From beyond the grave, man causes offense

LAST WEEK, an editor showed me a death notice in our paper for John McGee. Such listings are paid for by funeral homes based on information submitted by the family.

In this one, the family included the man's nickname - "Jewboy."

That grabbed me, but maybe not for the reason the editor thought. I'm Jewish, but rather than take offense, I was overwhelmed by curiosity. How did this Irish guy get that nickname?

When I was a kid, nicknames often focused on physical traits - Shorty, Fatty, Lefty - or personality traits - Tough Tony, Killer.

Nicknames - sometimes wanted, sometimes not - attach to the physical, but also to personality, lifestyle and occupation. Even cities have them - Brotherly Love. Nicknames can express affection, ridicule, familiarity or all three. They are usually bestowed by peers, and are on the wane, perhaps because many are (now) deemed offensive. It would be cruel to call a child "Fatty."

As to the death notice (which also appeared in the Inquirer), a handful of people complained to the Logan Funeral Home and my company, which printed an apology for publishing what seemed like a slur. But was it?

My mother called my son - her first grandchild - shaygetz, Hebrew for a non-Jewish male, because of my son's blue eyes, fair hair and pug nose. In Mom's view (she was kidding), he didn't [stereotype alert!] "look Jewish." It didn't catch on as a nickname, but was it hateful? A slur? Or a family in-joke? Before you crank the bigot siren, you should look at intent and ask about actual harm.

The genesis of McGee's nickname was explained to me by Michael Vance, his son-in-law.

McGee was one of 13 siblings, all of whom lived in a rowhouse in the Schuylkill section and "most of them had red hair," Vance says. "When he was born, he had black curly hair. Someone said to his father, 'He doesn't look like your other kids,' and he said, 'He's my Jewboy.' "

Vance quickly adds, "That was 80 years ago."

It wasn't intended as a character-building device, as in Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue." If James McGee hated Jews, would he call his son "Jewboy?" That defies logic.

I wanted to speak with Kim, McGee's daughter (and Vance's wife), but she was press shy because the day before she'd emailed an explanation to Victor Fiorillo's Philadelphia magazine blog that had reported on the obit.

Brimming with moral rectitude, a few posters tore into Kim, telling her to get with the "modern world," with one writing, "certain vestiges of the past should be done away with for pretty obvious reasons."

This suggests a Stalinesque erasure of the past, sanitizing it, rather than learning from it. It's the mindset that led hyperkinetic PC police to try to ban "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" - or "edit" it - because it uses the N-word. They couldn't see what might be learned from Mark Twain's use of that word, in that period, in his American classic.

The McGee family discussed whether to use "Jewboy" in the obit. They knew it would be offensive to some. They used it, Vance says, "because a lot of the people knew him only as that, especially the older people." It was not a nickname they used, nor did John, even though he never asked people to stop using it.

But, yes, it remains mildly offensive, an emblem of an earlier era.

Same with Chink's, the Wissinoming steak shop that became Joe's Steaks last year when new owner Joe Groh yielded to pressure from those who found the name offensive. A key difference is Chink's is public and commercial, while McGee's nickname was private and personal.

I doubt James McGee meant it as a slur, but times have changed and the self-righteous need new causes of complaint.

They don't believe "sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never harm you." America walks on eggshells, as anything that may cause offense to the thin-skinned is drained from our national narrative.

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