Alister

How I and my three brothers got our names.

Note that I have no idea where my last name, Strauss, came from. A very distant relative of my father's did a lot of digging and in the 1990's contacted us. All we know is that it came from a family of German Jews from at least as far back as 1755.

Background

My parents grew up in Germany and came to the US in 1938, just before they stopped letting Jews out. By then, they were living in fear, had been subject to abuse and had been banned from public schools, so America was very, very wonderful.

After arriving, the parents were mostly consumed with work. The kids learned about America in school and from each other.

My parents were both avid readers and good students. You can read my father's story in his auto-obituary, but I'll tell you a bit about Mom.

Mom was 8 and a half when they arrived from Germany. After a few months in a special English-language school, she joined 3rd-grade. While my dad's family lived in a very Jewish neighborhood, Mom's neighbors were an eclectic mix. There were a couple of Jewish kids, and Irish and Italian, but few Germans. In their first apartment, in the building where her Grandfather lived, she remembers one girl Gladys, a girl Camille from an Italian family, and one Jewish girl, Judith. After a year and a half, they moved to a building about three blocks away and she remembers a blue-eyed Irish boy lived there, Jimmy Preston.

In junior high school, she began to be sensitive about her name, Inge. It sounded so German! It was especially awkward when she met boys at dances. I once asked about her middle name and she told, me, "Lieselotte". But then she quickly said "but I never use it- I hate that name." Dad had no middle name (he always said it was Bruno N.M.I. Strauss, "no middle initial"), so Mom followed his lead.

(Note: Her brother, Manfred Max Laband was named after her father's oldest brother who died as a soldier in World War I, and her father's father Max, who died at in 1908 at age 45.)

In high school, lots of the kids had nick-names. She secretly hoped someone would give her one, but it never happened.

Mom did well in school, and was an avid reader- especially English literature. (Aside: But she didn't know what she wanted to study in college. Then she heard about a new field- occupational therapy, but the only colleges that offered it were a New York state university near Albany and another in the mid-west. She told her father, but he said they couldn't afford it. She would have to attend one of the free colleges in New York.) So she went to New York City College and majored in English. After she and Dad married, they moved to Seattle where Mom worked part-time and then finished her degree at the University of Washington.

NAMING

In 1956, when Mom was pregnant with my older brother, she and Dad went to the library together to get a book about baby names. They read that if you have a 1-syllable last name, it's best to have a two-syllable first name and a three-syllable middle name.

Mom wanted to ensure that her children had English names, to avoid the embarrassment that she felt. Plus, she wanted us to easily have nicknames.

At the time, she had just finished reading a book about Lincoln, and liked the name of his oldest son, Robert. Mom can't recall where his middle name came from, but for a middle name they chose Oliver. besides being English, the initials R.O.S. would be a good nickname.

When I came along, in mid-1957, Alistair Cooke had hosted the television show Omnibus for several years- they liked his name and his british accent. They named me Randolph Alister Strauss.

Note that I was sensitive about my name. Partly, I had allergies, and with a stuffy nose I couldn't pronounce the 'n' of "Randy" very well. Partly, kids at school teased me about "Randolph the red-nosed reindeer." And partly, the only other "Randy" I knew was a girl named "Randi"...

I don't know whether Dad was aware of it when I was born, but in high school, I read Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, which mentions the adjective, "randy." The passage made the meaning clear. Luckily, no one else in high school seemed to know the meaning, so I didn't have to cope with its meaning till after I learned it was applicable to most young males.

Almost four years later, my brother Bill was born: William Elliot Strauss, with two nice nickname ready: Bill and WES.

But two years later, they had trouble coming up with a name for the 4th son. They liked the name Michael, but couldn't think of a middle name. Dad was driving along Madison Street, in Seattle, to the hospital when it dawned on him: Michael Madison Strauss. It sounded good, had the right number of syllables and was even the name of an esteemed president!

In Dad's telling of the story, when he got to the hospital where mother and baby were resting, Mom liked it. Then she asked him, "How did you think of it?"

He responded, "It just came to me, as I was driving up Madison Street..."

She snapped, "I will NOT have my son named after a street!" And he was named Michael Allen Strauss. It didn't have the three syllable name, but the initials MAS would make a passable nickname...

(I don't understand, though- why not Addison? Perhaps after an upset, it's just too hard to think clearly...)

To my knowledge, none of us used our initials as nicknames. But I used "ras" as my email address ever since the early 1980's, and my older brother uses "ros" in his.

PS: In 2012 I began using the name "Rand." I was trying to get a team organized around PeopleCount, and was stretching myself in all sorts of new ways. I adopted the new name to remind me that I was creating a new persona, a leader and entrepreneur, in contrast to the engineering nerd I was comfortable being. I sometimes explained to people who knew me as Randy, "I'm up to something big, so I gave up the diminutive form of my name." (By 'diminutive form', I meant the one that ends in 'y'.)