Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Phew, was glad to find that I am the only one in the entire United States. I always felt kind of sorry for people with surnames like Smith or Brown — too beige for me.

As for my first name, Larry (Latin for laurels) — but never, ever Lawrence as some assume, I never was that fond of it. It’s grown on me over time though.

Out of curiosity, I checked on what were the top 10 male names for 2005. Here’s how the name’s ranked:

1. Jacob
2. Michael
3. Joshua
4. Matthew
5. Ethan
6. Andrew
7. Daniel
8. Anthony
9. Christopher
10. Joseph

On the same site, I discovered the Larry popularity ranking for the last 100 years.

In 1906, “Larry” ranked as 286th in popular names — which really tells me it was quite unpopular.

When did the Larry name popularity peak? You guessed it — in 1951 when it reached it all time popularity high ranking of 11th most popular male name.

What other names were popular around my birth year of 1953? Here’s the name popularity ranking: Robert, James, Michael, John, David, William, Richard, Thomas, Charles, Gary, Steven, Mark, Joseph, Donald, Ronald, Kenneth, Paul, Larry, Dennis, Daniel.

By golly, I have friends and relatives similar in age who have these names!

All that is but Paul — dang it, missed the best name by one. Mom must have been reading the book of boy’s names too slowly that day.

Unfortunately, Larry’s popularity sharply waned as it dropped to 30th in 1961, then to 50th in 1973, falling sharply to 115th in 1987.

In 2005, the name Larry finally dropped right off the popularity cliff with its all time lowest ranking of 357th.

So what the heck was going on in the early 1950s that made the name Larry so popular?

According to Wikipedia a significant trend saw the generation traumatized by the Great Depression and World War II create a culture with emphasis on normality and conformity. Yup, got that trend correct.

The world stage was focused on the Korean War, the “Cold War”, nuclear bomb testing, and the “red scare” in the US.

On the cultural end of things, Brylcreem was every boy’s staple and jjuvenile delinquency was viewed as reaching epidemic proportions (some things never change).

Optimistic visions of a semi-utopian technological future, including such devices as the flying car, were popular. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was a hit in movie theatres. Graffiti emerged as an art form and evangelical Christianity began to take hold, especially among some youth segments.

Pop music and jazz had reached its peak. Elvis Presley led the pack in the new rock and roll music form. Other prominent rock and roll musicians included Paul Anka, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.

Rock music was generally dismissed or condemned by older generations. My father would yell at us to take the goddamn noise off the record player and then would insist we all listen to his records by such favourites as Johnny Horton.

But the most important development was television taking over radio as the dominant means of mass communication. We got our first black and white television in 1955. There were two channels — CBC and the other one. We had to get up and change the channel by hand — not that it mattered as my father was in total control of when the TV would be on and what program we would watch. Saturday evenings were always “Hockey Night in Canada”, followed by “Don Messer’s Jubilee.”

Who knows what process happens when parents name a baby. I guess I just have to thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t named something weird like Sputnik.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 11:46:15 PM and is filed under JOURNAL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.