So, what do your friends call you?

My nickname from the time I started kindergarten until I graduated from college was Skip. The best joke I ever heard about the nick name Skippy was told by a TV comedian. He said he met a girl named Jane and when she asked him his name, he said it was ‘Skippy’. She responded, “Oh really, I’ve got a dog named Skippy”. He replied “Oh yeah, I’ve got a pet too, it’s one of those bare assed monkeys……. named Jane.”

When I was very young my parents were friends with an older couple, immigrants from Germany, Karl and Edith Prekwitz. They had an adult son named Skip (aka Skippy). My Mom thought it was kind of cute and so she also gave me the nick name ‘Skippy’. Not many children of my generation were named Harold and combined with Gunardson is sort of cumbersome to pronounce and remember. So, I used the name Skippy which later in my teen years was truncated to Skip.

I kept that nickname throughout my college years until I got my first post college job as an engineer at Lummus. The first day on the job the personnel director was escorting me to my new office and he told me “You’re going to be sharing the office with a senior engineer, Hal Sherwood and by the way his name is also Harold.” He then asked me “So what do your friends call you, Hal?”  My response was “Yeah, Hal”.

From that day forward Skippy was a thing of the past and it’s been Hal ever since. Hal Gunardson is a lot less cumbersome to pronounce than Harold Henry Gunardson. Ironically, the nickname Skip is derived from Skipper the term used to describe the captain of a ship.