Mr. Gravy
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According to Martin Snapp, "At 75, it's been a long, strange trip for Berkeley's Wavy Gravy", San Jose Mercury News 5/6/2011:
In 1965, when he and his wife, Jahanara (then called Bonnie Jean), were living in a one-room cabin outside Los Angeles with about 40 friends, including fellow ice cream flavor and Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, they all posed for a Life magazine cover photo.
"The landlord freaked out and evicted us, but the next day a neighbor came by and said, 'Old Saul up on the mountain had a stroke, and they need somebody to slop them hogs!' So we were given the mountain top rent-free if we would take care of about 60 hogs the size of Davenports."
And so the Hog Farm was born. Eventually, the Hog Farm moved north to Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville, which boasts a lake — Lake Veronica — with a raft named George and a 350-foot water slide from Marine World.
In 1969 the Hog Farmers were hired by the promoters of the Woodstock Music Festival to build fire trails around the festival grounds.
"But we convinced them to let us set up a free kitchen, too. When we got to JFK airport a bunch of reporters were there to meet us, and they told us we had been chosen to provide the security, too. I said, 'My God! They made us the cops?' "
By the time the festival was over, Wavy — or as he was still known, Hugh Romney — had become the MC.
A few weeks later, he was performing similar tasks at the Texas Pop Festival, where the great bluesman B.B. King dubbed him "Wavy Gravy." And Wavy Gravy he has remained ever since — except in the pages of the New York Times, which refers to him as "Mr. Gravy."
This is sort of true. The "Mr. Gravy" part, that is. It's one of those things that are really too good to check — but I will anyhow, in the interests of truth and serendipity.
The NYT index reports that the Gray Lady has printed the string "Mr. Gravy" five times since 1851. Two of these are OCR or indexing mistakes:
"French Cabinets Short-Lived", 2/23/1936, which actually refers to Jules Grévy, and informs us that
The term of a President of France is seven years, and only one French President, Jules Grévy, has been re-elected. Only five of the fourteen Presidents who have held office under the Third Republic have served out their full terms. These, besides Mr. Grévy, were Emile Loubet, Armand Fallières, Raymond Poincaré and Gaston Doumergue.
This does illustrate the traditional practice of using the full name (e.g. Jules Grévy) the first time around, and then the last name with a title (Mr. Grévy) in subsequent references; but it has nothing to do with Hugh Romney, under any name.
"The Nation: Embattled Teamsters", 3/24/1957:
To add to his troubles, Mr. Brewster was indicted during the week for contempt of the Senate.
This sentence was OCRed and indexed as
To add to his troubles, Mr, gravy. star was indicted during the weep for contempt of the Senate.
The word Brewster was split across lines as Brew- ster, which must have been part of the problem. But again, no Wavy Gravy here.
And one is in a letter from a reader, complaining about a positive review of Saint Misbehavin':
It might round out the love letter to Mr. Gravy by mentioning that he is a boot licking lackey of Fidel Castro and the murderous barbarian regime he has kept in place through abject terror.
I am certain the thousands of political prisoners being held in squalor tonight in Cuba would not be too amused to see Mr. Gravy, clown costume or not.
But there are two genuine hits that can be attributed to the paper itself.
"Anarchists Push Cause Of "None of the Above'", 11/30/1980:
A small group of Yippies and anarchists gathered in the rain today to offer an alternative Presidential candidate to the voters.
The organizers of the "Nobody for President Rally," led by Hugh Romney, who is known as Wavy Gravy, gathered across the street from the White House to push for the adoption of "none of the above" choices on the Presidential selection ballot. […]
"Just think of it," Mr. Gravy shouted to about 50 onlookers at lunchtime. "Nobody makes apple pie better than Mom. And Nobody will love you when you're down and out."
James Barron, "Woodstock 1989: Wallowing Again in Mud and Nostalgia", 8/14/1989:
A lot of the people who helped put on the show in 1969 are hoping that 1989 is the time to cash in on the nostalgia for Woodstock. Wavy Gravy, who ran the freak-out tents and helped handle crowd control, expressed this desire to augment his net worth by saying he planned to "cop a couple of pictures of dead Presidents on this one."
Now 53 years old, Mr. Gravy spends much of his time in northern California. But for the next week or so, his calendar is jam-packed. He is flying to New York to be master of ceremonies at a party in a Greenwich Village nightclub, then to Los Angeles to do the same at a retrospective with Blood, Sweat and Tears, Sha Na Na and Mr. Havens. "Then I fly to Texas," Mr. Gravy said, "where a guy is paying me a ton of money to go on the radio for half an hour. What can I say? Woodstock was created for wallets."
But in fact, a search for "Wavy Gravy" in the same index gets 300 hits, and in most of them deal with the name in a different way. Thus Jane Gross, "All Clowns? This Candidate Really Is", 10/18/1990, the first reference is
If elected, he promises "more creeks and fewer cars," campgrounds for the homeless that will set a model for the nation, and "whistle rings and hooter horns" at the weekly council meetings to help his colleagues "lighten up."
He is Wavy Gravy, court jester of the Woodstock generation, and he is making his first venture into straight politics by challenging an incumbent, Shirley Dean, an administrator at the University of California, in the Nov. 6 election.
But the subsequent references are all the same:
Wavy Gravy notes that his political resume is far from blank. […]
Within Citizens' Action, some say Wavy Gravy is skimming attention from more serious candidates and subjecting the city to ridicule. […]
But others admire Wavy Gravy's politics and his good works, which include running a children's camp in the northern part of the state and a foundation that raises millions of dollars to treat preventable blindness in the third world. […]
Wavy Gravy, who is 54 years old (his given name is Hugh Romney), has been clowning since his early days as a stand-up comic in Greenwich Village. […]
[Tip of the hat to Victor Steinbok]
William Gravy.star said,
July 9, 2011 @ 8:26 am
What a joy to see my name mentioned in language log! I can now die a happy man.
Rod Johnson said,
July 9, 2011 @ 8:29 am
Before I clicked through, I assumed this post would be about "living in a one-room cabin outside Los Angeles with about 40 friends" somehow. I thought that had to be some sort of misplaced modifier thing. But it's true?! That's a hell of a one room.
David L said,
July 9, 2011 @ 9:12 am
So we were given the mountain top rent-free if we would take care of about 60 hogs the size of Davenports.
I presume Mr. Gravy means davenport = sofa. That seems like kind of an antiquated usage, although maybe it's a regionalism, but in any case it should be lower case, right?
Dan Lufkin said,
July 9, 2011 @ 9:31 am
There used to be (1940s) a Sunday comic called Smokey Stover. Smokey was a firefighter who exchanged bizarre non-sequiturs with his Chief, whose name I've forgotten. Scram Gravy Ain't Wavy was one such. There is much of linguistic interest in this strip, including the ubiquitous phrase Notary Sojac, which may represent a phonetic spelling of Nodlaig Sóghach "Merry Christmas" in Irish.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
July 9, 2011 @ 9:58 am
@David L:
Some style books and editors are strict about capitalizing eponyms. Anything named after a person or other proper name gets capitalized because it was once a capitalized proper name.
So the peach dessert is peach Melba and the apple salad is Waldorf salad. You can store things in Shaker boxes. But as precedent for lower-casing davenport, we have graham flour, which was invented by Sylvester Graham, and probably many other examples that have slipped my mind.
Jerry Friedman said,
July 9, 2011 @ 10:14 am
@Rod Johnson: I took "about 40" as an exaggerated way of talking about early hippies who let lots of their friends and their friends' friends crash with them.
By the way, I am happier now that I've seen the phrase "fellow ice cream flavor", even if the sentence can be criticized on other grounds.
Mark Mandel said,
July 9, 2011 @ 10:20 am
"Mr. Gravy" makes about as much sense as "*Mr. Jintao". Neither "Wavy Gravy" nor "Hu Jintao" has the structure
Proper Name [ GivenName FamilyName ]
@Dan Lufkin: Aha! This is the first possible explanation I've heard of the second part of "Notary Sojac"; I'd always taken it as pure nonsense.
Dan Lufkin said,
July 9, 2011 @ 10:31 am
@Mark M: The 'Notary Sojac' interpretation should likely be credited to the famous etymologist P. Ben Trovato.
Skullturf said,
July 9, 2011 @ 10:32 am
The existence of names like "Wavy Gravy", or musicians Meat Loaf and Taj Mahal, is what finally convinced me that alphabetizing by first name (as tends to happen in programs like iTunes) isn't so bad.
As mentioned earlier, "Wavy Gravy" and "Meat Loaf" and "Taj Mahal" aren't really of the form "Firstname Lastname", even though they may consist of two capitalized words with a space in between.
Robert Coren said,
July 9, 2011 @ 10:57 am
I remember a few years back when a performer who goes (went?) by the name Meat Loaf was in the stands at a Red Sox game, and the announcers were discussing the question of whether he should be addressed as "Mr. Loaf".
It occurs to me that Mr. Gravy might have been a suitable companion for Mr. Loaf.
Q. Pheevr said,
July 9, 2011 @ 11:07 am
It's quite possible that the Times imposes its style on published letters to the editor, too. I remember writing to the Globe and Mail once in response to a column about Noam Chomsky; in my letter, I referred to Chomsky by last name only, as I would in an academic paper, and I was a little startled to see myself referring to "Mr. Chomsky" when it was printed. I don't know for sure whether the Times follows the same practice with letters as the Globe, but I wouldn't be surprised.
In any case, it doesn't really matter for the purposes of your investigation here, since you've already found examples of "Mr. Gravy" elsewhere in the paper. (If the letter were the only evidence we had, I guess it would be fair to say that "He is 'Mr. Gravy' in the pages of the New York TImes," but not to say that "The New York Times refers to him as 'Mr. Gravy'.")
JL said,
July 9, 2011 @ 11:51 am
The Times, like many if not most newspapers and magazines, regularly edits readers' letters to make them conform to house style. So that may be three examples, unless the reader internalized their standard practice of using honorifics, no matter how odd they may sound. (See, for example, "Mr. Rotten", "Mr. Hell", "Ms. Gaga", and, yes, "Mr. Mahal" so on. They will lift this rule to avoid obvious absurdities ("Mr. Loaf"), and for especially villainous characters who, they feel, don't deserve the honorific (just recently the announced that they wouldn't be saying "Mr. bin Laden").
That said, the Times is of course not alone in following this rule. What's (mildly) misleading about Snapp's article isn't the fact that the Times doesn't always refer to him as Mr. Gravy, but the implication that no one else does. (The LA Times has; the Dallas Morning News has, etc.)
Brett said,
July 9, 2011 @ 12:29 pm
@JL: The example of Lady Gaga is interesting, since most references to her in the Times (at least, the articles I've read) seem to take pains to point out that her "real" name is Stefani Germanotta and frequently refer to her as Ms. Germanotta. This approach works better for some artists than others; performers' attitudes about being referred to by their birth names (which may or may not be their present legal names).
Besides villains, there are a few other classes of people for which certain honorifics are inappropriate. Young girls can be "Miss," but young boys are not generally "Mr." (I can't remember what the Times' policy on this is. However, I do remember that the one time I was quoted in the Times, I was only 20, and being referred to as "Mr." made me feel very old.)
JMM said,
July 9, 2011 @ 2:17 pm
The closest I ever got to Wavy was the back of the back room at Luigi's where he was reading some 'poetry'. But I was lurking in the back corner of a club in Austin, where I unloaded trucks, sometimes worked the door, and occasionally tended bar some three decades or so ago, and learned from the man's mouth that Meat Loaf likes to be called 'Mr. Loaf', but laughs his ass off when people get all familiar and call him 'Meat'. (He's Mike)
I think you gotta be able to sing every syllable of "Whatever Happened to Saturday Night" before you get to laugh at his name. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qbOaaSGLmI
Chris Waters said,
July 9, 2011 @ 2:59 pm
What about John Wayne? Is there any reason not to refer to him as Mr. Wayne? Searching nytimes.com for "Mr. Cruise" turns up a lot of hits which clearly refer to the actor named Tom Cruise Mapother IV (star of Top Gun and humorous antics on Oprah). Given that, I'm not quite sure why Mr. Gravy would be inappropriate. Note that Mr. Gravy's name change was every bit as legal as Mr. Wayne's (California has very liberal laws about name-changing, probably because of the presence of Hollywood). As for Mr. Mapother, I can't find any evidence to show what name he uses legally (i.e. what might appear on his driver's license).
Is the usage questionable only when the chosen name is funny? Or is there some other detail I'm overlooking here? I might separate pure stage names from changed names, but as far as I know, Mr. Gravy uses Wavy Gravy exclusively, and without intent to defraud, which, in Berkeley in the 1960s, was sufficient to constitute a legal change of name.
Jerry Friedman said,
July 9, 2011 @ 4:13 pm
@Mark Mandel and Skullturf: If only Terry Gross had thought along those lines before interviewing Ice Cube! Listen to this, almost at the end, starting at 46:40.
@Chris Waters: Names such as "John Wayne" are obviously decomposable into a standard first name and a standard last name, so "Mr. Wayne" works, and the same applies even if one or both names aren't standard but conform to standard patterns, like "Ladainian Tomlinson" and "Beyoncé Knowles". Names such as "Wavy Gravy" and "Meat Loaf" appear to be constructed as two-word phrases instead—there's nothing standard about the names, and there are or seem to be grammatical relationships between the two elements, which is atypical of names in our culture—so the usage of titles with the second element is indeed questionable.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 9, 2011 @ 6:44 pm
Lady Gaga is a different case because "Lady" is or at least can be understood as a title and for many titles one can have either TITLE FIRSTNAME or TITLE LASTNAME. Is it parallel to "Lady Jane" or to "Lady Thatcher"? I frankly don't have a very strong intuition on that. But there are plenty of musical stage names which are fairly transparently TITLE FIRSTNAME (e.g., Doctor John, Sir Mix-a-Lot, DJ Jazzy Jeff – where the FIRSTNAME is itself compound) and I would think in those instances saying "Mr. FIRSTNAME" would not merely be stuffy but, in standard AmEng, incorrect.
"Ice Cube" frankly strikes me as a compound firstname (a nickname which displaced the given name, a la Catfish Hunter or Racehorse Haynes, with the fact that it's conventionally written as two words rather than one sort of a contingent accident), so I would be disinclined to analyze "Cube" as a surname – some recording artists are just surnameless for professional purposes and a journalistic stylebook needs to figure out what to do with that. You don't call Prince "Mr. Nelson" but you don't call him "Mr. Prince" either. If necessary check with whoever copyedits your newspaper's stories on Indonesian politics.
The same analysis as for Ice Cube might have originally applied in a vacuum to Meat Loaf, but "Mr. Loaf" jokes have been around for so many decades that they have as it were been lexicalized (also, perhaps it's significant that it's written out as two words although "meatloaf" as a generic noun is not?), such that I think the surname analysis may now be more proper. The erstwhile Mr. Romney seems himself to have treated his assumed name as subject to FIRSTNAME LASTNAME analysis on various occasions and there's no rival analysis that's more obviously plausible. The rhyme is goofy, but that doesn't make "Zowie Bowie" (son of David) immune from FIRSTNAME LASTNAME analysis (although the boy in question apparently discontinued use of "Zowie" once he was old enough for his own opinions to become determinative).
John Cowan said,
July 9, 2011 @ 11:13 pm
Jethro Tull is Mr. Tull on second reference, but none of the members of Jethro Tull are Mr. Tull, or Jethro either.
Spectre-7 said,
July 9, 2011 @ 11:34 pm
Just as an aside, he uses neither Zowie nor Bowie currently, instead going by (what is apparently his proper birth name) Duncan Jones. You may be familiar with his work directing the science-fiction films Moon and Source Code.
[/offtopic]
Peter said,
July 10, 2011 @ 12:19 am
This reminded me of someone peeving about how it's always wrong to treat Samuel Clemens' nom de plume as a FIRSTNAME LASTNAME construct by referring to him as Mr. Twain. What do y'all think? I would think that fits into the Wavy Gravy, Meat Loaf, Taj Mahal bucket, since it is a single term made of compound words…
Ellen K. said,
July 10, 2011 @ 8:27 am
I think the name Mark Twain is supposed to come across as a Firstname Lastname. Mark is certainly a standard first name.
jfruh said,
July 10, 2011 @ 10:53 am
"Ms. Gaga" was the moment when I really felt that the NYT standard usage had become unsustainable in the face of two-word stage names. The BBC does this too to stage names that are obviously two-word compounds, only without the honoriffic. I remember being amused by a BBC story in whch 50 Cent was referred to as "Cent" throughout after first reference. (The surreality was only hightened by the subject matter, an upcoming concert in Kosovo; Mr. Cent felt that his times on the rough streets of the US meant that he better related to Kosovar war crime victims.)
JL said,
July 10, 2011 @ 1:20 pm
@jfruh, and others: I certainly see your point. The question is, what would you do instead? Call her 'Lady Gaga' each time you use her name? That seems awkward, and tedious, especially if you wind up using the name a half dozen times in the course of an article. After you've used the full name once, coming up with — "A spokesman for Lady Gaga said…" seems unnatural and sing-songy.
What then? Simply call her 'Gaga'? That makes the same mistake as "Ms. Gaga", i.e., treating a compound stage name as if it was a standard first name/last name, and seems overly casual to boot, especially if everyone else in the paper gets a 'Mr.' or 'Ms.'. OK for a rock magazine, maybe, but dodgy for a news organization.
These things have no easy solution — still less so when you're dealing with single-named celebrities. With Oprah, you can get away with 'Ms. Winfrey', but I don't know how you do it with, say Madonna, or Sting. Use their real last name? That would be odd and misleading, especially if few people know it. (Quick, off the top of your head: what's Cher's last name?) I do, as it happens, have some friends with prominent stage names, and the convention is to always call them by the stage name, even if it's not, for example, what's written on their driver's license — much like the convention of referring to drag queens as 'she'. — But of course, that wouldn't work in a newspaper.
By the way, for anyone who may not know, Mark Twain got his name from a a riverboat phrase: navigators would call out the depth of the water — "Mark 7, mark 5, mark twain", and so on, where a mark is a fathom, i.e., six feet. That said, I don't know whether his friends called him "Mark" or "Sam".
Morten Jonsson said,
July 10, 2011 @ 6:34 pm
Sarkisian. Cher's last name, that is (the one she was born with, anyway). Sorry, the challenge was out there and I had to take it.
JL said,
July 10, 2011 @ 7:31 pm
Well done! (I don't know, myself, but I'll take your word for it.)
maidhc said,
July 11, 2011 @ 2:25 am
When I was a child I loved to listen to Hopalong Cassidy on the radio. I recently bought a collection of those old shows. Hopalong had a sidekick named California Carlson. Hoppy invariably addressed him as "California". I don't believe the listeners ever found out his given name. This may be unrealistic.
I read a memoir by a veteran of the Alaska Gold Rush, who was an acquaintance of a well-known saloon keeper known as Swiftwater Bill. (Apparently this referred to an incident when he fell out of a canoe or something.) He said that the term Swiftwater Bill served to distinguish him from other Bills. If you saw him, you'd say "Hi there, Bill". He criticized the Western movies of his day, in which you might expect to hear something like "Swiftwater Bill, draw yer shootin' irons".
In the field of traditional Irish music, there were two Joe Burkes, one of whom played the accordion and the other the banjo. So it was not unknown for people to refer to them as Joe "Box" Burke and Joe "Banjo" Burke, just to tell them apart. I did actually hear someone say "How are you doing, Banjo" to him, as though he was an Australian bush poet. He didn't react, but then he was a very courteous man. And the speaker was someone who was a little bit strange.
However, blues singer Lightning Hopkins was, I think, generally addressed as "Lightning". I'm not sure about Leadbelly.
So there's a difference between nicknames applied to clarify references and those which are substitute names, but there's a grey area in between.
JL said,
July 11, 2011 @ 8:29 am
From this morning's Times: http://goo.gl/wJ707. Maybe this sort of thing is the least bad solution to a thorny problem (and note that they provide his given name).
Mimi Sheiner said,
July 11, 2011 @ 12:39 pm
Last summer, two, ten year-old French children, staying with us overnight on their way to Mr. Gravy's summer camp, were completely incredulous that the first name of "le propriétaire du camp" was an adjective and his "nom de famille" was a sauce.
Sili said,
July 11, 2011 @ 12:42 pm
"Her ladyship"?
slobone said,
July 11, 2011 @ 5:24 pm
@J M Brewer, reminds me of when Jessica Mitford was visiting Washington during WWII and wrote to her mother "we met Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird." Her mother wrote back, "I've looked all through Burke's Peerage and can't find Lady Bird anywhere."
Bill said,
July 12, 2011 @ 10:33 am
People I have run across who knew Leadbelly generally referred to him as Hudie. Full name Hudie Ledbetter.
Mark Twain seems to have signed most of his letters, except those to fans, "Sam" or "S. Clemens" or some such. In the movie "The Adventures of Mark Twain," people kept calling him "Mark," and I found it grating. Pen names are a somewhat different animal than stage names.
What does the Times do with one-named people? Do they came back with "Ms. Cher said?"
What do they do with Larry the Cable Guy or Cedric the Entertainer?
David Walker said,
July 12, 2011 @ 10:42 am
"…fellow ice cream flavor … Jerry Garcia". Great phrase. I don't like cherries in ice cream, so I don't actually eat Cherry Garcia ice cream, but Ben & Jerry's flavor names are clever.
@Bill: I read an article in the Wall Street Journal a looong time ago. The author referred to the singer Meat Loaf as "Mr. Loaf" on second reference. I thought that was very odd.
David Walker said,
July 12, 2011 @ 11:11 am
Davenport is a city in Iowa. Those hogs were big!
quodlibet said,
July 12, 2011 @ 2:36 pm
"Pleased to meet you, Bo. Is this Mrs. Diddley?" (Stolen from David Letterman).
But then of course there's Mr. T, who's Mr. on first reference.
Keith said,
July 12, 2011 @ 5:55 pm
I wish that there had been a collaboration between two famous American jazz musicians and a British statesman; imagine what could have been recorded by Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Viscount Macmillan (commonly referred to as "Earl" Macmillan).
K.
Alan Palmer said,
July 13, 2011 @ 10:40 am
I was watching a kids' sitcom the other day (don't ask), and the actor playing the father said despairingly to his teenaged daughter, "I wonder if Papa Gaga goes through this?" The phrase has some real euphony, I think.
Peter said,
July 13, 2011 @ 3:39 pm
What about Mr. Mister?
John Cowan said,
July 19, 2011 @ 10:43 am
The NYT seems to use Sugaiguntung on first reference, and Mr. Sugaiguntung on second, which is bizarre but more or less consistent.