T. Collin Jones, Esquire

 If you watched American television sixty years ago, almost certainly you heard Kodak commercials using the song "Try to Remember [that time in September]". That song came from the musical "The Fantasticks". The lyricist, Tom Jones, died last month.

I remember very little of the song, but I read with interest the obituary of Mr. Jones in The New York Times. In particular there was his account of his high school, and early college years in Texas:

 “Sometime during my sophomore year at Coleman High School, I became a ‘character’” — wearing bow ties and a straw hat to school, smoking a pipe, signing his articles for the school newspaper “T. Collins Jones, Esquire.”

“Even now, nearly 70 years later, I can’t help but stop and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing,” he wrote. “Even more, I wonder at the fact that the other kids — farmers mostly, and ranchers and 4-H girls — took it all in their stride."

But then he got to the drama department of the University of Texas, where

"for the first time, there were other people actually like me," he wrote. "Here, marvel of marvels, everybody was T. Collins Jones, Esquire."

It is well that he found his tribe.

One understands the wish for distinction. An American can grow up in a homogeneous world, one of so many so much alike, and feel an urge to stand out from the crowd. In "My Military Campaign", Mark Twain mentioned a young neighbor, who

 had some pathetic little nickel-plated aristocratic instincts, and detested his name, which was Dunlap; detested it, partly because it was nearly as common in that region as Smith, but mainly because it had a plebeian sound to his ear. So he tried to ennoble it by writing it in this way: d’Unlap. That contented his eye, but left his ear unsatisfied, for people gave the new name the same old pronunciation—emphasis on the front end of it. He then did the bravest thing that can be imagined—a thing to make one shiver when one remembers how the world is given to resenting shams and affectations; he began to write his name so: d’Un Lap. And he waited patiently through the long storm of mud that was flung at this work of art, and he had his reward at last; for he lived to see that name accepted, and the emphasis put where he wanted it, by people who had known him all his life, and to whom the tribe of Dunlaps had been as familiar as the rain and the sunshine for forty years. So sure of victory at last is the courage that can wait.