What’s In A Name?

I am named after both of my Grand­fa­thers — My father’s father David and Edwin, my mother’s father. I am very proud of my her­itage. My father’s father, who actu­ally went by his mid­dle name Carl, owned Bow­man Hard­ware in Mar­shall, North Car­olina. I knew him as Papa Carl, and loved going to Mar­shall a few times a year to visit him. Though he is no longer around, the store is still there, and still bears his name. He was a proud man with a strong work ethic, and he was hands on as a busi­ness owner. My mother’s father, whom I don’t remem­ber per­son­ally, was another great man. He died shortly after I was born. Daddy Ed, as he was known, worked as an edi­tor for the Toledo Blade — a paper that is still con­sid­ered to be excep­tional. Any­way, as a result of these two great men, I was named David Edwin Bow­man. So where am I going with this…

Well as fate would have it, Arthur C. Clarke, who recently passed, chose to name the main char­ac­ter in 2001 A Space Odyssey, David Bow­man. Thus, should you choose to search for David Bow­man, you will find Arthur C. Clarke first. Peri­od­i­cally, when I call into a cus­tomer ser­vice and give the per­son on the other end of the line my name, I get the reply of “Hello Dave” in the best HAL impres­sion the sci-fi buff turned cus­tomer ser­vice agent can muster. I always play along, as I get a chuckle out of it.

Now, that is an inter­est­ing coin­ci­dence to be sure, but there is more. When I went to work as a sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive for a small com­pany in Cincin­nati back in 2001, who was I intro­duced to on my first day? Dave Bow­man, sales rep. This pre­sented a prob­lem, and for a short time I fool­ishly chose to use my mid­dle name to alle­vi­ate the con­fu­sion. I never got used to that. I love my mid­dle name, but it was meant to be in the mid­dle. To this day there are peo­ple whom I met there that refer to me as Edwin. For­tu­nately, he left soon after I started, and I went back to my given first name.

Well, liv­ing in Day­ton, I have tried to spend a good deal of my time net­work­ing and build­ing the brand call “David Bow­man” brand as Tom Peters might call it. It just so hap­pens that there is a local news­caster named… you guessed it, Dave Bow­man. I am con­vinced he used to spell it Bohman, but I can’t ver­ify that. So, yet another of me.

There are David Bowman’s that are musi­cians (so am I) blog­gers (so am I) and any num­ber of other things. I can’t imag­ine being John Smith.

So when peo­ple won­der why the E. in the mid­dle? The answer is mostly because I like the way it sounds, but has a lit­tle to do with dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion too. Even that is not fool­proof. I have my Google Alerts set up to let me know where David E. Bow­man turns up on the web. It turns out some­one who shares my first name and mid­dle ini­tial, was arrested in New Jer­sey last week. It is weird to see your name in print like that — but good to know it is some­body else.

So, what’s in a name? Arthur C. Clarke unknow­ingly altered my life, albeit just slightly, with his choice of names. I would guess that all the other David Bowman’s out there prob­a­bly share this expe­ri­ence in some way too. So I sup­pose that names do mat­ter — some­times in ways that can’t even be mea­sured. Is it any won­der that one of my favorite Dr. Seuss sto­ries is too many Daves?

Seth’s Blog: What you can learn from Arthur C. Clarke