They Called Me Baby

At age 20 I got a job at Lockheed Aircraft. This was just about the time that the United States got involved in World War II. The war production and the employment that was caused by the production brought an end to what remained of the “great depression.”

During the hiring process, I was required to submit my birth certificate as proof of citizenship. (They didn’t want bad guys working at Lockheed.)

Now, it just happened that before I was born, my parents were expecting a girl. They already had a boy, so the next should be a girl. Right? So they had chosen no masculine name for me. (I never found out what mane I would have had if I had been a girl. I should have asked.) My folks could not come up with a masculine name on a moments notice so the doctor, or whoever filled out my birth certificate, just wrote “Baby Moore” on it.

When I showed my birth certificate at the job application, some of the other guys in the line noticed it and thought it was funny. Some of these guys ended up working in the same department that I did.

One day one of these guys painted “Baby” on my lunch bucket. From that day on, for the five years that I worked at Lockheed before I got drafted, my name was “Baby!”

After a stint in the Navy I came back to Lockheed and worked there for a year and a half, minus the name “Baby!”

I was now able to get on with my life as an adult!