of his, asking for me to sign it. Eventually I would just nod and sign anyway. It wasn’t worth the effort explaining that I was the writer of cheesy detective stories and he was the author of serious political stuff. (Jumping ahead: This was indeed the Roger Simon now writing for Politico.)
Nevertheless, as the world turns, in 1979 one of my cheesy detective stories — The Big Fix — was made into a “major motion picture” starring Richard Dreyfus, for which I wrote the screenplay. No doubt because Richard was otherwise engaged, the studio sent me to Chicago to promote the opening of the movie in the Windy City, where the other Roger Simon was doing a column for one of their papers. The publicist got the idea that he should interview me — Roger Simon interviews Roger Simon. Cute. So the event was scheduled.
The other Roger never showed. Can’t say as I blame him. I don’t know if I would have either if the tables were turned.
So I never did brush up against that Roger Simon for decades, until I had invaded his terrain and started to write political commentary. That was mostly accidental on my part and came from my having been — to use the familiar pejorative — a flip-flopper (in my case, someone who was once a leftie becoming something of a rightie).
Everyone was confused by this, including me. It went so far as my being flown across country to appear on Meet the Press only to find they expected the other Roger Simon. (Yes, that really happened. My consolation prize was five minutes on air with Norah O’Donnell, who had no idea what to make of my strange libertarian utterings.)
I finally did bump into the other Roger at some Washington news gathering or other. He didn’t look pleased to see me, though perhaps that was projection. At this point I’m certain neither of us enjoys having our work confused. (I was appreciative of NRO’s Jim Geraghty, who recently referred to me as “our” Roger Simon is his esteemed morning email.)
So what does this all add up to? Not much except for one thing. No matter how unique you think your name might be, no matter how original, it is not unique enough. Most of us recall from high school English the fate of that man with that most original of names — Shelley’s Ozymandias.
And if you don’t remember that, better to heed the words of the great Memphis Slim:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfz-itRne0M
I feel your pain.
JJ
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and misapplying the wrong remedies.
About ten years ago, I was looking for a new e-mail address. I started off with Owen.Morgan, which is my real name, but that was taken, so I tried my middle names: G******* M*****. For security reasons, I’m not divulging those (I’ll trust the honesty of PJMEDIA regulars, but, if you put personal information out there on the internet, it really is out there).
My two middle names could barely be a more unlikely combination, but the ISP rejected the suggested e-mail id as one supposedly already in use. To this day, I just don’t believe that anyone in the whole world has that same pair of names as an e-mail address. I was starting to wonder if the ISP would accept any name, so I requested Ozymandias.Kingofkings.
The answer flew back: “Yes, we’d love to welcome you as ‘Ozymandias. Kingofkings”.
I went for a variant on “owen morgan”, instead, since it took considerably less time to enter into the internet. I think my situation is a bit different from Roger Simon’s. Roger Simon is amazed to find other “Roger Simons’, which don’t seem altogether surprising names, whereas I am astonished that my weird combination of Scandinavian and Middle Eastern had already been taken.
Thanks, Owen. Now I’m going to spend the rest of the morning wondering just what those names are.
I was thinking “Glendwyr” but you say they’re Scandinavian and Middle Eastern. Gandalf Mohammed? Gilgamesh Magnus? The mind boggles.
And speaking of common names, I’m wondering if Richard Cohen, the columnist, is the same as Richard Cohen, the former Mr. Ann Althouse, and if either of them is the same Richard Cohen I went to high school with in the late Sixties.
On your first question, no, although Ann’s ex is a rather fine writer of fiction.
Simon says?
Imagine your name is Bill Lawrence. Somebody actually emailed me asking for my autograph thinking I was some Hollywood guy.
There is a Bill Lawrence who is known as a fine guitarist and guitar pickup maker and inventor for the Gibson & Fender companies, and others- but he’s German, and his birth name is Willi Lorenz Stitt. Still, he prefers “Bill”.
Somebody should bug him for his autograph instead of me!
I guess you’re also not Bill Lawrence, former POW and Superintendent my first year at the Boat School? (especially since I discovered upon Googling him that he passed away in 2005)
Joseph Miller. As for security concerns, there’s too many with my name to count, which leads to it’s own security. And no middle name to distinguish one from another.
Roger, you need to distance yourself over, and over again from roger the politico writer – he is an asinine clown.
A couple months ago I wrote a book, or a dog dictated the book to me. He has the most ridiculous name. Complete invention based on the story. Googled it. Yeah. There’s a woman with that name.
Dang me – even with my name there seems to be an lgude out there. Sometimes I can get it, sometimes I can’t. According to my dad in the 50s there were two distinct Gude families running around the east coast. Ours and one down in Maryland where one of them was in congress. Sure enough, there is an East Gude Drive in the Rockville MD area but folks seem to pronounce it as two syllables: Gude-ee. Our family says it as a single syllable rhyming with rude, or nude or lewd, not nudie. Anyhow my dad discovered there were Gudes in Texas (a state I dearly love) when some retirement fund kept trying to send him checks for an airline career he never had. And I have discovered that there are plenty of Gudes in South Australia and Victoria. Seems that Gude is a fairly common Slavonic name from Silesia. Hitler has a special program for the Slavonic peoples of Silesia. They were to be taught numbers to 500, but not reading, and were not allowed to reproduce nor did they require confinement in concentration camps but instead were to be used as a mobile labor force until ‘exhausted’.
“Meanwhile, off in faraway Chicago, yet another Roger Simon — this one with the temerity not to use a middle initial — was beginning a career in journalism and also writing books. Another writer Roger Simon, I thought. I needed that like the proverbial hole in the head.”
If it’s any consolation, Roger, (may I call you Roger?), I understand that that OTHER Roger’s mother was English, and named him after the act of his genesis.
He certainly writes as if that is the case.
Must be a terrible thing to wake up in the morning, look at yourself in the morning and say:
“Awww, sh*t! I’m still me!”
I don’t believe it for a minute, but I like the story.
No fool, you.
Well Roger, I was taken by your political perspective, which I thought was similar to mine and then when you posted the link to Memphis Slim, I knew we were kindred spirits. There is nothing better than the blues to express our inner thoughts.
As far as I am concerned you are the one and only Roger Simon.
I deeply appreciate your writing.
Say Roger who?
I can relate. My name was the butt of jokes for most of my younger life and I thought it was uniquely exceptional, until Al Gore invented Facebook and social networks. Now I often get notes from people, under the same delusions I used to have that my name is unique, praising my artwork therapy for autistic children. What is unique about us is never our name, it is our eyes, fingerprints, voice, smell, personality and everything we have ever said or done. As any graveyard will gladly tell you, unique or not, our names will be soon forgotten, as we will, regardless of all our amazing glorious uniqueness. Nobody will remember eventually. Excpt one – the One who made us. he remembers everything.
Roger, I have always enjoyed your commentary and felt that it very much paralleled my own thinking. Reading about your background both on Wikipedia and in this post I see other parallels.
I was born in Manhattan on November 21, 1943. I went to Booker T. Washington Junior High School, on 107th and Columbus Avenue from 1955-1957. I played a lot of basketball as a kid but because I am not very tall I had more success with tennis which I played in high school and college. I always associate my 20th birthday with the Kennedy assassination because I heard about it while listening to a transistor radio that my parents had sent me for my birthday.
I got involved in radical politics because of civil rights and Vietnam. I went to Montgomery Alabama twice in March 1965 to support the right to vote efforts there. Eventually I became disillusioned with the left in the early 1970s because the people who remained active stayed involved for peripheral reasons: they found a way to make a living at it; they were members of sectarian left groups that were little more than cults; they were into nihilistic self-destructive forms of behavior including drugs, shop-lifting and rejection of working for a living. I was also troubled by what someone had referred to as the retreat into ethnicity, which from my observation was part of the process of turning politics into a way of making a living. And aside from the professional activists, there was and is a kind of tribal left, a generation of people who romanticize the sixties and for whom political opinions are a form of personal identity. It seemed to me that all of these extraneous factors influencing their politics undermined the idealism that had initially attracted them to participation in what was a political movement.
What I believe about your writing, and also that of Ron Radosh, is that the underlying idealism and concerns that animate your writing is not really different from what got you involved in more liberal politics in the 1960s. In fact what I believe about you, and what I know is true about me, is that my concerns have not changed. It is simply that political self-promoters have largely taken over such institutions as the ACLU, the AAUP, environmental groups, much of the academic community and the mainstream media.
I too thought about finding a way to combine my political interests with making a living but I decided against it because I felt that those people who made that choice ended up making their political beliefs subordinate to their personal interests. If I followed that path, I would end up doing the same.
While my political affiliations have not changed over the years, I don’t feel that my core values remain what they were fifty years ago. And that is what for me comes through in your writing.
Thank you, sir.
Most all liberals would be shocked were they to realize that conservatives value and seek to bring about the same outcomes as do those liberals – meaning, peace, security, justice, a minimization of human pain and a maximization of human well-being.
One becomes conservative upon realizing that liberals are simply very, very bad at producing those desired outcomes.
“While my political affiliations have not changed over the years, I don’t feel that my core values remain what they were fifty years ago.”
(emphasis added)
Did you really mean to write that?
With all due respect, Sir, there was no Air Force in this country, in 1943. Presumably you meant the U.S. Army Air Corps. The USAF was created post WWII. I salute your otherwise outstanding work, thank you!
In fact there was an Air Force in 1943, the US Army Air Corps was renamed the US Army Air Force on June 20, 1941, and would become the US Air Force in 1947.
Yes, but would a Roger Simon by any other name smell as sweet?
I remember once back when I still listened to him occasionally, Michael Medved went on a rant about a piece by the other Roger Simon that he attributed to you. His disappointment in you was profound. (I believe I left you a message about it. In any event, I trust it got straightened out.)
I do have a name unique to me which has its own set of problems and is why I seldom use it around the Interwebs.
I also have a very unique name – which I will not divulge here. Suffice it to say a very thorough web search comes up with 1 hit when used in full – me.
My mother always said I was unique…
Same here. Not many of us out here with a singularly singular name. Not even in another language have I found a match for my moniker. It has its advantages, and its disadvantages.
Think a name isn’t obscure? Our president may be the only one in the USA with the name Barack Hussein Obama – and possibly in the entire world. I could have went my entire life never having heard that name – and quite possibly been better off for it. In fact I’m quite sure of that!
This may be the first time in recent history when new parents didn’t wonder whether to name their kid after the president. I often wonder how many Adolfs there were running around Germany in the 40′s and beyond – maybe some changed their name?
In researching my ancestry, I’ve found a number of ancestors named after presidents. Especially popular were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. I can safely predict we will not have anyonein my family named after our current (alleged) president.
My great grandfather was born in 1861 in Georgia, and named Jefferson Davis Martin. I guess we know which side my great-great-grandparents were on.
The USAAF was formed from the Army Air Corps in June,1941, per Wikipedia. So you are good there.
I don’t have that unusual a name, but my wife found a picture with my name under it in a Sunday paper’s business section. He was of Asian heritage, which I am not. I sent it to my mom.
The United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) was a forerunner of the United States Air Force. Renamed from the Air Service on 2 July 1926, it was part of the United States Army and the predecessor of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), established in 1941. Although abolished as an organization in 1942, the Air Corps (AC) remained as a branch of the Army until 1947.
My parents were both of Danish extraction, so it wasn’t an overwhelming surprise when I first googled my name several years ago and got more hits in Denmark than in the US. That isn’t the case anymore – the increasing reach of the internet and the increased professional activity of several namesakes has changed that.
Hey! It beats “Over and Out”, for God sakes..
I had a girlfriend years ago (mercifully briefly) who not only knew another Dick Stanley but was related to him and assured me that he was known to her family as a loser. Sigh.
And now for some pedantry. “Over and out” is meaningless. Over means you expect a response, Out means you are terminating the conversation. Saying them together is akin to asking “What do you say?” as you hang up the phone.
Incorrect. The use of “over” at the end of speaking goes back to the time when you could either transmit or receive, but not both at the same time. “Over” was used to announce the end of your sentenace(s) and that you switched to receive a reply. [Pressing a button, usually on your mic, put you in Send mode, releasing it put you in Receive mode.] “Over” was used to end every instance of ending your sentence(s) and switching to receive. “Over and Out” was used at to indicate the completion of your discussion.
No, Steve is correct.
Cheers
Roger Steve’s transmission.
You’d only make the mistake of saying “Over and Out” on the radio one time when I was going through comm training in the Corps. Once was all it took.
Out.
All due respect to each of you. Steve is correct. or. was yrs gone by, ergo,
J.M. Heinrichs, also.
Completed Radio Sch, NORVA 1943
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Well, try Quintin Siemer. I am told that Simon would be my name in England.
The number of other Charles Martins writing is also ridiculous.
Roger, you have sometimes mentioned the Khalidi tape held by the LA Times. I just recalled that the LA paper is owned by the (Chicago) Tribune. That is an interesting connection.
As to the name confusion, perhaps you could rename yourself Roger X.
My names aren’t exactly common, either. The only other “Doug” I know of is that guy in the mesothelioma commercial. And “Frank” is a LOT more common in Germany than here. I’ve googled my name (who hasn’t googled theirs?) and there is, I see, a Douglas Frank who runs a singing group. Another is an acupuncturist. They ain’t me.
Some decades ago a former employer was requiring me to make weekly trips to Ft. Lauderdale (tough, eh?). I flew so often I decided it’s stupid not to sign up for a Delta frequent flyer account. So I did, and the ticket agent at the counter gave me a temporary membership card to use until the real card arrived in the mail.
The next week I was at the same counter buying another seat to Florida, and presented the temporary card. The poor kid had never seen one, and spent a good ten minutes trying to find me on his computer system. He wanted my middle name, then my address, and still couldn’t fish my account out of the database. After a while I got curious- what was the difficulty?
I grabbed the far end of the chest-high ticket counter and hoisted myself up and across, to peer down at whatever the agent was doing. (Need I say that this was long before the TSA? You could even SMOKE on an airplane back then.) And there I saw (upside down of course) what he was looking at: a small B&W screen with screenful after screenful of Douglas Franks.
And these were just the Delta frequent flyer Douglas Franks!
My surname gets pluralized all the time, and almost as often, it simply doesn’t register as a surname at all. (I have had numerous experiences when some bureaucratic flunky can’t find my file because it’s been filed under my middle or even my first name; I suspect that is because there aren’t that many of us in this region of the country . . . that or a lot of people are just dumbasses.)
True fact: one of my best friends is a guitar player named Kenny Rodgers (not the more famous–but IMHO no more talented–Kenny Rogers).
As an undergrad in biomedical electrical engineering, I was occasionally at pains to explain that I had no connection that other Charles C. Hardin, the distinguished PhD in biomedical electrical engineering.
Since then, I’ve gotten the occasional crank email protesting my skepticism as the former head of Project Blue Book, the US Air Force study of UFOs. I wonder if Captain (later Colonel) Chuck Hardin gets these emails as well; they are, after all, intended for him. If he does, he may find, as I have, that a soft answer turneth away wrath (and badly spelled rants).
Nobody has yet mistaken me for Charles Hardin Holley (a.k.a. Buddy Holly), but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
There’s actually a website “How Many of Me” that tests how common your name is in the United States. I’ve checked mine. There is only one according to their estimate. They estimate that there are 141 Roger Simons. It’s amazing that our Roger has run into so many of his eponyms.
Unfortunately, that website’s calculations are only probabalistic. The number it gives is the product of the percentage of people with that first name multiplied by the percentage with that last name multiplied by the total number of people in the U.S. According to HMOM, there are four guys running around with the name Mohammed Cohen (which I doubt).
Take comfort, Roger. At least you never had the displeasure of having an accounting professor, upon calling your name, announce to the entire class what an “ordinary” name it is.
Great blues
Google often sends me email intended for people with my exact name living in England, AUstralia and other places.
So I get to read about the other me’s townhouse in France, schedule issues with the personal trainer and the BMW dealarship and so on. Endless communications about the temperature of the hot tub.
In short the life that might have been mine in a just world.
My name isn’t that common, and neither is it that rare. There are several dozen of us in the United States. My wife’s maiden name was so common it’s unbelievable – Jean Smith. Where the fun begins is when my wife and I (young newlyweds at the time) bought a mobile home and moved into a park in Enid, Oklahoma. The lot we moved into had previously been rented to an Airman Michael A. Weatherford who had a wife named Jane. At the time, I, too, was an Airman with the name Michael A. Weatherford, and my wife’s name was Jean. We kept getting their mail until we moved away.
I write science fiction novels. There’s another Mike Weatherford who writes sports novels, and who was a sports reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He’s a bit younger than I am.
Ah, “Smith.” I married one and took his surname. I now get a cheap laugh when I have to give my name in a transaction and follow with, “It’s my real name, honest!” Before that, I had a surname that got me teased a lot in elementary school.
Truth to tell, I’ve never liked my first name much, as it never seemed to fit my style (I’m sort of a Columbina but with an Isabella-type’s name); my middle name got me teased even worse; and I don’t even have the dignity of a Hebrew name – it’s Yiddish, and sounds so dreadfully old-fashioned that it’s not useful, either. But out of honor to my parents, I never had the nerve to change any of them. Luckily, I managed to pick an online callsign that was not only original and unused (no stupid numbers in my e-mail address!) but actually gets compliments sometimes. So I guess this is the real me…
My maiden name was Mary Williams. I cannot tell you how many other women I’ve met with the same name. Once I was working at a large bank and I got a call to come to the lobby as I had a guest. I had no idea who it could be, but when I got downstairs, this older black woman took one look at me and said “Nuh uh. That ain’t her.” Apparently, there were 2 of us in the same building. And we kept getting each other’s calls until I left.
I later changed the spelling of my first name, and I changed my last name both times I got married.
I have to say, I kind of like the idea that people I went to high school with think I’m also doing what this guy does:
http://www.redbullxalps.com/athletes/profile/bio/michael-gebert.html
Roger,
As somebody named Christ Smith, who reads his credit reports to discover many excellent adventures in other parts of the country, I can’t say I’ve had quite the level of excitement you’ve had with your namesakes, but I can relate.
Cheers,
Chris
I have a not-to-common but not unusual German last name. At a previous residence in another state, I received calls meant for an alter ego. Apparently he didn’t pay his bills. I didn’t pay his bills either.
I did pay my bills, just to be clear.
“Christ Smith”? Now that really is an unusual name
I’ve always been fascinated by our host’s situation, despite my real name being neither particularly common nor particularly unusual. Here in the UK there is a quite well known barrister who used to write law reports for the Telegraph sometimes, and recently did a TV programme on the history of the law. His name is Harry Potter.
Roger,
My first name is not common, but I am beginning to wish it was.
At least your namesake doesn’t have a criminal record for meth distribution, unpaid child support from numerous “lovers”, and a name appearing on the Oklahoma Dept. of Corrections website (without picture).
I’ve received several letters demanding child payment in arrears, numerous invites to Narconon for drug treatment and counseling, attorney and debt collection letters so numerous I lost count, and a few harassing calls from spurned women (I’m white, he’s obviously black). I gave up on my land line and moved off the grid best I can.
Several of my high school classmates were stunned at my appearing at my reunion, sure I was spending my days in a maximum security prison.
I know your pain. Apparently I’m serving two life sentences in two different prisons in California, and another in Colorado.
My own name is quite unusual for the US, in spite of the surname supposedly being somewhere around #55 in the U.S’s “most common surnames” list. But in Scotland, the name is so common yet distinctive-to-Scotland that there’s a running joke in my family that three generations with that name have run into Scots saying “och aye, you’re one of us!”: Grandfather in World War Two being invited to the Scottish regiment barracks for a game of cribbage and a spot of tea when the Yanks were temporarily barred from their barracks; my father at a Royal Bank of Scotland/post office/general store in a remote village in the Highlands cashing a traveler’s check, and myself at a bank counter in Kyle of Lochalsh, when the teller stopped the usual “have you any other form of identification, Mr. . . oh! Ummm. . . okay…” when she perused the name on the passport. In my case, the tie is augmented by the fact that my nickname is also almost 100% Scottish, almost never heard in the States but common enough to be a cliched stereotype joke. (Oddly, Ronald MacDonald was a quite respectable and noble name over there until it was co-opted by a certain clown….)
My wife has such a distinctive combination of Celtic first name and rare Germanic last name that she refused for the slightest nanosecond to consider changing her last name when she married me. I can’t say I blame her.
As the forth generation with my name, and a Roman numeral suffix to that effect, I’m frequently asked if I’m related at all to either 1) the man of that name who invented a certain steam locomotive type (and I work in railroad history in that part of the country!); or 2) the man that invented a certain design of lighthouse operation (and I’m a lighthouse enthusiast!). There was also a country/bluegrass/old-time musician by my name in the next city over at the time when I was working with several folk music and Celtic/Irish festivals, which made for a couple years of confusion until the one day I went several miles to a dance where he and a band were appearing locally, walked in, went up on stage between sets, and said “[Name]? Hi I’m [same name]! might you have heard of–” “YOU!! You’re the Celtic music guy, aren’t you??” We both laughed and traded a few stories of confusion by others for a while.
It’s fine that there are other engineers out there with my name; both my first and last names are fairly common.
The problem is that there are felons who owe people money out there with my name. Collection agencies are difficult to persuade that, once they have a phone number that someone with the target name will answer, they are wasting their time calling it.
I have a fairly uncommon last name; in fact, I have met only one person with it to whom I was not directly related.
One day I moved to a new city and googled my last name to see if there were any others. Found one family, and thought I might ring them up some time soon. Just for grins I googled both my first and last name, and discovered a recent! What an unpleasant surprise. Further googling revealed it was the 18 year-old son of the family I had found. So I bagged the idea of introducing myself, had a feeling that would a very awkward event.
“And you think you’ve got problems…” (Jules Feiffer)
I loved your work with Art Garfunkel too.
There’s an actual Facebook group of people with my name. Last time I checked, it had around two thousand members.
The shortened version of my first name combined with my last name is an “h” short of being the same as that of the 2nd most famous Keating Five co-defendant. (The one who didn’t run for President) Lots of “space case” jokes as a kid, let me tell you…
As far as I know my name is unique, BUT I do have an identical twin. Figure that out.
And Doug, I have a brother in law named Douglass,and my mother in law was also named Douglass, the answer to that, in case you cannot figure it out, is the Southern custom of girls being given a family name.
As a System Analyst I helped install the communication system that the cops use to check info on the cars pulled over. When testing I used my own name to see what info came up. To my surprise there is a guy with my name who likes to get drunk race down the highway and fight the cops when pulled over. Needless to say I always drive under the speed limit.
I never thought my name was that common, but after I ran across a cookbook by an author who shared my full name, including “Robert” as a middle name, a web search showed that there were a bunch of Steve or Steven Wheelers, including an ice-skating stage magician. Now, that’s a career option I’d never have thought of. I was tempted to write an autobiography linking to all of them.
The strangest name coincidence I’ve had, however, was meeting a Wheeler Ronald Stevens. He went by “Ron.”
357 Roger Simons in the world!
http://www.peekyou.com/roger_simon
The Roger Simon at Politico is the same Roger Simon who used to be at the Chicago Sun-times…the one who was supposed to interview you. He’s an idiot, so you didn’t miss anything.
Roger;
Hi.
In your memoir, you relate how the KGB tried to recruit you.
And you relate how they sent you a hooker, but that you truned her down knowing that the room was probably being filmed and that they would use the fling to blackmail you.
SO…
If the KGB was doing that to control a mid-level Hollywood lib then, I think it’s reasonable to think somebody would do the ame to control Petraeus.
They either paid Broadwell or blackmailed her into doing the deed while Petraeus was lonely and horny AND WORKING FOR OBAMA in Afghanistan.
The they had her send emails to an operative in the State Dept – emails that could be used ANYTIME THEY WANTED OR NEEDED in order to expose the affair.
The woman at the arabist-dominated State Department is of Lebanese extraction – Jill Kelly nee Khawam.
Kelly was in Tampa. Not a real local threat to Broadwell.