The Demise of Richard Russell
This is a personal anecdote, not one of my customary hortatory essays, so if you’re easily bored with inconsequential trivia, please feel free to skip it.
My full name is Richard Steven Russell. I was named for my two grandfathers, who fortunately didn’t have names like Ebenezer or Adolf. If you go on the spiffy website Name Voyager and look up “Richard”, you’ll see that it peaked in popularity the year I was born (1944) but has been in steady decline ever since, producing a popularity graph that looks a lot like Mont Blanc. So you’d think that the chances that I’d be confused with some other Richard Russell would be in decline as well. Um, not as much as you might think.
When I was just a lad of 8, back in 1952, I naively wrote an admiring letter to Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, wishing him well in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. In response, I got a nice personalized letter, typed (I’m sure) by some campaign staffer but evidently signed by the senator himself. I’m sure I’ve still got it somewhere in my archives.
Years later, with a history major under my belt and a lot more worldly experience in my head, I became painfully aware that the senator had been a racist, sexist, jingoistic bully. But, as a long-serving Dixiecrat whose seniority enabled him to spend 16 years as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he was in a position to shower billions of dollars in federal military contracts on his home state, and he did so without hesitation or apology. To this day, if you visit the Georgia state capitol, you’ll find 2 nice little life-sized busts of Nobel Peace Prize winners Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter tucked unobtrusively into 2 of the building’s 4 exterior concave corners, but the front esplanade facing the main approach from one of Atlanta’s many Peachtree Streets features a triple-life-sized full-body statue of Richard Russell, with his generous hand extended toward (some of) the people of Georgia. Priorities, I guess.
After I graduated from college and moved to Madison to take a job with the state Department of Public Instruction, I of course made sure that my name and number were listed in the phone book. (Remember those?) Shortly thereafter I started getting calls and letters from local businesses that I’d never heard of, demanding that I pay up. I was kind of nonplussed by this, since I’d hardly been in town long enuf to have run up any debts, even if I’d been inclined to do so, which I wasn’t. Finally a letter from a collection agency threatening legal action for my delinquency got me to take it seriously. Evidently some other person named Richard Russell had been a deadbeat who’d run up tabs all over the city before skipping town, and I was the only one in the phone book by that name, so they all figured it must’ve been me. I eventually set them all straight, and they went away.
Well, these were not the kind of people I wanted to be confused with, so I took to always using my middle initial, “S.”, when giving my full name for any kind of record. (In recent years, I’ve joked that I always use it so that other people won’t get confused with me!)
About the same time, I also started to use a joke name for any formal financial dealings I had, such as my spare-time database work or renting out rooms in my home. I called my business operation “Nocturnal Aviation Associates”. It was never incorporated, of course, and the plural “associates” was part of the joke, since it was only ever just me. But it was fun to know that some small fraction of the people who encountered it would think “hmm, just another fly-by-night operation” and get a small bang out of it.
Some time after that, when various on-line services and associations would ask what company I represented, that’s what I’d put in. Then they wanted to know what my title was, so I went for the pun again and started entering “head pilot”. Aside from the meaning that’s obvious for an aviation firm, there’s also “I’m the guy who runs my own brain”. A little harmless fun with wordplay, and a matter of no consequence for decades.
Fast forward to about 2010, when I was doing some volunteer database development for the UW School of Veterinary Medicine and I needed to find the contact info for a vet who lived in Virginia. My regular sources of such info turned up nothing, so I took a deep breath and signed up for LinkedIn, figuring I wouldn’t have to use it ever again after this one occasion. And of course I identified myself as the head pilot for Nocturnal Aviation Associates. (Literary fans: This is known as foreshadowing.) I did indeed find the info for the person I was looking for and happily went off to deploy it, forgetting that I was still signed up with LinkedIn.
Well, everybody else apparently ignored it as well, since I’d only get 1 or 2 desultory notices a year from them, which I ignored. That was until this week, when I got an e-mail from LinkedIn informing me that there’d been 27 separate hits on my account in the preceding week. To quote the appropriate pilot-speak, “whiskey tango foxtrot?”.
So here’s what must be going on. On 2018 August 10, a baggage handler for Horizon Air’s operation at SeaTac International Airport stole one of his employer’s Bombardier Q400 commercial turboprops and proceeded to do an hour’s worth of aerobatics in it before crashing it into the barely populated Ketron Island at the south end of Puget Sound. His name was initially reported in the media as “Richard Russell”. There was no middle initial, but subsequent coverage supplied it as “B.”, a little-noticed factoid appreciated by hardly anybody but me.
So, say you’re an analyst for the FBI, CIA, TSA, NSA, XYZ, PDQ, or some other federal TLA, and you’re looking for clues that this guy might’ve been a deep mole from al-Qaeda. Or maybe did he leave a manifesto of some kind? Or was this some kind of joy-riding dare from one of his on-line Chuck Yeager–wannabe buddies? You hit the web. And what do you turn up? Some guy named Richard Russell with a fantasy life as the head pilot of a make-believe outfit called Nocturnal Aviation Associates. Oh boy!
So, to all you searchers out there: No, it’s not me. He’s dead; I’m still alive. Besides, I don’t like terrorism or terrorists. I deplore so-called practical jokes that harm people or property. I have a good sense of humor, but this wasn’t at all funny. Sad, really. The world needs all the Richard Russells it can get.
PS: Abigail fretted that my name might now turn up on the federal no-fly list as a suspicious person, and this might screw up our upcoming vacation to Niagara Falls. I assured her not to worry, since the only no-fly list that “Richard Russell” now appears on is God’s.
My full name is Richard Steven Russell. I was named for my two grandfathers, who fortunately didn’t have names like Ebenezer or Adolf. If you go on the spiffy website Name Voyager and look up “Richard”, you’ll see that it peaked in popularity the year I was born (1944) but has been in steady decline ever since, producing a popularity graph that looks a lot like Mont Blanc. So you’d think that the chances that I’d be confused with some other Richard Russell would be in decline as well. Um, not as much as you might think.
When I was just a lad of 8, back in 1952, I naively wrote an admiring letter to Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, wishing him well in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. In response, I got a nice personalized letter, typed (I’m sure) by some campaign staffer but evidently signed by the senator himself. I’m sure I’ve still got it somewhere in my archives.
Years later, with a history major under my belt and a lot more worldly experience in my head, I became painfully aware that the senator had been a racist, sexist, jingoistic bully. But, as a long-serving Dixiecrat whose seniority enabled him to spend 16 years as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he was in a position to shower billions of dollars in federal military contracts on his home state, and he did so without hesitation or apology. To this day, if you visit the Georgia state capitol, you’ll find 2 nice little life-sized busts of Nobel Peace Prize winners Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter tucked unobtrusively into 2 of the building’s 4 exterior concave corners, but the front esplanade facing the main approach from one of Atlanta’s many Peachtree Streets features a triple-life-sized full-body statue of Richard Russell, with his generous hand extended toward (some of) the people of Georgia. Priorities, I guess.
After I graduated from college and moved to Madison to take a job with the state Department of Public Instruction, I of course made sure that my name and number were listed in the phone book. (Remember those?) Shortly thereafter I started getting calls and letters from local businesses that I’d never heard of, demanding that I pay up. I was kind of nonplussed by this, since I’d hardly been in town long enuf to have run up any debts, even if I’d been inclined to do so, which I wasn’t. Finally a letter from a collection agency threatening legal action for my delinquency got me to take it seriously. Evidently some other person named Richard Russell had been a deadbeat who’d run up tabs all over the city before skipping town, and I was the only one in the phone book by that name, so they all figured it must’ve been me. I eventually set them all straight, and they went away.
Well, these were not the kind of people I wanted to be confused with, so I took to always using my middle initial, “S.”, when giving my full name for any kind of record. (In recent years, I’ve joked that I always use it so that other people won’t get confused with me!)
About the same time, I also started to use a joke name for any formal financial dealings I had, such as my spare-time database work or renting out rooms in my home. I called my business operation “Nocturnal Aviation Associates”. It was never incorporated, of course, and the plural “associates” was part of the joke, since it was only ever just me. But it was fun to know that some small fraction of the people who encountered it would think “hmm, just another fly-by-night operation” and get a small bang out of it.
Some time after that, when various on-line services and associations would ask what company I represented, that’s what I’d put in. Then they wanted to know what my title was, so I went for the pun again and started entering “head pilot”. Aside from the meaning that’s obvious for an aviation firm, there’s also “I’m the guy who runs my own brain”. A little harmless fun with wordplay, and a matter of no consequence for decades.
Fast forward to about 2010, when I was doing some volunteer database development for the UW School of Veterinary Medicine and I needed to find the contact info for a vet who lived in Virginia. My regular sources of such info turned up nothing, so I took a deep breath and signed up for LinkedIn, figuring I wouldn’t have to use it ever again after this one occasion. And of course I identified myself as the head pilot for Nocturnal Aviation Associates. (Literary fans: This is known as foreshadowing.) I did indeed find the info for the person I was looking for and happily went off to deploy it, forgetting that I was still signed up with LinkedIn.
Well, everybody else apparently ignored it as well, since I’d only get 1 or 2 desultory notices a year from them, which I ignored. That was until this week, when I got an e-mail from LinkedIn informing me that there’d been 27 separate hits on my account in the preceding week. To quote the appropriate pilot-speak, “whiskey tango foxtrot?”.
So here’s what must be going on. On 2018 August 10, a baggage handler for Horizon Air’s operation at SeaTac International Airport stole one of his employer’s Bombardier Q400 commercial turboprops and proceeded to do an hour’s worth of aerobatics in it before crashing it into the barely populated Ketron Island at the south end of Puget Sound. His name was initially reported in the media as “Richard Russell”. There was no middle initial, but subsequent coverage supplied it as “B.”, a little-noticed factoid appreciated by hardly anybody but me.
So, say you’re an analyst for the FBI, CIA, TSA, NSA, XYZ, PDQ, or some other federal TLA, and you’re looking for clues that this guy might’ve been a deep mole from al-Qaeda. Or maybe did he leave a manifesto of some kind? Or was this some kind of joy-riding dare from one of his on-line Chuck Yeager–wannabe buddies? You hit the web. And what do you turn up? Some guy named Richard Russell with a fantasy life as the head pilot of a make-believe outfit called Nocturnal Aviation Associates. Oh boy!
So, to all you searchers out there: No, it’s not me. He’s dead; I’m still alive. Besides, I don’t like terrorism or terrorists. I deplore so-called practical jokes that harm people or property. I have a good sense of humor, but this wasn’t at all funny. Sad, really. The world needs all the Richard Russells it can get.
PS: Abigail fretted that my name might now turn up on the federal no-fly list as a suspicious person, and this might screw up our upcoming vacation to Niagara Falls. I assured her not to worry, since the only no-fly list that “Richard Russell” now appears on is God’s.
Labels: airplane, confusion, identity, name, pilot, Richard Russell, thief
posted by Richard S. Russell | 7:44 AM
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