Fleetwood Willowbrook (a.k.a. Woody the woodchuck) is just my alter ego — and also the avatar I was attempting to hide behind for a while — but it’s also the crazy name my father had supposedly settled on before deciding at the last minute to name me after himself instead.
I have never used my real first name (i.e., my father’s name) for anything but legal documentation, primarily because my parents had a habit of assigning nicknames or contractions to almost all of their many children. As a child, I just assumed “Buzzy” was my real name (and that’s the name most of my family still uses for me). I won’t go into the reason for their choosing Buzzy to be my nickname (although it involved a good friend of my parents).
In school, I preferred going by “Buzz,” and I later shortened this to “Buz” (which is the primary yet non-official name I’ve been using for the last 30 years … or so).
Anyway, there are multiple theories for why my father had initially settled on Fleetwood Willowbrook to be my name. Some of those theories involve alcohol and laughter. Others involve a supposed celebrity who was apparently too obscure to be mentioned anywhere on the entire Internet.
My favorite theory, though, which is also obscure, involves my father possibly traveling to the city of Surrey, in the western Canadian province of British Columbia. Surrey has a nice community known as Fleetwood and a huge shopping mall known as Willowbrook. Coincidence? I think not!
So I now think of myself as being partially Canadian (which is cool, since one of my many siblings lives in Canada with her family).
The name Woody should also be of interest to all the terribly funny people (over the years) who have referred to me as Buzz Lightyear.
So who is the cowboy in the copper-colored banner photo at the top of this page? Why, it’s me (Woody), of course! Actually, it’s not me. If you stand directly in front of the U.S. Capitol building and look west (toward the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial), you will see this statue of Ulysses S. Grant. The statue is facing away from the Capitol building. I took this picture during a trip to Washington in 2006. Grant is appropriate for this reason: When I had a full beard (versus just a goatee), I was told more than once that I looked like “the guy on the fifty dollar bill.”
