Michael Shannon

So this is kind of an acknowledgment. There was something my father did in casual conversation that I found mystifying. He used to do this thing when talking to my mother or people he knew that were of his own generation and that thing was to refer to women by their maiden names.

He would say things to my mother, like,”I saw Georgie Hendrixs at Bennett’s grocery today and she said to say hello.” Thats all well and good, my mother understood who he meant but I didn’t. Now I knew only one Georgie and that was Georgie O’Conner. Bills’ wife. As I grew up and began to learn the ins and outs of social life in my hometown it finally occurred to me that the two Georgie’s were the same person.

One of these two women I knew well, she had a son my age, they lived on what once was Leedham Lane on the west side of town. The family still lives there, you know, the old house with the pair of big Fig trees in front. My dad knew that too. Then why did he call her Georgie Hendricks?

Georgia “Georgie” Hendrix, 17 Arroyo Grande HS yearbook 1943.

The mystery deepened when my mother always referred to her as Georgie O’Conner. Now it’s hard to be two people unless you are a criminal or a politician. Actors must count too, but here in the neighborhood it doesn’t happen. The mystery deepened.

When I was a teenager I asked him. We were at the table eating dinner and I said, Dad, why do you call your woman friends by the wrong name? It was always pretty hard to stump my father. I can count the times in my life when I did. I was probably around fourteen or so and he was forty seven, roughly. Dad was a college graduate and well read. He had a lifetime of experience in business so it was nearly impossible to confuse him which delighted me because like all the young I somehow thought we were equal in education and experience. I know better now.

He looked at me for a bit and you could practically see the marbles rolling around in his head as he tried to find an answer to my question. It was kind of a ridiculous question anyway, I mean what name he used was simply normal to him and I don’t think he had given it much thought one way or the other. Georgie had a name and it was Hendrix just like Marylee Baxter was Marylee Zeyen or Mrs Fuchiwaki was Iso Kobara. Make any sense to you? Me neither.

Rather than come up with a credible answer he gave me the usual, “You wouldn’t understand, or That’s just the way it is” or especially, “Those are their names.”

So there I was ignorant about something I heard my dad do all the time.

So here’s an example, when I was twelve or thirteen my parents took me to a party up on Sierra Drive. It was my father’s friend Cyril Phelan and his wife Kathryn’s home. It was a nervous experience because my mother had been sure to let me know that these people had daughters my age which made me a, twelve year old nervous wreck because it meant she had something sneaky in mind. The girls mother who I was meeting for the first time was called Kay, not Kathryn and my dad jokingly said something to her and called her Routzhan which made her laugh. Made no sense to me. Besides I was doing my best to avoid strange girls and was puzzling over this thing about the names. So, if you can follow, this Gus guy was really Cyril which seemed at the time a very unfamiliar and strange sort of name. He was married to Katherine or Kay whose last name was Phelan or was it Routzhan. See what I mean?

There was another woman there who was married to my dad’s poker playing buddy J. Vard, another strange name, who was apparently married to my mother’s friend “Happy Bottom” which I assumed was not her real name but…*

I guess it hadn’t yet occurred to me that adults did what we did in school. I had friends named Squeaky, Dumbo, big ears of course, and Woody. Tookie, his mom said he had just the cutest little Fanny when he was a babe. That one has stuck and it’s become practically his only name more than seventy years later.

All of course was explained by my mother. She told me my dad did it for several reasons. First of all many of the people he knew he had grown up with. The women who were once in school with him or he knew when they were just maids had married his friends or a stranger to our town and their married names were not the same as he remembered them and he just unconsciously recalled their maiden names and used them.

I guess these are things that make small towns special. Think of this. When I was sixteen I traded my job at Mattie’s restaurant for a better one at Baxter’s service station in Pismo Beach. It was owned by Walter Baxter and his sons. WA Baxter and sons Chevron where the bookeeper was “Granny” who had no other name that I knew of and her sons Bill and Tom. Take a breath and try and follow this. Tom Baxter’s wife was Mary Lee but her maiden name was Zeyen which is the name my dad used. Her father owned a clothing store on Branch street for eighty years and my mother worked there. Tom called my parents by their last names, Shannon and because when I went to work for him he apparently couldn’t remember my first name, though I have always believed that it was a compliment to my father, called me “George.” He called me George until the day he died.

Marylee Zeyen Baxter, Arroyo Grande High School, 1944.

It finally occurred to me that he did it because he considered it a marker that divided his young life from his older. He also did it because he really could not remembered some of their married names. He did it from affection too.

Kathryn Routzhan and my father went all the way through school together, first grade through Junior College and would have attended Berkeley together until Gus came along. He knew her for nearly thirty years of the most impressionable time of their lives. Routzhan was the correct name for him.

Kathryn Routzhan, Santa Maria Junior College, 1931

Eventually after enough questions were asked some semblance of order was established, at least by me. Apparently these women existed in parallel universes, the before and after. I can understand it now. In memory people exist in block of time and we recognize that.

I suppose, in a bookend, the same thing has happened to me. At school reunions I see the women of today as the girl of yesterday. Just like my dad did. Thats the name I use, the real one.

Cover: Georgia “Georgie Hendrix and Agness “Billie” Records who you may have known as Georgie O’Conner and Billie Swigert..

*Gladys, get it?