I have already relayed the fact that I was named for both of my grandfathers. What I haven’t mentioned yet is that I did not learn what my name was until after my 6th birthday.
When I was born at Swedish Hospital in Minneapolis, on June 14, 1955, my parents, B.J. and Charlie, had not yet agreed on a boy’s name. So the discussion continued. My mom, B.J., wanted to name me after her father, Cranford. Now Cranford Williams Ingham had never used his full first name. It was always shortened to “Cran”. Interestingly, his middle name was the last name of the doctor who delivered him, who was one of the few women doctors in Wisconsin in 1900. Charlie couldn’t stand the name Cran, so he said, “No son of mine is going to be named Cranford!” He wanted to name me Joseph, after his father. As I mentioned before, Joseph never used his name, either, except for perhaps as a child. People called him “Free” or “Freeman”, because he was a “free thinker” or atheist. He died two years before I was born of a heart attack. B.J.’s response to Joseph was, “Joe’s Bar, Joe’s Hardware, Joe’s Diner! It’s too common!” They kept arguing for three days after I was born. This is when I remind the readers that my parents met in law school. The hospital had to fill out the birth certificate before we were discharged. They told B.J. and Charlie that if they could not agree, they would just fill it out as “Baby Boy Coulter” and that would be my legal name until I was 16, the minimum age to legally change a name in Minnesota. (That wouldn’t have damaged me a bit.)
My folks arrived at the compromise and I was named “Cranford Joseph Coulter” with the agreement that I would be called “Ford”. The name Cranford was never spoken in our household. My sister, Sue Ann, who was almost 27 months old when I was born, got her F’s and S’s mixed up, so she called me “Sord”. Everyone thought that was cute, so they all called me Sord as well. It took a concerted effort to correct everybody, including me, to pronounce my name correctly as Ford, before I started kindergarten at Robbinsdale High School on Tuesday, September 6, 1960. That’s me (above) in my kindergarten picture wearing my Nixon-Lodge button on my wool tweed sport coat, like a proper little WASP.
During the summer of 1961, we moved out of the small, Dutch colonial on Shoreline Drive, Robbinsdale, and into the spacious, four bedroom colonial that my dad “built” at 4845 Lowry Terrace, Golden Valley. Charlie had acted as his own contractor, using the plans he had purchased from American Home magazine. It had won the prize for “Best Home for the Midwest”. It was the first home featured in a magazine to have a family room. It was a great house to entertain in. It had a formal living room and dining room, two fireplaces: one in the family room, and one in the basement. It had a master bath, a kids bath with two sinks, and a powder room just inside the back door and by the doors to the garage and the basement. My brother, Tic, and I each got our own bedrooms, since we were six years apart. Our sisters, Alison and Sue Ann, were just two years apart, so they still had to share a room until Tic went to college.
It was the last week of August, 1961, when B.J. took me to register for 1st grade at Noble Avenue Elementary School. We were standing just inside the doors at the end of a long hallway. A woman was sitting at a card table with notebooks with all of the pupils’ names and information in them. When it was our turn, the lady at the card table asked my mom for her child’s name. My mom said, “Coulter, Cranford.” I pulled on my mom’s arm and said, “My name isn’t Cranford.” She turned to the woman at the card table and said it again, “Coulter, Cranford.” This time, I hid behind my mom’s skirt and tugged on her arm, and exclaimed through tears, “MY NAME ISN’T CRANFORD!” She turned to me and said, “Your name is Cranford. Your nickname is Ford.” Then she turned to the lady at the card table and said, “His name is Cranford. His nickname is Ford. Mark his file.”
That’s how I learned that my name was Cranford. That evening, at dinner, my dad told me not to worry. As soon as I turned 16, we could legally change my name to Ford. All through grade school, none of the other students found out my real name. None of the teachers ever called roll with anything but “Ford Coulter” or “Coulter, Ford”.
On September 5, 1967, I started 7th grade at Carl Sandburg Junior High, Golden Valley, across the street from the Honeywell factory, where they manufactured the MIRV devices for nuclear warheads. Because of that factory, we were told, Golden Valley was the #16 priority target for a nuclear attack by the U.S.S.R. We were told a lot of things. Some of them were true.
Sue Ann had warned me that I had better talk to my teachers before they took attendance if I wanted to keep “Cranford” secret. I made sure to dash to every class on the first day of every semester in junior high to notify my teachers to mark their files with my name as “Ford”. None of them ever called “Cranford” out loud in my three years there. One leak did happen, however, at the beginning of second quarter in 7th grade. To be more efficient, homeroom was incorporated into 1st period. In my case, that was Mr. Nordstrom’s “Project Social” Sociology class. I was in the “Enriched Program” for Science, Math, Social Studies and English. The rule was that if one did test to qualify for all four subjects ‘enriched’, one was only allowed to take three of them and had to opt out of one of the subjects. However, there were ten of us, out of a class of 750 who scored so high that they allowed us to take all four subjects enriched. Two of the other boys also took German and choir, as I did, so we ended up with identical schedules for three years. The school wanted me to skip 7th grade, but my mom wouldn’t let me.
Back to the story. One morning at the beginning of the 2nd quarter, before the beginning of homeroom, I heard someone say, “Who is this Cranford Jose’ character?”
Mr. Nordstrom had posted the computer printout of the class’s grade point averages for the first quarter. The printout didn’t have enough character space for my entire middle name, so now I was the British-Mexican foreign exchange student. A few of my guy friends called me Cranford Jose’ or just Jose’ from then on. Half of the students from that class ended up going to the new, Plymouth Junior High for 8th and 9th grades. I stayed in touch with several of them. When I was starting my second year of college, I went to visit a couple of my high school friends at the main campus of the University of Minnesota. I was about to enter the Coffman Memorial Union, when I hear someone holler “Cranford Jose’!” from across the commons. It was my old, Finnish friend from 7th grade, Tapani Temul Lahti!
When I got back to Robbinsdale High School for my sophomore year, I decided to drop out of the enriched program for everything except math. (Math had been accelerated by a year since 5th grade.) I also decided to stop ‘correcting’ my name with the teachers. So any students who met me for the first time were introduced to me as Cranford (the kids from Robbinsdale Junior High). So half the kids knew me as Cranford and half knew me as Ford. I would sometimes encounter a group of kids and someone would address me by name, and the light would go on with someone, “Oh no! This Cranford person and this Ford person are the same person!” I had reputations. When I turned 16 just after my sophomore year, Charlie was ready to take me down to the courthouse to change my name. I disappointed him by letting him know that I preferred Cranford and intended to keep it.
My wife’s middle name, given to her at birth was Williams, for the woman doctor who had helped her mother survive several miscarriages and a still birth after the birth of her older sister Susan and helped her mom finally come to term and deliver a healthy baby girl, ten years later. Bethann dropped that name and has used her maiden name, Reber, for her middle name, since we got married in 1975. When we went to North Memorial Medical Center to deliver our first child, our doctor was out of town, so his partner showed up to deliver April. His last name was Williams. April’s middle name is Marie.