This is my First Holy Communion picture, taken one year after I was officially adopted.
I’ve had three legal names in my lifetime.
That’s not unusual for a female divorcee but I think it’s an anomaly for most men.
I was born John Carl Shreiber but taken away at birth from my mother. We were in a mental institution at the time and she was deemed unfit.
After a year in the St. Vincent de Paul Society orphanage, two folks in their early 40s who were unable to have their own children, took me home. They were uneducated and very poor, so it took them five years to convince Judge Joseph Trombley, Probate Court judge in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, that they were worthy.
But the adoption finally went through and I became John Richard Laug. I was six and the photo here is me one year later.
My adopted parents, Richard Ward and Florence Victoria, died when I was 14. They died three-and-a-half months apart, my father of brain cancer, my mother from the flu. But she had been sick all her life with high blood pressure and heart trouble, so the flu just did in her already weakened body.
Tough times followed. Most all of the relatives disappeared on me. My smart mouth and precocious arrogance never made me popular. I loved books. They loved sports and beer.
Anyway, Laug was always a problematic name. No one ever got it right. Laugh, lang, land, log, law, you name some mutilation of Laug and I’ve heard it a hundred times. It’s actually a German name, pronounced (with lots of spit) L-OW-K. Like ‘ow’, as in you’re standing on my foot, with an L on the front, and a big wet mucousy K on the end. Germany was not exactly popular after WWII, so my parents made the G silent, really complicating things.
I always hated Laug. “Hey, it’s Johnny Law!” or “Hey gang! Let’s beat the fuck out of Johnny Lang!”
So when I was 27 years old, I legally changed it to John D Rachel. (The D is just a D, not an initial. It stands for nothing specific, though I tell people my middle name is Dork or Demented or Divine or Disturbed, Delightful, Delicious, depending on my mood.)
When you’re a male and you legally change your name, most people think you’re up to no good. In fact, the court makes your declare that indeed, you are not changing it for any fraudulent purposes or to attempt to wrangle out of any legal obligations.
I wasn’t. I just hated my name and changed it to something I liked.
So here I am. For most of my life, I’ve been John Rachel.
The irony is that I’m a writer.
Shreiber is German for … writer.
